Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of reprezentanto
Coloured illustration of reprezentanto
#2244 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

representative, spokesperson

Word origin

Built inside Esperanto from reprezenti plus the active participle -ant-. Reprezenti comes through French représenter from Latin repraesentare, to bring back into someone's presence.

Origin
Esperanto
Root
reprezenti + -ant-
English cognates
represent, present, presence

Examples

.

Every country sent one representative to the meeting.

.

The village's representative spoke first.

, .

As a representative of the committee, I have to ask something.

This is a participle wearing a noun ending. Take reprezenti, swap the -i for -ant- and add -o, and you get "the one who is representing". The whole class works this way: parolanto a speaker, a beginner, loĝanto an inhabitant, vojaĝanto a traveller. There is nothing to memorise, because participial nominals are made on demand from any verb you already know, and the tense travels with them: o is the person who used to represent you, o the one about to.

and delegito are not the same job. The difference is baked into the suffixes, and it is a small lesson in reading Esperanto morphology as grammar rather than as vocabulary. -ant- is the ACTIVE participle: a is the one doing the representing. -it- is the PASSIVE one: a is a person who has been delegated, sent by someone else. So a company's agent in another city is a ; the person your society picks to attend a congress is a . English blurs the two into "representative" and "delegate" and leaves you to guess which is which.

Watch the accusative. needs its -n, and so does the plural: . Participial nouns decline exactly like any other -o word - see nouns and adjectives - which is one more thing the affix system gives you for free.

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Esperanto · Free printables

reprezentanto: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 45.