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As with the Oxford will be the first comprehen- English Dictionary, which sive, scholarly dictionary of took 40 years to finish, the the language spoken by mil- Great Dictionary of the Yid- lions of Ashkenazic Jews for dish Language was built by nearly 1,000 years. the patient labor of dozens of Four volumes of a proposed volunteer readers, who copied 12 have been published; vol- out millions of citation slips umes five and six are nearing by hand. completion. Mark died in 1975 and Her- "It is an all-embracing zog became the project's work, the Yiddish parallel to editor-in-chief. The editorial the Oxford English Dic- work is now centered at Col- tionary," says Marvin Her- umbia and at Hebrew Univer- zog, Atran Professor of Yid- sity in Jerusalem, with dish at Columbia and editor- scholars from both institu- in-chief of the dictionary. "It tions and from other univer- is a kind of national memory, sities serving on the editorial containing the totality of the board. language through history and The work has been made from region to region." easier and faster recently by Herzog described the dic- computers at Columbia and tionary as a "tool of scholar- in Jerusalem. The computers ship. Because Yiddish is a not. only speed up the lex- fusion of several languages, igraphical work, but also the dictionary will be a re- make it possible for the two source for scholars of Yiddish teams to communicate with and other languages as well — each other efficiently as they German, for instance, and the work. Satellite communica- Slavic languages." tion allows discussions of The first four volumes, pub- policy to flow back and forth lished independently and now between Israeli and American distributed by the Magnes computers within hours. Thx- Press of Jerusalem, are entire- tual material is also sent by ly in Yiddish. Beginning with satellite. the fifth volume, the diction- The project has been sup- ary's entries will have, in ad- ported by grants from the Na- dition, English and Hebrew tional Endowment for the glosses and Latin-letter Humanities (NEH) and indi- transcriptions of every Yid- vidual donors since 1967. The dish entry word. National Endowment has Most entries will include awarded three grants to Col- not only Yiddish definitions, umbia since 1981, when the but the various meanings of dictionary became formally each word through the years based at the University. Its as reflected in citations from most recent grants, for July Yiddish literature and speech. 1985 through June 1987, in- The idea for the dictionary clude $250,000 outright and goes back at least to the turn $290,000 in dollar-for-dollar of the century, when Alfred matching funds, bringing the Landau, a Viennese philolo- total possible NEH funding gist, set to work on a com- for the period to $540,000, the Yiddish diction- prehensive. largest award in the nation in ary. But Landau's scholarly its funding category. standards were so exacting With the addition of the and his resources so meager $290,000 in matching private that when he died in 1935 his gifts to be raised, the total work was incomplete. A par- funding for the dictionary for allel project was begun by a the two-year period would rise team of Soviet scholars in the to $830,000. 1920's, but both the scholars Scholars at other institu- and their work fell victim to tions in the United States and Hitler and Stalin. Europe also contribute their In the early 1950's, the talent and time. At the Uni- renowned Yiddish linguist versity of Trier in West Ger- Yudel Mark was commis- many, scholars have provided sioned to begin work on a both materials and expertise comprehensive scholarly dic- in the Yiddish of the 13th tionary by the YIVO Insti- through the 16th centuries, tute of Jewish Research. and the Jewish Historical The institute, founded in Institute in Warsaw has pro- Vilna in Poland, had been the vided etymological material. repository of Landau's pain- The editorial board includes stakingly compiled resources scholars from City and and notes, most of which were Brooklyn Colleges, Hebrew lost before YIVO was relo- Union College in Cincinnati, cated in New York during the University of lexas and World War II. The Institute Yale University. for Yiddish Lexicology at the E=/