kapro

Kaprico can finally point at its base. That page went up at rank 2,004 with a flag on it: its etymology section gives the rival accounts of Italian capriccio, one tracing it to capo and riccio, a head of bristling hair, and one tracing it to capra, the goat, and the goat's habit of leaping about for no reason anybody can see. The second account is the one with the animal in it, and until now this site had no kapro page for it to link to. It does now. Whether or not the goat is the origin of capriccio, it is certainly why English has caper and capriole, and it is the picture that makes the word memorable: a whim is a sideways jump.

The gendered set. Kapro is the male, the billy goat, and it doubles as the general word for the species the way hundo and ĉevalo do. The female is kaprino, the nanny goat, and a kid is kaprido. Goat's milk is kaprolakto or, more usually, lakto de kapro; goatskin is kapra ledo. The suffixes do the whole job here with no irregularity anywhere, which is Esperanto behaving exactly as advertised.

Watch the near-neighbours. Kapro is not kapo, the head, though the two are one letter apart and the Latin roots are genuinely different (caper against caput). Kapreolo is a roe deer, a separate animal with a confusingly similar name. And the goat-legged god behind paniko, seven ranks earlier in this chapter, is the reason both words come to us from Greek shepherds: Pan's terror and Pan's legs arrived in the same package.