(#111) Afiksy o wątpliwych zaletach

mal-
doesn't mean "badly" or "wrongly", but forms opposites – a device esperanto
overuses to a ludicrous extent, for which reason it's probably the most hated
affix in the language (certainly by me!). Thus common words like "small, short,
narrow, old, left, bad, different" have to be mal-granda, mal-longa, mal-largha, mal-juna,
mal-dekstra, mal-bona, mal-sama; and "loud"
is the ridiculous malkvieta. Not only do these words require unnecessary mental
gymnastics, they also gets monotonous if you have to use more than one or two of
them. Even a basic meaning like "to open" is not exempt; it's mal-fermi,
i.e. the opposite of fermi "to close"!!! As ever, there are unexplained
exceptions: "left" and "right" are opposites (dekstra, mal-dekstra), but "north" and "south" aren't (norda, suda);
why? And David Peterson informs me that some people like to say trista for
"sad" anyway, rather than the malfelicha you're supposed to use.
The augmentative -eg- and its opposite -et- reduce many possible
degrees of size to just three. Thus the triplet vento, vent-eto, vent-ego
"wind, breeze, gale" replaces the entire Beaufort Scale, and arb-eto (from
arbo "tree") turns out to be "small tree, shrub", requiring the
desparate-looking contrivance arb-et-ajho for "bush". Note also the
typically idiomatic derivation rid-eti "to smile" from ridi "to
laugh", which is clearly a lame attempt to keep the number of roots down; it
would better mean "to chuckle". eta, derived from the suffix, seems to be a synonym for malgranda "small" – but
if it isn't, as many sources imply, why is the distinction necessary? Is mal-eta
the same as ega? Can you use -et-eg-a and -eg-et-a to make finer distinctions of
size? Together with the vagaries of derivation and conversion, these suffixes
provide further scope for ambiguities: if rugh-eta (derived from an adjective)
is reasonably "reddish", then shtoneta (derived from a noun) is equally
reasonably both "a bit like a stone" (shton-eta) and "like a pebble" (shtonet-a).
And, for a language with supposedly high ideals and no grammatical genders,
there's no excuse for the excusively feminine suffix -in-, which requires "woman"
to be vir-ino "a female man" (not, strangely, the more neutral homino "female
human"); the hypothetical converse, fem-ula for "man", is equally absurd.

(#112) Afiksy używane niekonsekwentnie

-ec- "quality" is necessary to make abstract nouns from nominal roots. Thus
homo, hom-eco "man, manliness"; but compare the inconsistent firma, firmo "firm,
firmness". blanko, blank-eco probably both mean "whiteness"; a correspondent
informs me that blanko is used in phrases such as "the white of the eye", for
which something like blankajho would be better. -an-, -ist- and -ul- all represent various types of people; note the
inconsistency with mistiko "mysticism", mistik-ulo "mystic", but katolik-ismo "Catholicism",
katoliko "Catholic". (There are further perils here: you might think that
katoliko could be a compound with kato "cat", before consulting your dictionary
and discovering that liko doesn't actually mean anything.) Brendan Linnane points out that the suffix -on-, which is used to form fractions
(e.g. ses-ono "a sixth"), is also used on the word for "million", miliono, which
is not a fraction; note its similarity in form to "thousandth", which is
mil-ono, and in sound miljono, which could be anything.

(#113) Wieloznaczności

Because the affixes are short and arbitrary, many of them appear as parts of
longer roots and so give rise to words with several possible meanings. An
example for now is sukero, which means both "sugar" and suk-ero "a drop of juice";
more such words may be found in
Appendix 2. (unfortunately no longer available). Further ambiguities also arise when you mix affixes together, since there is no
indication of what affects what. The classic example is mal-san-ul-ej-o,
ultimately from the root san- "health" with the affixes mal- "opposite", -ul-
"person" and -ej- "place". You're supposed to work out that this means "hospital",
literally "place for a person the opposite of well"; even with this derivation
it could also mean "private hospital room", "epidemic zone", and so on. If
instead you parse it as malsan-ulejo, you get something like "sick building
syndrome". Likewise, malgrandeta is both the opposite of grandeta "largish" and
the diminutive of malgranda "small". There are at least nine ways of constructing something which looks equivalent to
English "different", but probably isn't: alia, malsama, nesama, malsimila,
nesimila, neidenta, malidenta, neegala, malegala.

(#114) Fałszywe afiksy

Worse, some affixes mean different things at different times; thus the prefix
eks- "former" has its meaning changed to "out of" (which should be el) in words
such as eksciti "excite", ekstrakti "extract", ekstrema "extreme" and eksporto
"export". Similarly, many words begin with pre-, which seems to mean "before", however
there is no such prefix; the actual esperanto equivalent is antaw-, which should
really have been left as ante-. And a lot of words derived from Latin begin with
kon- or its assimilated form kom-, retaining its meaning of "with" for which the
Esperanto is actually kun; the unwary reader or listener must therefore wonder
if the word is a compound with some form of koni "to know", or perhaps komo "comma".

(#115) Afiksy, których brakuje

The derivative apparatus is deficient in other ways too; one obvious omission
is an affix meaning "the result of an action". Thus the nearest to "a piece of
writing" or "something written" seems to be somewhere between skribitajho or
skribajho, but the usual meaning for -ajh- doesn't imply this. Another try is
skribito, but this properly means "a person who has been written", which is
nonsense even in Zamenhofese. There's always skribo, but that could be
something else again; although, in Ido, we can be sure that it's what we're
looking for.