Posts tagged with “language” and “yiddish”
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.
