Yiddish Empowerment Coach has an interesting Facebook post:
What if I told you that sometimes, transliteration is more authentic than using the alef-beys?
We’re often taught that “real” Yiddish lives in the alef-beys. And those who can’t read it yet? They often feel ashamed. Unskilled. Left out of classes and locked out of literature.
And yes — the alphabet matters. Standardization matters. It lets us teach, publish, and build a shared language in an ancient script dripping with heritage. But standardization also smooths. It evens out quirks. It blurs regional music into one correct, homogeneous voice.
Which is why I love a little joke book called Royte Pomerantsn.
In the early 1900s, the ethnographer Immanuel Olsvanger collected Jewish folk humor in Lithuanian shtetlekh — and published it in transliteration. Not neat, standardized YIVO transliteration. A quirky, phonetic system that captures the Litvish dialect of his storytellers. So you see:
– dar instead of der
– id instead of yid
– nit instead of nisht
– zakh instead of zikh
Sure, he could have written דערצייל in Hebrew letters. But then how would you know if the storyteller said dertseyl or dartseyl or even dertsayil? On the page, it would all look the same. Standardization unifies, but it also erases.
Royte Pomerantsn preserves the mouthfeel. The ta’am. The specific music of a particular region, a particular human being telling a joke. So I’ll say it again: Sometimes transliteration is more authentic than alef-beys. And pedagogically? It’s powerful.
I use this book even with students who CAN read the alef-beys!
Because Yiddish isn’t just a system to master. It’s a living chorus of voices — regional, imperfect, textured, embodied.Sometimes transliteration isn’t a crutch. Sometimes it’s a magnifying glass. And sometimes the thing people feel ashamed of — “I can’t read the alphabet yet” — isn’t a barrier to authenticity at all. Sometimes it lets you hear something you might otherwise miss.
Gerekht?
I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense to me (I’m sure rozele will have things to say). And I’ve long loved Royte Pomerantsn; I could have sworn I’d posted about it way back when, but if so I can’t find it.
Standardization v. variation in Hebrew-scripted Yiddish orthography is not something I know anything about (others who frequent the Hattery will), but whether or not it is a traditional practice I am reasonably confident that the “alef-bays” script can in principle be used for “quirky, phonetic” eye-dialect purposes just as well as Latin-alphabet glyphs can be, with the orthography adjusted as needed by pronunciation variations.
Immanuel Olsvanger is a distant relative of mine (by marriage). When I was little I loved to read a collection of Japanese folk stories he had translated from Japanese to Hebrew (aided by a German translation, as he humbly explains in the introduction). By all accounts he was a learned and charming person.
yes, i do, but tl;dr: what JWB said!
it’s simply baffling to me that this person conflates using oysyes with YIVO-standardized spelling, and fantasizes that transliteration is somehow automatically closer to spoken pronunciation. both of those notions are garbage, and kinda suggest to me that – despite having yiddish students of some kind – they simply haven’t read very much published in yiddish.
if they had, they’d know that the percentage of yiddish works that use YIVO spelling is impressively small, even after a century. and they’d’ve seen a wealth of works using spelling based on various topolects’ pronunciation, in exactly the ways they claim doesn’t happen – in every kind of context from fiction to songbooks to letters. they’d also have seen plenty of published spellings that are neither standardized nor strictly pronunciation-based, but reflect different conventions (often germanizing ones) about rendering voicing or schwa (יג- endings where YIVO uses יק-, for example, or participles with -גי rather than -גע).
and they’d’ve noticed that the vast majority of transliterated yiddish, whether in leo rosten’s popular lexicographies or this week’s latest “yiddish isn’t dying” retread article or the multi-authored academic doorstop Hasidism: A New History, is wildly far from any actual yiddish pronunciation! most of it is german-based rather than having a damn thing to do with yiddish of any kind, and what’s not is often ivrit-based, and if anything further removed*. when it does seem to reflect a specific topolect, you basically always have to guess at whether that’s what’s actually happening or whether it’s just worse-than-usual germanized spelling, since it’s hardly ever systematic enough to be clear, and almost always mixes in commonly-used spellings regardless of whether they’re in the perhaps-implicit topolect (שמועס | shmues almost always stays “schmooze” even if other /u/ vowels are being rendered “ee”, for example). it’s only in verrrry rare cases, in works by committed linguists, philologists, and ethnographers like olsvanger, that you find anything systematic enough to do anything like what this person claims as a benefit of transliteration.
and i think it’s equally bizarre – and a different kind of reprehensible, especially for someone doing yiddish teaching – to pretend that transliteration is, or can be, a way to avoid yiddish learners feeling badly about not having facility with oysyes. it’s just a plain fact that if you can’t read yiddish af yidish, you are basically “locked out of literature” – and literary criticism, and historical writing, and journalism, and almost everything else written in the language. it’s the job of a yiddish teacher to help students not feel “ashamed” about where they are in their reading ability – but pretending that they aren’t in fact “unskilled” at the key thing that gives them access to yiddish writings doesn’t do that. it just misleads them about what they’re getting into. the pushing back on shame is important – it’s important for me, even after many years, because i still read very very slowly – but this is a counterproductive distraction, not any part of doing that.
