Yiddish speakers speak not so much with individual referring words as with such clusters of relations, ready-made idioms, quotations and situational responses. Since each word may belong to several heterogeneous or contradictory knots, ironies are always at hand. It is precisely the small vocabulary of the language that makes the words more repetitive and more dependent on their habitual contexts, hence weightier in their impact (like the words in the limited vocabulary of the Bible). It is not the range of denotations that the languages covers but the emotive snd semantic direcctions of the hearer's empathy. In this mode of discourse, the overt clash, ironic or clever, between words of different stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact and delight.Quoted by Harold Bloom in his review of Max Weinreich, Hitory of the Yiddish Language, a steal from Yale UP at $300. He's quoting Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (1990). See "The Glories of Yiddish," New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2008 (I am gleaning the old newspapers).
Saturday, December 05, 2009
The Thing about Yiddish
Benjamin Harshav catches and undertakes to explain a paradox of Yiddish: for such a rich language, it has a curiously limited vocabulary. But Harhav says:
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It's awkward to disagree with a native speaker like Harshav, but this doesn't ring true to me at all. I'm not sure how one measures a the extent of a language's vocabulary, but Yiddish has an incredibly rich functional vocabulary because of its ability to assimilate words from its root languages as well as from languages where it has had more modern contact. English can look to Latin and Greek roots; we rarely look to Germanic roots for creating new words. No so for Yiddish. Need a word, and it's fair game to look German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, or even English for a term that can be Yiddishized. Need a term for a piece of heavy Soviet-style industrial equipment--look to Russian. Thus, molotilke or kosilke. Want a term for the woman who lives next door--turn to English, and you get neksdoorke. Want to talk about a train? Well there's ban or ayzenban, but also the Russian poezd or English-derived treyn or subvey. These are all perfectly good "Yiddish" words, even if they are derived from other languages, just as cummerbund is a find English word.
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