The Unity Lexicon
Ten ideas about union. What English’s warmest words are actually made of. And a hypothesis about one word that keeps appearing, in language after language spoken in this city — which we need you to check.
Why this page exists
The Day 7 letter ends on a practice its author calls unity — yoga, in Sanskrit, from the root yuj, to yoke. Two things joined, and both still there.
That one word opened a question we could not put down: what do Toronto’s other languages call this? This page is our first attempt at an answer. It is early, some of it is wrong, and that is why it is here: we would rather publish unfinished and be corrected by the people whose words these are, than publish late and polished by strangers.
Ten things English needs ten words for
Start in English. Here are ten ideas that sit very close together, circling one centre. English keeps them apart — some in a spiritual register, some in a civic one, with almost nothing crossing between.
| Concept | What we mean by it here |
|---|---|
| Union | Two or more becoming one without either ceasing to exist. The hinge. |
| Wholeness | Mind, body, breath and spirit as one integrated person, not four systems sharing a skin. |
| Kinship | The other recognised as a version of me. Not sympathy for; identity with. |
| Belonging | Membership in a place. Not ownership of it, and not stewardship from above. |
| Communion | Contact with the whole — however you name it. |
| Togetherness | The plain fact of being with people. Presence, not project. |
| Connection | The tie itself: the thread, the knot, the graft, the mooring line. |
| Community | Not people who live nearby. People who owe each other something. |
| Mutual aid | Horizontal and reciprocal. Not help for the needy — help among people who will each need it. |
| Solidarity | Not a feeling. Exposure. Your loss is collectible from me. |
This grouping is ours. It is a frame for asking a question, not a finding about anything.
What English’s warmest words are made of
Now look at what those English words are built from. Every line below is a standard dictionary etymology — check any of them.
| Word | Comes from | Literally |
|---|---|---|
| solidarity | Roman law, in solidum | each debtor liable for the entire debt |
| fellowship | Old Norse félagi | fé (livestock, wealth) + lag (to lay down) — one who puts money in the same pot |
| community | Latin com- + munus | together under a shared duty, or a shared gift |
| company | Latin com- + panis | those who share bread |
| union | Latin unus | one |
| yoga | Sanskrit yuj | to yoke — and English yoke is its cousin, from the same ancient root |
Five of those six are contracts, debts, meals or farm equipment. English’s tenderest vocabulary for human closeness is built almost entirely out of legal and agricultural instruments. The one abstraction in the set — union — is the one that aged into a slogan.
Which is the best answer we know to the charge that a message about unity is soft. It was never soft. It was enforceable.
A hypothesis: the word for unity might be the name of a day
Here is the idea this page exists to test. We are calling it a hypothesis because that is all it is.
In English, unity is a noun for a state or a feeling. In a great many other languages spoken in this city, the word that seems to carry the whole cluster at once is not an abstract noun at all. It is the name of an occasion: the day the neighbours turn up and work. The roof gets raised, the harvest comes in, the well gets dug, the body gets buried. Nobody is paid. Everybody will need it.
If that is right, then the most widely shared human word for unity is not we are one. It is we showed up.
Eighteen words we are trying to get right
We have written each of these in the Latin alphabet only. Not because the scripts do not matter — because printing somebody’s script wrong is worse than not printing it, and we have not earned these yet. If this is your language, send us the spelling in your own writing and we will use it.
Every gloss below is how we currently understand the word. Assume we have flattened it.
| Language | Word | As we currently understand it — correct us |
|---|---|---|
| Tagalog | bayanihan | From bayan, the town and its people. The picture is a house on poles, lifted and carried to new ground by the neighbourhood. |
| Ilocano | tagnawa | The same institution under its own name. Not a synonym for bayanihan — its own thing, in its own region. |
| Indonesian / Malay | gotong royong | Gotong is to carry on the shoulders. Carrying, together. |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | mutirão | From Tupi. Today it is the ordinary word for a neighbourhood building something with its own hands. |
| Turkish | imece | The village turning out to do one household’s work, because next time it is yours. |
| Korean | dure | The village labour band. Its partner word, pumasi, is labour traded between households. |
| Japanese | yui | The tying. Households bound to each other by work owed and work returned. |
| Vietnamese | vần công | Rotating labour: my hands in your field this week, yours in mine next. |
| Somali | iskaashi | Built from the reciprocal — helping one another, not helping the helpless. |
| Amharic | debo | Neighbours called out to work one family’s land in a single day. |
| Pashto / Dari | ashar | The call that gathers a community to a job too big for a household. |
| Sinhala | shramadana | “The gift of labour.” Revived at national scale in Sri Lanka in living memory. |
| Ukrainian | toloka | The work-day neighbours give each other. |
| Hungarian | kaláka | The work-bee — and a word that travelled across several borders in this region. |
| Serbian / Croatian / Bosnian | moba | The same again: the village arriving to bring in one family’s harvest. |
| Finnish | talkoot | The volunteer work-day. Still an ordinary, living Finnish word. |
| Haitian Creole | konbit | Working a field together. Its companion phrase, tèt ansanm, is heads together. |
| Akan / Twi | nnoboa | Roughly: help me, and I help you. |
Some of these come from communities of tens of thousands in Toronto, some from a few hundred. We chose for spread, not size, and we left out far more than we put in — including every word we were not confident enough to write down.
The strongest argument against all of this
An honest page prints the objection at full strength. Here it is, and it may well be right.
Every pre-industrial farming society faced the same problem. Harvests and house-building need more hands than one household has, on dates nobody controls, in an economy with no cash to hire with. Reciprocal labour is the only available answer. Finding the same institution in dozens of unrelated places is therefore about as remarkable as finding granaries in dozens of unrelated places. It may tell you something about agriculture and nothing at all about the human heart.
We think that is a serious argument, and we are not going to pretend we have beaten it. What we would say back is narrower. Whatever caused it, dozens of communities in this one city each carry a word for this. Many carry a living memory of it. Several are still running the institution here, now — the savings circles, the burial societies, the block that digs itself out. Even if the cause is mundane, the inheritance is real, and it is local.
Which reading is right is an open question. We would like your argument on it, too.
What this page still owes
Several traditions have looked hard at the idea of merging into one and deliberately declined it, with centuries of argument behind them. They are not oversights here; they are the part we have not built yet, and they deserve to be set out in their own words rather than summarised in ours.
And not every work party in history was freely joined. Reciprocal labour has carried caste, debt, and obligations you could not refuse without ruin. A page that prints only the warm version of this is propaganda. We would rather say that ourselves than have it said to us.
Toronto
There is one hard number underneath all of this. Toronto’s 2021 census counts more than seventy languages with over a thousand mother-tongue speakers each, inside the city boundary alone (City of Toronto, 2021 Census Backgrounder: Language). This page currently reaches eighteen of them, imperfectly. That ratio is why it is published as a draft.
Correct us
If you speak one of these languages, teach it, pray in it, or grew up hearing it from an elder — you are the reason this page exists. Three things we need:
- The word your community actually uses. Not the dictionary word. The one people say.
- What we got wrong above. Spelling, meaning, tone, who says it and when — or the whole idea.
- Whether your community wants its word here at all. Any word comes down on request, no explanation needed.
Bring it to the Harvest → That is where corrections, additions and objections land, and they are read.
Nearby
- Day 7 — unity for Toronto, together — the letter that opened this door.
- Mutual aid in Toronto — the practice these words name, running here now.
- Connect and Tribes — the people already doing it. Find yours, or add yours.
- The Harvest — where your correction goes.