libervola

Free-will-ish, and every piece is yours.

liber + vol + a

Libera is free, at rank 450. Voli is to want, at rank 63, and its noun volo is the will. Stick them together, put the adjective ending on, and you have voluntary - done of one's own free will. German does the identical thing with freiwillig and Dutch with vrijwillig, which is where Esperanto got the idea.

Three related forms fall out at no cost: libervole is voluntarily, the adverb; libervoleco is voluntariness; and libera volo, written as two words, is free will in the philosophical sense - the thing the theologians argue about.

And now the fence, which is the best one in the chapter.Volontulo at rank 2,536 is a volunteer, and its page taught you a false seam: volontulo looks like vol + ont + ul + o, a person who is going to want, using the future active participle. That parse is grammatical, decodable and wrong. The word is built on the borrowed root volont-, from Latin voluntarius, plus -ul-.

Libervola is the opposite case. Its seams are real. Liber- and vol- are both Esperanto roots you have owned since the first thousand, and the compound does exactly what its pieces say. So the two words sit side by side meaning almost the same thing, one of them assembled from home parts and one of them borrowed whole, and there is no rule you can apply to tell which is which without looking it up. Hold both in mind at once and you have understood something real about the language: regularity is a property of the grammar, not of the dictionary.

Which word when. They divide by part of speech more than by meaning:

• volontulo - the person. A volunteer.
• volonte - willingly, gladly, at rank 593. What you say when you agree to something. Volonte! on its own is gladly!
• libervola - the adjective describing an act or an arrangement. Voluntary work, a voluntary contribution, voluntary attendance.
• libervole - the adverb. Li venis libervole, he came of his own accord.

The opposite is deviga, compulsory, from devi, and the pair libervola against deviga is how a form, a course or a scheme gets described in ordinary administrative Esperanto.