Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of agordi
Coloured illustration of agordi
#2581 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

to tune (an instrument); to configure, to set up

Word origin

From French accorder, to bring into agreement and so to tune a string, from Latin ad cor, to the heart. The same Latin picture sits inside English accord, concord and courage.

Origin
French
Root
accordare
English cognates
accord, concord, chord

Examples

.

He tuned his violin before the concert.

?

Can you tune my guitar for me?

.

I have to set up the new computer.

A string, a screw, and a small turn. is what you do to a violin before you play it: you turn the peg until the string sits at the pitch it should. It takes a direct object, so you the instrument rather than tuning at it, and the result is . The thing you turn is an o, a tuning key, with the -il- tool suffix doing its usual clean job. Agordo is the noun: a tuning, a pitch, a setting.

The figurative sense is not a stretch here - it is the older one. Latin ad cor means to the heart, and accordare meant to bring hearts into agreement long before it meant to bring strings into agreement. Esperanto kept both. So you can a piano, and you can a mood, and neither is a metaphor borrowed from the other. This is the whole of what La Tagiĝo is doing in its first four words:

Agordu la brustojn, ho nia fratar'!

Tune your chests, brothers. Grabowski is asking a crowd to get their voices and their hearts into one key at once, and the verb carries both readings without choosing. It is the opening line of the song, and it is why this word earns a page in a course that has 3,000 slots.

And then the modern job. is also the ordinary Esperanto verb for configuring a machine: , on, and the settings menu on any Esperanto interface is Agordoj. Nothing new was coined for it - the tuning word simply took the work on, exactly as English tune did in tune the engine. If you use Esperanto software, Agordoj is the word you will meet first, and now you know the violin is underneath it.

Two neighbours. Akordo is a chord, three notes sounding together, and it is the same root with the noun ending straight on it; akordi is to be in agreement. Harmonio is the wider musical and social sense. All three come from the same Latin heart, which is a rare case of a family that stays honest in Esperanto.

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Esperanto · Free printables

agordi: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 52.