Philologos
By Philologos
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News Losing ‘Hope’
Harold J. White of Gloucester, Mass. writes: “Recently, friends asked me about the Hebrew word for ‘hope,’ tikvah, which they wanted to use in some announcement. Out of curiosity, I checked the concordance to the Bible and [the biblical dictionary of Wilhelm] Gesenius. The word tikvah does not occur there. And yet Hatikvah, ‘The Hope,’…
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News Something Turns, Words Catch
In last week’s column I wrote about the invention of new words in Hebrew to fill gaps in its vocabulary. But Hebrew, needless to say, is not the only language that has to keep up. Another is Yuchi, a Native-American language spoken fluently by several dozen people in northeastern Oklahoma. In need of a term…
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News Speak Like a Sailor
Modern Hebrew, as is well known, has had to come up with many new words for concepts and things that did not exist in the language before its late-19th-century spoken revival, or that were themselves 20th-century innovations. There are thousands of such words in Israeli Hebrew today, and dozens more of them continue to enter…
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News A Real Metsiya!
The Forward’s features editor, Erica Brody, tells me she knows a dedicated subscriber whose Yiddish-speaking family had a “hullabaloo” about the word metsiya. What precisely this “hullabaloo” was about I don’t know, but I can imagine. How many words are there that also mean their opposite and can be confused with their homonym in the…
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News Pardon My Turkish
In the Israeli writer Amos Oz’s autobiographical account of childhood and adolescence “A Tale Of Love And Darkness,” to be published in English translation this spring, Oz’s father, a Hebrew University librarian with a love for words and their etymologies, says at one point to his son, “And as for your [Hebrew word] gazoz,, it…
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News By Me, By You
In an e-mail entitled “Schadenfreude,” reader Sam Weiss of Paramus, N.J., writes about my September 5 column on foreign place names: “I couldn’t help noticing your misuse (a classic among Yiddish speakers) of the word ‘by’ in the sentence, ‘Or take the Chinese, who don’t mind our speaking of Shanghai when by them it’s Shangkhai.’”…
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News Luck of the Eye-er-ish
Writing this column is most fun when I manage to solve a linguistic mystery that Forward readers present me with. This time, I have Bernard Smith of Saratoga Springs, Fla., to thank for the opportunity. He writes: I come from Glasgow and although I didn’t grow up speaking Yiddish, my family did use some Yiddish…
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News Goats to the Slaughter
‘And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord and the other lot for the scapegoat…. And the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him and to let him go for a scapegoat unto…
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