dramo

There is no love in this word. Dramo looks like dr- plus amo, and amo, from ami, is one of the first nouns anybody learns. It is a false seam: Esperanto has no -am- suffix, dr- is not a root, and dram- is a single Greek unit that arrived whole. The reading is tempting mainly because so many dramas are about love, which makes it the sort of mistake that feels confirmed by experience. Set it beside tragedio on its own page, where -edi- is Greek for song and equally not an Esperanto suffix, and the lesson generalises: the theatre vocabulary came into Esperanto from Greek in finished pieces.

What the Greek was pointing at. Drama meant a thing done, from dran, to do. The Greeks were distinguishing a performance in which people act from a recitation in which somebody tells you what happened, and that distinction is still the working sense of the word: a dramo is a play, the genre of plays, and by extension any sequence of events with the shape of one. The same dran is behind drastic, which is a thing done vigorously.

Both senses carry over. Dramo is the stage form and also the real-life crisis - la dramo de la vespero is the drama of the evening - exactly as in English, and Esperanto uses it for both without apology. Drama is the adjective, drame the adverb, dramisto a playwright, dramigi to dramatise, and dramarto the dramatic art. The neighbours are worth having together: teatro the theatre, sceno the scene, scenejo the stage, aktoro the actor, komedio the comedy and tragedio the tragedy.