Yiddish Phraseology: Ill Wishes

Terminology, Phraseology, and Lexicography

This paper explores two aspects of word use and word meaning in terms of Sinclair's (1991, 1998) distinction between the open-choice principle (or terminological tendency) and the idiom principle (or phraseological tendency). Technical terms such as strobilation are rare, highly domain-specific, and of little phraseological interest, although the texts in which such word occur do tend to contai...

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

On the phraseology of stop words

Spoken language usually precedes language represented in writing. Children know how to speak and listen years before they learn to read and write. The history of language is estimated to be in the order of magnitude of hundreds of thousands of years, the history of writing in thousands of years. There are many language communities without writing, but only in the case of dead languages such as ...