Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of picejo
Coloured illustration of picejo
#2353 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

pizzeria

Word origin

Built inside Esperanto from pico, a pizza, borrowed from Italian, plus the place suffix -ej-. Italian reached the same word by the same sum, pizza plus the place suffix -eria.

Origin
Esperanto
Root
pico + -ej-

Examples

.

We ate at the new pizzeria next to the school.

.

There are only ten tables in the pizzeria.

?

Is there a pizzeria in your town?

is a pizza and -- is the place-where suffix, so a is a place where pizza happens. It sits in a large and completely regular family: a learning-place, o a baking-place, a drinking-place, a pizza-place. Nothing here is idiomatic and nothing needs memorising separately.

What makes it worth a page is that Italian did the identical sum. Pizzeria is pizza plus -eria, the Italian place suffix. Esperanto did not borrow pizzeria; it borrowed the pizza and built the shop itself, and the two answers came out matching. That is the affix system doing exactly what it advertises, on a word Zamenhof could not have anticipated in 1887.

It is also a small argument against the idea that Esperanto is stuck in the nineteenth century. entered the language when pizza entered Europe, and the machinery for making a shop out of it was already sitting there waiting.

Where this fits

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Esperanto · Free printables

picejo: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "picejo" (pizzeria): 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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This word is part of lesson 48.