Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of aŭtobuso
Coloured illustration of aŭtobuso
#2173 of 5,000 Core 5000

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.

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Esperanto · Free printables

aŭtobuso: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 44.