Esperanto, an artificial international language that never caught on, and Yiddish, the language of generations of Eastern European Jews, have been combined in an Esperanto Yiddish-Yiddish Esperanto dictionary published here by Harry Fineman. The author noted in his introduction that the root areas of the Yiddish language were destroyed by the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in Europe, and use of the language today is confined to the immigrant generation in the free world. Esperanto, invented by the late Dr. Ludwig Zamenhoff, a Polish Jew, was intended to be a world language that would become universal when a global society without national barriers was achieved. Some Yiddishists today see a revived interest in the language among Jewish youth and the note of the many Yiddish words and expressions that have become part of the English language. Esperanto, however, has never been spoken by more than a scattered few. The Esperanto-Yiddish section of the dictionary comprises 149 pages and the Yiddish-Esperanto section, 317 pages.
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