Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 December 20

= December 20 =

translation from Yiddish to English
Can a user please translate the following from Yiddish to English.

זיי האבן אלע געגלויבט אין איין גאט (ניט ווי די כינעזער אין א סך געטער, גייסטער און שדים), אז זיי פעלגן עסן ספעציעלע אידישע פלייש, וועלכע מען פלעגט זאלצן און ארויסציען די אדערן. נאר ער אליין ווייס פון אידישקייט גארנישט. ער האט אפילו ניט געוואוסט פון שבת, פון מל זיין

Thank you Simonschaim (talk) 10:27, 20 December 2009 (UTC)


 * First pass: "They all believed in one God (not like the Chinese in many gods, spirits and XXX demons), as they usually eat special Jewish meat, which is usually salted and has the veins pulled out. But he alone doesn't know anything about Yiddishkeit. He didn't know a lot even know about Shabbes, about XXX his...". I'll have to look up the words I rendered as XXX; and it seems to be cut off in the middle of a sentence. Is this about the Kaifeng Jews? +Angr 11:04, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. It is about the Jews of China and it comes from Noach Mishkowsky's book Etyopye p.132, published by M. Ceshinsky, New York in 1936. Simonschaim (talk) 11:22, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Having had a chance to sit down with my Yiddish dictionary, I've made some corrections. It occurs to me that the Yiddish word yidishkeyt, which I've translated as Yiddishkeit above, can also mean simply "Judaism", and that probably makes more sense in the context. I can't find the penultimate word מל in my dictionary; could it perhaps be אל? Then it would mean "about all his..." (whatever got left out of the last sentence). +Angr 13:45, 20 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Could מל be short for melamed? &mdash; Sebastian 01:34, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
 * מל זיין means "to circumcise." Thus "he didn't even know about Shabbes, about circumcising." --Cam (talk) 05:32, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
 * So it does. Uriel Weinreich alphabetizes it in his dictionary as if it were a single word מלזיין, and I was just looking up מל. Thanks for your help! +Angr 07:35, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
 * So, the next (final?) draft of the translation is: "They all believed in one God (not like the Chinese in many gods, spirits and demons), as they usually eat special Jewish meat, which is usually salted and has the veins pulled out. But he himself doesn't know anything about Judaism. He didn't even know about Shabbes, about circumcising." +Angr 07:49, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. Simonschaim (talk) 17:58, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

F's and s's in old documents
In images of very old documents or books, I see that an "f" was used in places where an "s" would be used in modern times, but they also used a modern "s" as a plural at the end of the word. Why did they mix their useage of f's and s's? 89.242.211.123 (talk) 21:42, 20 December 2009 (UTC)


 * That's not an "f", it's a long s. &mdash; Sebastian 21:49, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, a long "s" then. That article does not say why two different letters were used for what we would now regard as the same sound, or why the final s was a short s rather than the other way around. Or why it should be necessary to have two forms of s in the first place. 89.242.211.123 (talk) 23:39, 20 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't know that myself, but I will point out that the corresponding Greek letter sigma also had a separate form for use at the end of a word, and that this form resembles the short (now standard) "s". It's not obvious why users of the Latin alphabet would have copied that aspect of Greek writing, though.  --Anonymous, 00:55 UTC, December 21, 2009.


 * I was about to say that :). So I'm only adding an example: ὁμοούσιος, where the 6th and 9th letters are both sigmas. - Nunh-huh 00:58, 21 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The long "s" is still in use in a modified form (albeit in reduced use these days) in German, in words like Strasse (which you sometimes see written as "Straße", compare the shape of how this would be a long S followed by a standard S in English, straſse). IIRC, in German it's called an Eszett. Grutness...wha?  01:14, 21 December 2009 (UTC)


 * And the reason that it's called an Es-zett (as I found out only recently when sorting articles for Weiss and Weiß) is that it was originally for s-z (as in Georg Grosz) rather than s-s. The article on Es-zett explains why this is also used for double s (although less often since the German orthography reform of 1996 and not at all by the Swiss since the 1940's). The reason that you sometimes have different shapes for the letters in the middle and at the end of words I think derives from handwriting, where it might be tiresome to close up an ess in the middle of a word. —— Shakescene (talk) 01:37, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Did the long S literally mean a long s sound, and the other s a short s sound? 78.147.27.40 (talk) 20:38, 21 December 2009 (UTC)


 * No, it's just the shape. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:57, 21 December 2009 (UTC)


 * "S" being a consonant, I wonder how the postulated "long S" would sound vs. the postulated "short S". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:25, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * "Ssss" or "s" perchance? 92.24.34.242 (talk) 12:20, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Aha. As with a snake. Which, coincidentally, often assumes the shape of a long S. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:30, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

"ſ" is the initial and medial form, "s" is the final form. Note that ſ≠f. Marnanel (talk) 16:45, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * That tells us nothing new. 84.13.44.90 (talk) 18:38, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * That snippy comment is your first edit in over 2 years. Who do you normally log on as? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:43, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps it is related to the different ways of making an "s" sound - original research but when I say "bush" or "drives" my mouth seems to be in a different position when making the "s" sounds. 84.13.44.90 (talk) 18:42, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Since those words contain two different sounds, neither of which is /s/ ("bush" has /ʃ/, while "drives" has /z/), and this difference has nothing to do with position in the word, that's neither surprising nor particularly relevant. Algebraist 18:57, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Nevertheless, they've both still got "s" in them. I doubt if people were aware of the phonetic alphabet hundreds of years ago, so that's not relevant. The symbol you give for the "s" in "bush" looks like a long S to me. 92.29.68.169 (talk) 14:50, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

When I first studied German in the fifties my text was printed in Fraktur. The s scharfe were the least of its peculiarities. Are there still texts in this style? Are there web sites? How would one search for it? 69.116.67.201 (talk) 17:36, 24 December 2009 (UTC)sesquepedalia