see awad mail issue 79 posting by James Gammelgaard

This also from AWAD Newsletter #79:

From: Hershl Hartman (hershl@earthlink.net)
Subject: I.B. singer's error
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/chutzpah.html

Your Word-A-Day introduction to Yiddish included a quote from I.B.
Singer's Nobel address that was grievously in error.

In the fourteen years since I.B. Singer's Nobel Prize speech, I've
been trying to correct his egregiously erroneous statement that Yiddish
"possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war
tactics ..."

Linguistically, Singer's assertion implies that Yiddish is an archaic
language, possessing no vocabulary for "modern" concepts while the truth
is that Yiddish developed neologisms for every branch of science and
technology and, more recently, for every aspect of computer and Internet
technology. (I'm sending this message via _blitspost_ - lit., lightning
mail.)

In an historical/ideological sense, Singer tried to indicate that Yiddish
speakers were/are incapable of military action. The many hundreds of
Yiddish-speaking volunteers in the International Brigades in the Spanish
Civil War and the thousands of resistance fighters and partisans in WWII
give the lie to that calumny.

Nahum Stuchkoff's magisterial Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language (oytser fun
der yidisher shprakh) has more than two columns of words in the category
"Weapons" (vofn) and almost SIX columns of words in the category "War"
(milkhome). By contrast, Roget's "Super Thesaurus" (Writer's Digest Books,
1998) has mere handfuls of entries in each of those categories, while "The
New Roget's Thesaurus" (Putnam's, 1978) has only two-thirds of a column
under "Arms."

So, here are the words that Singer claimed Yiddish doesn't possess. They
include words from the major sources of Yiddish lexicography: Hebraic,
Germanic, Slavic, and Romance (esp., French-origin words that became
"international"). Note that most had equivalents in the 18th-19th
centuries, now considered obsolete.

Weapons - gever, kley-zayin, vofn
Ammunition - amunitsye (obs.: voyener zapas)
Military exercises - militerishe ibungen, genitungen; (obs.:soldatn mushtir)
War tactics - milkhome taktik (obs.: krigs-listikeyt)

Hershl Hartman
Education Director
The Sholem Community

[as yiddish words] How about "gunsel" meaning gunman?
How about "shiv" meaning knife as weapon?

Disagree, dr. bill. AHD lists "shiv" as probably Romany, and mentions no possibility of a yiddish source. My old Websters agrees.

"Gunsel" could be argued as evidencing that yiddish lacks of a term for "gunman", forcing the yiddish speaker to coin one from the english word and a yiddish ending.

But that raises a conceptual point: when speakers of a language (in this case Yiddish) borrow from other languages, at what point do you say the borrowed term has passed into the borrowing tongue. For example, when a yiddish speaker says donton (meaning "downtown"), is he saying an english word (in his yiddish accent) or has it become an english word?

The question is particularly apt regarding Yiddish because (perhaps because its speakers were geographically dispersed in many lands, and were not generally the educated literate class), Yiddish borrowed heavily from other languages:

Yiddish, "the Robin Hood of languages," has practiced the most bouyant banditry among the words of every land in which its practitioners wandered. In the course of twenty-four hours, a son of Judah, speaking Yiddish today, may, without being aware of it, raid over two dozen other languages. Leo Rosten, Treasuty of Jewish Quotations (1972), p. 24.