Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture How To Get a Haircut in Lvov
Herb Hoffman writes: “When as a child I needed a haircut — desperately, according to my mother — she would say, ‘Azoy a shmenge oyf den kopp, a mameshe choprene.’ This always seemed to me more Polish or German than Yiddish. She herself came from Lvov and knew all three languages. What is the derivation?”…
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Culture Should Israel Have Gone With Yiddish?
Murray Lefkowitz of Merion Station, Pa., writes a letter stating his opinion that it “may have been an unfortunate choice” that Hebrew became the language of the state of Israel, since “Yiddish was the more common tongue for almost all Jews prior to 1948.” The claim that Yiddish, not Hebrew, was the real national language…
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Culture Peace Process? Fuhgeddaboudit!
The daily English edition of the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, which also appears in an Internet version, has always struck me as a prodigious feat of translation. Day after day — or, more precisely, night after night — a battery of anonymous translators, working like galley slaves under enormous time pressure, takes the Hebrew paper, itself…
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Culture Pleasant, Pleasanter and Pleasanter-er
Rabbi Richard Hammerman of Caldwell, N.J., writes about my column of May 4, in which I said it was “pleasanter” to contemplate the origins of the expression “finger-lickin’ good” than it was to contemplate an Iranian nuclear bomb: “I always enjoy your columns and learn something new and often useful from them. But ‘pleasanter,’ not…
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Culture Hunting the Whale
Last week’s column was about the Hebrew word tanakh, spelled with the letters taf, nun and kaf. This week, we’re down to taf and nun, which spell — but I’d better begin at the beginning. It all started with an attack of bursitis in my leg. What do you do when you have to rest…
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Culture Acronyms and the Bible
In response to my column of two weeks ago in which I objected to the use by Jews of the term “Old Testament,” several of you have expressed the opinion that the best alternative to it is “Hebrew Bible.” Miriam Segall of Minneapolis, on the other hand, wants to get even more Jewish that that….
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Culture How Do You Say ‘Freebie’ in Hebrew?
How do you say “freebie” in Hebrew? This was the question facing the daily newspaper Haaretz when called upon to translate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark, delivered in Jerusalem in English on April 15, that the United States and Europe had given Iran a “freebie” by deferring further negotiations over its nuclear program until late…
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Culture From Esperanza to Shprintze
Bert Horwitz writes from Asheville, N.C.: “The outcome of a dispute between me and my wife was: ‘Let’s ask Philologos.’ In Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Tevye the Milkman,’ one of Tevye’s daughters is named Shprintze — a name my wife claimed derived from Latin or Spanish Esperanza, meaning ‘hope.’ I said that there are no Latin- or…
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