Esperanto · Chapter 19 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
La hejmo
Room, bed, table, door. The words for the house, and the -ej- suffix that names a room after whatever you do in it: you dormas in a dormejo.
Practise this lesson
16-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
Dormi, dormejo: the room named after what you do in it
means to sleep. Add --, the suffix for a place, and you get o: the sleeping-place, the bedroom. You did not learn a new word. You took a verb you already had and pointed it at the room where the verb happens. That is the whole trick, and once you see it the house half-builds itself.
The rooms are verbs wearing a suffix
English hands you a separate, unrelated word for every room. Bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, school - four words, four spellings, no thread joining them. You memorise each one cold. Esperanto refuses to make you do that. -- means "the place for this activity", it never once changes its meaning, and it bolts onto any root.
So (to cook) gives o, the kitchen. (to bathe) gives , the bathroom. (to learn) gives , the school. You know the verb, therefore you know the room, and you were never taught the room at all. Meet an unfamiliar -ejo in the wild and you read it straight off the root: is to eat, so a o is where eating happens - a dining hall, a canteen. You are simply right.
But the walls are given, not derived
Here is the line worth holding onto. The rooms are derived because an activity defines them. The structure of the building is not. A wall is not "the place for walling". A door is not "the place for dooring". So (wall), (door), (window) and (roof) are plain, primitive roots - you do learn each one cold, because there is no verb underneath to lean on.
The rest of the furniture sits in the same primitive box: (house), (a room in general), (bed), (table), (chair), (floor), (lamp), (cellar), (corridor), (cupboard or wardrobe) and (curtain). And , a storey, the floor-level you climb to. These are the things a house is made of; they are not the things a house is for. The -- magic only fires where a verb names the purpose. Learn the sixteen bricks, and every purpose-built room after that is free.
Put it together
o . - In the kitchen there is a big table and four chairs.
o . - My bedroom has a window and a curtain.
supra . - The bathroom is on the upper storey.
. - Through the corridor one goes to the school.
