Archive of July 2009
Di Geviksn-Velt in Yiddish, oyf English, umzist.
There was not nearly as much hubbub as I though there should be when, just a little while ago, The YIVO Institute For Jewish Research (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, for the true believers), released for free, immaculate download the entirety of Mordkhe Schaechter’s awe-inspiring work, Di Geviksn-Velt In Yidish or, in somewhat less monumental English, Plant Names in Yiddish. The somewhat-uninspiring English title belies the amazing nature of the work.
To an encyclopedia junkie like myself it’s amazing: you can imagine the book as starting off by demolishing the sketchy, vaguely-held notion that Yiddish is impoverished in its terms for flora and fauna, because it is a ghetto language. But it quickly moves on from that point to demonstrate the astounding breadth and depth of Schaechter’s scholarship. In addition to many scholarly pages on the overall nature of Yiddish plant terminology, he simply goes on to catalogue the name of every single plant you could think of, in Yiddish. The simplicity of this undertaking is amazing. It can be expressed in one sentence; but the fact that a single sentence can stand in front of such comprehensive, unassuming scholarship renders them both that more impressive. That YIVO has seen fit to digitize and put online, for free perusal and download, the entirety of the work is, at least for me, just the last wholly unexpected joy and surprise.
As a reference work it’s indispensable. But as a simple joy—as an impossibly rich and dense body to dive into at immediately satisying random—it is even dearer. At a random page turn I can tell you that the Yiddish name for Artillery Clearweed, Pilea microphylla, is הארמאטניק.. Harmatnik, that is, ‘cannoneer’—I have never heard of Artillery Clearweed but apparently its offensive associations are not unique to English. Sweetflag, the genus Acorus, goes by the name שאװער, or shaver. Its obvious false-friendship with the English verb aside, I am not nearly well enough versed in any of Yiddish’s many substrates to tell you offhand where the name shaver comes from. But I think it’s funny: indeed, far from being some wasteland of natural terminology, where the urban, mercantile Yid is happy to lump all ferns with ferns, trees with trees, birds with birds, and so on, stemming from a general lack of engagement with nature, Yiddish natural terminology is a happy and well-churned melange of influences, Polish, Hebrew, German, Russian, French, Ukrainian and original coinages, where the language’s syncretic, cosmopolitan nature joyously shines through.
It is rare that such a wide body of lexicography is combined with such keen linguistic analysis, and rarer still that such work is made freely available to all. I urge you to read this book, online or to download it.
Back up?
After a not-too-long period of moribundity it looks like Apodion.net might be back on its feet for good. I am running the newest long-awaited release of Chyrp, and I have restored to function my slightly hacked version of the Nouveau theme (to be soon released). This was accomplished with some personal help from the author of Chyrp, Alex Suraci; but I want to save my greatest thanks to the author of the Nouveau theme, Nevan Scott, who not only endured with good cheer my proddings and impatience, but then followed them up with direct and personalized help in getting this site running.
As always, please let me know if anything looks particularly broken.
Not a Very Faithful Transliteration
Commonly, the YIVO (nearly every other) system for transliterating Yiddish into Latin characters operates according to spelling, rather than pronunciation; thus האָבן remains ‘hobn’, even when pronounced ‘hobm’, and קױף becomes ‘koyf’ whether the speaker in question happens to say ‘koyf’ or ‘keyf’.
But it occured to me that of course it’s not strictly a literal transaction—or if it is, that it’s a lossy one. Because even as simple, regular and phonemic as Yiddish spelling is, 99% of the time, all bets are off when it comes to words of loshn-koydesh (Hebrew or Aramaic) origin. Not only do we not transliterate that phrase, <lshun kudsh> (understandably), we also don’t differentiate among homophonous letters that crop up in those words. In words that obey the standard spelling rules, Yiddish is pretty good using only one letter for any given sound. But when you introduce loshn-koydesh words for comparison, you start seeing redundancies: ק and כּ, or כ and ח.
And of course, we don’t differentiate among them in transliteration. They both become k and k, or kh and kh, respectively. But I wonder if we would find it more useful if we spelled things— well, it’s hard to think of what letter you’d use. ק, for instance, is often transliterated as <q> from Hebrew, but of course it’s become the dominant k/q letter in Yiddish so unless we want to start saying qoyfn and qoydesh (and I’m not saying I would be against it; Qs are fun), there’d be some figuring to do.
