Esperanto · Chapter 25 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Muziko
Song, note, piano, violin. The words of music, and the family of words one root can grow: kanti, kanto, kantisto, kantajxo.
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
Kanti, kanto, kantisto: one root, a whole family
English makes you learn four separate words for one idea. To sing, a song, a singer, the act of singing: four spellings, four things to remember, and no rule connecting them. Esperanto refuses to play that game. You learn one root, kant-, and a fistful of endings that never change their meaning, and the whole family falls out of it.
Watch it happen. is to sing - the -i marks the infinitive, every verb ends this way. is a song - the -o marks a noun, every noun ends this way. is a singer, because -- means the person who does this for a living, the same suffix that turns into o. o is a sung piece, a concrete thing that has been sung, because -aĵo makes a tangible object out of an abstract root. And o is singing, the ongoing activity itself, because -ad- means the sustained, repeated act. Five words. One root. You memorised nothing new after the first.
The grid, not the list
This is the trick worth internalising: Esperanto vocabulary is a grid, not a list. Down one side you have roots - kant-, -, not-. Across the top you have endings and suffixes - -i, -o, -a, --, -aĵo, -ad-. Every cell is a legal word, and the meaning of each cell is the root times the ending. No exceptions, no irregular plurals, no learning that "songster" is a real word but "singster" is not.
Run - through the same grid and it holds. is music. Muzika is musical, the adjective, because -a marks adjectives. is a musician, the -- person again, doing exactly what it did to kant-. You did not learn "musician" as a fresh word; you applied a rule you already had.
The international roots come free
The rest of the session's vocabulary you half-know already, because Esperanto borrowed it from the same European stock English did. o, , , , , , , - a melody, a rhythm, a rhyme. You are not learning these so much as respelling them into Esperanto's tidy phonetics, where every letter is pronounced and the stress always lands on the penultimate syllable. And each of them feeds the grid too: melodia, ritma, instrumenta. The economy compounds.
Put it together
. - The singer sings a beautiful song.
on, . - I love the singing, but the rhythm is too fast.
. - She plays the violin while he plays the piano.
. - This melody has a beautiful rhyme and a clear note.
