As I was investigating something else, I discovered Yiddishland:
YIVO is pleased to introduce Yiddishland: Countries, Cities, Towns, Rivers. This is the first attempt to collect and publish all Yiddish place names of Central and Eastern Europe in one book. We have now made available place names found in all the countries of Eastern Europe.
Yiddish place names are both a fascinating topic and something of a sore subject. Because everywhere they have lived, Yiddish speakers have been a minority, and since the language has almost never had government recognition or backing, it is miraculous that standardization has been possible. In the case of place names, standardization has been particularly difficult, as the Yiddish folk designations for cities, towns, rivers, and even city streets have often been ignored by the speakers themselves, not to mention Yiddish journalists and writers who are more familiar with the official names. Thus, a gazetteer of Yiddish place names has been a desideratum for many, many years. In YIVO-bleter VII (1934:229), the editor notes that Saul Chajes’s list of Yiddish place names, which was published in that issue, will be “an important contribution to the Yiddish geographical index that is being prepared by the philological section of YIVO,” which to the best of our knowledge never appeared.
As with so many other projects, the late Mordkhe Schaechter took it upon himself to collect and publish a definitive list of Yiddish place names. Although he did not live to complete the project himself, his extensive card files, with nearly 6,000 Yiddish place names culled both from oral interviews and printed sources, were donated to YIVO. The gazetteer, titled Yiddishland: Countries, Cities, Towns, Rivers, has been compiled in its present form by Paul Glasser, who supplemented Schaechter’s files with more recent published data and with Internet sources, particularly with respect to official names. Although Schaechter collected Yiddish names from around the world, the present work is limited to approximately 3,000 locations in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically present-day Austria, Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine, as well as the European regions of Russia. This includes what Mikhl Herzog (1965:7) designates “Yiddish Language Area (1938),” as well as neighboring countries with at least a few Yiddish place names of long standing.
This work is prescriptive as far as is practicable. The Yiddish names reflect the pronunciation of the natives of the respective location rather than the spellings that are most widespread in published sources, which tend to be based on official usage. To orient the reader to the normative approach of this work, we reprint here in English translation part of a chapter of Schaechter’s Laytish mame-loshn (Authentic Yiddish) entitled “Yidishe geografishe nemen” (Yiddish Geographical Names; Schaechter 1986:17-18) […]
What is the Yiddish name of a place? The name used in normal speech by the Yiddish speakers native to the place. As Yudel Mark put it: “The question of spelling is not directly relevant to the […] matter of Yiddish geographical names. In this instance, the spelling should reflect what Yiddish speakers actually called the cities and countries where they lived. The more deeply rooted spoken tradition takes precedence over the written tradition” (1958:92). […]
The Yiddish language has its own rules of historical development, in its phonological, morphological, and grammatical systems, which the corpus of names in this work illustrates in great detail. To put it very simply: place names, in particular when derived from the Slavic languages, were reinterpreted to fit Yiddish speaking habits. Perhaps the best example is Zhetl (in western Belarus), which appears to be a compromise between Polish (Zdzięcioł) and Belarusian (Dyatlava).
I’m sure rozele has known about it for years, but I’m delighted to find out about this resource. Enter and enjoy!
There are a reasonable number of Yiddish entries in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_European_cities_in_different_languages_(I%E2%80%93L) and the similar articles covering other stretches of the alphabet, but this resource should probably enable more to be added, or at least edit wars to be provoked.
It was always a pressing question for the genealogists trying to figure out the old country locations from the Ellis Island immigration lists. Like both Mogilevs (the more Southern of which has been my own great grandfather’s place of birth) would frequently appear in the US immigration records as Moliff or Moliv, while nearby Murovannye Kurilovtsy, where his father came from – as Krilowitz. The JewishGen’s “Community finder” shows Slavic and Yiddish place names alongside and helps many novice researchers.
https://test.jewishgen.org/Communities/Search.asp
I’ve used this extensive resource before, but I hadn’t read the introduction. I found its explanation of the guiding principle of the work interesting:
I remember that often the Yiddish forms I found there differed from what I found in other sources, but simply dismissed it as the expected lack of standardization of a minority language without state backing (even place names in official languages are often prone to variation in spelling).
