It would be ironic if the single sentence for which John Kerry, an articulate politician, were to be remembered one day were “Poof!” And yet Mr. Kerry’s pithy description of a breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations whose failure surprised no one but himself may go down in history as his most memorable utterance. What is surprising…
A reader signing his or her name as “ASP” asks: “In her book ‘The Passover Seder,’ Ruth Gruber Fredman wrote that the galaxy is called seder or ‘order’ in Hebrew. Is this true?” Exactly what Ruth Gruber Fredman wrote in her book, I don’t know, but seder, while it does mean “order” in Hebrew, does…
The other day, a French friend who lives in Israel used the expression quel capharnaüm to describe the state of her apartment after her small grandchildren had come for a visit. What she meant was, “What a mess,” but to my surprise, when I told her she had used a most appropriate word for Hebrew-speaking…
Jeffrey Lubin writes to ask what a bat-kol is and why it isn’t a ben-kol. Since this question won’t mean much to most of you, I’d better explain. The roughly 2,000-year-old Hebrew word bat-kol is not found in the Bible, and first appears in early rabbinic literature. Translatable literally as “the daughter of a voice,”…
Given all the hoopla surrounding it, it’s surprising that only one reader has written in about “Thanksgivukkah,” the word coined for this year’s coinciding of Thanksgiving dinner with the first night of Hanukkah. The reader is Amy Mintz of Sugar Hill, N.H., who complains: “This is such an assimilated-sounding combination! And it’s hardly a combination….
An article recently posted in the online Jewish magazine Tablet is titled “Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew”; it bears the subtitle “An eccentric Jerusalem-based researcher believes he’s found the key to the origin of tongues — in the Bible.” The “guru of Edenics,” as the Tablet article…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. On October 3, Yeshiva University socio-linguist and longtime Forverts contributor Dr. Joshua A. Fishman was honored by the Euskaltzaindia, or Royal Academy of the Basque Language, for his contribution to the struggle on behalf of “minoritized” languages. At a ceremony at the…
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