Yiddish for Comrades

[Miguel]

Forward.com
Yiddish for Comrades
Official Spellings by Order of the Soviet Union
By Philologos
Published December 02, 2009, issue of December 11, 2009.
The week of Yom Kippur, you may recall, I published a column about a Yiddish letter, written by a young soldier in
the Russian army to his family during World War I, that a reader asked me to decipher. In doing so, I pointed out
that the letter writer, although his spelling was generally good, misspelled several Hebrew words. As Hebrew is
traditionally spelled in Yiddish by its own rules, which differ from the strictly phonetic ones used for the non-Hebrew
component of the language, I concluded that he had had no or little Hebrew education.
Now, reader Rochelle Mogilner writes to ask whether I may have been unfair to the young man, who — so she
surmises — might have spelled the Hebrew words as he did not out of ignorance, but because he was adhering to
“the new Soviet system of Yiddish orthography” that was instituted in the 1920s. This system brought the spelling of
Yiddish’s Hebrew component into line with that of its other vocabulary by a number of measures, such as regularly
using the letters aleph, ayin, vov and yud to represent vowel sounds where Hebrew failed to indicate them, and
eliminating the letters taf and khes while substituting tes or samekh for the former and khof for the latter. (In a later
stage, the Soviet spelling reform also eliminated the special forms of the letters khof, mem, nun, peh and tsadi at
the ends of words.)
Thus, for example, shabbes, Saturday, was now spelled שאבעס instead of שבת and toyreh, Torah, טוירע instead of
תורה . This new system had two objectives. One was to make Yiddish spelling easier for Jews who knew no Hebrew.
The other was to efface the Hebraic character of Yiddish entirely, since, as Ms. Mogilner accurately observes,
“Hebrew was considered the language of religion and of Zionism, both of which were anathema to Soviet ideology.”
It’s an interesting theory. Inasmuch, however, as the young soldier wrote his letter in pre-Revolutionary czarist times,
years before the Soviet spelling reform, I did not at first think there could possibly be anything to it. Yet, having in
my library a book on Soviet Yiddish by the British scholar Gennady Estraikh, in which there is a chapter on this
reform, I took down the book from its shelf to read up on the matter — and to my surprise, I discovered things I
hadn’t known.
To make a long story short, though a comprehensive Yiddish spelling reform was never put into widespread practice
anywhere in Eastern Europe before the Bolshevik Revolution, nearly all of its principles had been proposed in
czarist times by various Yiddish scholars and intellectuals, many of them not communists at all; a few, in fact, such
as Marxist theoretician and Yiddish linguist Ber Borochov, were even Zionists. As early as 1908, at the famously
controversial first Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz, the conference’s initiator, Nathan Birnbaum, came
out in favor of “Yiddishizing” the language’s Hebrew component. Birnbaum made the same case as did the later
Soviet spelling reformers — namely, that the average Yiddish speaker who knew no Hebrew was at a disadvantage
when having to read or write Hebrew-derived words in which the traditional spelling had persisted under the
influence of the rabbinic establishment and its allies, the educated Jewish upper classes.
This argument was especially popular in left-wing and anti-religious Jewish circles, such as that of the Yiddisher
Arbiter Bund, the Jewish socialist party founded in 1897. Is it possible, then, that our letter writer was a Bundist, or
Yiddish for Comrades – Forward.com 12/4/09 1:47 PM
Yiddish for Comrades – Forward.com Page 2 of 2
Arbiter Bund, the Jewish socialist party founded in 1897. Is it possible, then, that our letter writer was a Bundist, or
someone of similar views, who jumped the gun by instituting his own private spelling reform without waiting for its
official promulgation?
This would make our young soldier an intellectual rebel rather than merely a poor speller. Yet, going back to his
letter, I quickly realized that a poor speller is what he was. This is because if one looks at his misspelled Hebrew
words, the way they are written is not how they would have been had he deliberately been applying new rules to
them. For example, whereas the kippur of Yom Kippur, whose Hebrew spelling is כיפור , became קיפער in Soviet
orthography, in line with earlier, pre-Soviet proposals, our soldier spelled it קיפר . And whereas the Hebrew-derived
word for a fast, taynis, is traditionally spelled תענית and became טייניס in reformed spelling, our soldier spelled it
.טענת
Clearly, then, we are indeed looking at the errors of someone who never had a proper Hebrew education. These
errors, however, so at variance with the rest of the letter, do show why Yiddish spelling reform had many backers
long before it was adopted by the Soviet authorities. Today, we tend to think of the Soviet measures as motivated
solely by a desire to de-Judaize and de-Hebraize Yiddish and Yiddish culture. But though this was a large part of it,
it was not the whole story. Many speakers of Yiddish sincerely felt that something had to be done to make reading
and writing easier for those who had never gone at all, or for very long, to heder, the traditional Eastern European
Hebrew school. Our young soldier might have agreed with them.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.

[tgtbtu2]

This language indeed exists. Wikipedia ranks it 141 in the world with 3 million speakers:
Yiddish (ייִדיש yidish or אידיש idish, literally "Jewish") is a non-territorial High German language of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. Yiddish is conventionally written in the Hebrew alphabet.

The language originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in the Rhineland and then spread to central and eastern Europe and eventually to other continents. In the earliest surviving references to it, the language is called לשון־אַשכּנז (loshn-ashkenaz = "language of Ashkenaz") and טײַטש (taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for the language otherwise spoken in the region of origin, now called Middle High German; compare the modern New High German Deutsch). In common usage, the language is called מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn, literally "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, which are collectively termed לשון־קודש (loshn-koydesh, "holy tongue"). The term "Yiddish" did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature of the language until the 18th century.

For a significant portion of its history, Yiddish was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews and once spanned a broad dialect continuum from Western Yiddish to three major groups within Eastern Yiddish. Eastern and Western Yiddish are most markedly distinguished by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin in the Eastern dialects. While Western Yiddish has few remaining speakers, Eastern dialects remain in wide use.

Yiddish is written and spoken in Orthodox Jewish communities around the world. It is a home language in most Hasidic communities, where it is the first language learned in childhood, used in schools, and in many social settings.
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There can be a demand for it, definitely.

[Stich]

Is this.. historical debate or something?? XD

[Miguel]

You're always welcome to read Arabic forum instead

[Stich]

Thats what I was asking for!! I was wondering how that subject is related to this forum and Is it ok to post any kind of subjects here couse I thought that only threads somehow related to this forum are allowed to post! and secondly Arabic is my second language my first is Russian

[Miguel]

The thread is exactly where it's supposed to be - the Hebrew section

[Stich]

u missed the point