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Who Knew?

de FourSpeed, 2009-oktobro-01

Mesaĝoj: 23

Lingvo: English

FourSpeed (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-01 17:51:03

In a hit for the (usually) intuitive nature of the language, I got bitten (figuratively) by this word yesterday... lango.gif

salikoko.

Now, I've been learning for a few months, so I have a basic vocabulary,
and I know that:

koko is "chicken" and
sali is "to salt".

So, putting them together is "salty-chicken"?

Ummmm... No...

salikoko is in-fact, "shrimp" (from ReVo) ... Who Knew??? shoko.gif

In a million years, I'd have never guessed that one until looking up the
full word, and I still can't see how they actually derived "shrimp" from
that combo.

So, I guess I've officially encountered my first completely
counter-intuitive word in Esperanto.

Certainly other native tongues have many of these (cathouse in our own language, springs to mind), but I was quite surprised to find one in Eo.

So, I hope you all can have a small chuckle over this little language
speed-bump of mine...

...I think I'll have salikoko-salato for dinner tonight... rido.gif

Cheers,
4

Matthieu (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-01 18:29:33

Salikoko is not a compound word, but a separate root.

But I wonder where it comes from. I supposed it was from the Latin name (like many other species in Esperanto), but I checked and it's not the case (Caridea in Latin).

Oŝo-Jabe (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-01 18:37:00

Actually it's not a compound word. It's salikok/o not sal/i/kok/o. I had a similar experience with subit/e, I read it as sub/it/e which didn't make sense. I also read re/e/n as re/en.

With salikoko at least there's an easy way to tell it's not a compound word: verb endings are rarely preserved in compound words, especially when the root is a noun (salo - salt), -ad will be used instead. In addition, usually only -o (and sometimes -a) will seperate the two words. So for "salting-chicken", it would be either be sal/ad/kok/o or sal/ad/o/kok/o.

Momomomomo (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-01 21:16:24

I discovered the same thing with kukurbo, cake-city sounds much more appealing that pumpkin to me.

rlsinclair (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-02 10:44:35

Butler has salikoko as prawn, with shrimp being salikoketo.

The Konciza Etimologia Vortaro says salikoko comes from the French “salicoque”, which according to Little Bob ( Le Petit Robert ) comes from “saillir” ( = “sauter”, to jump ) and “coque” ( = “coquillage”, shellfish ). So it is a jumping shellfish.

Matthieu (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-02 10:57:24

Wow, I had never heard the word salicoque before. You have just taught me a word in my mother tongue. lango.gif

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-02 11:35:47

Lets just be happy that it was left as 'salicoque' and not 'saillircoquillage' otherwise then imagine the confusion lango.gif

salirkokilaĵo - salt course chicken tool thing - what?! rido.gif

Personally though, I think 'saltkoko' would have been much better due to the amount of puns that could be made for a Esperanto-restaurant-comedy-show. I guess that wasn't on Zamenhof's priorities list unfortunately.

FourSpeed (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-02 19:42:34

Some interesting points in here - thanks for your responses.

Of course, due to the humour from the past couple days, I
will probably always remember salikoko, but it does
present an interesting visual trap for the unwary beginner,
namely, cases that "look" like a combination of easy root words
when in fact, they're unrelated to what you see.

Definitely, as a newbie, I'd classify these as irregular
exceptions to the word-building system. They require memorization
because following simple agglutination will get you into
trouble (kukurbo is an even better example of that than
salikoko).

...and yes, I enjoyed my salikoko-salato last night... rido.gif

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-03 01:48:23

For sure there are some words that a beginner will mis-parse. I wouldn't call it an irregularity in the word-building system; it's just something that tends to happen in languages that allow for a lot of compound words and affixes. This has never been a problem for me as an experienced speaker; you know through context how to parse something out. It would be impossible to avoid every possible instance of this sort of thing, due to Esperanto's flexible nature.

For example, we would practically be prohibited from starting a word with "fi-"; "filino" (daughter) could be parsed out as fi/lino, right? But no one would ever confuse a daughter and "shameful flax", I think!

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-oktobro-03 07:07:27

erinja:But no one would ever confuse a daughter and "shameful flax", I think!
Lets say though, on the odd chance that one of us (sal.gif) did happen to make that mistake at one point of time, then had to find out what flax was, surely there'd be no punishment to that unnamed person... right?

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