.
* Hasidism: A New History is particularly awful in that regard, using ivrit spellings for even the most common hebrew- and aramaic-rooted yiddish words, in ways that would’ve been wildly bizarre, if not offensive, to the people they’re writing about.
@Y. Immanuel Olsvanger’s doctoral dissertation (“Die Leichenbestattung bei den Juden, sprachlich und sittengeschichtlich untersucht”) is now online (https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/zoom/4629210) and is followed by some genealogical information.
The text attributed to “Yiddish Empowerment Coach” bears multiple indicia of having been generated by a chatbot rather than a human being (although it is certainly not *impossible* for a human to generate prose in this style with sufficient motivation and enough practice), which now makes me wonder about the current quality of Yiddish chatbot output. Are the corpora such software use as raw material adequate to generate output comparable to that of English chatbot output, or not yet? Largely the same issue is presented I guess for smaller-headcount languages like Latvian or what have you, although with Yiddish there’s the additional wrinkle that a corpus might be weighted more heavily toward century-old texts than current texts, which will have some implications for genre and style.
As the Soft Boys might have put, if only they’d had access to google translate in 1979:
דאָס אַלבאָם איז געווידמעט צו יעדן וואָס האָט אָנגעהויבן
ווי אַ חיה און ענדיקט זיך ווי אַ פאַראַרבעטונג־איינהייט
@jwb
Are you mistranscribing a vowel in Vararbe[should be ii]tung-iinheit?
@PP: I’m not transcribing anything, just cutting-and-pasting the output of some software that’s been generated in a script I myself can’t read …
Oh, and FWIW the software whose output quality I cannot vouch for romanizes that particular word as “fararbetung-eynheyt.” Reverse-translating the Yiddish into English suggests possible loss of some of the semantic nuance of the underlying English in that particular compound lexeme.
@jwb
My bad. Don’t know why I thought that.
The text attributed to “Yiddish Empowerment Coach” bears multiple indicia of having been generated by a chatbot rather than a human being
Wow, that didn’t even occur to me. I’ll have to up my paranoia game. (And remember, you can’t spell “paranoia” without AI!)
What are those multiple indicia? Other than — a cliché by now — the long dash.
Looking at some of her other posts, this looks to be in the same style, with something of the kindergarten teacher about it, and at least one error I don’t think AI would make: “Yiddish inherited materials — Germanic, Semitic, Slavic, Romantic. And then it reshaped them.”
@Y: count yourself lucky if you have not over the last year or so encountered so much AI-generated slop prose as to make the family resemblance difficult to miss. Obviously the moralizing/didactic/pseudo-dramatic style is somehow based on original human models. But if you ever encounter what appears to be an actual human being uttering phrasing like sometimes X isn’t Y; sometimes it’s Z, and sometimes blah blah blah, get them scanned by whatever radiological technique will reveal if they’re real or an android.
I would agree that some of the other posts attributed to the same pseudonym have less of a chatbot-generated feel.
JWB: I’ve seen some slop, though usually in the context of PR/corporate speech, or of robot-generated copycat websites trying to grab readers. This feels different. The rhythm of the sloppiness (in the old sense, not the AI sense) is more human than AI to my taste. See also added note to my above comment.
The teacher is a real person, anyhow.
If it’s in the training material, AI is probably quite capable of copying it. Remember the case where Artificial Idiocy repeatedly insisted (to itself, sort of) that all Nouns got a capital Letter in Dutch orthography?
Right, but “Romantic” for “Romance” in this context would be rare in the training material. Confusing Dutch and German somehow seems to me more of a typical six-fingerism.
Y : I’m not familiar with the term “six-fingerism”, and duckduckgoing it does not help much. I have an acquaintance who has six fingers on his right hand; another has only two fingers on both hands — doesn’t stop him from coding. If anything, he types faster than I do, and I type really fast.
פאַראַרבעטונג
Are you mistranscribing a vowel in Vararbe[should be ii]tung-iinheit?
