Esperanto · Chapter 8 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
The suffixes -et-, -eg-, -ul-, -ist-, -an-
Dometo is a cottage, domego is a mansion, junulo is a youth, esperantisto you already know. Five suffixes that each multiply your vocabulary.
The short version
-ul-, -ist- and -an- answer three different questions
All three build a person out of a root and they are not interchangeable. -ul- asks what someone is like: junulo, riĉulo, fremdulo. -ist- asks what they do for a living or as a settled practice: instruisto, kuracisto, maristo. -an- asks what they belong to: urbano, komitatano, kongresano. Test yourself on the sea. A maristo is a sailor by trade; a ŝipano is whoever happens to be on that ship's crew.
maristo, ŝipano
-et- and -eg- work on any part of speech
The size dial is not just for nouns. Domo gives dometo and domego, a cottage and a mansion. Ridi is to laugh and rideti is to smile. Peti is to ask and petegi is to beg. Both suffixes also stand alone as ordinary words, eta for tiny and ege for extremely, which is why you have already met them without noticing they were affixes at all.
ridi, rideti; peti, petegi
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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