mortpafi

A compound of two ordinary roots, and the last one decides what it is.Mort + paf + i: a kind of pafi, shooting, with the manner or the result named in front. That is the standard reading rule for Esperanto compounds, and it is what makes mortpafi transparent the first time you meet it.

Three near neighbours, three different claims.Pafi is to fire a shot and says nothing about the outcome. Mortigi is to kill, by any means at all - mort- plus the causative -ig-, "to make dead". Mortpafi is the narrow one: killed, and killed by shooting. Esperanto builds a great many of these result-plus-method compounds - mortbati, mortpiki - and they all read the same way.

And the same word with the halves swapped.Pafmortigi arrives at rank 2,922, built as pafi plus mortigi rather than mort- plus pafi. By the head-last rule that makes it a kind of killing rather than a kind of shooting, which is a real distinction and a thin one: in practice the two are used interchangeably. Mortpafi reads a shade more like a headline, pafmortigi a shade more like a record.

A word for the record, not for the argument. This is vocabulary you need in order to read history, a war memorial or a news report from another century, and that is the only place this site uses it. The site's Esperanto reading passages keep it to the past tense and the passive, where it belongs.