Yiddish

Yiddish-Russian UPDATED

Entries: 25 324
Author: Dr. Baruch Podolsky (read more about the author)
Download link: yid-rus.zip (~1 479 Kb). Hits:  

The only big Yiddish-Russian dictionary was published in Minsk in 1940. It is very
out-of-date; besides it used the Soviet orthography according to which all Hebrew words
were written phonetically. It cannot help reading Yiddish texts printed outside the Soviet
Union.

This dictionary is actually the first attempt to create a big such dictionary using the
YIVO spelling which is nowadays the most widely used spelling system. It contains
25,300 Yiddish words and expressions. The work is going on, and we will be glad to
receive any remarks, corrections and additions.

The Yiddish words are given in Jewish characters and also in the YIVO transcription
which allows to find any word using the standard English keyboard. There are,
nevertheless, certain shortcomings in this system: it does not allow to mark the stress;
besides, certain combinations of characters are ambiguous. E.g., the combination sh
usually denotes a single consonant; still in some instances (oyshaltn) it should be read
as two separate consonants. Similarly tsh in antshuldikn is not to be pronounced as
English ch.

Therefore a more exact phonetic transcription was added (the lower line) which marks
the stress and uses single characters instead of combinations (ts > c, kh > x, sh > š,
tsh > č, zh > ž).

The word in transcription is followed by the necessary grammatical information (gender
and plural form for nouns, past participle for verbs). Plural endings or forms are added to
the word in Jewish characters only when such ending or form is irregular (a Hebrew ending,
a form with vowel change).

Dr Baruch Podolsky
podolsky@post.tau.ac.il