migri

The song got here first. La Tagiĝo, the movement's second anthem, opens its third verse with Post longa migrado sur dorna la voj' - after a long migration on the thorny road. The noun there is migrado, which is migri plus -ad-, the suffix for a continuing action. Migri is to migrate; migrado is the migrating, the whole long business of it. That is the suffix doing exactly the job it was designed for, and it is why the lyric can put a century of wandering into one word.

It is not wandering, though. The dictionary is unusually blunt about this: do not use migri the way you would use promeni. Promeni at rank 1,050 is to stroll, to go out walking for the pleasure of it. Migri has a from and a to. Birds migras south, families migras to the city, a fairground migras between towns. What holds all three together is relocation, not aimlessness. The aimless one is vagi.

The three senses, in the order the dictionary gives them. Travelling between distant places. Moving your home deliberately, which is the sense in elmigri to emigrate and enmigri to immigrate. And living without a fixed home at all, which is what nomads and travelling players do.

Bird vocabulary you now own. Migra birdo is a migratory bird, migranto is a migrant, migrado is the migration, and none of them needed a new root. Watch the geese go over in October and you have a whole paragraph.