Late Rosh Hashanah post

The Moishe Oysher from Louis P. Listen to some samples of his music here.

Which reminds me, I read in the JC that Google now translates Yiddish. Note to Google: according to Meyer Levin, the Yiddish for website is polotinia platz). Test it for yourself on The Youth Will Sleep No Longer.

Oh, and if you didn't follow Matt's link to the NPR piece with loads of cool Iranian funk from the 1970s, including "Hava Negila" by Dia Prometido, apparently a Tehran-based Chilean Bahai band, then do.

Added: This will make your mouth water (actually, probably only if you are an Ashkenazi Jew). [H/t Jogo]

Comments

rokhl said…
RE: website in Yiddish. All the yiddish speakers I know use vebtsaytl/וועבֵצייטל. I've never heard the other term you mentioned.
bob said…
Thanks Rokhl. I thought polotinia platz sounded fishy. The JC article said that it translates website into verbzaytl, but when I used google translator just now to translate the JC article into Yiddish, it gave vebtsaytl/וועבֵצייטל, so I guess Marcus Dysch was being a smart aleck (and, I guess, so was I!).

Am I right that e-mail is blits-post?
rokhl said…
Yes, e-mail is blitspost. If you're really into Yiddish neologisms, you can subscribe to a regular email called VZMAY (vi zogt men af yiddish/how do you say it in Yiddish) a service of Yiddish League. It gives you all kinds of useful lists of words in Yiddish like chocoholic and treadmill. It costs money, but it's for a good cause.
rokhl said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
rokhl said…
Also, I was hoping that you were referring to the novelist Meyer Levin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Levin

But then I realized he's dead. Is this other Meyer Levin a friend of yours? His website has many odd inaccuracies and no comments function.
Bob said…
No, Meyer Levin is a complete stranger to me, but after several minutes trying to use google to find out what the Yiddish for internet actually is, he was all I could find. No, of course, I have probably added to his google juice unfairly. I'll try and amend the post later!

So, plats is place, but is polotonia a completely made up word?

And how does the Yiddishist world come to a consensus around these sorts of neologisms?
The W said…
Hey bob,
google translate works for simple stuff, but, as you can see with my blog, its not yet good for translating websites (from Yiddish to English or visa-versa). i was playing with it the other day and it translated ייִדישע שולן as Indian Schools. Its definately a cool project though.

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