Wednesday, February 23, 2011
How To Understand Yeshivish
Browsing on the Internet while working on last week’s column, which had to do with a blessing in the morning prayer, I came across the following:
“The lechatchila time for shacharis is neitz. B’dieved, if a person davened from amud hashachar and onwards he is yotzei. In a shas hadchak he may daven from amud hashachar and onwards lechatchila…. After chatzos it is assur to daven shacharis. One should wait till after mincha and then daven a tashlumin. The possibility for a tashlumin doesn’t exist for someone who was bemaizid.”
As strange as this passage may seem, there is nothing very unusual about it. It is written in what has semi-jocularly been called “Frumspeak” or “Yeshivish,” a perfectly normal form of discourse for many Orthodox Jews in America. Translated into ordinary English, it would read:
“One should plan to say the morning prayer no earlier than sunrise. After the fact, if a person unknowingly prayed earlier, starting with the break of dawn, he is considered to have performed the commandment. If he has no choice [because he will not have time after sunrise], he may knowingly pray starting with the break of dawn…. After midday, saying the morning prayer is forbidden. One should compensate [for having missed it] by waiting for the afternoon prayer and repeating that a second time. Such compensation, however, is unacceptable in the case of someone who acted deliberately [in skipping the morning prayer].”
Related
There are, by my count, 13 different words or terms in the Yeshivish passage, some used more than once, that would be incomprehensible to any non-Jewish speaker of English, as well as to a great majority of non-Orthodox Jewish speakers. Yet, is Yeshivish really a different language in the way that Yiddish, say, is different from German? Or is it just ordinary English with foreign words — in this case, rabbinic Hebrew ones with an Eastern European inflection — inserted into it? How, linguistically, is it to be analyzed?
On the face of it, it’s ordinary English with foreign words. If one looks at its English vocabulary, there seems to be nothing grammatically, morphologically or lexically deviant about it. Yeshivish isn’t like Yiddish, in which, in addition to its non-Germanic elements, German words themselves may have changed their original form, be pronounced differently, be conjugated and declined in different ways, and be joined together in different syntactical structures. You don’t have to learn a new language to understand Yeshivish; you simply have to know some rabbinic Hebrew.
On the other hand, we do occasionally find English words in Yeshivish that have meanings that do not exist for other English speakers. Here are two examples culled from an Internet chat site conducted in Yeshivish. The subject of discussion is, again, the morning prayer — or, more precisely, how fast it can or should be recited. Example 1 goes:
“I was speaking to a litvishe bochur [a non-Hasidic yeshiva student] and he was saying how he used to daven [pray] behind the rosh yeshiva [headmaster] but couldn’t stand how he had to wait so long with nothing to do until the R’Y [rosh yeshiva] finished the shemone esrei [silent prayer]. So he changed his place to next to the sefarim [bookshelf]. That’s a great story, but the way he said it was, ‘My R’Y has an 11-minute shemone esrei and I have a 4-minute shemone esrei.’ It didn’t ring right.”
In standard English, of course, one would say, “It didn’t sound right,” or “I didn’t like the way it sounded.” Although our chatter apparently speaks English as a native language, he was using the English verb “ring” like the Yiddish verb klingen, which means “to ring” but also “to sound” in an expression like “s’ klingt modne,” “It sounds strange.”
http://www.forward.com/articles/135621/
“The lechatchila time for shacharis is neitz. B’dieved, if a person davened from amud hashachar and onwards he is yotzei. In a shas hadchak he may daven from amud hashachar and onwards lechatchila…. After chatzos it is assur to daven shacharis. One should wait till after mincha and then daven a tashlumin. The possibility for a tashlumin doesn’t exist for someone who was bemaizid.”
As strange as this passage may seem, there is nothing very unusual about it. It is written in what has semi-jocularly been called “Frumspeak” or “Yeshivish,” a perfectly normal form of discourse for many Orthodox Jews in America. Translated into ordinary English, it would read:
“One should plan to say the morning prayer no earlier than sunrise. After the fact, if a person unknowingly prayed earlier, starting with the break of dawn, he is considered to have performed the commandment. If he has no choice [because he will not have time after sunrise], he may knowingly pray starting with the break of dawn…. After midday, saying the morning prayer is forbidden. One should compensate [for having missed it] by waiting for the afternoon prayer and repeating that a second time. Such compensation, however, is unacceptable in the case of someone who acted deliberately [in skipping the morning prayer].”
Related
There are, by my count, 13 different words or terms in the Yeshivish passage, some used more than once, that would be incomprehensible to any non-Jewish speaker of English, as well as to a great majority of non-Orthodox Jewish speakers. Yet, is Yeshivish really a different language in the way that Yiddish, say, is different from German? Or is it just ordinary English with foreign words — in this case, rabbinic Hebrew ones with an Eastern European inflection — inserted into it? How, linguistically, is it to be analyzed?
On the face of it, it’s ordinary English with foreign words. If one looks at its English vocabulary, there seems to be nothing grammatically, morphologically or lexically deviant about it. Yeshivish isn’t like Yiddish, in which, in addition to its non-Germanic elements, German words themselves may have changed their original form, be pronounced differently, be conjugated and declined in different ways, and be joined together in different syntactical structures. You don’t have to learn a new language to understand Yeshivish; you simply have to know some rabbinic Hebrew.
On the other hand, we do occasionally find English words in Yeshivish that have meanings that do not exist for other English speakers. Here are two examples culled from an Internet chat site conducted in Yeshivish. The subject of discussion is, again, the morning prayer — or, more precisely, how fast it can or should be recited. Example 1 goes:
“I was speaking to a litvishe bochur [a non-Hasidic yeshiva student] and he was saying how he used to daven [pray] behind the rosh yeshiva [headmaster] but couldn’t stand how he had to wait so long with nothing to do until the R’Y [rosh yeshiva] finished the shemone esrei [silent prayer]. So he changed his place to next to the sefarim [bookshelf]. That’s a great story, but the way he said it was, ‘My R’Y has an 11-minute shemone esrei and I have a 4-minute shemone esrei.’ It didn’t ring right.”
In standard English, of course, one would say, “It didn’t sound right,” or “I didn’t like the way it sounded.” Although our chatter apparently speaks English as a native language, he was using the English verb “ring” like the Yiddish verb klingen, which means “to ring” but also “to sound” in an expression like “s’ klingt modne,” “It sounds strange.”
http://www.forward.com/articles/135621/
Comments:
Post a Comment
