<div dir="ltr"><div>

        
        

            
    
                        
    <header id="gmail-story-header" class="gmail-story-header">
                                <div id="gmail-story-meta" class="gmail-story-meta">
                            
                                        <h3 class="gmail-kicker">
                                            <span class="gmail-kicker-label"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/section/arts">Arts</a></span>
                                                                        
                                                                    </h3>
                                                <h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline">How Do You Say ‘Email’ in Yiddish?</h1>
                                                        <div id="gmail-story-meta-footer" class="gmail-story-meta-footer">
                                                                                                    

<p class="gmail-byline-dateline"><span class="gmail-byline">By <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/by/joseph-berger" title="More Articles by JOSEPH BERGER"><span class="gmail-byline-author">JOSEPH BERGER</span></a></span><time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2016-10-05T14:08:48-04:00">OCT. 4, 2016</time>
</p>

                                    <div class="gmail-story-meta-footer-sharetools">
                        <div id="gmail-sharetools-story-meta-footer" class="gmail-sharetools gmail-theme-classic gmail-sharetools-story-meta-footer">
<a class="gmail-visually-hidden gmail-skip-to-text-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/arts/how-do-you-say-email-in-yiddish.html?action=click&contentCollection=arts&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0#story-continues-1">Continue reading the main story</a>
<span class="gmail-sharetools-label gmail-visually-hidden">Share This Page</span>

<ul class="gmail-sharetools-menu"><li class="gmail-sharetool gmail-facebook-sharetool"><a><span class="gmail-sharetool-text">Share</span></a></li><li class="gmail-sharetool gmail-twitter-sharetool"><a><span class="gmail-sharetool-text">Tweet</span></a></li><li class="gmail-sharetool gmail-pinterest-sharetool"><a><span class="gmail-sharetool-text">Pin</span></a></li><li class="gmail-sharetool email-sharetool"><a><span class="gmail-sharetool-text">Email</span></a></li><li class="gmail-sharetool gmail-show-all-sharetool"><a><span class="gmail-sharetool-text">More</span></a></li><li class="gmail-sharetool gmail-save-sharetool"><a><span class="gmail-sharetool-text">Save</span></a></li></ul></div>
                                                                                                </div>
                            </div>
        </div>
    </header>

        
    <div class="gmail-story-body-supplemental">
    <div class="gmail-story-body gmail-story-body-1">
        <figure id="gmail-media-100000004689878" class="gmail-media gmail-photo gmail-lede gmail-layout-large-horizontal">
    <span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Photo</span>
    <div class="gmail-image">
            <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/05/arts/05YIDDISh/05YIDDISh-master768.jpg" alt="" class="gmail-media-viewer-candidate"><div class="gmail-media-action-overlay">

</div>
            
            
    </div>
        <figcaption class="gmail-caption">
                <span class="gmail-caption-text">Some entries in the newly 
released Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, which is designed to 
carry Yiddish into the 21st century.</span>
                        <span class="gmail-credit">
            <span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
            Christian Hansen for The New York Times        </span>
            </figcaption>
    </figure>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
 a thousand-year-old language like Yiddish, with many of its words 
rooted in the ancient Bible, how would you say “email”? Or 
“transgender”? Or “designated driver”? Or “binge watch”?</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Those
 terms came into popular usage long after the language’s heyday, when it
 was the lingua franca of the Jews of Eastern Europe and the garment 
workers of the Lower East Side and was the chosen literary tongue for 
writers like <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/aleichem.html">Sholem Aleichem</a> and <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Singer.html">Isaac Bashevis Singer</a>.
 Though the Holocaust and assimilation have shrunk the ranks of Yiddish 
speakers — once put at over 11 million worldwide — to a relative 
handful, Yiddish still needs to keep itself fashionably up-to-date.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">So
 two of its conservationists have produced the first full-fledged 
English-to-Yiddish dictionary in 50 years and it is designed to carry 
Yiddish into the 21st century and just maybe beyond. After all, Yiddish 
has always had a canny way of defying the pessimists.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“Email”? How is “blitspost” — a combination of the Yiddish words for “lightning” and “mail”? “Transgender”? How’s “tsvishnminik<em>,” </em>which
 blends the common Yiddish words for “between” and “type.” “Designated 
driver”? “Der nikhterer shofer” does the trick by fusing the Yiddish 
word for “sober” with that for “driver.” And “binge watch” is “shlingen 
epizodn,” literally “wolf down episodes.”</p>        <a class="gmail-visually-hidden gmail-skip-to-text-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/arts/how-do-you-say-email-in-yiddish.html?action=click&contentCollection=arts&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0#story-continues-1">Continue reading the main story</a>
    </div>
    <div class="gmail-supplemental gmail-first" id="gmail-supplemental-1">
    </div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-story-interrupter" id="gmail-story-continues-1">
        
