provoki

English says provoke for two different things and Esperanto splits them. Get this right and a whole class of sentence stops sounding foreign.

Provoki is about the result. Something happens, and it calls a reaction into existence: a law provokes a scandal, a letter provokes a reply, a decision provokes a war. The subject is usually a thing or an event rather than a person, and the object is the reaction, not the person having it. Where English would say "caused", provoki will often be the better Esperanto than kaŭzi, because it carries the sense of drawing the reaction out.

Inciti is about the person. You goad, needle or wind somebody up: a dog, a crowd, a younger brother. There is an agent enjoying it, the target is a living creature, and the reaction is irritation. Inciti la hundon is teasing the dog. Provoki la hundon would be an odd thing to say, and if anybody said it they would mean setting the dog off rather than tormenting it.

So: provoki takes the reaction as its object, inciti takes the victim. Both are Latin and both arrived whole. And while pro and voki are both perfectly good Esperanto words, provoki is not built from them - the Latin fused long before Esperanto existed, and pro voki would mean something like "because of calling".