Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of kamentubisto
Coloured illustration of kamentubisto
#2950 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

chimney sweep

Word origin

Made entirely inside Esperanto out of three pieces the learner already owns. Nothing was borrowed: the language assembled the job from a hearth, a pipe and a trade suffix.

Origin
Esperanto compound
Root
kameno + tubo + -ist-

Examples

.

The chimney sweep climbed onto the roof.

, .

Black with ash, the chimney sweep smiled.

.

We called a chimney sweep before the winter.

Three joins, and every one of them decodes. Take it slowly, because this is the best worked example in the chapter. Kameno at 2,412 is the fireplace, the open hearth in the wall. Tubo at 2,111 is a pipe. Compound them and you get kamentubo, the fireplace pipe, which is exactly what a chimney is. Then hang -- on the end, the suffix for the person whose trade it is - , , - and you have the man who does chimneys for a living.

Nobody had to teach you that. Four morphemes, two of them from this chapter, and a five-syllable word for a job most languages had to invent a special noun for: Schornsteinfeger, ramoneur, deshollinador. Esperanto just glued together things it already had. This is the argument the course keeps making about 3,000 roots being worth far more than 3,000 words, and here it is in a single entry.

A note on the fire words. is the hearth you sit in front of, is the stove or oven you cook in, and kamentubo is the shaft above either of them. If what you mean is the tall industrial chimney of a factory, that is a fumtubo or a kamentubego, and the sweep does not go up those.

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Esperanto · Free printables

kamentubisto: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 59.