Oren Cohen Roman’s “When Yiddish Was Written in Latin Letters” (Journal of Jewish Languages, 30 Apr 2024) covers a lot of bases; the abstract reads:
Although Yiddish was traditionally written in Hebrew letters, texts in this language were also recorded using Latin characters in various circumstances, times, and places. These texts offer valuable information regarding pronunciation traditions and shed light on the processes of cultural history and sociolinguistics that acted as catalysts to their preparation. Various studies have discussed this phenomenon, yet they usually focus on one specific reason for using the Latin alphabet, such as ideological Romanization or linguistic adequacy. The following article offers for the first time a descriptive survey of the entire corpus, from the Early Modern Era to the present day. Paying close attention to the orthography used and the variety recorded, this article discerns within the studied corpus distinct categories reflecting the religious, linguistic, and ideological backgrounds of the texts’ authors and intended readers as well as technical factors pertaining to print. It also highlights the crucial role of the Hebrew alphabet in Yiddish culture.
A particularly interesting section is 2.2 “Jews Literate Only (or Primarily) in Latin Letters,” which begins:
The second category of Yiddish transliterations also originated in the German-speaking realm, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. The standardization of the German language and the general shift to the new standard, coupled with the maskilic struggle for emancipation and their campaign against Yiddish, served as the frame for the collapse of western Yiddish. Ashkenazi Jews in Western and Central Europe shifted to using German and other European languages, such as Dutch and French (Shmeruk 1978:147–175). Trends of linguistic assimilation also occurred in Eastern Europe but were never complete, and prior to the Holocaust Yiddish (written in Hebrew characters) was still the mother tongue and daily vernacular used by millions of Jews there.
As closely related languages, the shift from Yiddish to German was relatively easy, although Jewish literacy in the Hebrew alphabet brought about a range of standard-German publications in Hebrew characters (see section 2, “Yiddish in Latin Letters,” above). However, the new generation of Jews who received their elementary education in German (or French, Dutch, etc.) were necessarily primarily literate in the Latin alphabet. Some of them could nevertheless still understand or even speak Yiddish. Thus, when such an Ashkenazi Jew occasionally wished to write Yiddish—be it a quaint word, a religious term, a proverb, or even longer texts—they used Latin letters. The works of Meier Woog (1833–1896), who wrote plays and humoristic texts in Alsatian Yiddish, are good examples of this category (Shmeruk 1978:171–172). For instance, his parody of the Passover Haggada is entirely in Latin characters, except for the minor use of the letters ח and ק to refer to the responsorial singing between cantor (חזן) and congregation (קהל) (Woog 1878). This work undoubtedly targeted a Jewish readership; indeed, understanding it required intimate acquaintance with Jewish culture and religious practice, including the active (parodic) responsorial singing of traditional melodies.
Abraham Tendlau’s anthology, Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (Proverbs and Idioms from the Jewish-German Past, Tendlau 1860), is a landmark work in this category. […]
Also of interest is 2.6 “Artistic Creativity and/or Experimentation”:
The final category was produced by Hebrew-literate authors for a Hebrew-literate readership, while Hebrew types were available, and in the absence of technical difficulties. Very little material fits into this category, but Leyzer Volf’s (1910–1943) long epic poem, Evigingo (Volf 1936) makes it impossible to ignore (Schulman 1946; Ran 1955; Sutskever 1956; Belis 1964; Cammy 2001; Volf 2016). Numbering 420 rhyming lines, this work was printed entirely in Latin letters in a small booklet of sixteen pages in Vilnius in 1936 (See Figs. 7–8). It recounts the search of a man named Gutamingo for his son, after whom the poem is named. The characters’ names and the setting of the epic, in the distant (from Eastern Europe) “jungles,” introduce a foreign aspect into the work. This is augmented by the unusual meter, trochaic tetrameter, drawn from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic The Song of Hiawatha. In this case, the use of Latin letters may be understood as an added foreign or even ‘exotic’ element. […] To the best of my knowledge, Volf did not publish any further Yiddish works in Latin characters. The orthography used is not German but rather a combination of Polish (e.g., c for צ) and English (e.g., sh for ש), as well as a reflection of common Yiddish digraphs (zsh for זש [IPA ʒ], and tsh for טש [IPA t͡ʃ]). The pronunciation recorded is similar to the YIVO standard.
