Bee Stung

Last week I wrote about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, mainly whining that they rely on too many foreign words that are transliterated incorrectly. Well, the organizers of the Bee were stung again.

This time around a lot of other people have been complaining about the Bee spelling a word wrong. The winning word in the Bee was knaidel, a Yiddish word for a type of dumpling. The problem is, that's not the official transliteration of the word. It should be kneydl, according to YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.

The knaidel spelling came about because some guy decided he'd transliterate it according to "English pronunciation rules." The problem with this idea is that English has multiple ways of spelling the same sound, or phoneme.

That means it could have just as easily been transliterated as knaidle, knaidl, knadel, knadle, knaydel, knaydle, knaydl, kneydel, kneydl, kneidl, kneighdl, kneighdel, kneighdle. Or knödel, which is the spelling of the word in German, where the word comes from. Or קניידל, which is the actual Yiddish spelling in the Hebrew alphabet [1]. (Man, you cannot believe what a pain in the neck it was to copy and paste that single word!)

The Bee defends itself by saying their official dictionary spells it this way. But if Arvind Mahankali had spelled it correctly, with the official YIVO transliteration or the actual Yiddish spelling, would the Bee have ruled him wrong?

This brings up the most basic question about dictionaries, which linguists and lexicographers still debate: should dictionaries reflect how people use, pronounce and spell words, or should they dictate proper usage?

These two camps are the descriptivists and the prescriptivists. Who's right?

In my heart I want to be a prescriptivist: there's a right spelling, there's a right definition, there's a right pronunciation. But in my head I know that's nonsense: a century ago those things were completely different, and in another century they'll have changed again. And even today they're not the same in Boston, Atlanta, LA, London or Canberra. The reality is that dictionaries can only describe currently accepted usage in one place, which will only change as the demands on language change.

So the next time someone corrects your pronunciation or spelling of a word, just tell them, "Stuff it! I'm on the bleeding edge of linguistic evolution, old man!"


Notes

[1] Yiddish itself is an exercise in spelling weirdness. It is a dialect of German spoken by European Jews, but is written from right to left and spelled with the Hebrew alphabet. Its vocabulary is heavily influenced by Hebrew and and several eastern European languages.

The problem is that Hebrew typically doesn't bother to put vowels in their words (neither does Arabic), because they're basically unneeded. When they do feel the need (in children's books, for example), Hebrew writers put diacritical marks or "points" on the consonants to indicate the vowels. Hebrew only has five vowels.

But European languages have many more vowels: modern German has 17 vowels, while modern English has between 11 and 14 vowels depending on dialect (American, British and Australian speakers not only use different pronunciations for the same words, Australians have a wider palette of sounds to choose from).

That means Yiddish had to invent new ways of representing sounds that didn't exist in Hebrew.