Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Upside-Down Coffee
Adam Chanes of New York City, who at age 11 is probably the youngest person ever to address a query to this column, recently returned from a vacation in Israel with his parents. While he was there he asked me why, when Israelis order coffee in a café, they often ask for kaffei hafukh, which…
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Culture In Seventh Heaven
Forward reader Nochum Elek inquires: “I would like to know whether the Yiddish expression in zibnten himl [in seventh heaven] is a translation from the English, or whether it is the other way around and the English ‘seventh heaven’ comes from the one mentioned in the tractate of Hagigah in the Talmud, where it says:…
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Culture Judeo-English, Part III
In response to my previous two columns on “Judeo-English,” Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguist and assistant professor of Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, has sent me a paper, not yet published, that she has written on the same subject. In it she concludes (as I did) that such…
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Culture Judeo-English, Part II
Last week’s column, which started with an e-mail from Irving Treitel that despaired of the possibility of a distinct American Jewish language, ended with the question of whether, considered lexically, phonetically and grammatically, there actually is already such a thing as “Judeo-English” in the sense that there were once dialects of “Judeo-Italian,” “Judeo-Arabic,” etc. With…
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Culture Judeo-English
Irving Treitel writes: “Your May 11 column about Ladino and other Jewish languages was interesting. However, when I turn to the Encyclopedia Judaica, I become depressed. Apart from Yiddish and Ladino, I find listed under the letter ‘J’ Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Provençal, and Judeo-Greek. The one language that is missing is Judeo-English. “As…
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Culture Gematria and the Ouroboros
Marc G. Schramm writes: “I read recently that there is a relationship between the Hebrew letter Chet (gematria of 8) and the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The latter is a double zero, ‘the head and the body, the Moebius strip of the soul. It is the sideways sign of infinity.’ “Can…
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Culture Defending Ladino
In response to my May 11 column on Ladino, Rachel Bortnick, who identifies herself as “a native Ladino speaker and an activist for the preservation and appreciation of that precious Jewish language,” has written a lengthy letter to protest my statement that “the Jewish texture of Ladino isn’t quite as rich or as thick” as…
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Culture The Kitbag Question
Reporting on a visit by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to Sderot, the town near Gaza repeatedly hit by Qassam rockets, the Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz had this to say about her meeting there with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana: “In the course of a press conference…. Solana said that he understood the local…
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