Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of sinteno
Coloured illustration of sinteno
#1828 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

attitude; bearing, stance

Word origin

Built inside Esperanto from sin ('oneself', the accusative of si) and teni ('to hold'): sinteni is to hold oneself, and sinteno is the way you do it. The same picture underlies English bearing and comportment, and French tenue.

Origin
Esperanto compound
Root
sin + ten- + -o
English cognates
tenable, tenure, maintain

Examples

.

His attitude to work has changed.

.

I do not understand your attitude.

.

Her calm bearing helped everyone.

This one is a genuine build, and decoding it teaches the pattern. is sin plus ten- plus -o: the accusative of the reflexive pronoun , welded onto the root of , "to hold". Literally a self-holding. Sinteni is the verb, and it is one of the small closed set of compounds where a pronoun rather than a root sits in first position, alongside (a sequence, a self-following) and (self-confidence).

Note that the accusative -n survives inside the compound. That is not decoration: sin is the object of , so dropping it to *siteno would break the grammar the compound is made of. Esperanto keeps the case ending in exactly these compounds and nowhere else, which is why they look odd at first and then stop looking odd.

Semantically covers both halves of English "attitude": the physical bearing you can see across a room, and the stance you take on a question. can be his posture or his politics, and context settles it. Where you want only the opinion, opinio is narrower and safer; where you want only the body, pozo or korpa will do it.

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Esperanto · Free printables

sinteno: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "sinteno" (attitude; bearing, stance): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

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This word is part of lesson 37.