Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word
-aŭ. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
-aŭ, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
-aŭ in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
-aŭ you have here. The definition of the word
-aŭ will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition of
-aŭ, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
Esperanto
Etymology
Unknown. -aŭ was the only possible vocalic ending left in the language, after the dedicated part-of-speech suffixes, apart from the uncommon -eŭ. There are, however, sporadic parallels in other languages, such as Lithuanian tačiau "however".
Suffix
-aŭ
- A neutral suffix that does not specify the part of speech of a word. Generally used for words such as hodiaŭ "today" which may be either an adverb or a conjunction, noun, preposition, or adjective, depending on context.
Usage notes
In theory the suffix -aŭ may be replaced by another grammatical suffix, or simply dropped, but in practice this does not occur outside poetry:
- "aŭ does not belong to the root, but is only a conventional ending, and is thus as easily left off as the o in nouns." Zamenhof further wrote of the "neutral but definite ending aŭ", that is, that -aŭ does not define the part of speech of the root. He suggested in 1892 that it could be replaced with an apostrophe. —Kalocsay & Waringhien 1985:121.
Instead, grammatical and other suffixes, additional roots, etc., are appended to the -aŭ ending, e.g. ĉirkaŭ → ĉirkaŭo, ĉirkaŭi, ĉirkaŭa, ĉirkaŭaĵo, ĉirkaŭpreni, etc.
Derived terms
-aŭ is not a productive suffix, and is only found with a few roots. These are:
- adiaŭ (“goodbye”, interjection)
- almenaŭ (“at least”, conjunction and adverb)
- ambaŭ (“both”, adjective and adverb)
- ankaŭ (“also”, adverb)
- ankoraŭ (“still, yet”, conjunction and adverb)
- anstataŭ (“instead of”, preposition and conjunction)
- antaŭ (“before”, preposition) (the -aŭ cannot be removed)
- apenaŭ (“barely”, conjunction and adverb)
- baldaŭ (“soon”, adverb)
- ĉirkaŭ (“around”, preposition and adverb)
- graŭ (“because of”, preposition and neologism)
- hieraŭ (“yesterday”, noun and adverb)
- hodiaŭ (“today”, noun and adverb)
- kontraŭ (“against”, preposition and adverb)
- kvazaŭ (“as if”, conjunction and adverb)
- malgraŭ (“despite”, preposition)
- morgaŭ (“tomorrow”, noun and adverb)
- preskaŭ (“almost”, adverb)
Of the adverbs, only baldaŭ (“soon”) can be used in the comparative. The preposition laŭ (“along”), the numeral naŭ (“nine”) and the neologistic interjections ĉaŭ (“ciao”) and ŭaŭ (“wow”) are bare roots and do not contain this suffix.