Ch 19 · Lesson 25Esperanto · Chapter 19 · Lesson 25 · Themed review
La hejmo
Room, bed, table, door. The words for the house, and the -ej- suffix that names a place after whatever you do in it: you in a o.
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
Kuiri, kuirejo: the room named after what you do in it
means to cook. Add --, the suffix for a place, and you get o: the cooking-place, the kitchen. 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 a good part of the house builds itself.
The rooms are verbs wearing a suffix
English hands you a separate, unrelated word for every place. Kitchen, school, canteen - three words, three spellings, no thread joining them. You memorise each one cold. Esperanto spares you most of 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 learn) gives , the school. (to eat) gives o, where eating happens - a dining hall, a canteen. You know the verb, therefore you know the place. Meet an unfamiliar - in the wild and you read it straight off the root.
One warning, because the suffix names a place, not necessarily a room in your flat. o is a sleeping-place: a dormitory, a shelter with rows of beds. Your own bedroom is a , a room () for sleeping. In the same way is a place for bathing, often public baths, while the bathroom at home is usually a . When the thing is a room in a house, Esperanto often prefers the compound with .
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 place after that comes cheap.
Put it together
o . - In the kitchen there is a big table and four chairs.
. - My bedroom has a window and a curtain.
. - The bathroom is on the upper storey.
. - Through the corridor one goes to the school.