proverbo

The best false seam in the chapter, because both halves are real words. Pro is because of. Verbo is a verb, the part of speech. Put them together and Esperanto would give you something like "because of a verb", which is not a proverb by any road. Proverb- is one borrowed root, and the join inside it is Latin's, made two thousand years ago out of pro and verbum. Esperanto inherited the two pieces separately as well, which is exactly why the illusion is so clean here: this is a word whose parts you can look up and whose sum is nonsense.

Esperanto's proverbs came from one family. Markus Zamenhof taught languages and spent years lining up the same proverbs across Russian, Polish, French and German. His son, who had built a language, translated the collection into it, and the Proverbaro Esperanta appeared in 1910 with roughly 2,600 entries. Kia patro, tia filo, in the first example above, is one of them: two correlatives, no verb at all, and a whole grammar lesson in four words. The full story, with fifteen proverbs and the grammar point each one carries, is at the Proverbaro.

Using the word itself. Proverba is proverbial, proverbaro a collection of proverbs (the -ar- suffix, a set of things), and laŭ la proverbo is the ordinary way to introduce one, as English says as the saying goes. Diraĵo is a saying that has not earned proverb status, and slogano is a slogan, which is a saying somebody is selling you. Everything in the Proverbaro is public domain: Zamenhof died in 1917.