Esperanto · Chapter 2 · Lesson 16 · Grammar primer
Word building: mal-, -in-, -ej- and friends
You already know malgranda and patrino. Here is the machinery behind them, and the several hundred words it hands you free.
The short version
mal- flips a word to its exact opposite
The most useful morpheme in the language. Bona is good and malbona is bad, granda is big and malgranda is small, ami is to love and malami is to hate. Every antonym pair in English costs a learner two unrelated words; in Esperanto it costs one root and a prefix you learn once. That alone is several hundred words you were never taught.
granda, malgranda
-in- makes it female and ge- takes both
Patro is father and patrino is mother, and you already knew both without knowing they were built. The same suffix gives virino from viro, sinjorino from sinjoro and reĝino from reĝo. Then ge- on the front takes both sexes together, so gepatroj is parents, which English cannot do without reaching for an entirely different word.
patro, patrino, gepatroj
-et- and -eg- are the volume knob
A matched pair that scales a root down or up. Domo is a house, dometo a cottage, domego a mansion. Rigardi is to look, rigardeti to glance, rigardegi to stare. English reaches for a different word each time and you have to store all three; Esperanto turns a dial. The other two worth knowing early are -ej-, the place for something, and -ist-, the person who does it.
domo, dometo, domego
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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