festivalo

Three words, and they are not interchangeable.Festo is the broad one: a celebration, a party, a feast day, anything from a birthday to Christmas. Festeno narrows to the eating - a banquet, a spread, a table with too much on it. A festivalo is the organised public event with a programme and a date: a music festival, a film festival, a theatre festival, the sort of thing a town council or a committee runs. You would not call a birthday party a festivalo, and calling a film festival a festo would sound like the after-party rather than the screenings.

The seam that is not there. Festival- arrived under Rule 15 as one international root, so it is not festo plus some suffix, and there is no -ival- in Esperanto to build with. What is true is that the two roots are old cousins: Latin festum gave festo directly and, by way of the adjective festivus and a long detour through French and English, gave festivalo as well. Same family, separate arrivals, and Esperanto now carries both because they do different jobs.

Where the word actually lives. In Esperanto the word is inseparable from the movement's own calendar. There is a summer festival somewhere in Europe most weeks of July and August, and the largest of them run entirely in the language for a week at a time - which is where most speakers discover that they can, in fact, hold a conversation. The festivals and the calendar article covers the movement's own dates and the ordinary ones. Our milestone story for this chapter, La festivalo, is set at one.

Building on it. Festivala is the adjective, festivalejo the site, and festivali is used, though partopreni en festivalo is the commoner way to say you went. The verb festi belongs to festo, not to this word, and it is the one you want for celebrating anything at all.