Do the Bell Thing
Esperanto words are often made of roots extended with affixes and an ending. For instance, arbo, “tree”, is the root arb with the –o ending for nouns. –ar– is an affix meaning “group or collection of a bunch of things of the same type”. We can smush arb–ar–o together to get arbaro, which means “forest”. Similarly, amiko means “friend”, and amikaro is a “circle of friends”.
There are lots of normal affixes, like –ejo for “place characterized by”, –end– for “mandatory” or “needs to be”, –ul– for “person characterized by”, or re– for “again”—but there’s also –um–.
Esperanto has a suffix, –um–, that doesn’t have its own meaning. It’s used to create another almost-root word related to the base word. An example may be helpful. Brako means “arm”. One of the most common –um– constructions is brakumi, which means “to hug”. There are some exceptions, like number bases and clothing named after body parts, but generally, you can’t break down an –um– word to figure out what it means. Without knowing exactly what brakumi means, the closest you could decipher from its parts would be “to do the arm thing”. When you break down the Esperanto word for "to hug", you get "to do the arm thing"? Oh, for cute!
I was listening to Apollo 18 in preparation for an upcoming They Might Be Giants show. One of the tracks, Dinner Bell, includes the following lyrics:
Dinner bell, dinner bell, do the bell thing
I’m waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ding ding ding
“Do the bell thing”? This is my chance! I’m going to combine They Might Be Giants and Esperanto, and finally be cool!
Ahem.
If this were something formal, I wouldn’t translate “do the bell thing” with –um–. Folks wouldn’t know what you meant. However, translating a They Might Be Giants track? You better believe I’m gonna be singing sonorilumu! For more on –um–, see Adventures in Esperanto's "To word-thingy.
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