</div>

    
        <p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-2">The
 826-page Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, with almost 50,000 
entries and 33,000 subentries, is the work of Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath,
 a Yiddish editor and poet, and Paul Glasser, a former dean at YIVO 
Institute for Jewish Research, the major repository of Yiddish language,
 literature and folklore. Published in June by Indiana University Press 
with a copyright owned by the <a href="http://leagueforyiddish.org/verterbukh.html">League for Yiddish</a>,
 the dictionary’s debut will be formally celebrated on Nov. 13 with a 
panel discussion and klezmer music at the Center for Jewish History in 
Manhattan.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000004689950" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-vertical gmail-media-100000004689950">
    <span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Photo</span>
    <div class="gmail-image">
            <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/05/arts/05YIDDISHJP2/05YIDDISHJP2-blog427.jpg" alt="" class="gmail-media-viewer-candidate"><div class="gmail-media-action-overlay">

</div>
            
            
    </div>
        <figcaption class="gmail-caption">
                        <span class="gmail-credit">
            <span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
            Christian Hansen for The New York Times        </span>
            </figcaption>
    </figure>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Whether
 the new words, many of which were coined by the editors, will be widely
 embraced remains an open question. Many Yiddish speakers may already be
 too comfortable with the word “laptop” to jump ship for its Yiddish 
equivalent<em>, “</em>shoys-komputer” (a “computer for the lap”).</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“Any
 word that you’ve got to scratch your head to come up with they’ll use 
the English word,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist and 
translator who is the media consultant for Agudath Israel of America, 
the umbrella group for ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-3">That
 was true in the golden age of Yiddish speakers in America. Leo Rosten, 
the great lexicographer and humorist, pointed out that words like 
“boychik” (young boy), “boarderkeh” (female boarder) and “nextdoorekeh” 
(apartment-house neighbor) were concocted by immigrants tailoring their 
Yiddish to the English of their adopted land. Even “chutzpah” had a 
slightly more tart meaning in Rosten’s view: the audacity of “a man, who
 having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the
 court because he is an orphan.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
 new dictionary was adapted from the lexical research of Mordkhe 
Schaechter, Ms. Viswanath’s father, a leading Yiddish linguist and 
senior lecturer at Columbia University. As a refugee in a displaced 
persons camp in Vienna after <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about Wold War II." class="gmail-meta-classifier">World War II</a>,
 he sensed the grievous wound that Yiddish had suffered with the murder 
of six million Jews and began collecting Yiddish words on index cards. 
Later, he interviewed ordinary American speakers — shoemakers, tailors, 
musicians — to learn words they used. Even before he died in 2007 at age
 79, his daughter pored through those cards — 87 card catalogs and shoe 
boxes full. She and Mr. Glasser added his words and terms to the 20,000 
already solemnized in the 1968 dictionary put together by Uriel 
Weinreich, a close colleague of Mr. Schaechter’s.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
 editors then came up with Yiddish equivalents for the hundreds of new 
English words spawned as a result of advances in technology and science 
and shifts in culture since 1968. Some words, like those for “email” 
(“blitspost,” or “blitsbriv” for an individual message), had already 
been bandied about through what Mr. Glasser called “spontaneous 
generation” within the circles of Yiddish academics and aficionados.</p>

