Title of the article

2.3.Type : Yiddish and Esperanto

Esperanto emerged in the very same context as Modern Hebrew. Its creator, Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917), was born one year after Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, similarly from a Jewish family living in a small Lithuanian town, whose population was composed of Russian, Polish and Lithuanian people, but was dominated by a Jewish majority. The Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish) Haskala background of both men encouraged traditional Jewish education combined with studies in a secular Gymnasium; both of them went on to study medicine. Following the 1881 wave of pogroms, in the year in which Ben-Yehuda moved to Jerusalem, Zamenhof published an article calling for mass emigration to a Jewish homeland. For a few years, he became one of the first activists of the early Zionist movement Hovevei Tzion (“Lovers of Zion”). Berdichevsky (1986) points out the similarities even in the mentality and the physical appearance of Zamenhof and Ben-Yehuda.

Nevertheless, two key differences should be pointed out. The first one is Zamenhof’s pragmatism. In his 1881 article, Zamenhof imagined the Jewish homeland to be in the western part of the United States, a relatively unsettled area those days, which would have arisen much less sensibility from all sides. Furthermore, Zamenhof shared the skepticism of many of his contemporaries in the feasibility to revive the Hebrew language. According to the anecdote, Theodor Herzl said once that he could not buy even a train ticket in Hebrew. Leading Jewish writers, such as Mendele Moykher Seforim, oscillated between writing in Yiddish and in Hebrew; both of these languages called for the establishment of a modern, secular literary tongue. The young and pragmatic Zamenhof chose to reform Yiddish, the language with millions of native speakers; whereas the first native speaker of Modern Hebrew, the son of Ben-Yehuda was not born yet.

In his early years, Zamenhof wrote a comprehensive Yiddish grammar (completed in 1879, partially published in 1909 in the Vilna Journal, Lebn un Vissenschaft, and fully published only in 1982). He argued for the modernization of the language and fought for the use of the Latin alphabet, instead of the Hebrew one. How is it possible then that a few years later Zamenhof changed his mind, and switched to Esperanto (1887)?

Here comes the second key difference into the picture. Ben-Yehuda was sent by his orthodox family to a yeshiva (traditional school teaching mainly the Talmud), where one of the rabbis introduced him secretly into the revolutionary ideas of the Haskala. On the contrary, Zamenhof’s father and grandfather were enlightened high-school teachers of Western languages (French and German). For him, being Jewish probably meant a universal mission to make the world a better place for the whole humankind. This idea originates from eighteenth century German Haskala philosophers claiming that Judaism is the purest embodiment so far existing of the universal moral and of the faith of the Pure Reason; even today a major part of Jews worldwide perceive Judaism this way.

Zamenhof did not therefore content himself with the goal of creating a Jewish national language. For him, similarly to his semi-secularized coreligionists joining the socialist movement in the same decades, unifying the human race and building a new word order presented the solution for - among others - the problems of the oppressed Eastern European Jewry. And also the other way around: the secular messianic idea of the unification of the dispersed and oppressed Jews into a Jewish nation was just one step behind from the secular messianic idea of the unification of the whole mankind into a supra-national unit. This explains not only the motivations of Zamenhof himself, but also why Jews played such an important role in the pre-World War II Esperanto movement in Central and Eastern Europe (Berdichevsky, 1986:60). Whereas socialists fought for a social-economic liberation of the oppressed, Zamenhof spoke about the liberation of the humans from the cultural and linguistic barriers. It is not a coincidence that the twentieth century history of the Esperantist movement was so much intermingled with the one of the socialist movements.

Zamenhof’s initiative was to create a language that would be equally distant from and equally close to each ethnic language, thus each human being would have equal chance using this bridge connecting cultures and people. Hence Zamenhof created a vocabulary and a grammar using elements of languages he knew: Russian (the language his father spoke home and the language of his highschool), German and French (the languages his father and grandfather were teachers of), Polish (the language of his non-Jewish fellow children), Latin and Greek (from highschool), as well as English and Italian. Note that the resulting language, similarly to most artificial languages, is inherently European and Indo-European in its character, though extremely simplified.

However, one should not forget that Zamenhof’s native tongue was Yiddish, this was the language he used with his school mates in the Jewish primary school (kheyder, cf. Piron, 1984), and most of his life he kept contact with circles where Yiddish was alive. So one would wonder why Yiddish is not mentioned overtly among the source languages of Esperanto. Seeing Zamenhof’s former devotion for the Jewish sake and the Yiddish language, as well as his later remark that Yiddish is a language similar to any other (in Homo Sum (1901), cf. Piron (1984:17) and Berdichevsky (1986:70)), the possibility that he despised “the corrupt version of German” or that he felt shame at his Yiddish origins, are out of question.

The challenging task now is to find at least covert influences of Yiddish on Esperanto.

