Re: Rebbetzin Zamenhof?

At 10:10 11/01/99 -0600, you wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>>         The suffix -in- comes from German, as I said, and I don't know
where the
>> root edz- comes from. But Hebrew etymology is rare in Esperanto, so I=
 think
>> the one you got is a pure invention.
>
>But how common is pure invention for Zamenhof?  Why should that
>be more likely than borrowing?  Zamenhof was not only well educated
>in Hebrew (among the many languages he knew well), but IIRC he was
>also part of the Zionist movement and would have been likely to want to
>assert the national identity of Jews everywhere as a people with a common
>heritage and culture just as legitimate as any other group -- which could
>easily have manifested itself as just such an inclusion.
>
        I meant that the etymology which was given was a pure invention, not the
root edz- in itself. Sorry if I explained myself badly. Pure invention is
nearly inexistent in Esperanto. Nearly only the correlatives can be said to
be invention, and the verb tenses, but even these have natural roots. But
maybe edz- comes from Hebrew, I don't know. I must refer to my Esperantist
friends, they will know better than me.

>> But don't forget that the freedom of
>> composition is nearly total in Esperanto, so you can without a problem=
 use
>> edzin- as a suffix with the meaning "wife of a...", for instance
>> panistedzino for "wife of a baker", but I find this weird and useless,
>> except for very precise uses.
>
>"edzin-" would not technically be a suffix in that sense, as it would
probably
>be better described as a compound word;  it does not have the requisite
>syntactic properties.
>
        Well, when I think of the use of the suffixes in Esperanto, I think that
the difference between compound words and suffixes is not as important as
it can appear. Zamenhof himself said that the description he used to
explain Esperanto was made only to make it easier to learn for European
people (his first public) and that in fact, Esperanto was made of real
words that were compouned to make bigger entities. For instance, he
analysed fratino as:
frat: brother, in:feminine, o: something that is, and every part was a real
word which would be able to stand nearly alone (in fact, only the "words"
o, a, etc could stand alone, the others needed them, only to show the
syntactic links). So fratino meant in fact: something that is
brother-feminine: sister.
        As this explanation is from Zamenhof himself, I think we can trust him. So
if for him, suffixation and compounding are the same thing in Esperanto, I
think I'll believe this too.

>
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>Tom Wier <twier@...>
>ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
>Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
>"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
>
>"Only the educated are free." - Epictetus
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                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"R=E9sister ou servir"

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html