Starting from 1995, a group of us, literally from all around the world, including two Yiddish linguists from Japan, (one via Israel) worked every summer on a variety of computer-related issues at Yugntruf’s annual retreat Yidish-Vokh. We worked on finding, researching, and reviewing products and programs; sharing information; developing software; testing programs that worked with Yiddish; and advocating for Yiddish with a variety of computer developers, programmers, and companies, especially the Unicode Consortium, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc. We also developed a whole set of new computer related terminology and published it in either 2001 or 2002.
You can write to Yugntruf to get a copy of the terminology we developed. A mailing list called UYIP (=Understanding Yiddish Information Processing) was also established in 1996 to continue the work during the rest of the year, such as, organize and coordinate all of our advocacy efforts in all kinds of companies and developers; report and fix programming bugs; and to fine-tune all our Yiddish-related projects, e.g., developing word-processing, keyboards, web sites, right-to-left programs, fonts, e-mail programs, Internet browsers, desktop publishing, etc., etc. It took many years for us to develop Yiddish e-mailing for and between PCs and Macs and thus we now have several mailing lists in which people write to each other with Yiddish characters using YIVO’s standard, This was one of our chief goals. So, people can now write with the proper Yiddish characters on Facebook, Youtube, cell phones, and a variety of technical devices, no matter what kind of computer they have and what kind of browser they use.
You can see here some of the work that both the group and its individual members accomplished. You can see some results of some of our work at http://www.uyip.org/ http://www.shoshke.net/uyip/blitspost.htm http://sites.google.com/site/tsvisadan/web/web_c http://sites.google.com/site/tsvisadan/computing_h-j http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/ http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish.html http://zsigri.tripod.com/fontboard/yiddish.html http://www.yudit.org/.
I can assure you that the term ‘blits-post’ was not borrowed from either German or Scandinavian. Although we studied the logic Modern German, French, Hebrew, English, etc. used in developing each of their own new computer terminology, we made sure to avoid any and all borrowings from either German or any other language. Scandinavian languages never even entered the picture. We had lots of candidates for this new term and it took a long time to finalize on it. You can certainly say that we made it up ourselves and the term does not exist in any other language.
I am the person who went to my friends in 1995 at Yidish-Vokh and asked them to work on problems I was having writing Yiddish at my job and in wanting to develop Yiddish e-mail. A whole group quickly formed to take up the work with real gusto. I am very proud of all the work that members of this Yugntruf committee initiated and did, Yiddish has so developed and kept up with all the latest technology that it is really funny to hear someone still concerned with whether or not Yiddish might have borrowed something from Modern German. It is funny that we still hear in 2010 the echos of smear campaign some Germans started in the 1870’s claiming that Jews are a non-creative, parasitic people who only steal and borrow from other peoples. Co-opting the smear campaign from the German anti-Semites was very useful for the Hebraists in developing Biblical Hebrew into Modern Hebrew and campaigning for it to become the Germany was the center of science and industry and everyone acquired/borrowed their terminologies and language, just as people have been doing with English around the world in the last 50 years. You should know that since the lessons we all learned from what atrocities could be achieved by that high-falutin’ language and culture, post-Holocaust Yiddish linguists avoid Modern German like the plague. And it actually historically was a plague for some time. There is very little that Modern German can teach Yiddish speakers these dayslanguage of Israel. But to still smell it here after Yiddish disproved those claims a trillion times is still strange. People forget that German was the ruling and dominant prestige language in Europe from the second half of the the nineteenth century until WWII, just as English has been around the world since WWII.
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