taglibro

A day-book. That is the word, and you already had both halves. Tago is a day, rank 101. Libro is a book, rank 292. Put them together, main word last, and taglibro is the book of days: a diary. Nothing is dropped, nothing is added, and no linking vowel is needed because tag- and libro meet at a g and an l that sit comfortably together. A learner in their first month has both pieces, and can read this word at rank 2,319 the first time they see it without a dictionary.

Compare what English charges you. Diary is from Latin diarium, a daily allowance, and journal is from French journal, from Latin diurnalis. Two separate borrowings from two centuries, neither of them decomposable by an English speaker, both of them meaning the same thing. German does what Esperanto does: Tagebuch, day-book, and Dutch dagboek. Esperanto is not being clever here, it is being Germanic in its compounding while being Romance in its roots, which is roughly the deal the whole language makes. This is a compound to enjoy, and it is why this chapter's story is called what it is.

Read the story. La taglibro is the graded reader that ships with this chapter, written entirely inside the first 2,400 words, and it is about a grandmother handing over an empty notebook. If you have got this far in the course, it is the story to read next: the vocabulary is exactly what you have, the word on this page is its title, and it is the first point where the course's reading and its word list arrive at the same place on purpose.

The compounding rule, in one line. Rule 11 of the Fundamento says compound words are formed by writing the roots one after the other, with the main word at the end. Taglibro is a book, not a day, so libro comes last. Reverse it and librotago would be a book-day, some sort of festival, which is a real word-making operation and a completely different meaning. The compounding article works through the order rule and the optional linking -o-; the verb for the operation is kunmeti, four ranks earlier in this same band.

Neighbours. Kajero is the physical exercise book, blank until you use it. Taglibro is what a kajero becomes when you write your days in it. Ĵurnalo in Esperanto is a newspaper, not a journal, which is a false friend worth pinning down now; a scholarly journal is a revuo or a periodaĵo. Taglibri is to keep a diary, and ŝipa taglibro is a ship's log, which is the same metaphor English uses when it calls it a logbook.