Translation
bus, motor bus
Word origin
Aŭto from Greek autos, self, plus the tail of omnibus, Latin for for everybody. The -bus was never a word: it is the ending of a Latin dative plural, sliced off a vehicle's name and mistaken for a noun.
- Origin
- Greek and Latin, via international automobile and omnibus
- Root
- autos + omnibus
- English cognates
- omnibus, bus, automobile
Examples
.
The bus to town has already come.
.
We waited for the bus at the station.
.
There were many people on the bus.
This is the best morphological accident in the chapter. The horse-drawn public
carriages of 1820s France took the name omnibus, Latin for "for everybody",
because that was the point of them: anyone could get on. Omnibus is not a noun
in Latin at all - it is the dative plural of omnis, all, so the -bus is a case
ending, the way the -s in "cats" is. English then clipped the word from the
front, kept the grammatical suffix, and made it the name of the vehicle. Every
bus in the world is named after a Latin inflection somebody misunderstood.
Once bus was a word it became productive, and the motorised version was an
-bus. Esperanto has both halves in its own right: and are
separate pages in this course, and reads as a plain compound of the
two even though that is not how it was actually built.
Which to use? Everyday Esperanto says , the same way everyday English says
bus rather than motor omnibus. is the full, slightly formal form -
timetables, official notices, the sort of prose that also says "commence"
instead of "start". Both are correct; neither will be misunderstood. The related
family is aŭtobusa (a bus route is an aŭtobusa linio), aŭtobushaltejo for
a bus stop, and o for the driver, though does that job just as
well.
Where this fits
Add to review queue
Track this word in your spaced-repetition queue and be tested on it at the right interval.
Go to my review queueEsperanto · Free printables
aŭtobuso: worksheet, infographic and listicle
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "aŭtobuso" (bus, motor bus): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.
Free for members
The printable worksheets, infographics and PDFs are free with an account. Start a free week and download as many as you like.
Start your free weekThis word is part of lesson 44.