tajpi

Esperanto borrowed this root twice, from opposite ends.Tipo, a kind or a sort, came in the ordinary way - Latin spelling, Latin sound, from Greek typos. Tajpi came in from English, and it came in by ear: tajp- is Greek typos filtered through four centuries of English vowel shift and then written down phonetically. Two roots, one ancestor, and a thousand years of divergence between them. Esperanto does this very rarely; most of its borrowings are spelling-first, which is why tajpi looks so unlike everything around it.

How to type Esperanto itself is a real question and it has an answer. The hats do not sit on an English keyboard, so the language uses two workarounds: the h-system (ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, u) that the Fundamento actually authorises, and the x-system (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux) that everybody in practice uses because x appears in no Esperanto word and so can never be ambiguous. This site's slugs are x-system for exactly that reason - the page you are on is dolcxajxo in a URL and dolĉaĵo on the screen. The full treatment, including the keyboard layouts worth installing, is in typing Esperanto.

The family. Tajpilo with the tool suffix is a typewriter, tajpisto is a typist, and klavaro (from klavo, a key, plus -ar-, the collection suffix) is the keyboard. Fifty ranks below sits pasvorto, a password, built the same transparent way from paso and vorto - the two words arrived together in this chapter because the corpus that ranks them is a modern one, and modern Esperanto spends a lot of its time at a keyboard. Note that tajpi has not been swallowed by skribi: writing is composing, typing is the physical act, and a person can tajpi somebody else's words all day without having written a thing.