I decided it was time to stop treating Esperanto as an interesting theoretical concept and start learning it as a language.
Went to La Puzlo Esperanto.
It is aptly named because I have only started and am already puzzled.

Lesson 3:
Rido = laugh
Ridego = loud laugh
But rideto = smile
How does one say quiet laugh?

Lesson 4:
Miaj infanoj ridegas = my children laugh uproariously
Mi ridegas = I laugh a lot
One would have expected I laugh loudly, so how does that work?

Bemused:
One would have expected I laugh loudly, so how does that work?

It does mean I laugh loudly. "eg" is an "intensifier". What the puzlo esperanto says isn't wrong, but it's an awkward way of saying it.

Ridegi = to laugh loudly (more or less)

For I laugh loudly I would say:
Mi ridas laŭte

For I laught quietly I would say:
Mi ridas mallaŭte

The e suffix makes it an adverb

Bemused:How does one say quiet laugh?

'To laugh quietly' can be 'subridi'

Ridego is certainly a guffaw. You might have expected that rideto would be a chuckle. But it has been long since established that this word means a smile.

How this arose, I am not sure. Perhaps it is simply that there was a greater need for rendering the notion of smile into Esperanto (rather than chuckle) and the usage of rideto in this sense simply got stuck, and it became too late to change it.

Perhaps this is a calque from German or Russian, the languages of the earliest Esperantists.

However, if you can find a suitable international word for smile, you can always launch it as a neologism and see if it catches on.

For the moment you just have to use a work-around for chuckle - subrido, ridkluko, mallaŭta rido, malgranda rido, and so on, according to your preference.

There are some other compound words, whose specific meaning, sanctioned by long usage, may not be immediately apparent to the beginner - eldonejo, publishing house, aliĝilo, form for enrolling for a Congress, for example -but I don't think there are that many like these.

Compounds with '-et' have a tendency to involve a bit of a class change, or to be more specific, than the elements would suggest rather than just meaning a malgranda whatever it is. A similar effect can be observed with other common suffixes.

The immediate interpretation of 'lernejo' is not any place where learning takes place, but specifically a school. And lernejano is a pupil at a school - not, for example, a university student.

In general Esperanto's word-building system is a pragmatic device for cutting down on the learning load, and making it easier to recognize words, rather than being an exact science.

At the end of the day, it is much easier for the beginner Esperantist to remember that rideto means smile, rather than it is for the learner of English to guess the meaning of 'smile' if he only knows the word 'laugh'. And anyway can you chuckle without smiling? Try it in front of a mirror

By the way, Puzlo, is used for jigsaw puzzle, or some complicated brainteaser with analogously a large number of disordered elements, that you need to bring together to make a coherent picture.

A better word for you here to represent something that seems mysterious or difficult to understand might be 'enigmo'.

And more on word-building.

In a beginner's book you might find it mentioned that broso means a brush, and therefore you shouldn't say brosilo for a brush (though you say kombilo for a comb). However if in some mechanism there was something that had a brushing action, but wasn't really a brush, you might stretch the meaning of broso to include it, or you might equally refer to it as the brosilo.

Because such things rarely come into everyday conversation, and the distinction between a brosilo and a broso is rarely important, nobody notices that the meaning of the word broso is more specific than just anything at all that brushes, as, after a while, you will not find it remarkable that lernejo is more specific than anywhere you learn.

In Esperanto usage defines meaning, in much the same way as in other languages. If I use the word broso, the picture that comes into your mind is not that of a broom.

The big difference though between other languages and Esperanto, is the extent to which you have to learn how to express and to recognize a whole load of separate meanings. The combinatorial characteristics of Esperanto obviate that.

It is much easier to learn rapido, rapidi, rapide than (for the student of English) speed, hurry, quickly.

Don't complain too much that rideti is a particular (perhaps not 100% logical) diminutive interpretation of ridi. You will pick up the meaning, and retain the word more easily, than you might with smajli, or sorrisi, or usmevi.

sudanglo:Perhaps this is a calque from German or Russian, the languages of the earliest Esperantists.

German:

lachen - to laugh
lächeln - to smile

I can't find anything that says it's diminutive, but lächeln is derived from lachen. Another example of such a word:

Magd - maiden
Mädel - girl

That is diminutive.

I don't know German, Dibble, but it seems quite plausible that the German for smile is in effect some sort of diminutive of the word for laugh.

If Esperanto had followed the French model (rire, sourire) we would have ended up with subridi. But I think quite wisely this is used instead for a suppressed or hidden laugh.

By the way, I thought that subvoĉe was a common word, and I was surprised to find it only crops in one title in the Tekstaro.

sudanglo:I don't know German, Dibble, but it seems quite plausible that the German for smile is in effect some sort of diminutive of the word for laugh.

Indeed it does. Duden doesn't want to outright state it though.

I don't know Russian, but I do know a little Polish:

uśmiechać się - to smile
śmiać się - to laugh

I, unfortunately, do not know enough Polish to say whether that is a diminutive form, but perhaps a Polish comrade could help...

What was the word for smile before rideto?

What was the word for smile before rideto

I suspect that there wasn't one. The Tekstaro gives 22 hits in la batalo de l'vivo (1891). Whilst the context of some of these hits doesn't make it absolutely clear that the intended meaning was smile rather than little laugh, I can't imagine that Zamenhof would not have use the word consistently.

With the imprimatur of Zamenhof himself, there would have been little chance for others not to follow this usage.