Bridge of Words

Zamenhof collated his lexicon of nine hundred roots mainly from Romance languages, German, English, and Russian; conjunctions and particles he culled from Latin and Greek. When in doubt, he favored Latin roots: "house" was dom-; "tree," arb-; "night," nokt-. To attain wordhood, a root simply donned a final vowel, a sort of team jersey identifying it as a specific part of speech. Nokt- with an -o ending joined the noun team: "night." With an -a ending it joined the adjective team: nokta, as in "night-hour"; and with an -e ending, the adverb team: nokte, meaning "by night," et cetera. It could even join the ranks of verbs, as in the compound tranokti (to sleep over). Like Schleyer, Zamenhof relied on a system of affixes for word building, though he attributed this element to an epiphany he'd had about commercial signs: the suffix -skaja was used on both a porter's lodge and a candy shop. In Esperanto, for instance, the prefix ek- (begin, or start), added to the verb lerni (to learn), gives us eklerni, "to begin to learn," as in Kiam vi eklernis Esperanton? (When did you start to learn Esperanto?) Suffixes, like cabooses, also extend the reach of words: the suffix -aĵo (a thing), added to manĝi (to eat), gives us manĝaĵo (food); the suffix -ejo, manĝejo (dining hall). Some affixes, taking noun, adjective, or adverb endings, can become free- standing words: ilo, a tool or device; or male, "on the contrary." Strung together, affixes sometimes offer gains in concision, but at the same time create clunky polysyllabic words. The early poets in the language regarded the prefix mal, meaning "the opposite of," as the verbal equivalent of ankle-weights, and over time many mal- words—such as malsanulejo, literally, "a place-for-unwell-people"— have been bested by lithe competitors, such as hospitalo. Yet many affix clusters have survived, incurring affection and loyalty precisely because their Esperantic origins are so obvious.

Despite the prestige of Esperantism in the construction of new words, Zamenhof placed a premium on the internationalism of his lexicon. A century and a half before digital algorithms emerged to assess the internationalism of a word,¹⁸ Zamenhof used his own multilingualism and a stack of dictionaries to accomplish the task. To combine words from distinct European languages must have seemed natural, too, to a speaker of Yiddish. It was not Volapuk but Yiddish, a mongrel of Germanic, Semitic, and Slavic words, on which Zamenhof modeled his international language. (Apart from the interrogative Nu and the exclamatory Ho ve!, however, there are few overt borrowings from Yiddish; some speculate that edzino —"wife"—derives from the Yiddish rebbetzin, a rabbi's wife.)

What had happened to Yiddish over a millennium, in mass migrations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe and back, Zamenhof would try to recapitulate within his new, international language. The percentage of Slavic words in Esperanto and Yiddish is similar (15 percent). But whereas the ratio of Germanic to Romance words in Yiddish is more than three to one, this relationship is reversed in Esperanto. Zamenhof had already spent several years trying to modernize Yiddish, but with Esperanto, he found another, better way to recast Yiddish as a modern language. It was as if he wrapped Yiddish in a chrysalis, where its medieval German metamorphosed into French modernity. When it emerged, it would have shed forever its ancient Hebraicism. And as we shall see, it was Esperanto, rather than his romanized Yiddish, that Zamenhof would offer up as a modern language for emancipated Jews.