monaĥejo

Decoded: monaĥo plus -ej-. The base arrived at rank 2,047 and the place suffix does the rest. -Ej- is one of the first affixes worth owning outright, because it turns any root into the place associated with it and it never misbehaves: lernejo a school off lerni, preĝejo a church off preĝi, kuirejo a kitchen off kuiri, vendejo a shop off vendi, loĝejo a flat off loĝi. Learn -ej- and you stop needing a separate noun for half the buildings in a town.

A monastery, not a convent. The gloss matters. Monaĥejo is where monks live. A convent, where nuns live, is monaĥinejo - the feminine -in- slots in before the place suffix, and the three-piece build reads exactly as it should. Bilingual dictionaries often give both English words for monaĥejo because English blurs the line in casual use, but Esperanto does not, and using monaĥejo for a community of nuns is the kind of small wrongness a reader notices.

The ĥ. This word carries one of the rarest letters in the language. Ĥ is the voiceless velar fricative, the ch of Scots loch and German Bach, and it appears in only a couple of dozen roots - ĥoro, ĥemio, arĥitekturo, eĥo, monaĥo. Many of them have had an official alternative with k since 1974, standing beside the ĥ form rather than replacing it: kemio beside ĥemio, arkitekturo beside arĥitekturo, and koruso for ĥoro (because koro is already the heart). A few, like eĥo, have no generally accepted alternative. Monaĥo and monaĥejo keep their ĥ, partly because monako is already Monaco. Whether ĥ is dying or has already died is a live argument in the language, and we have written it up in full at la ĥo-demando, which ships with this chapter. In the x-system the letter is hx, which is why the file behind this page is monahxejo.