Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture The Details Are in the Devil
Christophe Barbier, editor of the influential left-leaning French weekly L’Express, published a column in his paper earlier in August about the upsurge of anti-Semitism in France in the wake of the fighting in Gaza. After condemning the phenomenon, Barbier turned to French Jews and in turn condemned those of them who, despairing of life in…
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News Is Operation Protective Edge a Mistake in Translation?
You all know those children’s puzzles in which you have to look at a picture and identify the details that are wrong. Those of you who can read some Hebrew might try this one from the August 7 New York Times. On its op-ed page is a cartoon essay by the Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based illustrator Koren…
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News Why the Hebrew Numbers Six and Seven Sound Almost English
Charles McLagan writes: “I am curious about the Hebrew numbers shesh and sheva [six and seven] and their other Semitic equivalents. They are clearly related to the English six and seven, and to like-sounding words for these two numbers in additional Indo-European languages. I wonder if you have any idea of how this came to…
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Culture Why Did John Kerry Mock ‘Pinpoint Operation’ in Gaza?
‘That is a hell of a pinpoint operation, a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Secretary of State John Kerry said to Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace on Sunday, July 20, in reference to the Israeli military operation in Gaza. The channel’s viewers did not get to hear this remark, because Kerry made it after he…
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Culture The Origins of Yiddish: Part Fir
In this last of a four-part series about the contemporary controversy over the origins of Yiddish, I’ll begin with the last of the Yiddish linguists profiled by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her Tablet essay, Alexis Manaster Ramer. Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors who came to the United States when he was a child, Manaster Ramer…
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News The Origins of Yiddish, Part Dray
The American-born Paul Wexler, now retired from the University of Tel Aviv, where he taught for many years, remains to this day the enfant terrible of Yiddish linguistics. Looking back, I wish the conversations I had with him when we inhabited adjacent tents while doing our basic training in the Israeli army in 1974, after…
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Culture The Origins of Yiddish: Part Tsvey
In last week’s column dealing with two recent articles about the origins of Eastern European Yiddish, I dwelled more on the first — Cherie Woodworth’s account of the “standard theory” most systematically worked out by the great Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1894–1969) and of some of its problematic aspects that have led to the adoption…
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News Origins of Yiddish Are Anything But Understood
Two recently posted articles in the Jewish Internet magazine Tablet provide an excellent introduction to anyone interested in the fascinating and problem-fraught field of Yiddish historical linguistics. One, by Cherie Woodworth, a scholar of Eastern European history who died last year, at the sadly young age of 46, first appeared in the journal Kritika in…
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