November 25, 2005

'The Tongue Is the Pen of the Heart': As Yiddish 'Dies,' Yiddish Lives

By CARLIN ROMANO

In his precise, already canonical The Meaning of Yiddish (University of California Press, 1990), Israeli-American scholar Benjamin Harshav recalled how Max Weinreich (1894-1969), author of the magisterial four-volume History of the Yiddish Language, noted that the beloved mame-loshn ("mama tongue") of Ashkenazic Jews at first possessed "few names for flowers but three words for 'question': frage (derived from German), kashe (from Aramaic) and shayle (from Hebrew)."

That's hardly

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