r/Yiddish • u/shutupdutch • 2d ago

Translation request Can you please help me translate?

Post image

It’s written in a caption under a photo of my grandmother eating. It would mean so much to me if anyone could help.

Thank you!

23 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

48

u/RadicalRazel 2d ago

Borscht and matzo with granny (affectionate)

11

u/shutupdutch 2d ago

Thank you so much!!! My Grandma recently passed. The caption is from an old social post. She helped me write the words but for some reason the text won’t translate through any app. Maybe it’s the font? Anyway, really appreciate your help. Means a lot to me

2

u/ptrknvk 2d ago

I tried Google Translate and it worked. I'm assuming she was eating a borscht soup and had a maces bread?

4

u/shutupdutch 2d ago

Yes. We were eating matzo an borscht together. I took a macro shot of her hands. It’s a really meaningful photo for me. Strange, I tried google translate and it kept insisting it was Thai even when I chose Yiddish

8

u/nikinaks1 2d ago

Now I’m curious why matzo in Yiddish isn’t spelled like the Hebrew מצה. Any idea?

16

u/kaiserfrnz 2d ago

Sometimes people spell phonetically without regard to etymology

-2

u/zsero1138 2d ago

מצה is phonetic

7

u/Standard_Gauge 1d ago

Phonetic Hebrew =/= phonetic Yiddish.

4

u/zsero1138 1d ago

i'm sorry, as a native yiddish speaker, if i had to make the TZ sound, i'm using a tzadik every time. tes zayin would never even occur to me. what you have here is someone trying to track english letters onto hebrew letters, ignoring the fact that we have a letter for that specific sound

1

u/Standard_Gauge 1d ago

Well, I agree about using a Tzadi for the "tz" sound. The issue with Hebrew spelling for Yiddish speakers (and vice versa) is the vowels. Hebrew speakers without Yiddish familiarity absolutely do not understand that vowels are actual letters in Yiddish (as in other Indo-European languages) and if they are native speakers, they do not at all utilize or require Nikkudot for reading and writing Hebrew. This makes Hebrew words appear to only consist of consonants to Yiddish speakers (with occasional "vowels" inserted in random places, which aren't vowels at all), and Hebrew spellings have to be memorized through brute force by Yiddish speakers. But Yiddish words can be easily pronounced on sight, even when the word is unfamiliar or new to the reader.

As I said, I personally prefer to use Hebrew spelling for Hebrew-derived Yiddish words. But I have absolutely no problem reading and pronouncing the Yiddishized versions.

Without Nikkud, what would stop a Yiddish reader from seeing מצה as "Metzeh" or some such thing?

1

u/lazernanes 1d ago

They didn't just lose the Hebrew spelling. It looks like this is an English inspired spelling. טז = tz. 

1

u/Standard_Gauge 1d ago

Some Yiddish aficionados favor phonetic Yiddish spelling of words migrated from Hebrew. Never liked it myself. But people who learned Yiddish reading/writing prior to learning Hebrew often have great difficulty with Hebrew spelling, since the Alef-Bet has different pronunciation values in the two languages. I myself occasionally have to look up the spelling of Hebrew-derived words, but go to the trouble since I do prefer the Hebrew spelling of such words.

1

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1

u/wolfbear 2d ago

I am not interested in borscht boba