Free-Floating Hostility

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Posted by Anna at 8:23 PM | Permanent Link to this Post


Yiddishkeit for the Blogosphere

I've finished my first book of the summer (calm down, I read it on the train over the past week after I ran out of homework that could be accomplished away from a computer). Recommended to me by a professor, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, is a good read and very interesting. Mike is making his way through it now. Jeff might be interested to know there's a chapter titled "Ostroff! Sea Gate!"

I bring the book up here primarily to point out that I now have support for the position that "far" is a legitimate transliteration of the first syllable in farcocked and farklempt and farshteyt and fartootzt. About a year ago Fritz insisted that it should be spelled "ver" and I capitulated. The author of Outwitting History, Aaron Lanksy, is a Yiddish scholar and a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, and he spells it "far." So there. I am choosing to ignore the fact that his system also generates the transliterations tshatshke and mentsh.

I was highly gratified last year when we helped Alex and April move and I came across a box labled "tchotchkes," though April continues to pronounce it "ta-chokes."

4 Comment(s):

  •   Posted by Anonymous Anonymous at May 15, 2006 2:05 PM | Permanent Link to this Comment

    • Have you read Born to Kvetch? It's an interesting companion to Outwitting History, which I enjoyed but found to be a little tiresome at times--"Then we did this, and then we did that, and then we visited this old guy, and then we talked to another old dude, and then I schlepped a crapload of books back to Amherst in an old truck, and then..."

  •   Posted by Blogger BrooklynDodger at May 16, 2006 6:26 PM | Permanent Link to this Comment

    • Yiddish [the mama Loshen] is a transliteration from the German of some time long ago, and far away from the Pale. It's a transliteration into a limited set of Hebrew characters. Yiddish includes word from the "Loshen Kodesh" - Hebrew, also transliterated in Yiddish characters. So the debate between "far" v. "ver" is mostly retransliterate.

    Fritz

  •   Posted by Anonymous Anonymous at June 05, 2006 12:37 AM | Permanent Link to this Comment

    • I'm sure Lansky, like every good modern Yiddishist, uses the YIVO Romanization system, which, while not precisely corresponding to any one dialect of Yiddish, does have the advantage of consistency. And once you get used to it, any other transliteration drives you up the farblutikte wall! So, tsum bayshpil, it's far (not ver), shlep (not schlepp), mameloshn, loshn-koydesh, kvetsh, khap, tsimes, tshatshke, and, for that matter, yidish(-kayt).

    Yes, One Transliteration System for One People! With such an advanced system of Romanization, Yiddish will surely triumph over Hebrew in the Twentieth Century!

    -Yitskhok-Yankev

  •   Posted by Anonymous Anonymous at June 05, 2006 11:20 PM | Permanent Link to this Comment

    • I should also point out that Yiddish was never exactly German, but a pidgin of Middle High German with Romance elements and lots of Hebrew. Later on, as the Jews moved eastward, it acquired a significant Slavic component. The point is that there's no point in "correcting" Yiddish to any standard of German. It's not just a transliteration, but a separate language.
    Also, Yiddish characters ARE Hebrew characters, with a few adjustments. But pre-YIVO Yiddish spelling in ordinary (Hebrew) characters is almost as chaotic as in Roman ones.
    Well, all these problems will be resolved once the great socialist revolution comes and we all use the one _true_ language of the Jewish people: Esperanto.
    IJM

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