More on glat(t)

January 2, 2023 @ 9:49 pm · Filed by under Language and animals, Language and food, Language and religion

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We have been discussing the Yiddish word "glat", albeit with a lot of loose ends (see "Glat perch and medicare yam" (12/19/22).  Having gained some additional information, it is worthwhile taking another look.

From a colleague:

I am very familiar with the word Glat, or Glatt. It is often used together with the word kosher. Glatt is Yiddish for "smooth". This word relates to meat and poultry and is never used with fish. Perhaps Chinese borrowed this word because Israel exports food items to China, including fish?
 
What Is Glatt Kosher?

For meat to be kosher, it must come from a kosher animal slaughtered in a kosher way. Glatt kosher takes it further; the meat must also come from an animal with adhesion-free or smooth lungs.

The word glatt is Yiddish for "smooth" (the Hebrew word is chalak). In kashrut, glatt refers to the lungs of animals and is primarily concerned with the meat of adult herd animals, such as cows and buffalo. On occasion, small adhesions may be removed from the lungs, and the animal is still worthy of the glatt kosher label.

The catch is that calves, sheep, deer, and fowl (chicken, turkey, and duck) must be glatt to be deemed kosher at all in the U.S. If one of these products is labeled "glatt," it is misleading because if it were not glatt, it would not be kosher.

After it's slaughtered according to kashrut, the animal is opened and examined to determine whether the lungs are smooth. If defects are found on the lungs during the inspection, the meat is considered treif (torn, non-kosher).

I eat only kosher food. Every observant Jew knows most of the rules of kashrut, its a matter of survival. One of the rabbis I know is in charge of inspections of food processing plants in a big part of North America.  Here is the link where you can read more about glatt.
 
They probably included the word glatt to advertise fish as nearly perfect. Who knows, maybe there's a Jewish community in the area of the shop where the picture was taken?  Also, the Russian / Ukrainian word "gladkiy" гладкий means the same thing. Given that Yiddish is the language of East European Jews, there could be a connection there.

Note that Russian / Ukrainian "gladkiy" гладкий is inherited from Proto-Slavic *gladъkъ < Proto-Balto-Slavic *glā́ˀdus ("smooth") from Proto-Indo-European *gʰleh₂dʰ- ("bright, shining; smooth"), possible reanalyzed root of *gʰleh₂- +‎ *-dʰh₁eti possible reanalyzed root of *gʰleh₂- +‎ *-dʰh₁eti, metathesized from *ǵʰelh₂- (“to shine”). (see here, here, here, here, here, and here)

Cf. Danish and Luxembourish glat ("slippery; smooth") < Old High German (*)glad, northern variant of glat, from Proto-Germanic *gladaz, whence also Old English glæd, Old Norse glaðr. The modern final -t is irregularly generalised from the uninflected stem. (source)

Cf. also glatt:

English

Borrowed from Yiddish גלאַט‎ (glat, “smooth”). Doublet of glad.

  1. (Yinglish, of an animal, Judaism) Having none of a particular kind of adhesion on the outside of its lungs; only meat from a glatt animal can be kosher.
  2. (Yinglish, by extension, of food, Judaism) Having no ingredients from animals that are not glatt.

German

From Middle High German and Old High German glat, from Proto-West Germanic *glad.

etc.

Norwegian Nynorsk

Borrowed from German glatt.

  1. smooth
  2. slippery

happily; in a happy and positive manner

(source)

Yiddish glat גלאַט

From Middle High German and Old High German glat, from Proto-West Germanic *glad.

    1. smooth

(source)

 

Selected readings

January 2, 2023 @ 9:49 pm · Filed by under Language and animals, Language and food, Language and religion


11 Comments

  1. martin schwartz said,

    January 2, 2023 @ 10:41 pm

    The spelling "glatt" for the Yiddish word is a Germanism,
    Yiddishists would transcribe it as "glat".@ the cited (Jewish) "colleague": I do not disagree as to content of what is said, but I must note that in the context of Yiddish "glat and "kósher"", and in the interest of preserving Yiddish culture, I personally would not use the Israeli (*Sephardic) Hebrew kashrút (alongdside kashér
    = 'kosher'), but the Yiddish káshres, which goes back to the same
    ancient Hebrew prototype (with final linguodental spirant (theta).
    Btw 'treif"/treyf/ is also the Yiddish pronunciation of a Hebrew term. As for fish, I would opine that "glat" does not apply;
    the smoothness of fish lungs is not a criterion for the fish being kosher; all fish are equally kosher UNLESS the fish does not have fins and (ganoid) scales. Thus even stugeon does not meet the traditional criteria for their being kosher fish. Thus I would caution,
    "caviar, emptor". I have long assumed the Yiddish surname
    Glatshteyn 'Smoothstone' preserves the older mg. of Gladstone,
    but I see online an etymology from Lanarkshire Scottish
    Gledstane where the first element (supposedly) is from
    Old English gleado 'kite' . Whether this is Norrish kite
    or not I know not.

