Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88739 in Books
• Published on: 1977-12-27
• Released on: 1987-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 856 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780805205756
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Language Notes
Text: English, Yiddish

Customer Reviews

A monument of philology, but a couple of caveats
Uriel Weinreich was one of the top scholars of the Yiddish language, and to a lesser degree, of Yiddishkeit. He was nonetheless overshadowed by his father, the great Max Weinreich, who wrote a four volume history of the language (in Yiddish, with a one-volume English abridgement) and who started the massive Yiddish-Yiddish dictionary (under the aegis of Columbia University, I think) which is still "under construction".
There aren't many good Yiddish-English dictionaries out there. Uriel Weinreich's is one of the two I'm familiar with, the other being Alexander Harkavy's Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary.
Weinreich gives good grammatical information in his entries, such as verb aspect and case of verb object, along with unpredictable forms such as the past participle. Both alphabets are very clear and distinct, and big enough to be readable for those past the bloom of youth. The English-Yiddish section is valuable for those using the book in Yiddish classes and for those who would like to speak, as well as read, Yiddish. Of course, it decreases the overall size of the dictionary, so a lot of the words you encounter won't show up in it.
The big drawback is the work's prescriptive nature, meaning that this is how Weinreich thought Yiddish should be spoken and written, not how it was spoken and written. Critics such as Solomon Birnbaum have even claimed that Weinreich made words up, if he didn't find them ready to hand. True, new words are formed or borrowed all the time, but that's the job of writers, subject specialists, members of subcultures, teenagers, and grannies, not lexicographers.
Further, if your goal is to read classic Yiddish literature (Perets, Sholom Aleichem, Yitskhak Manger etc.), this is not the book for you. I would recommend Harkavy's dictionary, if you can find it. He doesn't give the noun genders, there is little grammatical guidance and the print is hard to read, but the word you're looking for is likely to be there. And the book's very age (1920? or somewhere along there) is a plus, for this purpose. Of course, any serious student of Yiddish needs to keep good Polish, Hebrew and other dictionaries on hand, otherwise many words will remain a mystery, whatever Yiddish dictionary is used.

Excellent Yiddish Dictionary
The main reason I purchased this dictionary is because it actually retains the original Yiddish orthography, that is, the Hebrew alphabet. Many other dictionaries I saw were transliterated.
Whenever I want/need to look up a Yiddish word, I find this dictionary has it. It is extremely thorough and up to date to the things that need to be expressed today. Many times, if I look up the major word in an English idiom, it lists the equivalent Yiddish idiom, which is very helpful for writing in Yiddish.

The best English-Yiddish dictionary
This dictionary is probably the best Yiddish dictionary so far. It is very useful for all English speakers, not only the natives - for two obvious reasons. One is the English language as a contemporary lingua franca. Another is that many languages don't have their Yiddish dictionary equivalents (e.g. my first language - Polish).
So, this dictionary is a superb, very useful tool for everyone who learns, teaches, works with or simply uses Yiddish.