Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of gastigi
Coloured illustration of gastigi
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Translation

to host, to put up (a guest)

Word origin

Made inside Esperanto from gasto ('guest') and the causative suffix -ig-. Gasto itself is Germanic, a cousin of English guest and German Gast, and behind both stands Latin hostis, a stranger.

Origin
Esperanto derivation
Root
gast- + -ig-
English cognates
guest, host, hostile

Examples

.

They put us up for three nights.

.

She likes hosting friends at her house.

.

The family hosted two students from another country.

-- means to cause, and here it causes guesthood. Gasto is a guest; is to make somebody a guest, which in practice means to take them in, feed them and give them a bed. English needs a whole different word, host, and then has to explain that it is unrelated to the hostility in hostile. Esperanto derives the verb from the noun and is done. The igi and iĝi article is the general case: -- does something to somebody else, -- has it happen to you, and would be to become a guest, which is what the visitor does while the household .

The family is unusually complete. Gastejo is the guest place, an inn or a hostel; gastama is hospitable, literally guest-loving; gastamo is hospitality; gastiganto is the host and o the assembled guests. Every one of them is built from the same four letters, and you can generate the lot without looking anything up.

This is not a neutral word in this language. Pasporta Servo is an Esperanto institution: a list of speakers around the world who will put up another speaker for a night or two, free, on the strength of the shared language alone. It has been running since 1974 and it is the thing many people mean when they say the movement is more than a hobby. is what those hosts do, and the verb carries the whole idea in six letters.

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Esperanto · Free printables

gastigi: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "gastigi" (to host, to put up (a guest)): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

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This word is part of lesson 55.