Standard Yiddish

Khemye: Chemical Literature in Yiddish

English, along with a few other languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese), is the primary vehicle for transmitting chemical knowledge and discoveries today. Yet languages are not neutral carriers of information; the very act of choosing a language for instruction implies an educational, ethnic, and perhaps even a social class among the users. Given the impetus and the mea...

Sub-optimal Paradigms in Yiddish

It is well known that the phonological form of a word can depend on its morphological structure. In serial approaches, this follows naturally from the fact that words have derivational histories: morphologically complex words undergo successive levels of phonology as they are constructed. A crucial distinction is typically made, however, between derivational and inflectional morphology. Whereas...

Yiddish: Between Languages and Theories

Base-driven leveling in Yiddish verb paradigms

A noteworthy feature of Yiddish present tense verbal inflection is that, unlike many other Germanic languages, Yiddish has virtually no irregular stem vowel changes. Whereas Middle High German (the source language for Yiddish verbal inflection1) had numerous subclasses of verbs with different patterns of present tense vowel alternations, Yiddish verbs have the same vowel for all persons and num...

Modernist Yiddish Aesthetics, I. L. Peretz’s Middlebrow Yiddish Poetics,and the Place of Yehoash in Modernist and Middlebrow Literary History

Yehoash (the pen name for Solomon Bloomgarden, 1870-1927) was a revered Yiddish poet during the interwar period, the Holocaust, and the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.1 This essay establishes a critical methodology for recovering the work of this important Jewish poet. Before Yiddish poetry became closely identified with modernism, Yehoash’s inclusive and comprehensive aesthetic received ...