What is missing in Mordkhe Schaechter's COMPREHENSIVE ENGLISH-YIDDISH DICTIONARY?

• In Event: Yiddish Language and Yiddish Linguists

Abstract

A major event in Yiddish lexicography was the publication last year of the COMPREHENSIV ENGLISH-YIDDISH DICTIONARY, based on lexicographic materials collected over a lifetime by Mordkhe Schaechter, brought to completion after his death ten years ago and edited by Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, Paul Glasser, and Chava Lapin. This massive tome - almost seventy years in the making, more than twice as copious as its Yiddish-English predecessor - would, in the old days, have elicited a storm of controversy in the Yiddish press, as partisans and critics would have debated the merits of various innovations. Schaechter's dictionary descends from a long line of works implementing the Yiddishist language planning ideology characteristic of the YIVO linguistic circle. Because (unlike their Soviet counterparts) the YIVO linguists were powerless to impose their will on the community, lexicography became their main means of disseminating their reforms. Schaechter was particulary inspired by Uriel Weinreich's ENGLISH-YIDDISH YIDDISH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY, and, in fact, he initially conceived his own dictionary as a sort of complementary addendum to that earlier work. In the end, the new dictionary is much more ambitious both quantitatively and qualitatively, reflecting Schaechter's holistic/totalistic ideal of translating everything into Yiddish - while at the same time excluding parts of the lexicon that fail to meet his standards of purity. It is rich in phraseology and represents an invaluable resource for anyone wondering how to say almost anything in Yiddish, abounding especially in areas of special interest to Schaechter himself (or to his editors) like sex, sports, and medicine. On the other hand, terms from modern Hebrew are few, and the usage of today's Hasidim - the vast majority of the Yiddish speech community - is ignored. By virtue of what the dictionary lacks and of what it happens to contain, it excludes precisely the population which would have had the greatest use of such a dictionary. Schaechter's lexicon is therefore, unfortunately, unlikely to become the Yiddish of the future.

Author

• Alec Eliezer Burko, Jewish Theological Seminary