modifi

A false seam, and a tempting one. Esperanto has no -if- suffix. None. Not official, not unofficial, not in the Fundamento and not in the unofficial affixes list. So modifi cannot be mod- plus -if- plus -i, because the middle piece does not exist to be used.

The trap is that a whole cluster of borrowed roots ends the same way and looks like a paradigm: specifa, klasifiki, identigi's Latin cousin identifiki, justifiki, pacifika. Every one of them is a Latin verb in -ficare - the compressed form of facere, to make - borrowed into Esperanto whole under Rule 15. The -fi- you can see is Latin morphology, two thousand years old and belonging to a language that is not this one. This is the inspiri class: the decomposition is honest history and dead grammar.

The rule that keeps you safe is the same one that works everywhere else: split only where both halves are Esperanto words that combine to the meaning you have. Mod is not a word here, and -if- is not a suffix.

What Esperanto would build instead, if it were building rather than borrowing, is -ig-: aliigi, to make other, is the native way to say modify, and it is perfectly good Esperanto. Modifi won the frequency contest because it is international, not because it is better.

Against its neighbours, which is the useful part.

• Ŝanĝi - to change. Broadest of the three, and it can mean replacing the thing entirely.
• Modifi - to change some part of a thing that stays the thing. A modified plan is still the plan.
• Korekti - to correct. Implies the previous state was wrong, which modifi deliberately does not.

Derived forms. Modifo is a single change, modifado the process of making them, and nemodifita means unaltered. In the grammatical sense a modifanto is a modifier, the word that qualifies another one.