internation

Picture two countries standing on opposite sides of a border, passing messages, treaties, and perhaps a suspiciously large number of customs forms: that is the basic mental image behind internation. Its first half is Latin inter, “between,” the same little bridge seen in interstate and interpersonal—not the unrelated English verb inter, “to bury,” which comes from Latin terra, “earth.” Nation began more biologically: Latin nātiō meant “birth,” then “breed” or “stock,” from the PIE root *gene-, the family tree also behind generate, genetic, genus, and kin through a distant linguistic branch. By the late Middle English period, nation could mean a people connected by ancestry and language; by the sixteenth century, its political sense—a territorial community with government—was becoming dominant. Internation is now an uncommon formation, largely overshadowed by international, but its structure remains wonderfully literal: put nations side by side, and you have “between-nations” language.