Web resources for Yiddish

11, 13 and 14 February 2021

Introduction

This is for Yiddish what I made earlier for Hebrew, for Interlingua, and for phonetics. It’s a list of hyperlinks to web pages that may be useful when dealing with the Yiddish language.

Keyboards and alphabet

Keyman is an initiative of SIL International. There is installable keyboard software for many platforms and many languages, including Yiddish. That one was created by Zsigri Gyula. I didn’t install anything myself, I use keymanweb instead.
This keyboard software is quite smart: you can type in Latin transliteration, on a normal Qwerty keyboard, and the result is Yiddish in Hebrew letters, spelled correctly after the YIVO standard. You can then copy&paste that for use elsewhere.
A detailed explanation is here.
Here is an explanation of Yiddish and Hebrew letters that may seem similar, but are different and not to be confused. Video made Karo Wegner. Announced on Facebook here.
Techniques for Automatic Normalization of Orthographically Variant Yiddish TextsVariant Yiddish Text, by Yakov Peretz Blum, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2-2015.

Dictionaries

Yiddish Dictionary Online. Unfortunately, this dictionary is no longer available.
Yiddish dictionary lookup, by Raphael A. Finkel (Refoyl) at the University of Kentucky. This dictionary lets you enter a word in English, Yiddish, or transliterated Yiddish.
Raphael Finkel also made these tools, and collected the hyperlinks.
From the same author Refoyl: the Gloss displayer. Here you enter complete Yiddish phrases, and when hovering the mouse over a word, you see English translations of its base word. E.g. for איז (iz) it shows the English verb ‘to be’, and for the comparative ביטערער (biterer) it shows the English base word ‘bitter’. (Examples taken from Tumbalalaika).
Lexilogos is a portal to access several dictionaries, among which the two for Yiddish I mentioned above.
Wiktionary in English has many Yiddish entries.
דער גרױסער װערטערבוך Der Groyser Verterbukh. OCR’ed by Raphael A. Finkel, from scans made by the נאַציאָנאַלן ביכער־צענטראַל (National Book Center).
Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary. (Requires a paid login account.)
A dictionary of Hebrew and Aramaic (“Chaldean”) elements in the Yiddish language. By Spivak and Yehoash (יהואַש)‎, 1911, 1927. Entitled “Idish verterbukh” (אידיש ווערטערבוך).
Dictionnaire des mots d’origine hébraïque et araméenne en usage dans la langue yiddish, by Yitskhok Niborski.
Eliezer Niborski compiled a list of the words in the dictionary, spelled in Hebrew script as they are pronounced in Yiddish, in alphabetical order, to make it easier to find the dictionary entries, which are written, as is customary, in the Hebrew or Aramaic spelling.
The list is 79 pages long.
A guide to the more common Hebraic words in Yiddish, by Steven A. Jacobson.
Yiddish-Dutch dictionary, compiled by Justus van de Kamp.
An alternative interface, by Raphael A. Finkel, is here.
Yiddish Wit, a list of Yiddish expressions and aphorisms, from right to left: Yiddish, transliteration, English translation.

Facebook

There’s a group Learn Yiddish. See also this Yiddishistke Resource Guide.

Periodicals

Forverts is a New York based periodical in Yiddish and English. Its searchable archives at The National Library of Israel go back to 30 August 1897.
Lebensfragn (Questions of Life) was an Israeli-based periodical from 1951 to 2014. The online material seems to date from 2016.
More in Wikipedia.

Books

The Yiddish Book Center hosts the Digital Yiddish Library, sponsored by Steven Spielberg, which contain lots of scanned old Yiddish books. See also Archive.org.

The books were made searchable using the OCR software Jochre (Java Optical CHaracter REcognition) developed by Assaf Urieli. Quote: “Jochre is an OCR package based on supervised machine learning techniques. It has been applied to several languages, including Yiddish, Occitan and Alsacien.”

Film

What Language Does the Sea Speak? Yiddish in Tel Aviv (English Subtitles; 12 minutes)

Various

Eydes, Elektronische Form des Jiddischen Sprach- und Kulturatlas, Electronic Version of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry.