superbazaro

This is the good kind of Esperanto word. Super is over or above. Bazaro is a market. Put them together and you have a supermarket, and you did not have to learn a thing. Read it once, hear it once, and it stays - which is what the whole compounding system is for, and why a learner who reaches rank 2,592 with the affixes in hand is not really learning 2,592 words.

Where the shop ladder now stands. Esperanto sorts places to buy things more carefully than English does, and by this chapter the whole rung is in place:

• Butiko - one shop with one owner. A baker, a bookshop, a corner shop.
• Vendejo - any place where selling happens. Built from vendi plus the place suffix -ej-, deliberately vague, and the word you reach for when you do not want to commit.
• Bazaro - many sellers side by side. A market, a souk, a covered hall.
• Magazeno - a large shop or a department store, and in older texts a warehouse.
• Superbazaro - the modern self-service one, with trolleys.

Hipermerkato exists for the enormous out-of-town kind, borrowed rather than built, and superbazarego will be understood by anybody who has met the -eg- suffix.

About that super-. It is not a prefix in the strict sense. Esperanto's official prefixes are a closed list, and super is not on it - it is an ordinary preposition being used at the front of a compound, which the language allows freely. Supermarket in English is the same trick with the same Latin word, and the compound arrived in dozens of languages at once in the 1950s, so superbazaro is half calque and half construction. Note that Esperanto chose bazaro rather than merkato for the second half, which gives the word a slightly older, more open-air flavour than its English cousin.

One super- word that is not built the same way.Superflua, superfluous, looks like the same pattern and is: super plus flu-, over-flowing. That one is Latin all the way down (superfluus), and Esperanto happens to own both halves, so the seam holds in both languages at once. It is a happier accident than most.