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Line drawing of feino
Coloured illustration of feino
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Translation

fairy

Word origin

From French fée, from Vulgar Latin fata, 'the Fates', from fatum, 'that which is spoken, destiny'. The fairy of the tales is the Roman goddess of fate in a smaller dress, which is why fairies in stories are so often in the business of deciding what will become of you.

Origin
French
Root
fata
English cognates
fairy, fay, fate

Examples

.

In the fairy tale a good fairy helps the poor girl.

.

The fairy touched the shoes with her wand.

.

Granny told of fairies who dance in the forest.

The base root has no page here, so take it from the top. Feo is the creature - a fairy, a fae, of no particular sex. Add -in-, the suffix that makes the female of whatever the root is, and is a female fairy. It is the same derivation as giving o a queen, giving a woman, giving o a cow.

And then usage does something odd, so notice it. In practice has swallowed the whole word. The fairy of European folklore is almost always imagined female, so is what writers reach for when they mean a fairy at all, and feo survives mostly in dictionaries and in the rare sentence that specifically needs a male one. This is exactly what happened to - a widow - where the derived form is common and the base vidvo is not. Esperanto's affix system is regular; which of the regular forms people actually say is a separate question, decided by the world rather than by the grammar.

Fairy-tale furniture. The good fairy of fabelo has oj (wings) and magia (a magic wand - is a stick, and the magic comes from the adjective). Feina means fairy-like, and the fairy godmother is a feina o. If you want the tale rather than its cast, that is ; feo and are who live inside it.

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Esperanto · Free printables

feino: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 46.