birdotimigilo

Here it is: the four-piece build, and the best argument for Esperanto that this chapter contains. Birdotimigilo is a word most learners have never seen, in a language most learners have barely started, and you can read it correctly the first time.

Take it apart from the right, which is the direction compound words always go:

A bird-fear-causing-tool. Which is, precisely and unimprovably, a scarecrow.

The -ig- in the middle is the hinge, and it is the same -ig- set out in igi and iĝi. Timi is to be afraid; timigi is to frighten - to cause fear rather than to feel it - and once you have timigi the -il- suffix - one of the workhorses in the affix system - hands you the object that does the frightening. Nothing here is irregular, nothing is memorised, and nothing was borrowed from any national language.

English does the same job with the same delight. A scarecrow scares crows; the pieces are in the other order, because English compounds put the head last only sometimes and here it does not bother at all, but the joke is the same joke. Timigilo on its own is a bugbear, anything that frightens - the general tool before you say who it is aimed at. And when the fields in this course need guarding, the story la birdotimigilo is where he stands.