episkopo

The ladder is now complete. Pastro is a priest, the one who takes the service in a parish. An episkopo is a bishop, who has charge of many parishes. A papo is the pope, the bishop of Rome, and there is one at a time. The papo page sets the ladder out; this word is the rung that was missing from the middle of it. Esperanto keeps all three as separate roots, exactly as English does, and none is built from the others. Monaĥo sits off to one side rather than on the ladder, because a monk belongs to an order rather than to a diocese, and pastoro, a few ranks earlier in this chapter, is the Protestant minister - a separate root for a church that mostly has no bishops to put above him.

An overseer, literally. Greek epi- is over and skopos is a watcher, so an episkopo is the one who watches over. The same skopos is inside telescope and microscope, and epi- is the epi- of epidemic and epilogue. English bishop is the same word after a thousand years of wear: Latin episcopus lost its opening vowel and softened in Old English to biscop, which is why the English noun and the English adjective episcopal look unrelated and are not. Esperanto took the tidy Greek form and kept it whole, so the family stays visible.

Register. Episkopo is an encyclopedic word, not a devotional one. It is what a newspaper, an atlas or a history book calls the office, and it carries no reverence of its own. Lowercase for the common noun, a capital when it stands in for a name. The adjective is episkopa, the office episkopeco, and the diocese is episkoparo or diocezo. Ĉefepiskopo is an archbishop, built with ĉef- (chief) exactly as you would expect.

A false seam to head off. The word ends in the same three letters as teleskopo and mikroskopo, and there is a real Greek root in all three. But -skop- is not a live Esperanto suffix: you cannot build a new watcher-word with it, and episkop- behaves as one indivisible root that takes -o, -a and nothing else. The relationship is history, not word-building, which is the usual verdict on international roots that arrived under Rule 15.