by Catherine Madsen - Yiddish Book Center

More documents

Recommendations

Info

In 1908, a group of eminent Yiddishists assembled in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine) to argue about the spelling, grammar, vocabulary, status, and future of the Yiddish language. Among the items on their agenda was the production of a dictionary. A hundred years later, we are about to have the first comprehensive dictionary of modern Yiddish. Thanks to a handful of intrepid scholars and programmers, the Yidish-English verterbukh/Yiddish-English Dictionary is taking shape. Actually, the book will be a reworking of a Yiddish-French dictionary. In 2002, the Bibliothèque Medem in Paris published Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot’s Yidish-Frantseyzish verterbukh/Dictionnaire Yiddish-Français, an exemplary work that was immediately adopted by English-speaking Yiddishists as well. It listed so many words not represented in previous dictionaries that the extra step of translating from French to English was worth the trouble. Solon Beinfeld, director of the new dictionary project, aims to make that extra step unnecessary. The process of compiling the dictionary will be relatively quick: starting from Niborski’s abundant (and electronically stored!) lexical base, the time involved in producing an English version will be substantially less than starting from scratch. The story of Yiddish lexicography is complex, contentious, occasionally comic, and sometimes tragic. The first glossaries of Yiddish appeared in the 17th century, for the use of German merchants – and policemen: Yiddish words had entered the argot of the criminal underworld. Lexicography was just beginning to evolve in those days (Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary was not published till 1755), and there were wide variations among dictionaries in length, format, and purpose. Not until the end of the 19th century – by which time the first fascicles of the Oxford English Dictionary were being published – did the first major Yiddish-English dictionaries appear. They were written in New York by the great Alexander Harkavy, an immigrant from a learned Lithuanian family who also wrote a number of home-study manuals for Yiddish speakers learning English. Harkavy not only documented but championed the Yiddish language, at a time when most educated Jews were focused on the revival of Hebrew. His dictionaries were invaluable to their intended audience of immigrants and remain so for contemporary students in search of a broader Yiddish vocabulary. His entries are very brief, providing simply the Yiddish, the English, the part of speech, and sometimes an idiomatic usage. (Hakn, for example, is defined as “to cut, chop; to knock; to talk (fig.),” and hakn a morde is “to knock a person on the jaw.”) Harkavy did not supply grammatical particulars like the genders of nouns, nor the pronunciations of Hebrew and Aramaic imports, features that would be useful nowadays. But he had an eclectic sense of the Yitskhok Niborski Yiddish vocabulary, and his dictionaries are the best existing guide to actual usage in prewar Yiddish literature and and Bernard culture. His last dictionary, the trilingual 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew, has been reprinted twice by the YIVO Institute Vaisbrot’s 2002 and is still one of the primary Yiddish reference works. Yiddish-French But the rapid evolution of Yiddish did not stop in1928. Poets, writers, and ordinary speakers continued to push the dictionary. Right, boundaries of the language: adopting words from other languages, bending the meanings of existing words for new purposes, inventing new slang and bilingual puns. Snippets of non-Jewish dialect continued to attach themselves to adjacent Uriel Weinreich’s 1968 Yiddish- Yiddish dialects; modern translators regularly consult Polish, Ukrainian or Russian dictionaries when translating as English dictionary. simple a thing as a letter. Decades of intense social and literary activity – to say nothing of the upheavals and terrible losses of a world war – worked major changes in Yiddish vocabulary and usage. Uriel Weinreich, who next took up the challenge, was more concerned to limit than to expand lexical Yiddish. His father, the linguist Max Weinreich, had founded the YIVO Institute in Vilna (now in New York) for the study and preservation of Yiddish cultural materials. Uriel Weinreich worked at Columbia University just as the field of Yiddish studies was taking shape, and aimed to define the boundaries of the language. His 1968 Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary was a milestone in the establishment of correct usage. Whereas Harkavy was inclusive to the point of whimsy (among many other anglicisms, his 1928 dictionary includes sanovegon, “son of a gun”), Weinreich was austerely prescriptive, excising common German, Slavic and English imports as insufficiently authentic. He did coin words, notably for technological innovations, though not all of these have taken root in the language. His impeccable scholarship nevertheless produced a masterful dictionary, thorough and helpful in including many idioms that would otherwise confound the beginner. Tragically, Weinreich died at the age of 40, while his dictionary was still in proof. His family and friends saw it through publication under YIVO’s auspices. The book remains in print and is still indispensable for Yiddish readers at all levels, but it has never been revised. One can only wonder how Weinreich’s thinking and methods might have changed over the course of 30 or 40 more years.
