silko

One root and nothing to take apart. Silko is a single unit: no prefix, no suffix, no hidden compound. That is worth stating on a page in this chapter, because half its neighbours are traps, and the useful skill is recognising when a word is simply a word. The adjective is silka (silken), the adverb silke, and silkeca means silky in the figurative sense - a silky voice is silkeca voĉo, not silka voĉo, since the second says it is made of the stuff.

The word carries a trade route in it. Latin sericum came from Seres, which is what the ancient Mediterranean called the people who made the cloth, somewhere unimaginably far east. The Greeks and Romans never met them; they met the cloth. The southern route into Europe kept the r, giving French soie and Italian seta; the northern route through Slavic and Germanic turned it into an l, giving Russian шёлк, Old English seolc and modern English silk. Esperanto took the northern form, which is why silko looks Germanic and serioza - a completely unrelated word - is the only thing in the dictionary that still resembles the Latin.

Where you meet it. Silkraŭpo is a silkworm, silkfadeno a silk thread, and silkovermo turns up as a variant in older texts. Arta silko is artificial silk, the old name for rayon. Silk is also the standard Esperanto example of a fine ŝtofo, which is the general word for cloth and the one you want when you are not naming the fibre.