The form אַרבעט arbet seems to be what is expected. See for example José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente and Tomasz Majtczak (2016) ‘A dialogue about the etymology of Yiddish páze’, in Words and Dictionaries: A Festschrift for Professor Stanisław Stachowski on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday, p. 21:
I just made up “six-fingerism”, referring to bad AI–generated images. Hands with too many fingers were a notorious and obvious artifact of them.
The “long dash” as a heuristic for AI is a bad one. Those of us who cut our teeth on LaTeX used it all the time. – (or \-) for the hyphen, — for the en-dash, — for the em-dash. Easy.
And the blog software went ahead and made the substitution. Figures.
@Y The teacher is a real person, anyhow.
The more I read that biog, the more I thought this is too good (too much) to be true — even given the prodigious intellectual achievements of Jewry (to use their word).
It’s like they’re trying too hard to tick every politically correct box.
Orthodox Jewish and omnisexual and trans? Does their Rabbi know?
So? Not everyone who would be raised Orthodox Jewish is guaranteed to be born straight or cis.
For non-obvious reasons (9th grade Danish teacher? Touch typing course?) I do reported speech as double newline, em dash. No inline low-9, high-9 stuff here. I have been accused of being an AI on that account.
Perhaps you missed some of the over-achievements
(It seems Shuli/Sam(antha) was father to the child before coming out around 2020. The mother is a Rabbi, which answers my q above.)
Would it be wise to raise a child as Yiddish first language in Providence, RI?
Other googling suggests our Yiddish empowerment coach/Poet is a Medical Receptionist (currently on a break whilst writing a memoir). I guess so prodigiously productive, it needs some AI assistance to write Facebook posts.
It’s not that any one – or a few together – of these achievements is beyond belief, it’s the pile-up. Also the ‘omnisexual’.
OTOH I’m withdrawing and apologising for questioning “real person”. I don’t think an AI could have placed such a disparate trail of evidence on Google.
(And I’m not going to put further enquiry into my browser history.)
Lars : in this blog I just put two hyphens together and I get an em-dash. LaTeX fist-bump, though.
I use the em-dash as a surrogate for a semicolon, but not as disruptive.
“Two Jews, three opinions”…?
“A-million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York City.”
Maybe someone didn’t like the Greek-Latin mashup in the usual expression pansexual.
By her she’s an Orthodox Jew, and probably by her child’s mother she’s an Orthodox Jew, but by an Orthodox Jew is she an Orthodox Jew?
Test:
Two hyphens — thus — gives an en-dash.
Three hyphens—thus—gives an em-dash.
Edit:
Nope. Well I’ll be. What about 1976–77?
Edit 2:
Well I’ll be even more.
The table of WordPress auto-translations (hyphens to dashes, quotation marks, a few others) has been linked here before.
Spaced endash erasure. And calling ’round and ’cause “Cockney” is… bloomin’ ‘eck.
Erasure? Huh? There are spaced en dashes in the comments above – like this (input: hyphen with spaces before and after). Actually, now that I look at it again, that table isn’t very clearly formatted. This one is better. (As for the “cockney”, heh, yes.)
“isn’t very clearly formatted”? The second “note spaces before and after” row – with no-space transformed text – is Just Plain Wrong. I am relieved.
On another subject, my Punjabi friend (born a few years after Independence) says that his teachers used “transliteration” to mean word-for-word translation, the kind they wanted students to avoid. He hadn’t heard it used to mean changing to a different alphabet.
I make all my dashes the slightly harder way – Alt+0150 (on the numeric block) for en, Alt+0151 for em.
Easier in MS Word: Ctrl+minus (on the numeric block) for en, AltGr+minus for em… German keyboard layout, so I don’t need Ctrl+Alt for AltGr. (Does require long fingers, which I have.)
Yet easier on the Mac: Command+hyphen for en. Don’t know about em.
On the mac it’s option-hyphen for en, option-shift-hyphen for em (“option” is Macese for “alt”.) Also opt-[ for opening double quote, opt-] for opening single quote, and shift ditto for the closing ones. Those are useful when the algorithm can’t figure out how to do smart quotes correctly.
*facepalm* Yes, Option. It’s been 16 years.
Android and iOS: hold down the hyphen-minus key.
Just for fun, -​- comes out as
-​-.
​ works correctly:
--
Equivalently, ​
--
I think the first transgender Orthodox Jewish person that I had heard of (Joy Ladin) was on this podcast:
https://onbeing.org/programs/joy-ladin-finding-a-home-in-yourself/