kajuto

A cabin on water, and only on water. A kajuto is a room on a ship: the one you sleep in as a passenger, or the captain's, or the cramped one under the foredeck. It is not a room in a building and it is not a hut in a field. Ferdeko is the deck above it, ŝipo the vessel around it, and maristo the sailor who lives in it.

The fence with kabano, which English will not help you with. English says cabin for both, and Esperanto does not. Kabano is a hut: one room and a roof, on land, a shepherd's shelter or the shed at the end of the garden. Kajuto is the ship's room. A log cabin in the woods is a kabano; the room you booked on the ferry is a kajuto; and if you write kabano for the second, an Esperanto reader will picture you sleeping in a shack on the car deck. Two roots that arrived from different languages for two things English happens to call by one name.

A third neighbour, for completeness. Kabino is a booth or a small enclosed compartment - a telephone box, a changing cubicle, the passenger compartment of an aircraft. So an aeroplane has a kabino, a ship has a kajuto, and a hillside has a kabano. Three similar-looking roots, three jobs, no overlap.

And a false seam worth saying out loud. Kajo is a quay, the stone edge you walk along to board, and it is a real Esperanto word - so the eye offers kaj- plus some -ut- and reads kajuto as a quay-thing. There is no -ut- suffix in Esperanto and no relationship between the two words. Kajut- is one root, borrowed whole from Dutch sailors along with half of Europe's other sea vocabulary. The test is the usual one: if the piece you have cut off means nothing, you have cut in the wrong place.