Your spelling lesson of the day:

[conuly]

Yarmulke

That thing that Jewish men wear on their heads? That's a Yiddish word, and that's the accepted English spelling.

Transliterating from Yiddish is tough because it's a Germanic language that's generally (but not, I think, exclusively) written in Hebrew, and when it's NOT written in Hebrew the transliterations seem to follow rules that make sense in German (I'm guessing, I can't find out where people came up with the transliteration conventions from) instead of in English, so you end up with weird spellings like, well, yarmulke.

It's tough to spell, but please - get it right. Variations along the lines of "yamaka" look Japanese instead. You could call it a kippah, which is the Hebrew word and much easier to spell in English, but of course then most people* wouldn't know what you're talking about.

*Well, I guess most Jews would know? I don't know. I only picked up that it's called a kippah as well from a murder mystery, of all things. The hapless housewife runs a needlework shop and a young girl came in for a pattern to make one for her bat mitzvah, and she argued with her grandmother over whether or not to use the Yiddish word or the Hebrew one as she'd been taught in her religious education classes. I learn more things from murder mysteries than you'd expect...!

Comments

[redbird]

Maybe they aren't using transliteration rules, just writing down individual words they've heard rather than read. If it's sentences and paragraphs, I'd expect transliteration. If it's someone saying "I went to my coworker's wedding, and they asked me to wear a yarmulke," the speaker may not even know that Yiddish is usually written with Hebrew letters.

That's before we get into the dialect/pronunciation of the person transcribing in English. (I'm typing this in a suburb of Boston; on my way here by subway on Wednesday, someone asked me where to get the train to "Pahk Street." He might well come up with a spelling something like "yahmulke.") And while I want those consonants, I can't really argue that someone is wrong for transliterating a final schwa into English with an a instead of an e.

[conuly]

Yes, but Yiddish transliteration of words like yarmulke is in the dictionary, meaning that there IS a correct spelling in English for "yarmulke" and that's the way it's spelled, according to the (weird) transliteration. If they're just "writing down what they heard" they're misspelling it.

I don't make the rules, I just red pencil them.

[kerrypolka]

That thing that Jewish men wear on their heads?

And some women! Like me!

[conuly]

And some women, like you :)

[steorra]

I wanted to reply to this comment of yours over on LiveJournal, but I'm having trouble logging in, probably because of the nother DDoS attack.

You were saying you needed to know about transliteration of Yiddish into Roman script. I can help with that, since I've done some Yiddish and still have some books on it. Do you specifically just want the Hebrew script and transliteration of 'yarmulke', or more? (More info = longer for me to get around to putting it together. Just looking up 'yarmulke' and its transliteration should be pretty straightforward.)

[conuly]

I really just want to know who came up with the transliteration and why, what language they were working with to come up with the... assumptions (?) they did.

But more info is better, thank you so very much :)

[steorra]

Hmm, interesting. So, I looked it up in my Yiddish dictionary and in the OED.

In my Yiddish dictionary, it's spelt as:
יאַרמלקע
That would transliterate directly as yarmlke - the l is syllabic.

The OED gives a bit extra etymological information:

< Yiddish yarmolke, < Polish jarmulka cap.

It cites examples with quite a variety of spellings, although 'yarmulke' is the one it gives as the headword. Here's a link to the OED entry that should let you access it for the next 3 days:
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/231239?p=emailAWaDPyw4Bb6fI&d=231239 .

The Yiddish orthography was standardized in 1936, with pronunciations largely based on northeastern dialects, but of course there are many other dialects. The word was borrowed before 1936, so standardized Yiddish spelling didn't exist yet; I don't know how much variation there would have been in Yiddish spelling of this particular word.

Variation among the forms cited by the OED in the spelling of the vowel of the second syllable likely has to do with it actually being a syllabic l, and so not in fact having a vowel.

Hope that's helpful.

[gmdreia.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, yeah, I most often hear "kippah" (plural: kippot) within Jewish circles. How such a difficult word as yarmulke got passed around the non-Jews, is a good question. Oy gevult!

[eofs.livejournal.com]

This might be a strictly American problem, because I'm reasonably certain kippah is the more commonly known word here in the UK. But then, I will have learnt it from RE classes I suppose. Outside the few areas with large Jewish populations, it's not a particularly visible or known community. I actually wouldn't except it to be a particularly widely known word here at all - to be honest, a depressingly large section of the population would probably conflate it with the taqiyah (which I did have to check the word for).

I know the word yarmulke (I thought it was without the r actually, so good to learn the correct spelling) but I think only through my consumption of American media.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

If "yarmulke" is pronounced anything like "yamaka" (which does indeed look Japanese), German spelling rules do not apply at all - German is (mostly) phonographic, and "yarmulke" would be pronounced (roughly) "yarr-mull-ka" ("mull" to rhyme with "pull"). So I suspect it's actually supposed to make sense according to American/English spelling. Or direct transliteration from the mysterious Hebrew? Or the English pronunciation might differ from the original pronunciation - which is of course perfectly possible!

To make matters entirely confusing, around here I've only ever heard it called a kippah...

[conuly]

The rhotic pronunciation is listed as acceptable, but who knows how much that's influenced by spelling?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I wasn't just talking about the R and L, though, but also about the vowel sounds. Which according to Merriam-Webster's are not at all pronounced as they would be in German (or one of the Skandinavian languages) with the exception of that final e, which would indeed end up a schwa. ^^

I know next to nothing about Polish, though - perhaps the spelling makes sense there?

[conuly]

Maybe. Or maybe the English pronunciation has been altered from the Yiddish, or the spelling made sense THEN but not NOW due to a change in Yiddish and/or German pronunciation. It wouldn't take much for them to shift away from each other.

See, now I really need to know more about how transliteration of Yiddish into the Roman alphabet works, and I can't find anything!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Well, since M-W's points out the word's Polish origin, which looks pretty similar, I think Polish is a pretty good bet in this case. ;) As an explanation for the spelling, that is - still no idea about the pronunciation!

German wikipedia says that the orthography of Yiddish in Roman letters has been officially fixed by the YIVO in NYC, so maybe you can find out more on their page?
(Probably "Some linguist decided that this was how to do it". But still...)

[pne.livejournal.com]

German wikipedia says that the orthography of Yiddish in Roman letters has been officially fixed by the YIVO in NYC

That's sort of like saying "the orthography of English in Roman letters has been officially fixed by [someone]".

Some people use the YIVO orthography, just like some people use the OED orthography - while others use "color" and "theater" and instead follow Merriam-Webster or something like that. Similarly, while YIVO romanisation is *a* standard, I don't think it's the only orthography in common use for Yiddish.

[conuly]

I guess that at one point you all decided to play a nasty little joke on us. "Let's annoy the goyim! Let them struggle along with yarmulke! Hahaha!"