kolonelo

The best joke in this chapter. Look at kolonelo with an Esperantist's eye and you will try to take it apart as kolono, a column, plus something. Do not: there is no -el- suffix in Esperanto, and kolonelo is one root, kolonel-, borrowed whole. So the decode is wrong.

And yet the history says you were right. Italian colonnello really is a little colonna: the sixteenth-century officer who led the small column of soldiers at the head of a regiment. A colonel is, etymologically, a column man. The seam you thought you saw in the Esperanto word is not there, but the seam in the word's own past is, and it goes exactly where you guessed. That happens more often than you would expect once you start looking, and it is one of the quiet pleasures of learning a language built out of Europe's shared vocabulary.

What English did to it. French borrowed the Italian word twice, once as colonel and once as coronel with the first l switched to an r. English took the spelling from one and the pronunciation from the other and has been embarrassing itself ever since. Esperanto, having no such history to be loyal to, spells it as it says it.

The ladder. Kapitano captain, majoro major, kolonelo colonel, generalo general. All are oficiroj, and their rango is their rank.