Translitteration

From Kindergarten until Year 4 I attended a Jewish school - Emanuel School (although at the time I attended it was still The Emanuel School, abbreviated to TES).

This meant numerous things.

Not only do I know the correct plan of action should: a gunman enter the school; a bomb be planted on the grounds; the school be under siege; etc. ad nauseam, but I can also recite prayers in Hebrew with the kind of fluency that can only be gained from having to do so daily for five years.

It also means that I'm reasonably proficient in Hebrew.

Being a Jewish school, we were taught Hebrew from Kindy in the desperate hope we'd beat Moriah in Hebrew come the HSC, which as it turned out, we actually did in 2009 (Moriah are our deadly rivals. A joke which explains the situation reasonably well goes as follows:
How many Emanuel kids does it take to change a lightbulb?
Ten. One to change the bulb, and the other nine to run down the hill to Moriah to brag about how well they did it.)

This early start in Hebrew had two main effects.

The first, rather more disconcerting one, is the fact that I can still sing along to the alphabet song in Hebrew. The fact that I still remember it creeps me out somewhat.

The second it that I know how Hebrew is actually pronounced. So it pisses me off when an author translitterates something in a mediochre manner.

I am aware that I have not as yet vented my spleen regarding the text I was just forced to study in English - The 5oth Gate - on this blog, but suffice it to say that I thoroughly dislike it. And one of the main reasons is because the author translitterates in the shoddiest manner I have ever come across.

Translitteration is the practice of taking a language which is in character format and phoenetically substituting the characters to english ones. This is all well and good for those who haven't ever learned Hebrew or Yiddish and would thus regard text therein as a bunch of squiggles, but that doesn't mean the author is allowed to merely stich whichever letters he so chooses in whichever order he chooses on the page, and then call it Yiddish (or Polish, which he also did) because it's not.

It's crap.

I had two main issues with Mark Baker's translitteration of Eastern European languages.

The first regarded a mention of the shtetl of Łodz. Łodz is pronounced in a manner akin to the word lodge (the 'o' sound is slightly lengthened, but that's about as close as it'll get without the use of actual phoenetics). Which made me wonder why Baker said that the Ł was pronounced as a W. I know it isn't, because a bunch of my ancestors came from there. The rest of my Polish forebears came from a tiny town called Mława (pronounced kind of like Mølava). Again note the fact that the ł is pronounced as an l not a w.

My other main issue was the fact that although he is from Melbourne, Baker's Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation is that of an American Lubovitch from the eastern seaboard. It pissed me off, more than the fact that my teacher couldn't even read out the translitteration as it was written, let alone correctly.

If someone is going to translitterate something so that the masses can get the gist of it, THEY SHOULDN'T SUBSTITUTE LETTER SOUNDS IN A MANNER THAT MAKES THEM SEEM LIKE A WANKER!

Thanks go to Damon for inadvertently giving me the idea for this post.