almozo

An almozo is money or help given to somebody poor. The Reta Vortaro is blunt about it: monhelpo al malriĉulo.

It is not al plus a root mozo. By now the eye takes every short word at the front of a longer one for a preposition, and al is one of the first prepositions the course teaches. There is no mozo in Esperanto and nothing here comes apart. The word arrived whole, and its history is one of the best in this chapter.

Greek had eleēmosynē, mercy or pity, a five-syllable abstract noun built on eleos. Church Latin took it as eleemosyna, and then a thousand years of ordinary speakers who did not know any Greek wore it down. German got Almosen. Old English got ælmesse, which became almes and then modern alms - a word English now treats as plural although it never was one. Esperanto's almozo is the same survivor, arriving by way of German and the Romance forms. The Greek is still in there: the al- is what is left of eleē-, and the -moz- is -mosy-. English eleemosynary, that ridiculous adjective meaning charitable, is the full form preserved in a museum case.

The derivations are regular and useful. An almozulo is a beggar, with the person suffix. Almozi is to beg. An almozulejo is an almshouse, and an almozkesto is the poor box in a church. There is a proverb in the Zamenhof collection worth having: almozoj ne malriĉigas, giving alms does not make you poor.