<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">For
 the ones the editors invented from scratch, they consulted dictionaries
 of languages like German, French or Polish to see what these made of 
contemporary English terms. And sometimes they concocted words from 
their own quirky experiences. Ms. Viswanath, who is 57, remembered that 
as a 3-year-old her sister, Rukhl, now editor of the Yiddish Forverts 
newspaper, called flip-flops “fingershikh” — “finger shoes” — because of
 the way the toes stick out, and she gave the word the dictionary’s 
kosher seal of approval.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000004689822" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000004689822 gmail-ratio-tall">
    <span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Photo</span>
    <div class="gmail-image">
            <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/05/arts/05YIDDISHJP1/05YIDDISHJP1-master675.jpg" alt="" class="gmail-media-viewer-candidate"><div class="gmail-media-action-overlay">

</div>
            
            
    </div>
        <figcaption class="gmail-caption">
                <span class="gmail-caption-text">Paul Glasser and Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, editors of the new Yiddish dictionary.</span>
                        <span class="gmail-credit">
            <span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
            Christian Hansen for The New York Times        </span>
            </figcaption>
    </figure>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“It’s an innocent word coinage,” she explained. “No strategy was needed.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Similarly,
 for butt dialing — the accidental call made by a cellphone stuck in a 
back pocket — the editors came up with “alpi tokhes”<em> — </em>which literally means “by way of the backside.” Surrogate mother was an easy coinage — “bimkem-mame<em>,” </em>or
 substitute mother. And autism became “oytizm.” With smartphone, the 
editors decided to have it both ways — rendering it with Yiddish 
equivalents, “klug-mobilke,” which uses the Yiddish word “klug” that 
means “smart,” along with “mobile,” and keeping the sound of the word 
essentially the same with “smartfon.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“If everyone is using the word, it doesn’t make sense to fight it,” Mr. Glasser said.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
 2006, the census estimated that 152,000 Americans speak Yiddish at 
home. The vast majority are Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews in the
 New York area who spurn secular books and newspapers and, yes, even 
dictionaries in using a vernacular that is as intrinsic in their 
neighborhoods as air and water.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Beyond
 that group, Yiddish is increasingly confined to the dwindling ranks of 
Holocaust survivors and a smattering of their children, to teachers and 
students of Yiddish in more than two dozen college programs nationwide, 
and to the eclectic sprinkling of Yiddishists, ardent advocates who have
 chosen to make preserving the language a lifelong mission.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Hasidim
 and other ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to absorb new English words just as 
they are for convenience’ sake without any guilt that they are 
bastardizing the purity of Yiddish. Email becomes email, though spelled 
in the Hebrew script that Yiddish adopted when it arose among Ashkenazic
 Jews in German-speaking lands during the 10th century.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“For
 Hasidim, Yiddish is not about culture; it’s about using language in a 
utilitarian way,” Mr. Rapaport, the Hasidic translator said.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">But
 Mr. Glasser, 59, who learned Yiddish when his family sent him to a 
Workmen’s Circle Yiddish school in the Bronx and “caught the bug,” said 
that the editors tried to avoid too much borrowing of English words.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-4">“In the long run if you keep borrowing English, you end up speaking English,” he said.</p>Language
 is so fungible a medium that English has absorbed dozens of Yiddish 
words, like chutzpah, kvetch, kibitz, megillah, schmooze, nosh and 
schlock. The new dictionary includes these and, without blinking, 
translates them back into Yiddish.<br clear="all"><br></div>New York Times, October 4, 2016-- <br><div><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies                     <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone:  (215) 898-7475<br>Fax:  (215) 573-2138                                      <br><br>Email:  <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Eharoldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a>    <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
</div></div>