Nahum Stutchkoff’s 900-page thesaurus, Der oytser fun der Yidisher shprakh (The Treasury of the Yiddish Language, 1950), provides a rich supplement to the standard dictionaries. Stutchkoff was a Yiddish actor, playwright, and radio announcer noted for his eloquence who also compiled the only Yiddish rhyming dictionary. However, as generations of Englishspeaking students have found with Roget ’s, it is dangerous to try and extrapolate definition and usage from a thesaurus; the unwary writer can make really embarrassing mistakes. As Nokhem Stutchkoff’s a source of vocabulary the Oytser is Der oytser fun der splendid, but the nuances of meaning Yidisher shprakh. must be filled in from other sources. Yudl Mark, a major figure in Yiddish linguistics and education and author of the invaluable 1978 textbook Gramatik fun der Yidisher klal-shprakh (Grammar of Standard Yiddish), worked for many years on the Yiddish-Yiddish Groyser verterbukh fun der Yidisher shprakh (Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language). Four volumes, covering only the letter alef, were published between 1961 and 1980. This is a much larger achievement than English speakers might guess, since a number of common Yiddish prefixes (and the vast majority of words beginning with vowel sounds) have an initial alef :by stripping away the prefixes one can identify verb roots for the whole alphabet. Fifteen or so prefixes – among them oys, oyf, on, op, arum, avek, aroyf, aroys, arayn, arop, ariber – can attach themselves to the verb geyn,“to go”; the prefixes yield various subtleties of expression, but the underlying root geyn is easy to spot. When this factor is taken into account, the four alef volumes cover about one-third of the Yiddish lexicon. Yudl Mark died in 1975. A group of his colleagues attempted to continue his work, with ambitious plans – beyond the capacity of the software then available – but did not manage to complete any subsequent volumes. The project eventually lost its funding and was never revived, again an immense loss to the Yiddish world. Rumors (and recriminations) still circulate about the failure of the project and the location and extent of the remaining materials. For many years, Mordkhe Schaechter was the man to contact for the meanings of obscure Yiddish words and for new coinages. Born in Czernowitz in 1927, he came to New York in 1951, had a long association with YIVO, and taught in the YIVO/Columbia Weinreich summer program in Yiddish from its inception in 1968 until 2004. After Schaechter’s death in 2007, an obituary in the Forward described him as a “one-man Academy of the Yiddish Language.” Schaechter was fascinated by minutiae, and published a substantial list of Yiddish botanical terminology as well as a book of terms relating to pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Among the work he left behind is an enormous card file of the sexual terminology in use among yeshiva students (needed for – among other purposes, one supposes – Talmudic debate). Schaechter was associate editor of the Groyser verterbukh in the 1980s, and not surprisingly was at work on his own dictionary. His descendants are organizing his materials into an English-Yiddish dictionary that will undoubtedly be a magnificent counterpart to Beinfeld’s Yiddish-English. Yitskhok Niborski, compiler of the Yiddish-French dictionary from which Beinfeld’s group is working, was born in 1947 in Argentina – the Library of Congress lists him as Isidoro – and attended the excellent Yiddish day schools of Buenos Aires, whose students spoke Yiddish even on the playground. As an adult he taught in those same schools, and co-authored a Yiddish-Spanish, Spanish-Yiddish dictionary. Gradually it became clear that the schools were being compelled to shift from Yiddish to Hebrew education. Niborski moved to Paris to work at the Bibliothèque Medem, a vibrant center of Yiddish activity and the largest Yiddish library in Europe. His 1997 Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh-shtamike verter in yidish (Dictionary of Words of Hebrew and Aramaic Origin in Yiddish) is an invaluable tool for decoding the often difficult Hebrew spellings and sometimes surprising Yiddish usages of Hebraic elements. Niborski’s Yiddish-French dictionary contains roughly 37,000 words to Weinreich’s 20,000, restoring the German and Slavic imports and introducing many dialectal forms. Niborski’s dictionary stands in Harkavy’s descriptive tradition rather than Weinreich’s normative one. The expansion of the field of Yiddish studies since Weinreich’s time made such a dictionary imperative. Scholars from many specialties now use Yiddish books and documents in their research. Serious students and translators of Yiddish fiction and poetry have been handicapped for a long time by the lack of a dictionary that draws from the full range of post-1928 literary sources. Political and social historians of Eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust need much better access to the range of dialects represented in memoirs, personal papers, and yisker-bikher (memorial books for destroyed communities). Few of these scholars are native Yiddish speakers, and the potential for misunderstanding and mistranslation is enormous. Solon Beinfeld, who is a native Yiddish speaker as well as the son of a teacher in the Workmen’s Circle schools, is a historian of modern Europe, specializing most recently in the Holocaust in the Kovno and Vilna ghettos. Based in Boston, he has made frequent research trips to the Medem, and met Niborski there. When Niborski’s dictionary appeared, Beinfeld 24 SPRING 2008
Page 1: y Catherine Madsen photographs by B

by Catherine Madsen - Yiddish Book Center

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?