Esperanto · Chapter 4 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Familio kaj hejmo
The people of a household and the rooms they live in, with the -in- and -ej- machinery that builds half of them from the other half.
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
Patro, patrino, gepatroj: how Esperanto builds a family
Most languages make you learn family vocabulary twice: once for the men and once for the women. Esperanto makes you learn it once. That is the whole point of this session, and it is the single biggest saving the language offers a beginner.
One root, two people
You already know -in-, the feminine suffix. Here it is doing the heavy lifting:
| root | as it stands | with -in- |
|---|---|---|
| - | ||
| - | ||
| - | ||
| - | ||
| - |
is a son and a daughter. is a wife, and note that the root is the husband: . and are boy and girl.
Then - collects both sexes into one word. is parents, oj siblings, oj a mixed group of children. And --, the collective suffix, does the same job for groups: is humanity from , a forest from . ( is not built that way - it is its own root - but a collection of people rarely needs one.)
So five roots have quietly become fifteen words, none of which you had to memorise separately.
Where they live
is the one worth pausing on, because it is not . A is a building. A is where you live, and it can be a flat, a room or a country. English keeps house and home apart in exactly the same way, which makes this an easy one to get right.
Inside it: a is a room, a a table, a a window. is a garment, and in the plural is simply clothes.
sits slightly apart from the rest, and it belongs here for a domestic reason: a letter is the thing that crosses between two .
Put it together
. - My mother is sitting at the table.
. - The girl is looking through the window.
. - My parents are at home.
. - He wrote a letter to his son.