There are, of course, plenty of striking images. Thanks, Y!
so fascinating and useful to have this kind of a survey! thanks Y, and thanks hat!
i’ve got quibbles, mostly in the realm of “that doesn’t inspire confidence”, but i’ll spare you, aside from saying that this:
applying Czech norms… This effort was not consistent, with ch used for ח.
made me a lot more skeptical about whether i could trust roman (cohen roman?) on anything at all, since last i checked “ch” was precisely the czech norm for /x/.
but there is a certain overall blinkeredness that comes through in a few places.
unlike in Western Europe, where most of the Yiddish texts produced since the nineteenth century were in Latin letters
i’m pretty confident the yiddish newspapers published (in the jewish alefbeys) in either london or paris alone amount to more yiddish text than the total volume of latin-character yiddish ever published in the region.
The people who write such texts often did not learn any standardized form of Yiddish and their writing reflects the spoken variety they know, occasionally influenced by the orthography of the hegemonic language amid which they live.
i’m extremely skeptical of the second part of this claim (the first is clearly true: standardized yiddish has always had a very small reach). it’s rare to find latin-character yiddish published in the u.s. in any period that uses english spelling conventions; german (or, more accurately, an anglophone pseudo-german) is the consistent model even when yiddish words have been quite thoroughly naturalized (e.g. “schmooze”, “schmuck”, “plotz”, or, from the less-fully-absorbed layer, “yahrtzeit”), with transliterated-hebrew spelling conventions also playing a role (e.g. “chutzpah”, “chanukkah”). and while there is occasionally some visible influence from writers’ specific yiddish lects (“tchotchkie” or “tati”, indicating /i/ rather than /ǝ/ for final ע, for example), it’s thoroughly overridden by the germanizing and hebraizing moves. i’ve never seen either the “tote-mome loshn” vowels of the southeastern lects or the “sabesdike losn” consonants of northeastern lects turn up in latin characters outside of a linguistics context.
and roman seems oddly unaware that state policies shape what scripts are used for what languages (except for the soviet “forced” cyrillicization of turkic languages, in a footnote). for both ginzburg & marek in 1901 and beregovski in the 1930s, biscriptal publication was partly to serve their non-jewish folklorist readers, but was likely also a practical requirement for getting permission to publish from the tsarist and stalinist authorities. and to describe ladino romanization as “driven by both ideology and practical factors (because many of its speakers were educated in French and Italian schools…)” with no mention of the forced kemalist romanization of turkish is ridiculous.
Did the Kemalist reform apply (in practice anyway) to languages other than Turkish? Surely Turkish Arabs never used the Latin script?
(From what I read, a current conspiracy theory among Turkish antisemites is that Ataturk was Jewish, and that the Cabal was behind the Young Turks. Ugh.)
not in any formal way, as i understand it, but the shift to latin-character publishing for ladino was very much in the context of, and shaped by, the latinization of turkish. i don’t know for certain that there was informal pressure on sefardi publishers in turkey to follow suit, but i’d be shocked if there wasn’t a substantial amount.
and yes, eek! there’s apparently a longstanding dönme-related conspiracy trope that’s been attached to all kinds of people, depending on the current needs of the turkish right; i wonder if that’s what’s being applied to kemal pasha.
This effort was not consistent, with ch used for ח.
What he meant was, Czech orthography results in one letter (±diacritic) per Yiddish phoneme, unlike in German: c vs. ts, š vs. sch; Czech/German ch being an exception.
