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Post date: Feb 24, 2016 8:28:01 AM
I
f you want to publish a German translation of Shakespeare, would you write on the title page "Translated into German", "Übersetzt ins Deutsche" or "Translated into Deutsche"?
The first would inform English speakers what kind of book they are holding, the second would inform German speakers that they will be able to read this translation in their own language, while the third option is a strange mixture of English and German where the reader apparently understands enough English to read the title but uses the German name for their native tongue.
Something similar I find on title pages of Haggadot translated into English. Some titles are in Hebrew informing the reader that the translation is in English. See for example the title page of a 1912 Haggadah with music arranged by Henry A. Russotto.
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The Hebrew states: "Umeturgam Anglit" (Translated to English).
Most choose the more logical option of writing in English that the Haggadah is translated into English. See for instance this Haggadah from 1867, published by L.H. Frank. (By the way, the typography on this page with at least five different font types would be a modern-day layout designer's worst nightmare. But the Haggadah was well received and reprinted many times so that apparently never bothered anyone.)
The "Translated into Deutsche" option can be found on Haggadot with a twist because when writing "English" in Hebrew letters there are several possibilities of transliterating the word. This would be comparable to writing: Translated into "Deutsche", "Deutch" or even "Doytch".
Since the word "English" starts with a vowel sound and there is no possibility of spelling a Hebrew word starting with a vowel, the Hebrew language has two silent vowel place holders: the letter "alef", א and the letter "ayin", ע. Although modern Hebrew spelling rules dictate that a transliteration on the word "English" would start
with an alef, we can find several Haggadot that write it with an ayin. This is probably due to the influence of Yiddish, the Jewish hybrid Hebrew-Germanic language which is written with Hebrew letters but uses a different spelling system in which the letter ayin is more often used. As examples of this I present here two title pages, one from the Haggadah of Dr. M. Stern, 1926, New York which writes "ענגליש" with the ayin at the beginning (Mind you, Hebrew is read from right to left!) and the other a title page from the "Revised Hagada" by A. A. Green Haggadah (1898) which uses "אנגליש" with an alef.
More outlandish possibilities also exist, for example the 1808 Haggadah, printed by E. Justins in London and translated by Isaac Levi into "Anglateera":
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