Translation
cool (slightly cold)
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Word origin
Built inside Esperanto from varm-, which Zamenhof took from German warm and English warm. Nothing else in the word is borrowed: mal- and -et- are Esperanto's own machinery.
- Origin
- Esperanto, on a German root
- Root
- warm
- English cognates
- warm
Examples
, .
The water is cool, not cold.
.
Today the weather is cool and grey.
.
I am drinking cool tea.
Three pieces, and you already own all three. -varm--a. The prefix - reverses, so is cold. The suffix -- shrinks, so a small version of cold is a slight cold. And -a makes it an adjective. Nobody had to invent this word; it assembled itself out of parts taught in the first three chapters, and if you had never met it you could still have built it on demand.
That is the whole argument for Esperanto in one adjective. English needs a separate lexical item, cool, with its own spelling and its own history, sitting between warm and cold with no visible relationship to either. Esperanto just says a-little-bit-not-warm.
The temperature ladder, top to bottom, all on the same root:
(rank 785) - boiling, scorching(rank 516) - warm, hota- lukewarm, tepid- cool(rank 526) - colda- freezing
Six words, one root, two affixes and a prefix. Learn the ladder as a shape rather than as six vocabulary items and it will never leave you.
Where this fits
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Grammar articles
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Esperanto · Free printables
malvarmeta: worksheet, infographic and listicle
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "malvarmeta" (cool (slightly cold)): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.
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Start your free weekThis word is taught in chapter 26, lesson 8: malvarmeta, smeraldo, ŝmiri and 7 more words.