eĥo

This is the word that keeps the letter ĥ alive. Esperanto has twenty-eight letters and the eleventh, ĥ, has spent a century being quietly shown the door. The escape route was always k, made in the same place in the mouth: ĥemio became kemio, meĥaniko became mekaniko, teĥniko became tekniko. The ĥ article sets out the whole retreat, including the Akademio's Eighth Official Addition of 1974, which printed kemi/o. Moderna formo de: ĥemio in its own official list.

Eĥo never had a challenger. The Reta Vortaro lists eĥo, eĥi, eĥe and seneĥe with no variant spelling offered anywhere on the page. Nobody appears to have proposed eko, and the reason is obvious once you see it: ek- is one of the most productive prefixes in the language, marking the start of an action, so eko is already spoken for many times over. Where ĥoro was blocked by koro, a heart, and ĥolero by kolero, anger, eĥo was blocked by a prefix, and the collision was intolerable enough that the alternative was never even attempted.

It is not the only ĥ word in this course, but it is the only one with no way out. Ĥaoso at rank 2216 has kaoso sitting beside it in complete parallel, and monaĥo at 2047 has a monako that exists, is scarcely used and collides with a country on the Riviera. Eĥo has nothing. Say it like the ch of Scottish loch or German Bach: the Fundamento's own English column glosses the letter as strongly aspirated h, ch in loch (scotch). Do not sand it down to a plain h, because ĥ is a scrape made at the soft palate and h is a breath made in the throat, and that difference is the entire letter.

Typing it, and the small footnote nobody expects. The x-system writes ĥ as hx, which is why this page lives at /esperanto/words/ehxo; the Fundamento's own substitute is hh. And the word has one piece of movement history attached to it: the Danish Esperanto association's magazine was called Eĥo, and it is where the pronoun ri first appeared in print in 1976, so the least-loved letter in Esperanto is on the birth certificate of its most-argued-about reform. That story is in the gender article.

The family is small and regular. Eĥi is to echo, both of a place giving the sound back and of a person repeating an opinion; eĥa is echoing; eĥe is the adverb; seneĥe is without an echo. The figurative sense in the third example above, words finding no echo, works in Esperanto exactly as it does in English.