At the end of last week’s column about the traditional use of Hebrew characters to write Jewish languages, like Yiddish and Ladino, I promised that this week’s column would deal with the opposite development — namely, the growing tendency in America to write Yiddish in Latin characters. More and more, one finds Yiddish written that way in books and articles, and on the Internet.
It’s not entirely new. As far back as 1947, European-born author Immanuel Olsvanger published in New York a collection of humorous Yiddish stories in Latin characters with an accompanying English translation, titled Röyte Pomerantsn, “Red Oranges.” (Why Olsvanger put a Germanic umlaut over the “o” in royte is something I’ll get back to.) On the one hand, he was responding to the fact that among children and grandchildren of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to the United States, there were many who could speak or understand some Yiddish but were unable to read it because they had never received the rudimentary Hebrew education that would have made this possible. On the other, Olsvanger was hoping that in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, there would be an arousal of interest in Yiddish among American Jews who would want to know more about it, though not to the point of troubling themselves to learn the Hebrew alphabet.
Today, this hope has been borne out. Contemporary America is teeming with Yiddish clubs and Yiddish activities for non- or partial Yiddish speakers and dozens of Yiddish songbooks, how-to-speak and what-does-it-mean books, dictionaries, and anthologies of sayings and expressions are available in Latin characters.
You don’t have to know a single Hebrew letter to learn the words to “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen” or “Oyfn Pripetshik,” to memorize 500 Yiddish proverbs or to find out how to say in Yiddish, “I love you madly,” or, “May you itch all over your body and your eyes crawl out of your head.” Are you stranded in a Yiddish-speaking country with an empty gas tank or a full bladder? There are books that will tell you what to say, even if you don’t know your alef-bays — viz., “Vu iz di gazolin-stantsyeh?” or “*Ikh darf a vashtsimmer.”
Even fluent Yiddish speakers who have no difficulty reading Yiddish in Hebrew characters now use Latin ones routinely for writing it. There is, for example, a Web site called Mendele.com on which serious scholars, students and speakers of Yiddish request and provide information on a wide range of Yiddish-related subjects. Most write in English, but those who write in Yiddish use the English alphabet only, keeping to the official transliteration rules of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Here’s a randomly chosen example:
“Mit a por vokhn tsurik, hob ikh gekoyft Paula Teitelbaum’s CD, ‘Di grine katshke.’ S’iz oyser geveyntlekh. Yedn tog (un nakht) bet mayn zunele, ‘Daddy, zing a lidl. Di frosh. Di frosh. Di frooosshhhhh!’ Ot iz mayn zorg: ‘khob sheyn farloren di CD un ikh gedenk nisht mer di verter….” (“A few weeks ago, I bought Paula Teitelbaum’s CD, ‘The Green Duck.’ It’s great. Every day (and night) my little boy begged me, ‘Daddy, sing a song. The frog. The frog. The fro-o-og!’ But here’s the problem: I’ve lost the CD and can’t remember the words….”)
The Yiddish words to Paula Teitelbaum’s “The Frog” were quickly supplied by a Mendele reader — in Latin characters, of course.
Is this a good thing? It’s hard not to be of two minds about it. On the one hand, using the Latin alphabet makes a smattering of Yiddish available to large numbers of people who otherwise would have no access to it. It also enables those fluent in it to communicate by e-mail and Internet without a special computer program to handle the Hebrew alphabet. These are real advantages.
But on the other, a Yiddish written in Latin characters is no more “whole Yiddish” than an English written in Hebrew characters would be “whole English.” Although alphabets are not intrinsic to languages (many languages, after all, have switched alphabets in the course of their history, and a far greater number had never been written at all until modern times), an alphabet is nevertheless, as it were, the clothing in which a language dresses. Yiddish has always worn Jewish clothing. Is it really the same language when it dresses as a non-Jew? Can it give us quite the same feeling when we see it, read it, run our fingers over it?
Moreover, there is the question of Yiddish regional speech. When Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, every Yiddish speaker is free to pronounce it the way to which he is accustomed. The word for “red,” for example, רויט, can be read as “reyt” if your Yiddish is Lithuanian or Belarusian, and as “royt” if it’s from elsewhere, but if it’s written in Latin characters, you’re forced to pronounce the “oy” in non-Lithuanian fashion, as in “boy.” (This was the reason for Olsvanger’s umlaut, which was meant to create a special letter that would preserve the element of choice.) Jews have gone to war with each other over lesser things. There’s something to be said for sticking to the alef-beys.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.
