Esperanto · Chapter 6 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
La naturo
Sea, sky, sun and forest. The nature words arrive scattered across four chapters; this session puts them in one landscape.
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
Arbo, arbaro: the suffix that turns one thing into many
is a tree. is a forest. The root itself comes from Latin arbor, as most of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from somewhere, but no second root had to be borrowed for the wood: -- means a collection of these, and it has been bolted onto the back of the root you already know.
That is the pattern this session is really about.
The collective suffix
Once you have seen become , the rest follow without being taught:
gives , humanity. gives , a dictionary. gives o, the animals of a place. , a step, gives , a staircase.
English needs a fresh, unrelated word for every one of those. Esperanto needs a suffix, and the suffix never changes its meaning. When you meet an unfamiliar - in the wild, you can read it off the root and be right.
Above and below
is the sky, the sun, light. These three sit together for a reason: Esperanto compounds them freely, so sunlumo is sunlight and taglumo is daylight. Put two roots side by side and the first one describes the second.
is the sea, water. Note that they are not interchangeable in the way English sometimes lets them be: is the substance, is the place.
is a field and a forest, which is the open-versus-covered contrast the language leans on when it describes land. covers the lot.
The living ones
is a flower, an animal, a horse.
And -in- has not gone anywhere. A o is a mare, exactly as a is a mother. The suffixes do not care what kind of noun they are attached to, which is the single most useful thing to know about them.
Put it together
lumas super . - The sun shines over the sea.
. - There are many animals in the forest.
. - She is looking at the flowers in the field.
. - The sky is blue and the water is cold.