nazio

A historical term, and this page treats it as one. Nazio names a member of the German National Socialist party, in power from 1933 to 1945. It belongs to the same shelf of the vocabulary as faŝisto, bolŝeviko and jakobeno: words a reader of twentieth-century history and of Esperanto's own wartime story needs in order to follow the sentence. Use it about that period. The adjective is nazia, the movement naziismo, the state nazia Germanio, and the years la nazia epoko.

Where the word came from is a fact about German, not about politics. German makes casual short forms by clipping the first syllables of a long compound: Sozialdemokrat gave Sozi, and Nationalsozialist gave Nazi, taking the Na of National and the zi of sozi. It began as an outsiders' nickname, was adopted, and travelled into every European language in the 1930s. Esperanto simply took the international form and put its noun ending on it.

Two false seams, and one of them is a real trap. Esperanto has a suffix -i- that builds country names from a people - anglo gives Anglio, franco gives Francio - and it has the root nazo, a nose. Parse nazio by those rules and you get the land of the noses. The parse is wrong: nazi- is one indivisible borrowed root and the -o is just the noun ending. The second trap is the near-homophone nacio, a nation, which differs by one letter and by everything else. Nacia means national in the ordinary sense; nazia does not. Getting that c and z the wrong way round in a sentence about the twentieth century is a mistake worth taking trouble to avoid.

The context this course keeps returning to. The mondmilito page tells the movement's side of the story: the Universal Esperanto Association forwarding letters across the front in the first war, and in the second the language proscribed outright. Hitler attacked Esperanto by name in Mein Kampf; the German Esperanto association was dissolved in 1936; Zamenhof's three children were murdered in the Holocaust, Adam shot outside Warsaw in 1940, Zofia and Lidia at Treblinka. That is why the word is in a list of the first three thousand at all, and it is why the course carries it plainly rather than not at all.