alivorte

Take it apart, because you can. Ali- is the root of alia, other, learned at rank 57. Vort- is the root of vorto, word, learned at rank 120. -e is the adverb ending, the one that turns anything at all into a manner or a comment. Put them together and you get alivorte: other-word-ly, in other words. Nobody had to invent this compound and nobody has to look it up. If you have read this far in the course you could have built it yourself from two words you met in the first fortnight, which is the entire argument of the language in one item.

It is a connector, and connectors have jobs. Alivorte restates. It says: what I just told you is true, and here is the same thing put differently, usually more bluntly. That is a different job from the words beside it. Tamen contradicts. Cetere adds something on the side. Aliflanke, at rank 2,041, balances one consideration against another. Do and tial draw a conclusion. Alivorte alone claims to be saying the same thing again, and readers notice when it is not - it is the connector that most often gets a writer caught smuggling in a stronger claim than the one they made. The whole family is laid out in Esperanto connectors.

Punctuation and position. It takes a comma when it opens a clause and usually follows a semicolon or a full stop, because it needs something to restate: li ne venos; alivorte, ni komencu sen li. Mid-sentence it can go bare after a comma. Being an adverb it never agrees with anything and never takes -n. And there is a formal cousin, alivorte dirite (put in other words), plus the near-synonym nome (namely, that is to say), which specifies rather than rephrases.

The last root of three thousand, and a fitting one. This is where the course's frequency list stops. Three thousand roots, which in an agglutinative language with sixteen rules and a full affix system is not three thousand words but something closer to fifteen or twenty thousand - every one of them buildable from pieces you now own, in the way that this final entry is built from alia and vorto and a single letter. That is the whole method, and it seems right that the three-thousandth word should be the one that means let me say that another way. Esperanto has spent this entire list saying things another way: manĝilaro for cutlery, tenilo for a handle, ŝuldanto for a debtor, naĝilo for a fin. The language does not have a word for everything. It has a way of making one.

Alivorte: you are finished with the list, and you can now build the rest yourself.