As strange as it may sound, a considerable literature has been devoted to etymology within Esperanto linguistics. One of the biggest mysteries is the morpheme edz. As a root, it means ‘married person’ (edzo ‘husband’; edzino ‘wife’, by adding the feminine suffix -in-). While as a suffix, it turns the word’s meaning into the wife or husband of the stem: lavistino ’washer­woman’ vs. lavistinedzo ‘washerwoman’s housband’; doktoro ‘doctor’ vs. doktoredzino ‘doctor’s wife’. Hungarian Esperantists have tried to use this suffix to translate the Hungarian suffix -né (‘wife of…’, e.g.: Deákné ‘wife of Deák, Mrs. Deák’; cf. Goldin (1982:28)). The phonemic content of the morpheme is not similar to any word with related meaning in any of the languages that Zamenhof might have taken into consideration.

Zamenhof himself wrote in a letter to Émile Boirac that the morpheme was the result of backformation, and that originally it was a bound form (Goldin, 1982:22f). Boirac suggested in 1913 the following reconstruction: if the German Kronprinz (‘heir apparent’) became kronprinco in Esperanto, while Kronprinzessin (‘wife of a crown prince’, note the double feminine ending: the French feminine suffix -esse is followed by the Germanic feminine -in) turns to kronprincedzino, then the ending -edzin- can be identified as ‘a woman legally bound to a man’. By removing the feminine suffix -in-, we obtain the morpheme -edz-. Goldin adds to this theory that the morphemes es and ec had already been used with other meanings, that is why the surprising [] combination appeared. Summarizing, the etymology of the Esperanto morpheme edz would be the French feminine ending -esse, which had been reanalyzed with a different meaning due to the additional feminine suffix in German.

However, this is not the end of the story. Other alternatives have been also proposed. Waringhien and others (in Goldin, 1982) have brought forward the idea that the word serving as the base of backformation was the Yiddish word rebetsin (‘wife of a rabbi’). In fact, this word can be reanalyzed as reb+edz+in, and we obtain the edz morpheme using the same logic as above. Goldin’s counterargument that the Yiddish word is actually rebetsn with a syllabic [] is not at all convincing: old Yiddish spelling often uses the letter yod to designate a schwa, or even more the syllabicity of an [], similarly to the in German spelling, like in wissen. Consequently, I can indeed accept the idea that a pre-YIVO spelling rebetsin was in the mind of Zamenhof.

Piron (1984) adds further cases of possible Yiddish influence. In words taken from German, the affricate [] always changes to []: German pfeifen ‘to whistle’ became Esperanto fajfi. This coincides with Yiddish fayfn. Though, one is not compelled to point to Yiddish as the origin of this word: the reason can simply be that the affricate [] is too typical to German, not occurring in any other languages that served “officially” as examples for Zamenhof. In other words, [] was not seen as universal enough. But what about the consonant clusters ], ], ], which are also characteristic solely to German (and to Yiddish)? May the solution be that while [] becomes [] in Yiddish, these clusters are unchanged; therefore, Zamenhof felt less discomfort with regard to the latter clusters than with regard to [] which truly occurs exclusively in German? I do not believe that we can do more than speculate about the different unconscious factors acting within a person more than a hundred years ago. The only claim we can make is that some of these factors must have been related to Yiddish, as expected from the fact that Yiddish was one of the major tongues of Zamenhof.

In the field of semantics, Piron brings the differentiation in Esperanto between landa (‘national, related to a given country’, adjective formed from lando ‘country’) as opposed to nacia (‘national, related to a given nation’, adjective from nacio ‘nation’). This differentiation exists in Yiddish (landish and natsional), but not in any other languages that Zamenhof might have taken into consideration. Piron also argues against the possible claim that this is not a Yiddish influence, rather an inner development related to the inner logic of Esperanto.

The most evident example of Piron is Esperanto superjaro ‘leap year’, a compound of super ‘on’ and jaro ‘year’. No known language uses the prepo­sition on or above to express this concept. However, Yiddish has iberyor for ‘leap year’, from Hebrew ibbur (‘making pregnant’), the term used in rabbinic literature for intercalating an extra month and making the year a leap year (e.g. Tosefta Sanhedrin 2:1-7). On the other hand, iber also means ‘above’ in Yiddish, which explains the strange expression in Esperanto. I do not know if Zamenhof realized that the Yiddish expression iberyor is not related to German über, but this is probably not relevant.

Let us summarize this section. Yiddish influence on Esperanto is a case where there is only one exchange particle - in the first order approximation, at least, since we have not dealt with the possible influences related to the numerous later speakers of Esperanto of Yiddish background. Though, this one particle had a huge impact on the language for a very obvious reason. Even if he did not overtly acknowledge that Yiddish had played a role in creating Esperanto, it is possible to discover the - either consciously hidden or unconscious - traces of Yiddish.

Did Zamenhof want to deny that he had also used Yiddish, as a building block of Esperanto? Perhaps because his goal was indeed to create a universal, supra-national language, and not the language of the Jewish nation? Or, alternatively, was this influence unconscious? I do not dare to give an answer.