This explanation doesn’t contradict that, of course, but further elucidates that they were going for accurate representation of local spoken usage rather than the most common written forms.
I see the logic here and I think it makes it a more valuable resource than simply compiling spellings found in written sources (which would not fully indicate the pronunciation in any case given the ambiguities of unpointed spelling with the Hebrew Alphabet). But I also wonder how much if at all the Yiddishland forms of these place names have been adopted in written usage since its publication. Come to think of it, I know next to nothing about the standardization of written Yiddish in practice.
I got the impression, from rozele mostly, that YIVO sees itself as a kind of official arbiter of Yiddish correctness, which fits with nobody’s actual dialect (hopefully I am not misinterpreting her.) The approach here, explicitly acknowledging dialectal diversity, is welcome.
[apologies for length; see the other thread for the french]
yes to what Y said! to expand a little: YIVO has has aspirations to the functions of an official language academy, but can’t because it’s never had buy-in from most yiddish speakers (and at this point most cradle-tongue yiddish speakers have never even heard of it). what it (and most other formal yiddish teaching institutions) teaches is a “standard” intended as a dakh-shprakh for academic, journalistic, and other such functions, on the assumption that everyone would continue speaking their own actual home lects. but very few people ever bought into that function, and at this point very few people who encounter YIVOish have a home yiddish lect. to my eye, YIVOish is at this point, in practice, a living lect, seriously hindered in its development as such by YIVO’s insistence on treating it as a fixed “standard” rather than an evolving peer of the living lects spoken by the majority of cradle-tongue yiddish speakers (here in nyc, satmar yiddish in particular, which is descended from unterlander hungarian yiddish).
the Yiddishland gazetter, however, is from a somewhat different lineage of standardization!
it’s a mordkhe schaechter project, like the similarly fascinating and useful Plant Names In Yiddish. he was very much not a YIVOnik, having his own institutional base at the League for Yiddish (“League”, because it’s descended from the last major Territorialist outfit, the Frayland-lige far Yidisher Teritoryalistisher Kolonizatsye [Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization]), and his commitment to standardization involved a lot more willingness to be openly prescriptive rather than pretending to be a mere auxilliary. Plant Names In Yiddish, for example, does not – frustratingly – include lists of the names in use in different regions for the plants included, which would be incredibly helpful; instead it aims to establish a standard name for each one, without marking whether the selected term is pre-existing or a neologism. here is leyzer burko’s phenomenal review of the latest product of the lineage, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, which goes further into all this than i’ll even try to (his section on “The Art of the Neologism” is a tour de force in itself).
mordkhe schaechter was, however, also vigorously committed to his own bukovinan yiddish, so it’s predictable he would center the gazeteer on local pronunciations. but, infuriatingly, it’s also predictable from his prescriptivist stance that he wouldn’t both to include other forms that are in use – even though doing so would have made the work hugely more useful! as JP said, there’s a ton of variation to be found.
i’m wondering what yiddish texts you’ve been looking at, JP, to find vowel-less (which i assume is what you mean by “unpointed spelling”) in placenames? i don’t think i’ve seen yiddish placenames (aside from biblical ones or ones in ivrit) written in anything but the usual yiddish phonetic spelling system*, except in very early texts, where the style was still to treat placenames as if they were in loshn-koydesh.
and whew! the history of yiddish spelling standardization is fascinating and messy. yiddish-readers can get mordkhe schaechter’s account of it in the League’s edition of the YIVO-adopted Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg [The Standardized Yiddish Orthography], but i don’t think it’s been translated into anything else. similarly, dovid katz’s extensive writing on yiddish standardization and stylistics is almost entirely untranslated. and i don’t even know where to direct anyone to a full account in english; joshua fishman’s article on standardization and planning in the YIVO Encyclopedia isn’t bad, but is very much an overview of the full, larger subject.
