Mouth full o' words

Found some really inventive words today! If you’ve been paying close attention to the Lernu forums since at least… December, maybe? Then you might have seen my source: an article by Claude Piron, because I think someone may have linked to it a while back.

Besides being an incredibly interesting article on the evolution of Esperanto, there are a couple of anecdotes about some pretty cool uses of the word building system.

jeskaze
if you (one) agrees, in the case of agreement

buŝpleni (pri)
to “constantly pay lip-service (about)”, constantly talk about, mouth full of speech (about)

Let's analyse jeskaze:

jes
yes

And kaze is the adverbial form of kazo “case”. So kaze is like “in the case”. Kazo apparently originally talked only about “case” in the linguistic sense (e.g. accusative case), but has since drifted to be like “affair/event”, more like okazo. A less risky version may well be jesokaze! Regardless, this word is like “in the case of yes/affirmation/agreement”. Pretty neat!

And now breaking down buŝpleni:

buŝo
mouth

plena
full/complete

pleni
to be full/complete (see this previous post for why, and this one for an interesting point about this transformation)

So pleni is “to be full”, and if we add a word to the front, is says that we’re full in a particular kind of way. By adding buŝ to the front, we’re saying that the manner in which we’re full is characterised by “mouth” in some way.

ili buŝplenas pri homrajtoj
they constantly pay lip-service to human rights / their mouth is full of speech about human rights

Literally “they mouth-full about human rights”.

I think that’s pretty cool don’t you?

If you haven’t already, do take a read of that article; it really shows how our language has grown in some interesting ways!

Buŝpleni made me think of plenbuŝe:

Dum la tuta manĝo, lia koramikino parolis plenbuŝe!

Know what I mean by that?