rifuĝi

Rifuĝi is to get yourself somewhere safe. It is intransitive and takes a place: rifuĝi en la montoj if you are already there, rifuĝi al alia lando if you are still moving.

A seam that fails on a vowel. Latin refugere is re- plus fugere, flee back, and Esperanto has both halves: re- is a live prefix, and fuĝi at rank 1168 is to flee. But the Esperanto word is rifuĝi, with an i, and ri- is not an Esperanto prefix at all. The form came through French and Italian, where the Latin unstressed e had already shifted, and it was borrowed as a unit. Refuĝi is not a word. This is a narrower version of what reflekti does two ranks earlier, and it is arguably the crueller case: there, the prefix is right and the meaning is wrong; here, the meaning would have been right and the prefix is simply spelled wrong.

The derived family, which is where the frequency comes from.Rifuĝejo is a place of refuge: a shelter, a hostel, a mountain hut, an air-raid shelter. It arrives at rank 2,861, in the last chapter of this course, and you will meet it constantly. Rifuĝinto is a refugee, and it is built the way the language builds all such words: the -int- participle plus -o, one who has fled. Not one who is fleeing (rifuĝanto, which is also correct and means something slightly different, someone in the middle of it) and not one who will flee (rifuĝonto). The distinction is real and it is one Esperanto makes better than English, which has only the single word refugee. The mechanism is set out in participial nominals.

The neutral register is worth preserving. In Esperanto community writing rifuĝinto is the ordinary factual term, used the way a newspaper would use it, and the language offers no built-in euphemism or slur in its place. Azilo is asylum, the legal status; rifuĝinta familio is a family that has fled; rifuĝintejo is a refugee camp.