Esperanto · Chapter 20 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Koloroj
Red, blue, green, yellow. The colour words, and how Esperanto builds a colour out of the thing that has it: an orangxo gives you orangxa.
Practise this lesson
12-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
Oranĝo, oranĝa: the colour is just the thing, with an -a
Here is the whole trick, and English half-knows it already. is the fruit, the thing you peel. Add the adjective ending -a and you get oranĝa, the colour orange - the shade of that fruit, named after it and nothing else. English does this exactly once and then loses its nerve: an orange is orange, but a rose is not "rose", it is pink, a word from nowhere. Esperanto keeps its nerve. The colour is the thing, with an -a on the end, every time you want it.
The roots that were always adjectives
Some colours in Esperanto never had a "thing" stage. (red), (blue), (green), (yellow), (black) and (white) are simply roots that arrive wearing the -a ending, and you learn them the way you learn any adjective. (grey), (brown) and (purple) join the same club. There is nothing to derive here - a is a red apple, and that is the end of it. itself, the word colour, is the noun the whole set answers to.
When the thing comes first
The interesting ones are built the other way round, from an object you already know. gives oranĝa. And where a bare -a would be odd, Esperanto reaches for -kolora, literally "-coloured": a is a rose, so is rose-coloured, which is to say pink. This is the same regular machine as to . You do not memorise a fresh, unrelated word for the shade; you point at the thing and say "that colour".
Then you tune it. Hel- means light or bright, - flips a root to its opposite, so helverda is light green and malhelblua is dark blue. Pin a colour to a thing and you get a compound shade: is the sky, so ĉielblua is sky-blue. One small kit of parts, and the whole paint chart falls out of it.
Put it together
oranĝa . - The orange sun set.
. - She wore a pink dress.
malhelblua. - The sea was dark blue.
helverdajn ĉielbluan . - I like the light-green leaves and the sky-blue roof.
