No subject

[Christina Paulston]

How about Ladino? I suppose it depends on what you mean by literary.  
Christina
On Feb 18, 2007, at 8:45 AM, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:

> New York Times, February 16, 2007
>
> Mordkhe Schaechter, 79, Leading Yiddish Linguist, Dies
>
> By WOLFGANG SAXON
>
> Mordkhe Schaechter, a leading Yiddish linguist who spent a lifetime
> studying, standardizing and teaching the language, died yesterday in  
> the
> Bronx. He was 79 and lived in Yonkers. His death, at Montefiore Medical
> Center, followed a long illness, his daughter Rukhl Schaechter said.  
> Dr.
> Schaechter, whose passion for Yiddish dated to his boyhood in Romania,
> dedicated his life to reclaiming Yiddish as a living language for the
> descendants of its first speakers, the Ashkenazic Jewry of central and
> eastern Europe. Written in the Hebrew alphabet and containing Semitic,
> Germanic and other components, it is one of the three major literary
> languages in Jewish history, the others being Hebrew and Aramaic.
>
> In addition to being a teacher, Dr. Schaechter was an author and  
> promoter,
> founding organizations devoted to furthering the use of Yiddish. He  
> wrote
> dictionaries intending to standardize it. Dr. Schaechter was a senior
> lecturer in Yiddish studies at Columbia from 1981 to 1993. He also  
> taught
> in the Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture  
> from
> its beginning in 1968 until 2004; the program is a joint project of
> Columbia and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, which  
> is
> prominent in the study of Ashkenazic Jewry. Dr. Schaechter started
> contributing to YIVO then based in Poland as an archival collector in
> Austria in 1947, four years before he came to the United States. Over  
> the
> years he also gave Yiddish courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary  
> of
> America, the Jewish Teachers Seminary-Herzliah and Yeshiva University,  
> all
> in New York.
>
> In the 1980s, he was associate editor of The Great Dictionary of the
> Yiddish Language and, from 1961 to 1972, he was associate editor of The
> Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. From the 1970s until  
> 1986
> he was a bibliographer, proofreader and finally editor of YIVOs  
> Yiddishe
> Shprakh, a journal devoted to the pronunciation, grammar and  
> vocabulary of
> standard Yiddish. Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter was born on Dec. 1, 1927, in
> what was then the Romanian town of Cernauti but is now Chernivtsi in
> Ukraine, or Czernowitz to its Yiddish speakers. He became fascinated  
> with
> Yiddish as a pupil and later studied linguistics at the University of
> Bucharest. He received his doctorate at the University of Vienna in  
> 1951
> with a dissertation in Yiddish. Dr. Schaechter arrived in New York that
> year. After serving in military intelligence in the United States Army
> during the Korean War, he resumed his association with YIVO and began
> teaching and writing.
>
> He founded the Committee for the Implementation of the Standardized
> Yiddish Orthography in 1958. Six years later, with two students, he
> founded Yugntruf (Call to Youth), a worldwide organization devoted to
> teaching Yiddish to new generations. (It has a Web site at
> www.Yugntruf.org.) Dr. Schaechter founded the Task Force for Yiddish
> Terminology in 1970 and the League for Yiddish, based in New York, in
> 1979. He served as its executive director until 2004. In 1994, Dr.
> Schaechter received the Itzik Manger Prize, the most prestigious  
> Yiddish
> literary award. His books, all in Yiddish, include Authentic Yiddish
> (1986), Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood: An English-Yiddish
> Dictionary (1991), The History of the Standardized Yiddish Spelling
> (1999), Yiddish II: An Intermediate and Advanced Textbook (2004), and
> Plant Names in Yiddish: A Handbook of Botanical Terminology (2005).
>
> Dr. Schaechter is survived by his wife of 50 years, Charne Schaechter;
> three daughters, Rukhl Schaechter of Yonkers, Gitl Viswanath of  
> Teaneck,
> N.J., and Eydl Reznik of Safed, or Tsfat, Israel; a son, Binyumen of
> Manhattan; a sister, Bella Schaechter-Gottesman of the Bronx; and 16
> grandchildren, with whom he spoke only in Yiddish, his son said.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/obituaries/16schaechter.html? 
> _r=1&oref=slogin
>
> *********************************************************************** 
> ************
>
> N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to  
> its members
> and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner  
> or sponsor of
> the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who  
> disagree with a
> message are encouraged to post a rebuttal.
>
> *********************************************************************** 
> ************
>