Translation
identity, who someone is; sameness, the quality of being identical
Word origin
From Latin identitas, coined on idem, the same, by late Latin writers who needed an abstract noun for sameness. The whole international family sits on that one pronoun.
- Origin
- Latin
- Root
- idem
- English cognates
- identity, identical, idem
Examples
.
The police checked his identity.
, .
In the big city he felt he was losing his identity.
.
Nobody doubted that the two letters were identical.
Root plus suffix, and the root has no page here. is identa,
identical, plus --, the suffix that turns a quality into an abstract noun.
gives o, goodness. gives , freedom. Identa
gives , sameness. The honest note is that identa itself does not
appear in this course's frequency list at all, so it has no word page: the
derived abstract noun is commoner in real Esperanto than the adjective it is
built from, which happens more often than you would expect.
The does have one. Identigi, rank 2503, is
identa plus --, to make identical, which in practice means to identify: to
establish that this person and that name are the same. Between the two of them
you can say most of what the family is for without ever needing the bare
adjective.
Two senses, and English blurs them the same way. The first is logical
sameness: the identity of two figures, two signatures, two accounts of the same
night. The second is personal: who someone is, the thing a passport is supposed
to prove and a large city is supposed to erode. Esperanto does not split these
either, so context carries the whole load. An ID card is identeca or,
more often written, identiga .
Where this fits
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identeco: worksheet, infographic and listicle
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "identeco" (identity, who someone is; sameness, the quality of being identical): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.
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Start your free weekThis word is part of lesson 54.