Translation
banana
Word origin
A West African word, usually traced to Wolof banaana, which Portuguese and Spanish traders carried into Europe in the sixteenth century. It is one of the few genuinely non-European roots in the core vocabulary.
- Origin
- Wolof, via Portuguese and Spanish
- Root
- banaana
- English cognates
- banana
Examples
.
The monkey ate a banana.
.
Bananas are yellow and sweet.
.
I bought bananas at the shop.
Nothing complicated about the word itself: is the fruit, o or bananarbo the plant, and the accusative in is the only grammar involved.
The trap is that it looks built when it is not. A learner who has met bani, "to bathe", and the suffix -an-, "member of", will read ban-an-o and get "a member of the bath", which is nonsense delivered with total confidence. There is no seam. - is a single root, borrowed whole from an African language by way of Portuguese, and it shares nothing with beyond four letters.
That happens more often than the sixteen rules make it sound. Esperanto is transparently built where it is built, but its borrowed roots are still borrowed roots, and the ones that accidentally contain the shape of an affix are exactly the ones learners over-analyse. When a parse produces a meaning that is silly, the parse is usually wrong.
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
banano: worksheet, infographic and listicle
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "banano" (banana): 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 36.