Philologos
By Philologos
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News Of Biblical Proportions
If you read the newspapers or watch the news on television, you couldn’t have avoided hearing, probably more than once, the expression “of biblical proportions” in connection with the Asian tsunami. “A disaster of biblical proportions,” the New York Daily News reported. “A humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions,” the Washington Post declared. “A tragedy of…
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News Oy, gevalt!
William Lasser writes from the political science department of Clemson University to ask where the expression “Oy, gevalt!” comes from. This is a reasonable question, because the literal meaning of the Yiddish word gevalt (or gevald, as it is sometimes spelled) does not explain the expression. “Oy, gevalt!” (or just plain “Gevalt!”) has the sense…
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News Hebrew vs. Israeli
Israeli linguist Ghil’ad Zuckerman, whose new Hebrew book, “Hebrew as Myth,” will appear this coming year, thinks I am wrong to call “denigrating” Yiddish linguist Dovid Katz’s use of the term “Israeli” rather than “Hebrew” for the contemporary language of Israel. Mr. Zuckerman writes: “On the contrary! It is time to acknowledge that the language…
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News Philologos vs. Dovid Katz, Round III
In this third and last column on linguist Dovid Katz’s theory of the origins of Yiddish, let us pose the question: Is there any historical evidence for a migration around the year 1000 C.E. or later of a community of Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East to a German-speaking area of Europe — a migration…
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News Philologos vs. Dovid Katz, Round II
Last week’s column ended with a brief description of linguist Dovid Katz’s theory of the origins of Yiddish. Succinctly restated in Katz’s newly published history of Yiddish “Words on Fire,” this theory holds that the first speakers of Yiddish did not arrive, as is generally assumed, in a German-speaking area of Europe from elsewhere on…
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News The Case for Yiddish in Israel
Dovid Katz, whose newly published “Words On Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish” was reviewed in the Forward recently, is one-of-a-kind in the Jewish world — a roving, long-bearded scholar (born in New York, he now, according to the book’s jacket cover, “divides his time between Lithuania and North Wales”) who, one has the impression,…
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News Hospitable Origins
L. Yourman writes: “I recently heard that the English word “hospitality” has an etymological connection to the Hebrew-Aramaic word ushpizin. Is this so?” Ushpizin, besides being the name of a new Israeli movie, is the plural of ushpiz, a word meaning “guest” in medieval Aramaic. In Jewish tradition, the ushpizin are the biblical patriarchs who…
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News When the Dog Dies
What was Israeli Knesset member Inbal Gavrieli (Likud) referring to last week when she said to Knesset member Ahmed Tibi (The Democratic Front for Peace), prior to a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in the Likud government, “It’s worth your while to be paired with me, because you’ll want to be paired yourself when the dog…
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