[Lexicog] mentee/mentoree

[David Frank]

Actually, dediquee is a good St. Lucian French Creole word, though we spell it dédiké. It is listed in our dictionary as a verb meaning 'to dedicate,' but following the pattern of French Creole verbs, it could be used as an adjective or a noun as well, meaning '(one who is) dedicated.' We had a problem with this French Creole word in terms of finding the source, though, because it does not seem to be based on a French word that I have been able to find. The French verb is dédier. So the French Creole word seems to be a frenchified version of the English word "dedicate." I just got back from a conference in Amsterdam where I talked about the problems of pinpointing the origins of certain St. Lucian words like this. (Hi, Joseph Farquharson.)

In this recent discussion, I don't think anyone has mentioned the obvious fact that the -ee words are based on the pattern of the feminine form of the past participle of French verbs. For example there is French employer 'to employ' with the past tense form employé 'employed' doubling as a masculine adjectival form and employée as the feminine adjectival form. The corresponding French noun is employeur, from which we evidently get English "employer."

We can expect to have some -ee words that don't have a -er or -or counterpart, such as "divorcee" or "amputee." On the other hand, I checked an unabridged dictionary just now and did find "divorcer" listed as "one who divorces."

-- David Frank

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Tuggy 
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 4:58 PM
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] mentee/mentoree


  -ee spawns oddities, it seems to me. Two others I have enjoyed, and seen in fairly high-falutin’ publications, are baptee (=one who has been baptized) and dediquee.

  --David Tuggy


  Benjamin Barrett wrote: 
The normal formation is to add -er/-or to get the person doing it and 
add -ee to the receiver of the action. So employ-> employer, employee, 
address -> addresser, addressee. There isn't a verb for mentor, but 
using back formation you get: mentor <- ment and then ment -> mentee. BB

Fritz Goerling wrote:I discussed with David Frank, an SIL colleague on this list, whether 
”mentee” or “mentoree” is more common.
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