Tastify

I’ve been playing around with making words in Esperanto recently. Been daydreaming in conversations with people. Every word they say that I don’t know in Esperanto, I try to make it, using only what I do know in Esperanto.

In my playing, I’ve stumbled on a useful set of steps for making a particular kind of word (much like this previous post, check it out, it’s neat!).

Do you already know by now what I mean by a quality root? If not, see this post.

Today we’ll be using quality roots, and these extra tools:

pli
more (see this post for more details)

malpli
less (mal is a prefix that reverses the meaning of things)

igi
suffix meaning “to cause/make [root]”, e.g. boli = “boil”, but boligi = “to cause to boil”

iĝi
suffix meaning “to become [root]”, e.g. pala = “pale”, but paliĝi = “to become pale”

Now, say you’ve got a quality root in its adjective form (-a ending), like this:

bela
beautiful

longa
long

vasta
extensive, vast, wide

You can do a neat thing with them using this formula:

(pli/malpli)<root>(igi/iĝi)

Things in brackets show alternatives! So you get a few choices here. The idea is that you’ve got some quality, like “beautiful”, and you want to make a verb which means: to become, or cause someone/something to be, more or less that quality:

beli
to be beautiful

plibeligi
to embellish (literally: to make more beautiful)

plibeliĝi
to grow/become more beautiful

malplibeligi
to make less beautiful

malplibeliĝi
to become less beautiful

Cool, huh?

This saves you some work:

1. ŝi volas igi min (esti) pli bela
2. ŝi volas plibeligi min

Both 1 and 2 mean roughly “she wants to make me more beautiful”. But look at the second one! So neat! So neat in fact, that I wasn’t sure on the structure of 1. I think the esti is optional. The long way around would be then: estigi min pli bela. Also note that beligi would mean “make beautiful” (sorta like "beautify").

Sometimes, all this adding of -ig and malpli etc. makes the words really long, so sometimes we use shorter forms. Look at these two:

1. plilongigi = (literally) to make more long
2. longigi = (literally) to make long

There is a clear theoretical difference. 1 implies something is already long, and you are making it longer, and 2 says nothing about how long it was, but you’re now making it long (maybe like English, the omission of “pli” might mean that the thing wasn’t long or beautiful until you made it so). But in practice, this distinction matters little, and often the shorter word will be used. Especially when you get to malplilongigi, you might just say “mallongigi”. See this PMEG page for this note, and more -ig examples.

Here’s a few more I like:

plilongigi
to lengthen (to make longer)

plivastigi
to extend (to make more extensive)

verdigi
to colour green (to make green)

plilarĝigi / larĝigi
to widen

malplivarmigi
to cool down/ to cool (something)

plibongustigi
to make something more tasty... tastify!