Yiddish words for body parts

Kop, aksln, kni un fingerlekh, kni un fingerlekh. The children’s rhyme “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” sounds ridiculous in Yiddish. For starters, there is no single word for toe. (The phrase “finger fun fus”, which literally means “finger of the foot” is usually used, but this is simply too long for the rhyme. For that reason fingerl, “little finger” has been used, although that can also mean “ring”.) Secondly, having heard it my whole life in English, when I saw parents singing it with their children in Mame-Loshn, I really couldn’t hide my laughter. But the song gave me the idea to write about one of the interesting aspects of language in general and Yiddish in particular.

The international medical community uses anatomical terms in a version of specialized Latin and not in the native languages of the doctors. This has the obvious advantage of enabling doctors from different countries to discuss specialized anatomical vocabulary without confusion. But the main advantage is that since almost all languages actually define parts of the body slightly differently, doctors using the Latin words know not only the word’s translation, but its exact meaning. For instance, Yiddish does not distinguish between the foot and the rest of the leg. Both are rendered as fus. Yiddish does however distinguish between the upper and lower parts of the back as being separate units, while English does not. The word rukn, which in German just means back, in Yiddish signifies the lower half of the back. The word pleytse, which in Polish also means the entire “back”, in Yiddish has come to refer to just the upper section of the back and in some dialects, the shoulders.

Although German traditionally made no distinction between the shoulders and the armpit (it now does), Yiddish adopted the Polish word pakhve to express the concept. (German later adopted a close cognate of the Yiddish word for shoulder to express armpit (achsel), so Jews learning German often confused armpits and shoulders in German). Here is some more anatomy in Yiddish:

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