.
* which is good for indicating some aspects of pronounciation, and less good for others (unless you know what lect the writer spoke, in which case it’s generally quite clear).
So if I understand rozele’s explanation correctly, this Schaechter-produced gazetteer is going to be of extremely limited use if you’re trying to figure out the referent of an apparent toponym in an actual historical Yiddish text, because the spellings used all reflect Schaechter’s idiosyncratic view of what they should be rather than what they actually have been in actual historical practice?
Sounds like it, yeah. Why are scholars so prone to that kind of egocentric megalomania?
leyzer burko’s phenomenal review of the latest product of the lineage, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary,
Phenomenal indeed. Thanks!
“Zhetl”
I’m not sure their analysis is correct.
By the way: the place is famous. The region of Zhetl contained an enclave of Baltic speakers in historical* times. Their dialect is classified as Lithuanian, but it is peculiar, so there is the question whether it continues something else than Lithuanian
* I think for linguistics “historical times” begin very recently, because until very recently people did not even discuss minority lanuages – like Muscovites who NEVER discuss (which is shocking and requires an explation from psycho- and cognitive linguists I think) all those languages we hear all the time. **
** New “historical times” will begin when linguists start doing science: recording langauges rather than talking about them. Talking can be done by grandchildren of speakers, but recording – raw audio – is what science proper*** needs today.
*** not to be confused with tribal rites like the pilgrimage into “the field” and the ritual “defence” against the elders – the initiation ceremony. Or festivals called “conferences”.
P.S. no, of course “sceince proper” in its highest sense is not expanding the humanity’s knowlege (which indeed requires massive recording by people untrained in talking) but just satisfying your own curiousity. Even studying your spouce’s navel.
But I think it is not what most scientists do:(
I’m not sure their analysis is correct.
I had my doubts about that as well.
Phenomenal indeed. Thanks!
I second the thanks! A snippet:
Burko’s review of Alexander Beider’s The Origins of Yiddish Dialects
https://ingeveb.org/articles/new-yiddish-dialectology
is very interesting too. I had no idea of all this more recent scholarship into the origins of Yiddish.
Same here! A snippet:
I’m fortunate to be acquainted with Beider through years of our volunteering for the Jewish Roots project, and it stunned me too at the time, how much the historic linguistics of Yiddish advanced so recently (the other breakthrough has been tracing the phonetics of the Litvak Yiddish to the Slavic dialects of XVth c. Mazovia). And of course we discussed the quandary with the extreme diversity of the attested Bohemian dialects, many of which have parallels in Yiddish – but none of which matches it perfectly. The proposed solution is that the extinct Prague Bohemian, or perhaps even more narrowly, German dialect of the artisan and trader neighborhoods of Prague, was the ultimate fertile ground from which Yiddish sprouted … but I wish we knew more how those people spoke!
@JWB: yeah, it’s not a compilation of existing usage – “prescriptive as far as is practicable”, right? but the “practicable” part is real, too; if he’s really just reflecting local pronounciation, a lot of his localizing moves are likely to be on the level of אָ vs אַ, or at most ו vs י, which are a lot less confusing than a lot of the variation you’re likely to come across in yiddish texts. i mean, last winter i was working with a tkhine collection from around 1900, and i still don’t know what a word in one piece was meant to be – פּרעכטיק, פֿאַרריכטיק, פֿאָרכטיק [prekhtik, farrikhtik, forkhtik; marvelous, reformed, terrifying] were all perfectly plausible. admittedly, that’s because it was a paraliturgical text that made some particularly unusual spelling decisions, but there’s a ton of baseline spelling variation out there.
About Zhetl: does this /ʒ/ mean that the source language also has some sort of ʑ, ʐ, ʒ (or d̠ʒ, dʐ, dʑ) and not z/dz?
