Re: Rebbetzin Zamenhof?

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.

> 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.


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Tom Wier <twier@...>
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