merkato

Ten chapters late, the story gets its title word. La merkato has been the milestone story of chapter 14 since chapter 14 existed: the narrator's grandmother writes a shopping list in big letters, the sellers set their tables out between the station and the cinema, and everything turns on a piece of sheep's cheese that is nowhere to be found - until sinjorino Berta, who is selling eggs from her own hens, turns out to have a cousin with a farm and a weakness for chocolate. Every word in that story linked to a page except the one on the door. It does now.

Merkato and bazaro are not the same word. Bazaro is the physical marketplace - the stalls, the awnings, the covered hall, the Sunday spread of tables. It is a place, and you go to it. Merkato is the trading: the buying and selling as an activity and as an institution, and by extension the demand for a particular thing. You can hold a merkato in a bazaro, and Esperanto writers do use merkato for the weekly market itself - the story's title is perfectly good Esperanto - but if you want to name the location, bazaro is the safer word, and if you want to talk about the market for coffee or the labour market, only merkato will do.

The economic vocabulary sits on it. Merkata is market-related, merkatiko is marketing as a discipline, nigra merkato is the black market, libera merkato the free market, and merkatumi is to trade or market something. Around it: vendi to sell, aĉeti to buy, prezo the price, komerco trade, negoco a deal, varo the goods, kliento the customer.

The shop ladder, from smallest. Butiko is a shop, small and usually specialised. Vendejo is the general built word for any selling-place - vend- plus the -ej- of location - and covers everything from a kiosk to a supermarket. Bazaro is the market hall or open market. Merkato sits above all three: not a building at all, but the trade that happens in them.