mondmilito

Head-final again, and the linking vowel drops out. A mondmilito is a kind of milito, and mondo says which kind. The -o of mondo goes because mondmilito is pronounceable without it; mondomilito is also correct and is written by people who prefer the seam visible. Both are in use, and compound words explains when the vowel earns its keep.

Numbering them. Esperanto uses the ordinal, before the noun: la unua mondmilito, la dua mondmilito. Roman numerals show up in print - la I-a mondmilito - but say it as the ordinal. The adjective mondmilita exists for things belonging to the period.

Why the movement takes this word personally. The First World War fell on Esperanto at the worst possible moment. The Universal Esperanto Association, founded in Geneva in 1908, found itself the only body with correspondents in every belligerent country, and it spent the war years forwarding letters between families divided by the front through neutral Switzerland - a postal service run in a constructed language because no national one could cross the lines. Zamenhof himself did not see the end of it: he died in Warsaw in April 1917, in a city under occupation, with the international ideal his language was built to serve in ruins around him. The word is ordinary, transparent Esperanto; the history behind it is not.