kometo

The best gift in this band, and it costs nothing to remember. Greek kome is the hair of the head. A comet is kometes aster, the long-haired star - the Greeks saw a smear of light behind a bright point and described it as hair streaming out behind a runner. Every European language kept the word without keeping the picture, so English speakers say comet several times in a lifetime and never once think of hair. Now you will. The astronomers preserved the other half too: the fuzzy envelope around a comet's nucleus is still called its coma, which is the same Greek word again.

The sky, as this course has assembled it.Stelo at rank 774 is a star, planedo at 1,036 a planet (itself Greek for wanderer), luno the moon, suno the sun, galaksio at 2,342 the galaxy and orbito at 2,775 the path a thing follows round another. Kometo completes the set. The scientific register that holds all of it together is set out in scienca Esperanto, which is worth reading if you intend to use the language for anything technical: the international vocabulary is admitted wholesale, and words like this one need no translation anywhere.

A note on the tail. Vosto, at rank 1,641, is an animal's tail, and Esperanto uses it for a comet's exactly as English does: la vosto de la kometo. It is a metaphor so old that nobody notices it, and it sits oddly next to the hair metaphor buried in the name - the same object, described twice, once by its head and once by its back end.

Grammar. Regular in every way: kometo, kometon, kometoj, kometojn, and the adjective kometa. Stress on the me: ko-ME-to. Beware only the near neighbour kometo versus komenco in fast reading; they share four letters and nothing else.