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October 27, 2005
400 Words for Splanchnik
Arnold Zwicky over at languagelog has had a couple of posts about the word "splanchnik" recently (complete with assistance from Kenny) and given languagelog's fondness for jokes about the Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, (my favourite is the zombie cartoon) I couldn't resist posting this excerpt from the novel I'm reading:
(Context: the Jewish-American hero-abroad is having a conversation with his Ukrainian guide. I've retained the non-standard layout of conversations from the original.)
"And I want to see what it's like now. I don't think there are any Jews left, but maybe there are. And the shtetls weren't only Jews, so there should be others to talk to." "The whats?" "Shtetls. A shtetl is like a village." "Why don't you merely dub it a village?" "It's a Jewish word." "A Jewish word?" "Yiddish, like schmuck." "What does it mean schmuck?" "Someone who does something that you don't agree with is a schmuck." "Teach me another." "Putz." "What does that mean?" "It's like schmuck." "Teach me another." ""Schmendrik." "What does that mean?" "It's also like schmuck." "Do you know any words that are not like schmuck?" He pondered for a moment. "Shalom," he said, "which is actually three words, but that's Hebrew, not Yiddish. Everything I can think of is basically schmuck. The Eskimos have 400 words for snow, and the Jews have 400 words for Schmuck." I wondered, what is an Eskimo? (p. 60 of Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer.)
Posted by logican at October 27, 2005 02:39 AM
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Comments
I think they'd like that excerpt! (The zombie cartoon was a pretty good one too.)
Posted by: Kenny Easwaran at October 28, 2005 01:38 AM
Hey, did you see? Languagelog linked to the post! (And Prof Zwicky was politely indirect about observing that I spelt "splanchnic" wrong in the orginal post.)
(And it made me realise that although the main index for this blog lists all the entries as being by Gillian Russell (i.e. me), the archive pages still use the name that Movable Type assigned me automicatally, "logican" (the first seven letters of "logicandlanguage", I'm thinking.) I'll have to try and do something about that...)
Posted by: Gillian Russell at October 31, 2005 04:51 PM