Esperanto · Chapter 27 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Vestoj
Coat, hat, shoe, shirt. The clothing words, and the prefixes of dressing: you surmetas a coat in the morning and demetas it at night.
Practise this lesson
13-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
Surmeti, demeti: dressing is a matter of prefixes
is to put. That is the whole engine. Bolt - (on) to the front and you get surmeti, to put on; bolt - (off, down) and you get demeti, to take off. So in the morning you surmetas your , and at night you demetas it - one verb, two prepositions doing prefix duty, and not a single fresh word to memorise. English makes you learn "put on" and "take off" as if they were unrelated facts. Esperanto shows you the machinery.
Two prepositions, four English verbs
Here is the trick worth internalising: the prefixes are the same little prepositions you already use as standalone words. means on the table; - means to put on. means off the wall; - means to take off. Nothing is memorised twice. The garment does not care what you do to it - (hat), (shoe), (dress), (shirt), (tie) all take surmeti and demeti identically. Learn the pattern once and it applies to every item in the wardrobe, from your (boot) to your (glove).
English, by contrast, has a scatterplot of verbs for the same idea: put on, take off, slip into, pull off, don, doff. Esperanto refuses the clutter. Surmeti and demeti cover all of it, and the meaning never drifts.
Dressing yourself, and undressing
Now the reflexive. Vesti is to clothe; vesti sin is to clothe oneself, that is, to get dressed. The sin is the reflexive pronoun - you are doing the clothing to yourself. To reverse it, you reach for the affixes again. - means without, -- means to make, so senvestigi is literally to make-without-clothes: to undress. Same logic, opposite direction.
So the four English verbs - put on, take off, get dressed, undress - are, in Esperanto, all transparent constructions from and vesti plus a prefix or a suffix. You are not learning vocabulary. You are learning arithmetic. The roots themselves stay boringly international: (suit), (skirt), (stocking), (scarf), (garment). The cleverness is all in the joins.
Put it together
surmetas . - In the morning I put on the shirt and the tie.
demetas . - In the evening he takes off his boots at the door.
jam vesti sin . - The child already knows how to dress himself alone.
bano senvestigis sin . - Before the bath she undressed quickly.