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The Hebrew alphabet is still used by the very large group of native Yiddish speakers in the frum/Orthodox world. If one does not read the Hebrew alphabet one would be completely cut off from a vibrant, alive Yiddish world that exists right now - as well as being cut off from the historic legacy of Yiddish.
I have taught Hebrew throughout the former Soviet Union. Always, the first lesson is the alef-bet. It takes no more than two lessons to teach it. "...The rudimentary Hebrew education that would have made [reading Yiddish in Hebrew script] possible" is really very rudimentary, indeed. There is no reason for a Yiddish club to assume that the Hebrew script is asking for too much. (The local Greek club teaches Greek in the Greek script, obviously). The problem is much deeper. There are no standards in the American Jewish community. There is no self-criticism. You will have in your Yiddish club people who have a PhD, but they never had the chance to sit in class for a few hours to learn the Hebrew script! And, yet, no one would point a finger and say: "Gee, how strange it is to have had such a serious education, yet one's Jewish training never seemed to have any importance". So, although using the Hebrew script for Yiddish would solve the "problem" of the "Litvak vs. the Polak" pronounciation - yet, that problem really is quite esoteric. Not using Hebrew script is really a gauge by which one can see the depth of crisis in the American Jewish experience. Knowing the Hebrew script should be self-evident in a well-to-do, educated Jewish Diaspora. But, alas, there is no Jewish "self-evident" in America.
Having neither Hebrew or Yiddish as my first language, I have learned the אלף בית more from learning Yiddish than the siddur, prob’ly because of Yiddish’s similarity to German (third language after junior high French).
The proliferation of latinized Yiddish on the internet is not just a matter of communicating on a computer “without a special ... program to handle the Hebrew alphabet.” Even with a computer that can handle Hebrew/Yiddish text, different computer platforms make communication less than certain because there is no single standard for coding Hebrew/Yiddish characters. Among the many gems located on _Refoyls yidish veb-bletl_ (run by Raphael A. Finkel) is a Yiddish typewriter and spelling checker, די ייִדישע שרײַבמאַשינקע. Among the input formats are MS-Windows Hebrew, Mac Hebrew, Unicode and Unicode-16. There are even more output formats. If you’re uncertain of the target platform, Yiddish —and Hebrew— text on the internet is a crap shoot. It’s dumb luck that the Yiddish text from my Macintosh is readable to the FORWARD’s computer.
There is another factor that Philologos only obliquely mentioned: music, or rather, transcribing music and lyrics. Western musical notation reads left to right, opposite of Hebrew and Yiddish (and Dzhudezmo, etc.). Combining the two necessitates compromise. In 1623, Salome Rossi settled upon writing the lyrics in Hebrew letters, with the individual words reading right to left, but the sentences read left to right, resulting in ocular calisthenics. Feel the burn, eyes! Feel the burn! The more usual combination I have seen is the text adjacent to the musical staff is transliterated into latin characters with the additional stanzas set in Yiddish or Hebrew. It may be less authentic, but it’s easier to sight read.
As the Rambam said: It is not the language of your prayers that matters, it is the content. The same with Yiddish, writing it in Roman characters, not with the Hebrew characters opens the beauty of Yiddish thought to many more people who would not be able to share the wonders that we the children of the immigrant learned as youngersters. Mama would always start a conversation with, Meine Kindt. To this day I can still understand Yiddish because of this and being able to read it in Roman characters.
I forgot to ask in which Yiddish-speaking country would you hypothetically be stranded, the Federal District of Sitka?
The correct link for the website dedicated to Yiddish language and literature is http://mendele.commons.yale.edu/
As a linguist I have been interested in "transalphabets". After the Bolshevik revolution there was a major effort to publish Yiddish in I believe Latin letters (not Cyrillic?). In the 19th Century, as part of an effort to obliterate Lithuanian national consciousness, there was a 20 year period when the Czarist government permitted publishing Lithuanian only in Cyrillic instead of Latin letters (interestingly never attempted for Yiddish/Hebrew). It failed, since Lithuanian books published in East Prussia were routinely smuggled into Lithuania (often by Jewish smugglers). Language mavins should check out Catherine the Great's Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa (Peter Simon Pallas)from c. 1794, where among the 200 languages represented are Yiddish and Hebrew/Aramaic words in Cyrillic. All these transalphabetic representations are fascinating from a historical dialectology perspective.