RE: Yiddish on List

[Dick Rosenberg <drosenberg...>]

I, who sent in a tongue-in-cheek hint that Yiddish should be encouraged
on this list, nevertheless wholeheartedly agree with Alana when she
said,

>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

Let's all agree to that policy.

Dick

>----------
>From:  the Cheshire Cat[SMTP:alanacat (at) wam(dot)umd(dot)edu]
>Sent:  Monday, March 02, 1998 8:32 AM
>To:    World music from a Jewish slant.
>Subject:       Re: Yiddish on List
>
>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
>
>