cirko

Nothing to take apart. Cirk- is one root and the -o is the noun ending, and that is the entire morphology of the word. The interest is all in what the Romans meant by it.

A Latin circus was a ring, and specifically the long oval arena where chariots raced. The Greek kirkos behind it also meant a ring. So does the root of cirklo, the geometric circle, which Esperanto takes from the diminutive circulus and which arrives at rank 2,649, two chapters along from here. The two words are cousins with the same ancestor, and it is worth keeping them apart in your head precisely because they look so alike: cirklo is a shape, cirko is a show. The adjectives make the split obvious, cirkla circular against cirka of the circus. And ĉirkaŭ, the preposition meaning around, belongs to the same family again: it is Latin circum, the accusative of circus used adverbially, which is to say that going around something and running round a racetrack were once the same word.

The modern circus is younger than most people assume. Philip Astley, a cavalry sergeant-major, opened a riding ring in Lambeth in 1768 and worked out that a circle roughly forty-two feet across is the smallest one in which a horse can gallop steadily while a rider stands on its back. Everything else, the clowns, the acrobats, the big top, accreted around that piece of applied physics. When the shows travelled to Europe the Latin name travelled with them, which is why the word is the same in every language this course teaches.

For the tent itself Esperanto is precise: the big top is the cirkotendo or simply the granda tendo. A cirkisto works in one, a klaŭno is the clown, and cirka arto is what the community calls the discipline when it wants to be taken seriously.

This chapter's graded reader is La cirko, which is where the word does its real work: a big top, a town, and not one word in it ranked above the 2,500 you have now been taught.