Unification day

I was listening to really quite an interesting talk today, but the room was SO incredibly warm, and I’d had such a great deal for lunch. So I began to nod off… BUT! In an effort to stay awake and thinking, I began to listen really hard, and try to translate in my head what they were saying into Esperanto.

I noted down all the words that I could not translate, and subsequently tried to build words for them. And one of my favourites was for “unify”. I had no idea what the word for “unify” was! So I came up with the idea of making many things into one.

Soooo… unu is the word for “one”, and the suffix -ig means “to cause/make [root]”. So:

unuigi
to make one/to unify/to unite (something)

Esperanto word-building wins! I thought it was pretty neat. I later looked it up, to confirm, and found this definition in Reta-Vortaro:

kunigi plurajn objektojn en unu tuton
to make together several objects into one whole

It's always pleasing to see the system work. I then went shopping around to see if there are any other words typically used for "unite" and came across this:

kunigi
to unite, to bring together (literally: to cause to be together)

komuna malamiko povus kunigi la melojn kaj sciurojn
a common enemy could bring together the badgers and squirrels

From kun "together". A similarly:

kunligi
to unite, to link together

From kun + ligi "to link"

Awesome!