avara

The base finally arrives, one chapter late. Malavara, generous, is at rank 2,141 and has been on this site for a chapter and a bit - sitting there with its mal- pointing at a word that had no page to point at. That is fixed here. Avara is the root; malavara is its reverse; and the ordering was an artefact of the frequency list, which counts words as people use them and has no opinion about which one is logically prior.

Which direction is the default, and why it is not the English one. In English the unmarked word is generous and the marked one is mean or stingy - if anything, the negative sits on the miserly side. Esperanto goes the other way. Avara is the plain root and malavara is the derived one, so the language's built-in default is the vice, and generosity is literally un-miserliness. Zamenhof was following Latin and the Romance languages here, where avarus / avare / avaro is the primary word and generosity gets its own separate root. The practical upshot: when you want to say generous, do not go hunting for a root. Reach for mal- and you are done. And if you meet avara first and find it faintly odd that a language would build "kind" out of "not-cruel", that is exactly the trade mal- makes everywhere - one root, two words, at the cost of the occasional lopsided default.

Range of use. Avara is not only about money. Avara pri laŭdo is sparing with praise, avara je vortoj is a person of few words, and the sense there shades from vice into mere frugality. The noun is avaraco or, more usually, avareco - the quality of being miserly - and avarulo is the miser himself, which is the word you want for Scrooge. Do not confuse it with ŝpari, to save: saving is a virtue and avareco is what it turns into when it stops serving anything.