Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Philologos Gets Roasted — And Eaten
In a response to my February 20 column on the American Yiddish verb mufn, in which I said, “You won’t, of course, find *mufn *in any Yiddish dictionary,” Solon Beinfeld of Cambridge, Mass., writes: “In Alexander Harkavy’s 1928 edition of his celebrated Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary*, we find ‘mufn (Am.), to move.’ Uriel Weinreich’s 1968 Modern English-Yiddish…
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Culture To Have and To Have Not: An Et Hater at Heart
Jack Zeldis writes from Fresno, Calif., about the verb “to have” — or rather, about the lack of it — in Hebrew. Specifically, he asks me to comment on the two kinds of constructions for a Hebrew sentence like “I have the book”: the “correct” one of “Yesh li ha-sefer,” *which you will almost never…
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News A Fate Worse Than Death
Susan Ganc writes that she has three “grave matters” to ask me about — and when she says “grave,” she means grave, the kind you’re buried in. Let’s start with the first one. Recently, Ms. Ganc writes, she was reading, in Yiddish, Sholom Aleichem’s story “Khave” in his “Tevye the Dairyman,” and came across the…
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News Taking Foreign Leaders’ Names In Vain
Rick Zichlin of Highland Park, N.J., asks: “Why does the American press refer to the head of the Likud party as Benjamin Netanyahu instead of Binyamin Netanyahu? I understand that Benjamin is the English language equivalent of Binyamin. Yet to my knowledge, the English-language media have never referred to other Israeli politicians as Isaac Rabin…
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News At Last, Pomedorn!
A t last, tomatoes! Forward reader Herbert Hoffman’s request to know why they are called *pomedorn *in Yiddish finally gets its answer. There are actually two answers, a short and a long one. The short one is that Yiddish *pomedor *(the singular form) comes from the same word in Polish. The long one is that…
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Culture The Moving Forward, Mir Trogn Zikh Ariber?
Where were we? Ah, yes, tomatoes. Last week, I put off writing a column about the Yiddish word for them, *pomedorn, *in order to write one about *tfu, tfu, tfu *instead. This week, I promised you that I’d get back to them. But man plans and God laughs, as we say in Yiddish. Checking my…
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Culture Spit Your Way To Safety: Toi, toi, toi!
On my way to tomatoes this morning, I was sidetracked by expectorations. If that seems like an odd thing to happen, let me explain. It all began with a letter from Forward reader Herbert Hoffman, who wanted to know the derivation of the Yiddish word for “tomato,” pomedor. *Although I knew the answer, I wasn’t…
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Culture Polishing off Your Delicious Ponchkes
Were pa˛czki, *or ponchkes,* a Hanukkah food in Poland? If they were, why didn’t they become one in America, too? And if they weren’t, why did they become one in Israel? With these questions, last week’s column ended. Let’s start with Question 1. The answer to it is apparently negative. In fact, some of your…
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