Language
In some cases, changes were minor. In others, Yiddish phrases were transformed nearly beyond recognition.
New borrowings and old ones.
Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?
The language of Paul Celan.
Some paleolinguists have floated the idea of an original human language they call “Proto-Sapiens.” Is that what our ancestors were speaking when they built the Tower of Babel?
Israeli politicians have in recent decades become obsessed with calling each other poodels.
A recently discovered letter explains.
Amid the familiar clutter of vowels and cantillation marks, a few strange dots appear. They have no obvious function, and yet they go back thousands of years. Their purpose is . . .
Nachman Blumental.
A desecration of what is most sacred.
A Mosaic reader was able to solve the mystery of the Yiddish expression tapn a vant, “to grope a wall.”
From Hebrew to Spanish to German to Italian and onward, the term is now as international as Coca-Cola.
It is practically impossible to utter a complete sentence in Hebrew that lacks gender.
A Russian Jew and an Indian Zoroastrian.
