- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Do you hate TV news? Pet your peeve in the Media area of Table Talk

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Stop the millennium -- I want to get off
By Virginia Heffernan
As the year 2000 approacheth, so doth a Biblical plague of special issues of news weeklies
(02/23/98)

Earth to Mars and Venus
By Mary Beth Williams
Relationship guru John Gray's syrupy new mag
(02/20/98)

Looking for some company
By James Surowiecki
Tripod + Lycos: In search of community
(02/19/98)

Under the Covers
By James Poniewozik
Reports of Spy magazine's death are greatly exaggerated
(02/18/98)

Bestseller Hell
By Jon Carroll
James Patterson's "Cat & Mouse"
(02/17/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

The YIVO spelling was at the center of another great scandal in the '50s. Yudel Mark, an eminent Yiddish linguist, was preparing a "Great Dictionary of Yiddish," comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary. YIVO was underwriting this great work of scholarship, but Mark wanted to deviate from YIVO's spelling system. "There were bitter arguments and discussions in print and orally and votes and counter votes," Schechter said. In the end, YIVO refused to go along, and Mark walked, eventually publishing the first four volumes of his Great Dictionary -- all on the letter aleph, the first letter of the alphabet! Nothing more has ever been published, and, though work has been done on other volumes, the project has collapsed.

In recent decades, Yiddish publications continued to spell idiosyncratically. For a while, the Workmen's Circle published three Yiddish periodicals, each with its own spelling. "Some of us said, this is not a normal situation where every editor of every daily, quarterly, monthly, weekly, can decide him or herself, this is how I'm going to spell it," Schechter said.

"But when you told them, 'Come on, it's not in the best interest of the language,' the answer was, 'Who are you to tell me how to spell? I've been spelling like this for 60 years.'"

Recently, however, other Yiddish publications have switched to YIVO spelling, including Zukunft in New York and Undzer Zeit in Paris. But the Yiddish publications of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic groups, including the weekly Algemeiner Journal, retain the old spellings, though even they have long since dropped many of the silent letters.

At the Forward, the silent letters disappeared nearly 20 years ago. The word "Yiddish" itself used to begin with a silent aleph. It now begins with two yuds. But that still left other deviations from the standard system. Those are the changes that are being adopted now. For example, the word "Yiddish" now has a dot under the second yud.

The Forward's reticence to make these changes for many decades was due in large part to the paper's one-time strength: It refused to be pushed around. In addition, there was some concern that the readers wouldn't accept it. "Some of the writers and editors said that people would not be able to read the new spelling," Joseph Mlotek, the paper's managing editor, said. "For instance, when we changed the aleph and the yud in 'Yiddish,' one of the editors said that people wouldn't be able to read it."

But that hasn't happened. When Mlotek introduced the new spelling into his column "Pearls of Yiddish Poetry" some years ago, "We didn't have any protests," he said. Nor have there been any now.

But the changes are taking longer to implement than the Forward expected because, Norich said, the compositors who type the Yiddish copy into the Forward's computer system are having trouble getting used to the new spelling. There are four or five compositors, all Yiddish-speaking men, ranging in age from their 50s to their 70s.

The paper announced last November that it was adopting the complete YIVO spelling system right away. But the news pages (usually the first four pages) have still not shifted. The whole paper is now expected to be on the YIVO system by spring. As to the writers? "Most of them write with the old orthography, but we correct it," Mlotek said.

Yiddish, it has been said, is the only language without a Navy: It has no government to decide on spelling and no state-run school system to enforce that decision. The conversion of the Forward means that with the exception of the ultra-Orthodox papers, an essentially standardized orthography has been adopted by choice.

"The stunning thing is that YIVO was able to promulgate a standardized orthography for the Yiddish-speaking world without there being a government that enforced that orthography," Norich said. ("We do have a moral authority, but not a legal authority," said Schechter.)

Still, with readership dwindling, one might think that the Forward might have other things to think about than changing the spelling that most of its readers have been reading for decades. Why is the paper doing this now?

"Do you know Churchill's definition of diplomacy?" asks Norich, typically answering a question with a question. "Doing the right thing after you've tried all the other alternatives," he answers himself. "Finally, the Forward came around to doing the right thing."

Mlotek says that since most Yiddish literary magazines and books now use the standard orthography, and since it is the one that is taught at almost all of the 60 universities that offer Yiddish, "We felt that it's time that we, too" went along.

The decision was greeted with glee by Schechter, head of the League for Yiddish, which picketed the Forward in 1970 to get it to change its spelling. To reward the paper for doing it now, Schechter took out 100 subscriptions, at $36 each.

The $3,600 was given by an anonymous benefactor, Schechter said. He tried to get the donor to identify himself, but without success. "I told him, 'People will think it's me,'" he said. "So he said, 'Let them think.'"
SALON | Feb. 24, 1998