Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 13 • June 2005
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Review:
Philosophische, wissenschaftliche und technische
Termini Benjamin Katz‑Biletzky 757 pages ISBN 3-87548-265-4 Helmut Buske Verlag Hamburg 2003
Katz‑Biletzky’s
dictionary is composed of an abundance of Hebrew equivalents for some 25,000
German terms, many of which have been in existence and dispersed throughout
the extensive canon of Hebrew philosophical and scientific literature since
the Middle Ages. The target audiences for this book are scientists and
translators. The dictionary itself has 720
pages. Following an introduction given in both Hebrew and German is a list of
publications used in the compilation of the dictionary. This includes 113
Hebrew sources, books and articles, and 61 mainly German books and
dictionaries. The final part of the dictionary includes a list of various
terms that the author himself has used his considerable scholarship to
innovate. The book’s lexical entries
cover all science-related areas that a well-informed individual is ever
likely to need: philosophy, psychology, anatomy, economics, hydrology,
zoology, biology, chemistry, geography, linguistics, and so on. Each term has
Hebrew equivalents gathered either from one of the sources mentioned above or
in some cases coined by the author. The author retains a purist
attitude towards translations and definitions throughout the work. He cites
Hebrew terms before loan ones, avoids loan words as much as possible, and
invents Hebrew terms and cites them as the first translated option. The directory of abbreviations
makes it possible for each Hebrew term listed to be placed in its relevant
field e.g. 'éti(ka) ‘ethics’, mahsh(evím) ‘computer sciences’, dat
‘religion’, refu('á) ‘medicine’, tiksh(óret)
‘communication’, etc. Some entries are cited with a Hebrew source immediately
after the first one or two terms, although not necessarily referring to them,
e.g. German Cubus – Hebrew me'ukav ‘cubic’ (mat(ematika))
[k/b/240] which refers to Jacob Klazkin’s Thesaurus of Philosophical Terms,
volume 2 (New York: Feldheim 1968), p.240; Modulation – silum (mus(íka))
[lmv/249] referring to Aviva Shelah’s Dvir Musical Lexicon (Tel Aviv:
Dvir 1990; silum is in fact used within social sciences in modern Hebrew
to mean a hierarchical building scale and it also appears in the translation
of Skalierung in statistics). Nominalisierung ‘nominalization’
is first translated into Hebrew as shimuy based on Ora R. Schwarzwald
and Michael Sokoloff’s A Hebrew Dictionary of Linguistics and Philology
(Even Yehuda: Reches 1992), p.46, but this term is not used there at all, but
rather nominalizatsya or ha'atsama. These terms are conveyed
secondarily in Katz‑Biletzky's dictionary, only after the citation. The
same applies to Tautologie, translated as yitur lashon which is
based on Klazkin and the same linguistic dictionary, even though both sources
do not mention this definition. In the linguistic dictionary ‘pleonasm’ is
translated as yitur milim (not yitur lashon), or as pleonasma
and yitur, while ‘tautology’ is translated as plain tautologya.
Had the author included references at the end of each lexical entry, this
misleading information could easily have been avoided. It is Klazkin's thesaurus that
is seemingly the authentic source for the last word in the Hebrew title of
the book: Milon germani‑'ivri lemunhey
filosofya, mada va'asut, ie ‘A
German‑Hebrew dictionary for philosophic, scientific and technological
terms’. The word 'asut 'technology' does not exist in contemporary
Israeli Hebrew nor indeed in any Hebrew dictionary; the word tekhnologya
is the commonly used term. Even though it is the author’s personal innovation
to make use of this specific term, he attributes it to Klazkin. Although the dictionary is
German‑Hebrew, many English and French terms are also listed, but are
only given some clarification when they happen to be the same in German. Each
of these words is referred to the German term where it is translated. For
instance, Langue ‑‑‑> Sprache; Sprache
{Langue} is translated as leshon haklal (in linguistics), lashon,
lang, leshon hahevra, etc. Binary ‑‑‑> binär;
binär is translated as shniyoni, du-helki, binari, etc. It might have been more helpful to
translate the English terms as well, as it is English that has become the
international language of science since the middle of the 20th
century.
Hebrew and Semitic Languages Bar
Ilan University, Israel
K Dictionaries Ltd |
