faraono

Why a pharaoh is in a 3,000-word Esperanto list at all. Because of one book. La Faraono is Bolesław Prus's Polish novel of 1895, and Kazimierz Bein translated it into Esperanto in 1907 - three volumes, the language twenty years old, the translator an ophthalmologist writing under the pen name Kabe. It is the most famous translation in Esperanto literature and, by broad agreement, the moment the language proved it could carry a long serious novel. Word lists built from real Esperanto corpora are pulled upward by it, which is why faraono outranks plenty of words you would expect to meet first.

And then the translator walked out. Kabe wrote the first monolingual Esperanto dictionary in 1910, sat as vice-president of the Akademio, and in 1911 simply stopped - no statement, no quarrel anyone could name. The community's response was to make a verb out of his name. Kabei means to abandon the movement abruptly after having been prominent in it, and it is still in daily use. There is something worth admiring in a movement that coins a word so it can keep discussing the man who left, rather than quietly deleting him from the record.

The word itself, and where the authority sits. Faraono is a title, so it behaves like reĝo: la faraono, faraonoj, faraona for the adjective, and no -in- form in normal use even for Hatshepsut, who is la faraono and takes ŝi. The root came through Greek and is one of the small set of Esperanto words with an Egyptian ancestor. If you want to know who settles questions like whether a title takes an article, the Fundamento and the Akademio is the article for that, and Kabe's dictionary is one of the reference works it discusses. For the people rather than the ruler, see egipto at rank 1,881.