Esperanto · Chapter 23 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Laboro kaj studo
Work, office, school, student. The words of the working day, and the -ist- suffix that turns any activity into the person who does it for a living.
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
Instrui, instruisto: the suffix that makes a job
means to teach. Bolt -- onto the front of the ending and you get , a teacher - the person whose trade is teaching. That is the whole trick, and it does not vary. English hands you a fresh, unguessable word for every profession; Esperanto hands you one suffix that means "the person defined by this activity" and lets you do the rest of the arithmetic yourself.
One suffix, a whole payroll
Take , to work. The person who does it is a o, a worker. Take the root , a tooth, and the professional attached to it is a , a dentist. Notice that the root can be a verb or a noun - -- does not care. It names the human occupied with the thing, whatever the thing is. Once you have met a , a profession, you can very nearly build the practitioner without being taught it. That is the point: you learn one rule instead of memorising a dictionary, and the rule never quietly changes its meaning behind your back.
The place the work happens
Pair -- with --, the suffix for the place where something goes on, and the working world fills in around your professionals. is an office, from , a post or office you hold. is a school, the place for learning. Not every workplace takes the suffix, mind: a , a factory, is a plain borrowed root, and it is simply where the o clocks in. A , a company, employs them all under one .
Now the honest caveat. Esperanto is regular, but it is not a machine with no exceptions. , a student, , a director, and itself are whole European loanwords that Esperanto kept intact rather than rebuild from -ist-. So are the -or- and -ent- endings baked into them. Your , colleague, and your , diploma, are the same sort of adopted forms. Know these as the small irregularities they are, and they will not trip you.
Put it together
. - The teacher works in the school.
. - My colleague is a dentist.
. - The director of the company has a large office.
, . - Without a diploma, without a profession.
