Coalesce…

Coalesce

Meh it’s an alright word. Nothing special. Simply to grow together or fuse, to amalgamate and unite. Although if we get down to some physics, linguistics and genetics….(I left out chemistry and computer science because they don’t follow the rhyme, not acceptable.)…then this word means a WHOLE lot more.

In Physics, it simply is the process where two or more particles merge after contact and form one single “daughter” particle. So this is most commonly used in meteorology. Let’s take a nice fluffy cloud, which contains thousands of tiny rain droplets. I am guessing that the more rain droplets there are, the more they collide or coalesce to form a larger droplet. When these larger droplets bash in to each other, they form even larger droplets. Eventually the size of the droplets become too heavy for the air currents to sustain and the droplets fall as rain.

In Chemistry, it is the process by which two or more (miscible) substances pull each other together after contact, so basically the same thing as physics- although it probably has different meanings in different fields of chemistry.

In linguistics, fusion or coalescence is when two segments of a word are turned in to one segment. So the most common example of this is in French, where the masculine word for a/one, “un” is pronounced without the “n”. So the u and n segments have merged together to form one sound. If you compare “un” in French to its counterpart in Spanish, “un (poco)” or “uno”, it shows that this new sound, quite nasal, has only developed in French! 

I hope that was un poco interesante!