Esperanto · Chapter 18 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Vojagxi
Car, train, plane, ticket. The travel words, and the -il- suffix that names the tool: a thing you veturas with is a veturilo.
Practise this lesson
15-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Veturi, veturilo: the suffix that names the tool
is to travel by vehicle. Add three letters and you get , a vehicle: the thing you travel in. That middle chunk, --, is the whole trick. It means "the instrument, the tool for doing this". You bolt it onto a verb root and out drops the object that performs the action. English makes you learn a separate noun for every tool it owns; Esperanto hands you one suffix that never shifts its meaning, and you read the tool straight off the verb.
The tool suffix, everywhere
Once you have seen it in , you cannot unsee it. is to cut, so a o is a knife - the cutting tool. is to lock, so a is a key - the locking tool. The pattern is ruthlessly consistent: root of the action, --, -o for a noun.
Now the lovely part, and the reason this pattern earns a travel session. , aeroplane, is not some borrowed lump of a word you memorise whole. Pull it apart: avi/ad//o. The root avi- is to do with flying, -ad- marks the ongoing activity, -- is our tool, -o is the noun ending. An aeroplane is, quite literally, "the tool for the activity of flying". One of the biggest words at the airport is built from the very suffix we are teaching.
Words that are just their own parts
Esperanto keeps doing this with the rest of the station. , railway, is (iron) plus (road) - an iron road, which is exactly what a railway is. A is (station) plus (house): the station building, the house of the station. You are not memorising vocabulary so much as reading obvious compounds off parts you already own.
The rest of the trip fills in fast and stays borrowed-and-transparent: and for car, for train, for bus, , (ticket), , (suitcase), , and the plain and for road and street. Learn -- properly and the airport, the ticket office and the platform stop being a wordlist. They become arithmetic.
Put it together
per . - I travel by train to the station building.
. - The aeroplane is a vehicle for flying.
, . - I need the ticket, the passport and the suitcase.
. - The railway follows the road through the town.
