Yiddish has a word for that! Notes on the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (2016)

Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath:

The dictionary grew out of eighty-seven card catalogs and shoeboxes that Mordkhe Schaechter kept in his home, and there were hundreds of thousands of notecards in those catalogs. They were collections of countless different specialized terminologies on just about every topic . . . there was science and medicine and sports and food and military terminology, romance terminology. Dr. Schaechter hoped to live to see the day when he’d be able to publish those terminologies. That didn’t happen, but it was decided [after his passing] that a collection of the terminologies would be published. An untold number of those words can’t be found in any of the [other] dictionaries available today.

The story begins more or less in 2000, when Dr. Schaechter and Lyubov Remennik and I began to work on the project. At first it was supposed to be just a collection of different terminologies, but over time we realized that a full dictionary was needed. It would have to include words for “chair” and “table” and “book,” and everything that a student might learn in a Yiddish class.

My father, Dr. Schaechter, published a dictionary that was called “Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood,” with terminology for parents raising children in Yiddish. ^{3 3} Mordkhe Schaechter, Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood: An English-Yiddish Dictionary. New York: League for Yiddish, 1991. I would say that the “pregnancy” and “birth” of this dictionary was much more difficult than the pregnancy and birth of any child! For years the project was on my shoulders, simply because I was the one who undertook it. Later Chava Lapin also joined in—Chava Lapin looked over all of the terms and offered many important suggestions. After that, Hershl was brought in, and Hershl worked on it for I don’t know how many years.

Paul (Hershl) Glasser:

More than two years, almost full time.

Schaechter-Viswanath:

For over two years. And we decided that we need to include all of the words. All of them. So I went through the pocket edition of the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary ^{4 4} Ya’acov Levy, ed., Oxford Pocket Dictionary English-Hebrew / Hebrew-English. Jerusalem: Kernerman and Lonnie Kahn, 2002. and incorporated all of the words that we hadn’t yet defined, and that became the core of the dictionary.

Glasser:

Gitl forgot to mention that the dictionary was intended to be a supplement to Uriel Weinreich’s, ^{5 5} Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1968. and only incorporate those words that were coined over the course of the last forty or fifty years. But we’d heard from various people [the complaint]: What do you mean? First I’m going to have to look up the word in Uriel Weinreich’s dictionary, and then if it isn’t there, I’ll have to look it up in your dictionary, or the other way around? So we decided that although it will become a massive volume, it’s worth including everything—that way the user will only need one large dictionary and not have to lug around several different books. So we drew from Uriel and from Harkavy and from Stutshkov, ^{6 6} Nokhem Stutshkov, Der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh. New York: Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut—YIVO, 1950. “Harkavy” refers to various editions of the bilingual (between English and Yiddish) and trilingual (English-Yiddish-Hebrew) dictionaries edited by Alexander Harkavy beginning in 1891. and from everywhere else.

I just want to say a few words about how we decided between different variants, and what we did when we couldn’t find a Yiddish equivalent. As we mentioned, we drew from the previous dictionaries, and when Stutshkov provided ten synonyms, we, based on our own knowledge, chose the two or three that we considered the most common, or the most useful, or the clearest, because incorporating all ten synonyms would have meant a dictionary that is ten times larger. So that’s number one.

When it came to new words . . . As we all know, Dr. Schaechter had a reputation for coining words just because he liked to do so. It’s not true. He much preferred when he could find older Yiddish words that were equivalents of contemporary English terms or contemporary concepts. For example, he wrote about what one should call that device (over there in the back of the room) that helps people who have difficulty walking. In English, a “walker.” He had the idea of calling it a “geyerl” [walker with the diminutive suffix] because in a book about children, I think, from around 1860, he’d seen the word “geyerl” referring to a device that children could lean on when they hadn’t yet learned how to walk. ^{7 7} See Mordkhe Schaechter, Laytish mame-loshn: observatsyes un rekomendatsyes [Authentic Yiddish]. New York: League for Yiddish, 1986, p. 219. Schaechter notes that the word dates back at least to 1836. So it turns out that we already had a ready-made word. He much preferred that over coining terms himself.

Nevertheless, sometimes you just have to create new words. And that is nothing new. He [Schaechter] once mentioned the word “fregtseykhn” [question mark], as a variant of the daytshmerish ^{8 8}Daytshmerish is a stylistic label referring to lexical items that are considered to be “Germanized,” and therefore not acceptable in Standard Yiddish. term “frage-tseykhn,” which was coined at the end of the eighteenth century, and apparently the person who coined it was a Yiddish writer who wasn’t a Jew but a priest. ^{9 9} Schaechter, Laytish mame-loshn, p. 244. That’s just one example. If you sit in prison, in a prison in English, where do you sit, in a . . . ?

