Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of ŝarĝaŭto
Coloured illustration of ŝarĝaŭto
#2875 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

goods lorry, freight truck

Word origin

A compound made inside Esperanto from ŝarĝo, a load, plus aŭto, a car. Ŝarĝi belongs to the Romance charger family, from Late Latin carricare, to load a cart, on carrus, a cart; English charge and cargo are the same word arriving twice by different roads. Aŭto is the clipped international automobile.

Origin
Esperanto compound
Root
ŝarĝo + aŭto
English cognates
cargo, charge

Examples

.

A big lorry waited at the factory gate.

.

The lorry carried timber to the new house.

.

We saw a long line of lorries on the road.

Read it and you have it. Ŝarĝo is a load; aŭto is a car. A is a load-car: a vehicle whose job is cargo rather than people. Four syllables, two diphthongs, ŝar-ĝa-ŭ-to collapsing to ŝar-ĜAŬ-to in practice, and no dictionary needed. This is the language doing precisely what it advertises.

So which one do Esperantists actually say? Both are correct and both are in use, and the honest answer is that the borrowed one has won the frequency contest. Kamiono sits at rank 2,269 in this course's list and at 2,875 - six hundred ranks behind it, on the same corpus. ReVo gives ŝarĝ- a full entry and mentions ŝarĝveturilo as the general cargo-vehicle term without granting a headword of its own, while has one. That is the usual shape of these contests: the international loan is shorter to say and instantly recognisable to speakers of half a dozen European languages, and the transparent build is the one a beginner can decode but nobody reaches for first.

Learn both, use when you want to sound like everybody else, and use when you want to be understood by somebody who has known the language for a fortnight. Neither is wrong. The same argument runs through against and half a dozen other pairs, and it is one of the more interesting standing quarrels in the movement.

The doublet note from carries here. That page teaches the pattern X per Y: the vehicle is the direct object and the cargo comes in with per. So you per , never the other way round. i unloads it, senŝarĝigi relieves it, and ŝarĝveturilo is the umbrella word for any goods vehicle at all, lorry or van or wagon.

The rest of the fleet. Veturilo is any vehicle, o a van or pickup by the diminutive, ŝarĝvagono a goods wagon on the railway, and the driver is a ŝoforo or, specifically, a o.

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Esperanto · Free printables

ŝarĝaŭto: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "ŝarĝaŭto" (goods lorry, freight truck): 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 58.