by Erwin Lau

In recent years, lecturers have been assigned as academic advisors to a group of freshmen, who are known as “advisees”. The words advisor-advisee and mentor-mentee, despite not being synonymous, are often deemed interchangeable nowadays. The word structure of the former pair is obvious: the root (to) advise + suffix -or means a person who offers advice, and the root (to) advise(e) + suffix -ee means a person who is advised. This structure concords with employer/employee, interviewer/interviewee, tutor/ tutee, et cetera, and is thus, rather conventional. However, the case is not the same for the other pair. There is not a verb (to) ment in English; therefore, mentor is not “(to) "ment” + or depicting a person who “ments”. 

For centuries, the word mentor had to be written capitalised, for Mentor is the Romanization of a Greek name: Mentor, a character in the Odyssey, was the teacher of the young hero Telemachus. This is also why the word is pronounced Men-TAW, where the o is not a schwa. The name was then borrowed to mean the teacher of a youth in the 18th century. Two hundred years later, the word mentee was created to make mentor more comparable to advisor, which had had its own advisees for long.      

Philologists suggest that the name Mentor was derived by men in Proto-Indo-European language, which is also the root of the men in mental, the min in (to) mind, the mon in monitor, which means to think, to instruct, or to oversee. Hence, Mentor was named per the role this character plays in the epic, which is quite a common assignment in ancient folklore. In this regard, “mentor” actually means “advisor”, just not in the typical English way. As previously stated, there is not a verb (to) ment in English, and so mentor is not (to) ment, or depicting a person who ments.

Aesthetically speaking, I am glad that we do not have lecturee or moderatee in our language, yet.

Author’s Bio:

Erwin Lau

Mr Erwin Lau is a lecturer at the Division of Social Sciences, Humanities and Design. He majored in philosophy and holds a Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Besides philosophy, Mr Lau is interested in history and military thoughts. He prides himself in being a drifter.