The shrinkage of “Turkish” territory during the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman regime meant that lots of Ladino-speakers whose ancestors had lived under Ottoman rule for much/all of the 19th century never came under Kemalist rule. I will admit to knowing essentially nothing about the locations in which publishing in Ladino (whether periodicals or books or wall-posters/ephemera) was centered in the 1920’s, but I would imagine it wasn’t *all* in Istanbul or other Kemalist-controlled territory? Now, perhaps the new political situation in e.g. Salonika motivated a romanized script for other reasons involving the new ethnonationalist regime in power there, but that’s not obvious, and most goyische languages in the Balkans that were not already Latin-scripted were not buying into the romanization = modernization concept, with I guess Albanian as the notable exception. (Romanian had made the transition some generations earlier but it was mostly spoken north of the territorial divide between Askhenazim and Sephardim.)
…Although, unlike in German, Czech ch does actually count as a separate letter (as seen in dictionaries and crosswords and suchlike).
However, German ch was implemented as a ligature in blackletter, even in S p e r r u n g (along with stuff like tz and fft and many more that didn’t occur word-initially like in ch e m i sch). Not as its own section in the dictionary, though, and they probably didn’t have a Ch ligature for C h e m i e:
Yes, thank you for this interesting link. I had no idea texts in romanized Yiddish were ever published for Yiddish speakers.
rozele, certainly those initial sch-es are anglophone pseudo-German, but I might say the “ooze” in “schmooze” and the “y” in “yahrtzeit” (or “yahrzeit”, which is more common at Google Books) are more English spelling conventions than attempts at German.
As an anomaly, here are three or four words of romanized Yiddish in a Jewish prayerbook (top of the gray column and next to it in the white on p. 89, near the beginning of the excerpt). I’m not gong to decide whether the first word is Yiddish or Ashkenazic Hebrew.
@JWB: certainly! but as far as i know, the ladino press in salonika never used greek characters, but romanized more or less in tandem with the shift in istanbul. i’m less certain about the cyrillic zone, but i think the same is true for sofia. i don’t know when the current as-official-as-it-gets latin orthography was adopted (which matters because if it was after 1945, it would’ve been more entirely centered on communities in turkey), but it uses turkish ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ü⟩, though not the turkish ⟨c⟩ or other diacriticized letters.
@Jerry: that’s precisely why i called it “pseudo-german” – it uses stereotyped markers of german-ness (“sch”, postvocalic “h”, etc.) specifically to separate it from english spellings, without applying german orthography in any consistent way. i think that includes the way it heightens the ‘foreignness’ by using (non-german) spellings that separate yiddish words from regular english: “oo” instead of “u” is a constant.
@Y: i don’t think what he’s describing as inconsistent is czech elimination of digraphs, but “the effort” to apply czech spelling to latinized yiddish, while citing as an example… an element of czech spelling. but it’s a matter of interpretation /shrug/
German has schmusen and a few related but more or less obsolete words like Schmu, all from what my etymological dictionary (of GDR vintage) calls “jüdisch-deutsch” (was “jiddisch” a taboo word in the GDR?), and ultimately from Hebrew.
Schmu.
Schmu / Shmoo
not to be confused with its minimal pair, the shmo (i adore melina mercouri’s exquisite, if not exactly standard, pronunciation with /ɔ/ in Topkapi*; i assume she got the word from jules dassin, who got his start in the performing arts at the Yiddish Art Theater, and later was part of ARTEF).
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* used, of course, about peter ustinov – both of them are in top form through every ridiculous twist of the plot.
@rozele: I agree with your description “anglophone pseudo-german”, given that that means there is a lot of influence of the “hegemonic” language English. (One exception where the German influence didn’t show up is “nosh” with no “c”.) But the context of the statement you objected to is not, for the most part, published material, but informal communication by people who know spoken Yiddish but not written.
