Latin *mercatus* ghost-writes three of these four words — Esperanto's *merkato* barely disguises the loan. The Romance thread grips the transaction: goods (*merx*) in motion, buyers and sellers defined by what they carry. Chinese 市场 thinks otherwise — the character 市 possibly a banner marking where exchange happens, arriving at the concept from the outside in. One tradition names the act of commerce; the other names the site it needs.
Entered Middle English via Old North French *market* (Norman variant of Old French *marché*), ultimately from Latin *mercatus*. The -t ending preserves the Latin past participle stem rather than the French reduction to *marché*.
Direct Castilian reflex of Latin *mercatus* via Vulgar Latin; the -ado ending is the regular Spanish development of Latin -atus (past participle), giving the word a residual verbal sense of 'a place where trading has been done.'
One analysis sees a cloth banner (巾) hung beneath a cover marker (亠) to signal a trading place — though this decomposition is debated. The Shuowen Jiezi treats 市 as a unified pictograph of a gathering place for exchange, not a transparent compound.
A phono-semantic compound: 土 (earth/soil) gives the sense of open ground; 昜 provides approximate pronunciation. The rising-sun imagery of 昜 is incidental — it is a sound carrier, not a semantic contributor to 场.
市 alone meant 'marketplace' in Classical Chinese. The compound 市场 became standard in modern Mandarin, now covering both physical markets and abstract economic markets. 场 here is the simplified form; traditional: 場.
Borrowed by Zamenhof from Italian *mercato* (itself from Latin *mercatus*); the Esperanto noun suffix -o is appended. No productive Esperanto affixes are active here — this is an unmodified root adoption. Contrast *vendejo* (shop: *vend-* sell + *-ej-* place-suffix + *-o*), where Esperanto's own morphology is fully visible.
Every market, in every tongue, is the same ancient proposition: come out, bring what you have, and see what others will give for it.