July 20, 2005

army-navy zhargon

I’ve been meaning to scan the following image for a while now, but just haven’t got around to it, but finally Languagehat’s entry on a New York Times article on the SIL Ethnologue which mentioned Max Weinreich’s famous linguistic maxim (a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot) pushed me over the edge. Click on the image below to see the full paragraph for a better context.

[Max Weinreich. “der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt”, pp 3–18 in yivo bletter yanuar-yuni 1945 (nyu-york), p. 13.]

Posted by jim at July 20, 2005 06:15 AM | TrackBack
Comments

404 Not Found.

Having quoted Weinreich, too, on occasion, I'm waiting with baited breath.

Posted by: Chris W. on July 20, 2005 09:09 AM

Chris, try http://www.bisso.com/ujg/pix/armyNavyFull.jpg .

Posted by: Aidan Kehoe on July 20, 2005 09:45 AM

Fixed. Thanks.

Posted by: jim on July 20, 2005 04:33 PM

So,
אַ שפראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט
is that correct? It's be nice to have it as a Yiddish example for my Unicode test file.

(I don't think I can get it to right-align here...)

Posted by: Tim May on July 22, 2005 02:41 PM

The army-navy statement has also been cited as having originated with one of Weinreich's students, identified as Joshua Fishman in at least one such reference. Does anyone know anything more about that? (I realize that the answer may be provided in the text illustrated in the jpeg referenced above, which is not breezy reading for me, but I assume is readily accessible to others following this discussion.)

Posted by: omega on July 27, 2005 11:04 PM

Just found the answer to my own question:
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/armynavy.html

Posted by: omega on July 27, 2005 11:41 PM

With Fishman's own statement (in addition to the less specific one provided via the previous URL) at:
http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol06/vol06.077

Posted by: omega on July 28, 2005 01:06 PM

Omega. Hi. Thanks. If you look at my original entry and then Languagehat's, you'll see we discuss these, too.

Posted by: jim on July 29, 2005 03:46 AM

In a more recent posing to the Mendele list, it is pointed out that the person described by Weinreich as his source for the army-navy statement is unlikely to have been Fishman. See:

http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol15/vol15022.htm

Posted by: omega on August 8, 2005 10:27 PM
Post a comment