One very short published example I can think of is the story “A Lamed Wufnik”, which the iSFDB informs me was by Mel Gilden, in the December, 1975 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Of course, when I saw the title in the table of contents, I mentally pronounced “lamed” as an English word, and I had no clue that “wuf” would turn out to be the Hebrew latter I knew as “vav” [*]. Just one example of someone the dialect he heard, without reference to German.
Edit: I’m going to leave that “without reference to German”, but maybe I’d better rethink it.
[*] Pretending there are other readers: the Hebrew letter “lamed” represents 30 and “vav” represents 6. The title character is one of the 36 righteous people for whose sake God refrains from destroying the world, if I remember correctly, which happens once in a while.
to my eye/ear, that “w” for /v/ is very much a fake-german move! (or possibly a fake-hebrew move rooted in the kind of transliteration that gives us “YHWH”)
i’m not aware of any yiddish lect where װאָװניק would be pronounced beginning with the sounds that english “w” generally indicates. i don’t think there’s much reflection of what people are actually hearing in these spellings – especially given the actual historical predominance of southeastern yiddish among u.s. yiddish speakers (which would lead to, for example, “schmeeze” rather than “schmooze”).
to my eye/ear, that “w” for /v/ is very much a fake-german move!
Definitely, and I automatically read it as “Vufnik.” I wonder if I bought that issue of F&SF? I wasn’t as loyal a reader by December 1975 (being deeply sunk in the misery of grad school), but the cover looks familiar. In any case, I was certainly familiar with the Tzadikim Nistarim by then, so I would have known what the title referred to.
@rozele
I took the intended pronunciation of wufnik as vufnik, where v is very and u is but. I am agnostic on i.
I say /ˈvʊfnɪk/ myself.
to my eye/ear, that “w” for /v/ is very much a fake-german move!
That was the rethinking I realized I needed. I was still assuming, as I had all those years ago (but maybe not 1975), that the W meant /w/.
However, Max Brod used the spelling “Lamed-Wufniks” in 1921. Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero used “Lamed Wufnik”, plural “Lamed Wufniks”, in El libro de los seres imaginarios in 1967 (I can’t tell whether it was in the 1957 version, Manual de zoología fantástica, but this snippet shows it in Spanish in a volume of Borges’s collected works), and an English translation, The Book of Imaginary Beings, used the same spelling in 1969. So maybe the spelling originated with a German speaker.
i think the fakeness of the german, as well as the presence of similar germanoid forms in spanish and english contexts, are giveaways that actual german-speakers aren’t particularly important to this*: it’s about the (still widespread) idea that yiddish is at heart just degenerated german, not about the writer’s linguistic repertoire, or what they’re actually hearing (or saying).
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* in some cases, like that of max weinreich, people who spoke german before yiddish have been among the most militantly opposed to germanized spellings for transliterated/latinized yiddish.
https://www.rulit.me/books/more-wandering-stars-an-anthology-of-outstanding-stories-of-jewish-fantasy-and-science-fiction-read-543551-16.html
Gilden’s story starts at the bottom of page 16.
@rozele: To that point, I’m impressed by how consistently “core-era” Jewish immigrants to the US adopted German spellings for their surnames. If you see someone with a faithfully transliterated Yiddish name it’s almost a dead giveaway that their people were still living in the Soviet Union in 1970.
rozele: I’m sure you’re right that the idea of Yiddish as degenerated German is important here, but it seems to me that the spelling “lamed wufnik” probably originated from Max Brod or another German speaker. But why did Brod give a plural in -s?
David W.: Thanks for the link to the story.
I could easily check and see how people pronounce The Berenstain Bears but I don’t, because I will probably not like it.
@adam: absolutely – and sometimes with idiosyncracies that show the path through cyrillic, or/and preserve specific regional pronunciations! (i’m thinking of a shneyveys i know)
though the earlier immigration wave’s spellings are also connected to the trans-imperial pattern of imposing german-rooted surnames on jews, the volume of emigration from the hapsburg lands, and the pre-1880 numerical dominance of german jews in u.s. jewish communities.