Audience:

Cell.

Glasser:

And what does the body have, many . . . ? Also “cell.” So what is that called in Yiddish? “Kamer.” The cell in a prison is a kamer. I can’t remember if it was Peretz or another writer, but at the end of the nineteenth century somebody (I think Peretz) came up with the idea that if a prison has a “kamer,” then the body should have a “kemerl” [the diminutive form]. ^{10 10}Ibid., p. 248. So there we have a neologism from the nineteenth century. If one was allowed to make up new words in the nineteenth century, why not in the twentieth century?

That’s precisely what was done in the Yiddish schools and in the Yiddishist movement, especially during the interwar period. It’s from there that we inherited the idea that it’s acceptable to coin new terms when they do not already exist. And so our philologists, and Yiddishists more generally, maintained that it was better to coin new words than to borrow foreign words, especially when it came to German and daytshmerish. Because if you borrow from German, eventually Yiddish just becomes pure German, which is what the maskilim ^{11 11} Practitioners of the Jewish Enlightenment movement [haskole] that spread across Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. See also Immanuel Etkes’s entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia (2010). wanted. Of course, Yiddishism endorsed the exact opposite view.

And that is precisely what we have done. We searched and searched and searched, in every place under the sun, and when we couldn’t find an equivalent we were compelled to coin one. How did we coin new terms? We didn’t just use the English term, as is the practice among many [Yiddish-speaking] Americans. Instead we looked to see what the word is in French, in Russian, in Hebrew, in Polish, in Italian . . .

Schaechter-Viswanath:

In German.

Glasser:

Well, in German, again, only when there was no alternative. But we tried to steer clear of English and German when possible because that would have been too easy. We tried to get inspired by all of the other languages at the same time. Or if we noticed that there’s a word shared by six languages, six European languages, we generally either incorporated it or used it to create something new.

There’s no such thing as perfection. A dictionary is a manmade artifact. Even the large dictionaries that were compiled by large teams of people—manmade. Even in the best dictionaries you can find mistakes, inaccuracies, definitions that neither you nor I would find appealing. So it’s important to understand that it is a human enterprise.

As I said before, we found inspiration in all kinds of different sources. Today there are a number of dictionaries available from other languages into Yiddish: We have French-Yiddish, ^{12 12} Samuel Kerner and Bernard Vaisbrot, eds. Dictionnaire français-yiddish. Paris: Bibliothèque Medem, 2000. we have English-Yiddish, we have . . . by that I mean earlier dictionaries. We have Russian-Yiddish. ^{13 13} M. Shapiro, E. Spivak and M. Shulman, eds., Russko-evrejskij (idish) slovar’. Moscow: Russkij jazyk, 1984. Sometimes we had to work backwards: In order to find a Yiddish word, if we didn’t know the word in Russian or couldn’t find it in Russian, there was a long chain . . . English to French, for example, French to German, German to Polish, Polish to Russian, Russian to Yiddish, and eventually in this way—in other words, like traversing a mountain range—we’d work our way from English to Yiddish. So, “whatever works.” As long as one reaches one’s goal, so to speak, any means is kosher. So to speak.

Schaechter-Viswanath:

And another thing. We recently received an email from a professor who wanted to know whether we include Hasidic Yiddish. It’s complicated, because we don’t necessarily live among the Hasidim. We included what we were familiar with, and we asked around. He [the professor] asked, but how can you call it “comprehensive” if it doesn’t include all the dialects? So I sent the email to Hershl.

Glasser:

We constantly hear that criticism. Why don’t they teach today’s living variety of Yiddish in the summer programs, and why not in the dictionaries, and why not in the textbooks? My answer is always the same: What should be taught? Hasidic Yiddish is constantly changing. It [a standard] hasn’t yet emerged. Should we forget about gender marking in noun phrases just because they [the Hasidim] are losing it? Should we include all of the English words that they use? You wouldn’t need a dictionary for that. If they say, “I’m going to parkn my kar,” you can understand that without a dictionary if you also know English. So what is contemporary Hasidic Yiddish? I’m afraid that we won’t live to see the emergence, the formation of a Hasidic Yiddish that can be described in a grammar, included in a dictionary. That will probably remain a task for future generations.