kordo

The cousin arrives. When akordo was written six hundred ranks ago, it had to explain a false seam using a word that did not yet have a page: akordo looks like a- plus kordo, a thing done to strings, and for a musical chord that reading is almost too good to give up. It is still wrong. Akord- is one root from Latin ad cor, to the heart, and agreement came first with the musical sense as a metaphor on top of it. Kordo is a different root entirely, from Greek khorde, a gut. Now both pages exist and you can see the two families side by side.

Four near neighbours, and only two of them are relatives.Koro is a heart, Latin cor. Akordo is built on that heart. Kordo is the Greek gut, unrelated to either. And ĥoro is a choir, from Greek khoros - which is where the ĥ question comes in, because ĥoro is one of the words whose escape route to k is blocked: koro was already taken by the heart, so the alternative had to be koruso instead. Four words within two letters of each other, three etymologies, and one blocked spelling reform.

In use. The instruments are kordinstrumentoj, a whole kordaro is the set of strings on one instrument, and senkorda is what a harp becomes when somebody has been careless. Do not use ŝnuro here: that is rope and cord in the hardware sense, the thing you tie a parcel with. The anatomical extension does hold, though - voĉkordoj are vocal cords, and PMEG uses exactly that word when it explains where in the mouth ĥ is made.