Re: Yiddish on List

[the Cheshire Cat <alanacat...>]

On Sun, 1 Mar 1998, Solidarity Foundation wrote:
> 
> first of all, to my recollection, very, very little Yiddish has ever been
> used on this list --
> khas v'shulem [G-d forbid] somebody should use a little Yiddish on this
> list. I mean, it's only the Jewish Music List. I think there are even a
> few songs with lyrics in Yiddish. Even klezmer tunes with titles in
> Yiddish. Terms for genres, dances, musical effects in Yiddish. 

The above is actually a good example of what I would like. It isn't really
that difficult. It isn't that I don't enjoy a Yiddish expression now and
then (and to be honest, I know a good bit, and can usually figure out
more), but see below...



> Well, oky. Maybe I'm not being fair. The argument is over UNTRANSLATED
> Yiddish. Well, I'm sure everybody knows that normally, the point of
> throwing in a little expression here, a proverb here, or a term of one
> kind or another, in another language, is precisely because it adds a
> certain flavor to the discourse. In normal flow of language, one simply
> doesn't translate these tyhings, and I think it's generaly felt that it
> adds more for those who do understand than it takes away from those who
> don't.

Your claim is that an untranslated phrase here and there is all that there
is, however, lately that's simply not true: entire sentences, and several
to a paragraph were going untranslated - and that's much more difficult to
figure out. If you really want people to learn, translating the phrase
when you use it shouldn't take much effort if it's only a phrase or two.

I moderate on another Jewish list, and there our policy is that you can
use whatever phrase you want from whatever language you want,(Hebrew,
Yiddish, ladino, etc) but you should assume thatthere are least some
people pn the list who don't know that language/phrase/word, and thus it
should be translated if you're not trying to exclude them. Since a list
is, by nature, a message to everyone on the list (otherwise, you should be
sending it seperately to whomever it is off list) it'snot nice to "have
secrets" (I recall covering this in elementary schoo).

Alana Suskin