A delightful excursion through the Yiddish language, the culture it defines and serves, and the fine art of complaint

Throughout history, Jews around the world have had plenty of reasons to lament. And for a thousand years, they've had the perfect language for it. Rich in color, expressiveness, and complexity, Yiddish has proven incredibly useful and durable. Its wonderful phrases and idioms impeccably reflect the mind-set that has enabled the Jews of Europe to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution . . . and enables them to kvetch about it

Michael...

This volume examines relationships between native languages and Yiddish. It highlights the historical and sociolinguistic development of Turkic, Iranian, South Asian, Slavic, Greek, Balkan, Judezmo, Armenian, Georgian, and Basque languages. One of the main focuses is on the adopted post-medieval and pre-modern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi homelands of Eastern Europe.

The book emphasizes the role of ludic or playful modifications of a language's structures at the colloquial level as sources of linguistic change. And, it goes further to say that expressive language, linguistic iconicity,...

Here is the remarkable story of how this humble language took vigorous root in Eastern European shtetls and in the Jewish quarters of cities...

Dieses Worterbuch enthalt den vollstandigen althochdeutschen Wortschatz des 8. Jahrhunderts (und der fruheren Quellen) und bildet den ersten Teil eines geplanten chronologischen Worterbuchs des deutschen Wortschatzes. Zum ersten Mal sind deutsche Worter in lateinischen Quellen dieser Zeit und Entlehnungen ins Lateinische mit einem Anspruch auf Vollstandigkeit erfat. Der Wortschatz wird zunachst aufgeschlusselt nach Wortfamilien (mit Angabe der Quellen unter Berucksichtigung einer chronologischen Einteilung in Vierteljahrhunderte und einer regionalen Einordnung); in einem weiteren Teil nach...

In his New York Times bestseller, Born to Kvetch, author Michael Wex led readers on a hilariously edifying excursion through Yiddish culture and history. With Just Say Nu, he shows us how to use this remarkable language to spice up conversations, stories, presentations, arguments, and more, when plain English will not suffice (including, of course, lots of delightful historical and cultural side trips along the way).

There is, quite simply, nothing in the world that can't be improved by being translated into Yiddish. With Just Say Nu, readers will...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish was widely viewed, even by many of its speakers, as a corrupt form of German that Jews had to abandon if they hoped to engage in serious intellectual, cultural, or political work. Yet, by 1917, it was the dominant language of the Russian Jewish press, a medium for modern literary criticism, a vehicle for science and learning, and the foundation of an ideology of Jewish liberation. Challenging many longstanding historical conceptions about the founding of modern Yiddish, The Revolutionary Roots of Yiddish Scholarship, 1903-1917 investigates...

This book is about Jewish language. The fact that Jews speak and write in distinctive ways is well known. (The journalist Mike Royko called it "Hebonics.") These forms of expression actually draw from many sources and have been employed in popular culture from Henry Roth's Call It Sleep to the novels of Saul Bellow to contemporary television. What has received less attention is what allowed these modern forms to flow from a rich body of Yiddish literature. This book fills that gap by exploring the language of modern Yiddish literature, addressing emblematically why Jews answer a...

Die Basis dieser Arbeit bilden 1470 Anzeigen aus deutschen und schweizerischen Zeitungen. Diese sind vollzahlig und im Wortlaut abgedruckt. Der Band stellt eine Quellensammlung zur Verfugung, die Linguisten, Publizisten und Historiker zu weiteren Studien ermuntern soll.

Die vorliegende Studie verfolgt zwei Ziele. Auf der theoretischen Ebene werden Hypothesen uber die Entstehung und Entwicklung von Textsorten aufgestellt und anhand des vorliegenden Materials uberpruft. Auf der empirischen Ebene werden die Anzeigen mittels eines handlungsorientierten Textsortenmodells analysiert. Es...