trumpeto

The word this course kept having to walk around. When la cirko needed a brass instrument for the parade, the story had to reach for korno instead, because trumpeto sat two hundred ranks above that chapter's ceiling and a graded reader does not get to cheat. It is here now, and this chapter's own festival story leans on it heavily. That is the whole design of a frequency-ordered course visible in one word: you write around a gap until the gap closes.

A fossil suffix, not a live one. Trumpeto looks like a root plus the Esperanto diminutive -et-, and half of that is true: French trompette really is trompe plus the diminutive -ette, a little horn. But Esperanto imported the whole French word, not the French parts, and there is no *trumpo in the language for the -et- to shrink. So the suffix you can see is a fossil of another language's grammar. If you genuinely want a small trumpet, you have to add a second one: trumpeteto, which is silly, and which is exactly why nobody does.

Blow your own trumpet, in Esperanto. English has the idiom and so does Esperanto, but the verb does the work rather than the noun: fanfaroni, to brag, from fanfaro - a fanfare, a blast of brass. The player is a trumpetisto, the act of playing is trumpeti, and a korno beside a trumpeto is the older, rounder, hunting sort of instrument. The valves are what tell them apart on the page: three of them, and the trumpet has them.