anasido

The -id- set is now complete. This word closes a family the course has been building for six chapters, and it is worth seeing all at once: reĝido (2,542) a prince by birth, kokido (2,561) a chick, ŝafido (2,613) a lamb, hundido (2,628) a puppy, bovido (2,681) a calf, and now anasido, a duckling. Six words, one suffix, no exceptions, and English needs six unrelated nouns to say the same six things. This is the single clearest demonstration in the language of what an affix buys you. Ido at rank 847 is the suffix standing alone as a word, meaning offspring - and, confusingly, also the name of the 1907 schism language.

Andersen, and why the joke lands better here. La malbela anasido is the standard title of the ugly duckling, and the cigno page has already told you the punchline: the entire plot is a mislabelled -id-. The bird is not an ugly duck-child, it is a perfectly ordinary swan-child, cignido, in the wrong nest. In English that is a story about appearances. In Esperanto it is a story about morphology, and the title gives it away to anybody who can parse a suffix.

What it is not. Anasido is a duckling, a live young duck. It is not duck as a meat: that is anasaĵo, with the -aĵ- suffix that turns a creature into the substance it yields, and asking a waiter for anasidon orders a living bird - the same fence the bovido page puts up for veal. A female duck is anasino with -in-, a drake is viranaso with vir-, and the word-building article has the rest of that machinery. Bovido predicted this page by name two chapters ago, which is what a productive suffix looks like from the inside.