Zh in Zhetl is spelled by two Hebrew letters zayin-shin which seems to me to be a pretty good representation of the Polish “Zdz”.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dzi%C4%99cio%C5%82#Polish
The Polish vs. Belorussian or Russian names sound so dissimilar to each other simply because they mean about the same (“Woodpecker” in Polish, “Woodpecker-town” in Belorussian or Russian) rather than sound the same. It’s cognate with English “delve” and, of course, with Russian “долбить”
DP, yes, and yes*.
So their source wrote /zC/ as zayin-shin and then YIVO mistook zayin-shin for a digraph and turned it into zh /ʒ/?
*apart of z- and Lithuanian forms, this z- is not a part of the pecker root
Russian Ж is represented by Yiddish זש, no questions about it, but I don’t known if the reverse is always true ( if zayin-shin is always read as zh and only as zh… )
be.WP:Дзятлава quotes certain proposals for its Baltic etymology. As it happens, as if it were a known fact:)
For the name they refer to an article in BSI-74 (p.151, 77 of the pdf, in Russian) and for the root and in ALL/LKK-75 (p. 140-141 Lithuanian). I link the jounals’ pages rather than specific issues. because… I don’t know, I like these lists of issues each marked with “pdf”.
They don’t tell who connected the two (the reconstructed name and the root).
Also shtetlroutes (GT)
“…имение “Жыдомля” переименовали в “Благовещенское” … ”
Для благозвучия:) The euphony continued in 1940 (presumbly with a period when it was reverted to Żydomla?): now it is Жы/итомля:
“Согласно версии В. Жучкевича, название образовано от слова «жито», «житница».”
“создатель топонимической школы Белоруссии” says WP about him…
i can’t think of a “זש” that isn’t [ʒ], and a quick glance at refoyl’s dictionary didn’t show me any; i assume that at some point somewhere, at least a few people have spelled that sound in yiddish some other way, but i don’t know how. “zh” is just a transliteration convention, though, so it doesn’t have much relation to the yiddish spellings themselves. the YIVO transliteration system, more-or-less sensibly, uses “zh” for זש [ʒ], and “dzh” for דזש [d͡ʒ], but “tsh” for טש [t͡ʃ]. solomon birnbaum, on the other hand, in his brilliant and damn near useless historically-informed and dialect-neutral transliteration system, instead uses ź, dź, and ć. while confirming that, i (re)discovered that he also includes in his Yiddish, a Survey and a Grammar a six-page (in double columns) “Toponymical List” – entirely, of course, in his transliteration.
(and less relevantly, i had entirely forgotten that in his transliteration chart he distinguishes between the shtumer alef before vov or yud (retained in YIVO spelling only at the start of words, but elsewhere appearing medially in, say, רואיק), analyzing it as a “weak glottal stop”, and the mekhitse-alef clarifying the reading of sequences like ווו or וווי, which he says is purely graphic – even though neither is represented in his transliteration system. the man was a monster, in the musician-slang sense of the word.)
Polish zi before vowels, ź elsewhere, is [ʑ]; and z is the preposition “from, out of”, so Zdzięcioł could have been misanalyzed, I guess.
Polish doesn’t do diphthongs – except au & eu in loans, but even these often come out as separate syllables except for purposes of stress assignment.
I haven’t read most of it, but:
Bohemian origin of eastern Yiddish confirmed.
@rozele, nice to hear this monster from an English speaker. I think that’s where we borrowed it from and I also came across Arabic waḥš used similarly but I don’t remember hearing it in English.
@drasvi: i think of it as coming from the jazz world, but that may just be because jazz players were the first professional musicians i spent time with. it’s definitely common in all the musical circles i’ve spent time in since (which are mostly english-centered).
“Tropical Hot Dog Night, like two flamingos in a fruit fight
Like steppin’ out of a triangle into striped light
Striped light, striped light
Tropical Hot Dog Night
Everything’s wrong, at the same time it’s right
The truth has no patterns for me tonight
I’m playing this music so the young girls will come out
To meet the monster tonight, meet the monster tonight”
-Cap’t Beefheart
Tropical Hot Dog Night. (I wonder where my copy of Shiny Beast is…)