  2. martin schwartz said,

    January 2, 2023 @ 11:50 pm

    for the IE antecedence, it is problematic to
    involve/invoke a root with palatal aspirated g-. since that would give Slavic *z, not g-, but there may have been parallel
    IE CVC roots with initial palatal and velar roots in this broad semantic field–worth checking, perhaps.

  3. wanda said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 2:34 am

    "the smoothness of fish lungs is not a criterion for the fish being kosher"
    Most fish lack lungs. Instead, they have gills to collect oxygen. Although some of the earliest fish had lungs, in most fish, the lungs evolved into the swim bladder. Lungs only persisted in the fish lineages that took to land (which include us, and which we usually don't call "fish") and in the lungfish. (I have no idea whether lungfish have the right kind of scales or enough of a fin to be kosher, and a quick Internet search doesn't pull anything up either.) So it's a good thing that the smoothness of fish lungs is not a criterion for fish being kosher.

  4. martin schwartz said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 4:11 am

    @Wanda: thanks for confirming what I said.
    (Smiling face emoticon and/or emoji)

  5. David Marjanović said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 7:09 am

    "caviar, emptor"

    :-)

    Lungs only persisted in the fish lineages that took to land (which include us, and which we usually don't call "fish") and in the lungfish.

    And in various sorts that don't occur in shouting distance of Europe: osteoglossomorphs, gars, bowfins, bichirs.

    for the IE antecedence, it is problematic to
    involve/invoke a root with palatal aspirated g-. since that would give Slavic *z, not g-

    Not if we assume Weise's law (depalatalization of the palatalized velars whenever followed by *l or *r, i.e. *e-grade *ǵʰelh₂- but zero-grade *gʰlh₂-) and, plausibly, a lot of analogical leveling (plus vrddhi: *gʰlh₂- used as a base to derive *gʰleh₂-). Pretty often, Sanskrit has kept the palatalized reflex, Slavic the depalatalized one, and Lithuanian has both…

  6. wanda said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 11:31 am

    "And in various sorts that don't occur in shouting distance of Europe: osteoglossomorphs, gars, bowfins, bichirs."

    That's true; some early-diverging lineages of ray-finned fish have them too. Apparently coelacanth have a vestigial lung (it starts developing a lung as an embryo, but it never gets big or becomes functional).

  7. Coby said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 11:57 am

    My parents (who lived in Los Angeles) kept kosher, but my father, who was Modern Orthodox (and a Judaic scholar), refused to patronize shops that advertised "glatt"; he saw it as an imposition by ultra-Orthodox rabbis of Hungarian origin, with no basis in Halakha.
    ,

  8. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 12:51 pm

    'If your local [kosher] bakery advertises itself as “glatt,” it’s seemingly making the absurd claim that its cupcakes and donuts have healthy lungs.'

    This piece goes into more detail than most will want about the different schools of thought about exactly what makes a slaughtered mammal's meat kosher lungwise, but also provides a decent explanation (while deprecating it in a prescriptivist way) of how "glatt kosher" came to idiomatically mean more loosely something like "strictly kosher" or "adhering to the more demanding standard on various points [not all having to do with lungs!] where there is a division of rabbinical opinion."

    https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3234466/jewish/What-Does-Glatt-Kosher-Mean.htm

  9. Tim Leonard said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 10:43 pm

    Yiddish "glat" (smooth) comes from the same roots as English "glide".

  10. Andrew Usher said,

    January 3, 2023 @ 11:26 pm

    Actually, 'glad' is the more direct cognate, with 'glide' being from a related verb.

    In the case of Yiddish words with variant spellings, it seems to be we should prefer the standard German one, here glatt, if existent.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  11. Michael Carasik said,

    January 4, 2023 @ 6:37 pm

    A friend who supervised a kosher bakery in Brookline, Mass. got tired of trying to explain that "glatt" applied only to meat and just told people who asked, "Yes, the bakery is glatt kosher."

    And another friend used to refer to the food in New Orleans as "glatt treyf." A beautiful example of the way language works.

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