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This is a summary of the talk given in Melbourne by Raphael Finkel on Yiddish and the Internet.
Raphael Finkel is Professor of Computer
Science
at the University of Kentucky, Lexington,
KY, USA.
He is in Melbourne on sabbatical at Monash University.
Over the past 20 years, the Yiddish speaking community has been turning to computers to help it overcome its geographic dispersion.Professor Finkel's talk described the growth of Yiddish mailing lists, particularly Mendele, and the development of software for Yiddish creation, transmission, and archival storage.
Here are a few key points that Raphael Finkel discussed:
- Yiddish speakers are spread around the world. There are large centers in the United States and Israel, but also significant centers in Australia, Argentina, Europe, Canada, and surprising centers in Japan, Vilna.
- The young who are trying to join the Yiddish world are often distant from native speakers.
- Examples of the resurgence of interest: University programs in Columbia, Harvard, Penn, London University (MA), Oxford (M.St.) Hebrew University, Ohio State, Trier, Dusseldorf.
- The internet allows people from all over to communicate. Mailing lists are a type of subscription email that one may contribute to from anywhere in the world.
- There is a Yiddish mailing list sponsored by Daniel Sherman, Montreal, around 1987.
It is mostly devoted to cultural events.
- The Mendele mailing list started by Noyekh Miller in 1991 was originally more devoted to linguistics, but eventually replaced the yiddish mailing list. There were 22 subscribers at the start – and 2000 by 1999!