aflikti

Aflikti is transitive and it points the way round that catches learners: the thing that hurts is the subject, the person who hurts is the object. La novaĵo afliktis min - the news distressed me. To say you are the one suffering, use the passive or -iĝ-: mi estas afliktita, mi afliktiĝis. Aflikto is the affliction itself, afliktita the adjective for the person carrying it.

It sits at the heavy end of a scale. Ĝeni is to bother, ĉagreni to vex, aflikti to grieve deeply. Bereavement, ruin and chronic illness afflict; a noisy neighbour does not.

There is no prefix here, whatever the shape suggests. Esperanto has an al- and lots of words built with it, and a- is not a prefix in the language at all, so reading aflikti as a- plus flikti gets you nowhere - the nearest real word to that imagined stem is fliki, to patch or mend, which is an entirely separate root and means nothing like it. The Latin verb was assembled from ad and fligere two thousand years ago and arrived here welded shut. The same is true of aludi, aserti and atenci: Latin's seams, not Esperanto's.