[lg policy] How Do You Say ‘Email’ in Yiddish?

Wed Oct 5 19:08:01 UTC 2016

 Arts <http://www.nytimes.com/section/arts> How Do You Say ‘Email’ in
Yiddish?

By JOSEPH BERGER <http://www.nytimes.com/by/joseph-berger>OCT. 4, 2016
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Photo
Some entries in the newly released Comprehensive English-Yiddish
Dictionary, which is designed to carry Yiddish into the 21st century. Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

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”?

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 Sholem Aleichem
<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/aleichem.html> and Isaac
Bashevis Singer
<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Singer.html>. 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.

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.

“Email”? How is “blitspost” — a combination of the Yiddish words for
“lightning” and “mail”? “Transgender”? How’s “tsvishnminik*,” *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.”
Continue reading the main story
<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>

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 League for Yiddish
<http://leagueforyiddish.org/verterbukh.html>, 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.
Photo
Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times

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*, “*shoys-komputer” (a “computer for the lap”).

“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.

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.”

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 World War II
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
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.

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.

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.
Photo
Paul Glasser and Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, editors of the new Yiddish
dictionary. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times

“It’s an innocent word coinage,” she explained. “No strategy was needed.”

Similarly, for butt dialing — the accidental call made by a cellphone stuck
in a back pocket — the editors came up with “alpi tokhes”* — *which
literally means “by way of the backside.” Surrogate mother was an easy
coinage — “bimkem-mame*,” *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.”

“If everyone is using the word, it doesn’t make sense to fight it,” Mr.
Glasser said.

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.

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.

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.

“For Hasidim, Yiddish is not about culture; it’s about using language in a
utilitarian way,” Mr. Rapaport, the Hasidic translator said.

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.

“In the long run if you keep borrowing English, you end up speaking
English,” he said.
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.

New York Times, October 4, 2016--
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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