Comment of the Week

This week, some interesting ideas were raised and discussed in the comments section of Matthue Roth's post which gave us a round-up of Limmud UK. In the post, Roth writes, "Former Speaker of the Knesset Avrum Berg's assertion, while reading I.B. Singer's Nobel address, that Yiddish is a language without words for violence. That, he says, should be our model for building a Jewish state and a model for its future — with all the corollaries that come with that. (After our session, I pointed out to him that one of the first Yiddish phrases I learned was potch in the tuchus. He said it didn't count.)"

Out of the six that were posted in response to Roth as of this late hour I'm writing, the comment that really stuck out to me was Portnoy's original comment, the very first comment, a comment in direct response to this particular item on Roth's bullet-pointed Limmud UK summary list. Portnoy wrote:

"This is a load of crap. Yiddish has numerous words and expressions for violence which range from the ever-mild barnes (noogies) to aroysnemen a mashkante af emetsn (to hold someone down and beat the shit out of them, – literally, to take out a mortgage on someone), not to mention all the variants that deal with nase arbet (murder, or, literally, wet-work). The notion that Yiddish doesn't have words for violence is also illogical, since as the victims of violence Yiddish speakers would, at least, have words for what was done to them. But Yiddish speakers also did unto others as was done unto them and a significant lexicon exists for it. Just because milquetoasty Avrum Burg is a frayer for buying into the fantasy that Yiddish speakers are passive, doesn't mean you have to be. His comment may be a nice platitude, but it's not based in reality. It's Yiddish disinformation."

Yiddish social-lingual structures and dynamics? Yes please. The lingual nerd in me enjoyed this comment immensely, to be sure, as it conjured up all sorts of linguistic essays I've long wanted to delve into writing (or try writing, in any case). But surely such rumors, extracted from either nothing or from tiny threads of misunderstanding, surely they exist around other languages, too? You bet. Like the notion that the Irish have no word for sex (Hat tip to Tamar for uncovering this fabulous article that only gets better and better as it continues.) and the many other fascinating articles (if you geek out on such things, too) on Language Log like John McCain's assertion that Eskimos have no word for robins, or the 46 Somali Words for Camel— which includes this beautiful line about assumptions, "…hackneyed rhetoric and banality of thought… the unmotivated assumption that cultural interest always translates instantly into multiplication of vocabulary…" Not that that line as anything to do, per se, with the comment of the week, my original jumping off point, but it's a good line in any case. On that same thread, please let the record show that I can't actually decide if I love "Yiddish misinformation" or "milquetoasty Avrum Burg" better.