Talk:Yiddish

Other German version for the "Language examples" section...

In the "Language examples" section, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is shown in Yiddish and compared with other languages. I noticed though that the official German version sounds a lot more different than the Yiddish than need be, simply because it's using different wordings. (German is a rich language, so lots of different wordings are possible.) So I thought it would be helpful if, for the German comparison, in addition to the official German version, another version in German were shown, written as closely as possible (while still being German) in wording and construction to the Yiddish, so as to have more of a direct "apples to apples" comparison. This is what I came up with:

"Jeder Mensch wird geboren, frei und gleich in Ehre und Recht. Jeder wird beschenkt, mit Verstand und Gewissen; Jeder soll sich führen, miteinander im Gemüt von Bruderschaft."

This version then only has two words - "Ehre" and the "einander" part of "miteinander" - which are fundamentally different than the Yiddish. The construction isn't exactly typical of modern German prose. It sounds a bit "poetic," one might say, but it would be fully comprehensible to a (monolingual) German speaker.

I'm thinking it would make sense to place this version between the transliterated Yiddish and the official German version. Not sure exactly how it should be labeled, but maybe something like "Yiddish-equivalent German translation"? -2003:CA:8717:D29F:5D79:AC58:31B7:2264 (talk) 00:50, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Update: Since it'd been a couple weeks and nobody objected, I went ahead and edited to add the new German version, in addition to the official German one. As I said, I think this makes sense, as this gives more of an "apples to apples" comparison. German has a lot of synonyms, so simply wording things differently can give a misleading impression of more difference than there actually is. -2003:CA:8717:D226:D00E:5FF3:6984:AEB6 (talk) 12:39, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I don’t know if there’s a formal policy about it but if the cited translations of Article 1 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are intended to serve a uniform purpose in articles about languages, only the sanctioned translations should appear in the section bearing the UDHR heading. The point about the proximity of Yiddish to German is already made with abundant clarity in the article. The personal rewording of a sourced text to make that point yet again resembles (if not constitutes) personal research. The added text is a really good translation and does support "apples to apples" comparison. However, this is an article about Yiddish, not German, and care needs to be taken to avoid any hint of editorial treatment of the one somehow being less an autonomous language than is the other. --Futhark|Talk 08:07, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. My intention here certainly wasn't to "editorialize," but simply to provide more of an "apples to apples" comparison. Like I said, with German or any other complex language with lots of synonyms, there are a multitude of potential ways of wording the same basic idea. So the problem that I see is that an English-speaking reader who's not proficient in either Yiddish or German would read the Yiddish and German texts and come to the conclusion that the languages are very different, when most of the difference here simply comes from differences in wording choices. I would say that making the sentence structures and word choices as close as possible, it better highlights the words which actually are different.....Of course sometimes these words are rather important keywords in certain sentences - for things like "dream" and "moon," which can make it difficult for German speakers to understand certain Yiddish sentences, even if they understand a large majority of the constituent words.

I'm not sure what the ideal solution is. I know some other articles about languages here have used the Lord's Prayer as a basis for comparison, and these translations typically use fairly similar wordings, especially if it's showing comparisons between different Romance languages, which all directly translated from the same Latin text....It'd be kind of odd though to use a Christian prayer as the basis of comparison for an article about a Jewish language. But perhaps one of the Psalms or some other verse from the Jewish Bible/Old Testament?

For now, it seems that adding a rewording of the German UDHR close to the Yiddish version works fairly well, but I'd say that even this isn't quite ideal, since the Yiddish transliteration uses more English type phonetics, whereas the German versions (both official and the more Yiddish-similar rewording) both use the official German standards....So an English speaker who's not very familiar with German likely wouldn't know that the German J is pronounced like an English Y, that the German W is pronounced like an English V, that the German V is pronounced like an English F, that the (single) German S is pronounced like an English Z, or that German speakers often pronounce the D at the end of a word like a T (hence native German-speakers often conflating "seit" (meaning "since") with "seid" (the informal 2nd person plural conjugation of "to be")). So the unofficial German version is actually even closer to the Yiddish than most monolingual English speakers would realize. I suppose there could be a "transliterated" version of the German, with more English phonetics, but then the table would become more cluttered. -2003:CA:8717:D288:8565:38CB:D2FF:D0F1 (talk) 15:38, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Digitized Yiddish Titles accuracy

I work at the Yiddish book center. The numbers being provided are incorrect. There are between 40,000-60,000 titles in published Yiddish literature, not 20,000. “Over half” is a false statement, which was the believed number a decade ago, but this has since changed drastically. 24.34.21.66 (talk) 17:37, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Can you cite any reliable sources that support your assertions? Largoplazo (talk) 18:16, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

It is directly about the Yiddish Book Center, so the most reliable sources I can provide are from ourselves:

https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/about/white-goat-press-0/david-mazower

David Mazower is one of the main directors of the YBC. In one of our recent publications, Bridge of Books, he writes:

"Despite the exciting surge of new translations in recent years, the vast majority of Yiddish books—numbering somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 titles, including outstanding works of fiction and nonfiction—remain inaccessible to all but the relatively small number of Yiddish readers."

This information is significantly more readily available in our building. I can provide photos of information panels when I go into work tomorrow. 24.34.21.66 (talk) 18:24, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Just to clarify, the number of digitized titles has only increased from 10,000+ to 11,000+; it is the proportion of total works that have been digitized that is inaccurate. 24.34.21.66 (talk) 18:31, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

The issue is that we really need an independent source, per WP:RS, not your own website. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 13:39, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

There isn't an independent source for the original claim either. It is just a link to our own Internet Archive page's description. 24.34.21.66 (talk) 15:11, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Fair. Should probably be removed then, but I'm personally willing to look the other way if you just want to update the link & numbers. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 15:22, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

I think this is fine since the new text is cited to an updated version of the original citation. I reverted the IP because of the phrasing "sixth and a quarter" which seemed like drive by vandalism (apologies!) but that's not the case. RegentsPark (comment) 15:35, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Great, thank you! And I recognize how without the sources, it definitely could be taken for vandalism. Thanks for being keen and glad we could sort it out easily :) 24.34.21.66 (talk) 15:56, 23 May 2024 (UTC)