Klingons invade Esperanto

I was casually reading some Esperanto, when suddenly the word klingon popped up in the most serious of texts!

I then realised it was simply the word klingo “blade” with the accusative “n” on the end to mark it as the object of the sentence.

Anyway, it served as a reminder of the suffix -ing, made me realise I need to brush up on something: what's the distinction between the suffix -ing and the suffix -uj?

Some definitions lead them to be confusingly similar, but in actuality their differences are quite clear. And they’re pretty handy!

Let’s work with the example root cigar-.

cigaro
(a) cigar

What happens when we add our suffixes?

cigaringo
cigar holder

cigarujo
cigar box/container

-ing makes a word which is a holder/sheath for the object described by the root it’s attached to. This’ll often be some structure that the object is partially put in, for holding purposes. E.g. a glavingo "scabbard" for a glavo "sword".

Whereas -uj constructs a word which is a container (usually for storage purposes) for objects described by the root it’s attached to. So a glavujo is more like a weaponry chest.

And because I enjoy silliness: a cigaringujo is a container for cigar holders!

-uj happens to have a couple other uses too, if you’re interested:

• When used on a fruit, berry or flower, it often shows the thing upon which that object grows. E.g. a pomujo is an “apple tree” from pomo “apple”. Apparently, due to the confusion with “a container for apples”, people are now starting to use pomarbo for such things!
• If you’ve got a word like Anglo “Englishman”, you can construct the country name from the people. Anglujo is the container for Englishmen “England”!

Check out the PMEG pages on uj and ing.

Qapla’!