Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.182 January 3, 1997 1) Yiddish dictionaries (Gilad J. Gevaryahu) 2) Yiddish dictionaries (Meyer Wolf) 3) Yiddish dictionaries (Joachim Neugroschel) 4) Yiddish dictionaries (Al Grand) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 13:40:30 -0500 From: gevaryahu@aol.com Subject: Yiddish dictionaries While we are listing the deficiencies of the Weinreich dictionary. Weinreich doesn't have the word shvants (tail and ???) either. Once I tried to find the correct spelling of some word in the famous maxim "mer macht nisht a shtreimel fun a shvantz of a khazer" and was surprised to find no such word in Weinreich. What a shvants! Gilad J. Gevaryahu 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 22:40:34 -0500 (EST) From: wolfim@chelsea.ios.com Subject: Yiddish dictionaries The "deficiencies" of the Weinreich dictionary were well known to Prof. Uriel Weinreich himself, and are discussed in the Yiddish preface, though unfortunately for those who may most need the dictionary, not in the English preface. Permit me to give the author a chance to speak for himself in his translated words: The bottom line is that the recomendations of the dictionary, whether explicit or implicit, are based on the author's taste. He has no authority to legitimatize or delegitimatize words in the name of any public; but he can nonetheless not evade the responsibility to make recommendations. No one is under the illusion that everything recommended here will be enthusiastically accepted by all those who use Yiddish. One may however hope that everyone - even the most experienced stylist -- no matter how accustomed to depend on his memory and his own creativity -- will find pleasure in at least one thing the dictionary offers: excellent words saved from oblivion, Let everyone take what the dictionary offers him; let him improve on it if he can. The author gives his thanks in advance for ideas that will improve the dictionary in its future editions. The dangers of omitting the indispensable, of inadequate definition, of rejecting what is good or accepting the unsuitable lurk at every step for the compiler of a dictionary. The dictionary _must_ be reworked, must be reissued again and again in improved versions; there can be doubt of that. In these further versions illustrations of usage must be made ever more accurate. Moreover usage will continue to change -- perhaps even improve as a result of this dictionary: in some cases, the recommendations here will be accepted generally; in others, the reaction will be to create better alternatives. A living standard language must frequently be "lexicographicized", taking lessons from the image it sees in the mrror which lexicography holds up to it. Meyer Wolf 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 13:53:59 -0500 (EST) From: achim1@cris.com Subject: Yiddish dictionaries The thread about the problems of the Weinreich dictionary is certainly useful, and one subscriber, while coming down hard on Weinreich, did allow for some merits in his dictionary. Granted that Weinreich's prudery is rather funny and that a number of his neologisms haven't quite made it on the international loop. But both for reading and for translating, I find his dictionary indispensable (along, of course, with Harkavy, the Groyser Verterbukh, etc.) W.'s chief advantage is that his Yiddish-English portion is fairly descriptive, his English-Yiddish half quite prescriptive. This is especially important in regard to genders, which sometimes vary between the two sections. Max Weinreich's History describes the way Yiddish advocates in interwar Vilna took in the missing neuter, thereby thoroughly changing their gender system. The Uriel Weinreich Dictionary is to some degree a document of that evolution. Harkavy also includes genders, but since the two books do not always overlap, I need them both desperately (except for the letter aleph perhaps). One huge merit of the Weinrich dictionary is the pronunciation of Hebrew-Aramaic borrowings. Aside from movies and radio programs and conversations with native speakers (all rare), there is no way a foreigner can know that the word that is spelled "kheshbon" is pronounced "khezhbm". Both Harkavy and Yehoyesh's lexicon of Hebrew-Aramaic items in Yiddish offer pointed spellings but few pointers on how to pronounce them in Yiddish--and Shteynberg's "Psukim un Taytshn", wonderful as it is, doesn't even point its items. Moreover, despite the smaller size of the W. dictionary, it does include items that I haven't been able to find elsewhere. On its downside, along with the other problems listed earlier, it sometimes includes imprecise equivalents--such as "antologye" = "anthology". Actually, an "antologye" can refer to any collection including one of texts by a single author, while an "anthology" normally refers to a collection of works by _different_ writers. The latter concept is covered by a less frequent Yiddish noun: "khrestomatye", which is more bookish than "antologye" or "anthology." Given the conditions under which Yiddish lexicons are produced, we have to be both tolerant and cautious--as we should be with any dictionary. I've sometimes had problems even with the OED, which doesn't include, say, an expression ("What's the fun of it") that I found in "The Mill on the Floss." And Grimms Deutsches Woerterbuch, two centuries in the making and running to dozens and dozens of fat volumes, is fabulous but excrutiatingly political--each volume reflecting shifts of highly politicized attitudes toward German, especially loanwords. As for the quality of Weinreich's College Yiddish, I dont see anything wrong with it. It was my thorough introduction to Yiddish, and I've never found any reason to regret it. I've noticed changes from one edition to the next: I believe that he eventually replaced "kvUtse" with "kibbUts"--so he can't have been totally hidebound. Many people use Yiddish as a tool--but he and his father used it as an instrument. Joachim Neugroschel P.S. I dont want to get involved in the Hundred Years War about standardized spelling or borrowing from modern German or neologisms. My draft status is: conscientious objector. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 16:22:00 -0500 From: savoyid@aol.com Subject: Yiddish dictionaries I'm grateful to A. Joseph Ross for bringing his problem of finding "tokhes" in Weinreich to this forum [6.180]. I, too, have looked there in vain because I've had a couple of occasions to need to know if my perception that "tekheser" is the plural of "tokhes" is indeed correct. It sounds sort of right but I'm eager to know the exact correct plural. As a child, during periods of boredom, I'd sometimes complain to my mother that I couldn't find anything to do. Her advice would be, "Patch zikh in tokhes un shray 'bravo!' " I often wonder if that was an expression peculiar to my immediate family or rather more widespread. Again, I thank A.J. Ross for emboldening me to bring this momentous topic to this list. Al Grand ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.182