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<span class="gmail-kicker-label"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/section/arts">Arts</a></span>
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<h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline">How Do You Say ‘Email’ in Yiddish?</h1>
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<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>
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<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>
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Christian Hansen for The New York Times </span>
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<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®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0#story-continues-1">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<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">
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<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Christian Hansen for The New York Times </span>
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<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">
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">Paul Glasser and Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, editors of the new Yiddish dictionary.</span>
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Christian Hansen for The New York Times </span>
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<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>
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