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Line drawing of identeco
Coloured illustration of identeco
#2666 of 5,000 Core 5000

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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Esperanto · Free printables

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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This word is part of lesson 54.