Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.003 May 18, 1997 1) Pronunciation reversals (Miriam Isaacs) 2) Pronunciation reversals (Arn Abramson) 3) "Big" (Sam Weiss) 4) Jewish folklore from Ukraine (Zachary M. Baker) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 14:28:55 -0400 (EDT) From: misaacs@wam.umd.edu Subject: Pronunciation reversals Another note on the question of v and w. The same problem exists for native Hebrew speakers. I once asked a taxi driver in Jerusalem to take me to Woolworth Street and he had a terrible time with that word- exclaiming about why they would put two such awful w sounds into one word, which to him came out "vulvitsh" -- of course th not existing in either Yiddish or Hebrew either. Miriam Isaacs 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 08:45:51 -0400 From: abramson@uconnvm.uconn.edu Subject: Pronunciation reversals While grazing in the pasture, I have been prodded by Ellen Prince, who, along with Rick Turkel and Sam Weiss (Vol. 7.001), has responded to Marjorie Hirshan's question about Yiddish speakers' tendency to swap English /v/ and /w/ in speech. Sam's story is a funny example of insufficiently dynamic phonetic instruction. Ellen and Rick have clearly presented the linguistic (phonological) situation, namely, one of a contrast in English--/w/:/v/--that is irrelevant in Yiddish and, for that matter, in many languages that come to mind. Depending on many variables, a given Yiddish speaker may have more or less interference in his English from his Yiddish. If he does learn to pronounce a labio-velar glide [w], in addition to his native labio-dental voiced fricative [v}, which will surely do in English too, he may not always remember what English words each one belongs in. If he gets it right, he is not noticed. If he gets it wrong, he is heard by English-speakers to have committed a "pronunciation reversal." This is essentially what Ellen has offered in her second suggestion. Rick seems to suspect that our Yiddish speaker may indeed favor [w] variants as more "English." There may be something to that; I have seen no frequency counts in the matter. Ellen's other suggestion is phonetically tantalizing. She writes, " I believe this is a case of where what they are in fact saying is phonetically *between* English/v/ and /w/ and it is we, the native English listeners, that assign it to the wrong category since we (given our sound system) figure it has to be one or the other and it doesn't sound like the one it's supposed to be." That is, Ellen seems to think the speakers are pronouncing something like a bilabial voiced fricative that varies sporadically in the intensity of the fricative turbulence, as attested for varieties of Spanish. In the abstract, this has the ring of phonetic and perceptual plausibility; however, my own observations of this kind of speech behavior make this explanation dubious for Yiddish speakers. Rather, Ellen's other suggestion, perhaps as amended by Rick, and summarized by me above, is probably the answer. Here is a short story of how I was taken in by this kind of Yiddish interference. About 35 years ago, when I was living in Greater Metropolitan New York, an aunt of mine asked me to drive her from Manhattan to visit her niece--my cousin--in Far Rockaway, Queens. Aunt Minnie was a native-born American, my cousin, an immigrant from Ukraine long resident in the U.S. Aunt Minnie had road directions. We were to go through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and then take the Wenvick Expressway to a certain exit. "Well," said I, "I don't know where the Wenvick Expressway is, but we'll ask at the toll booth." The toll-taker had never heard of the Wenwick Expressway either, but he knew far more about the highways of Queens than I. After pondering for a moment, he exclaimed, "Do you mean the Van Wyck?" It then dawned on me that in her perfectly normal sounding native English, my aunt had fallen victim to two sources of Yiddish interference in my cousin's speech:(1) the lack of a contrast between /w/ and /v/ and (2) the lack of contrast between the two English vowels /E/ and /ae/, as in "bet" and "bat" or "den" and "Dan." Note: At that time at least the popular pronunciation of Van Wyck treated the second word as "wick" rather than the older pronunciation, "wike." Arn Abramson 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 23:51:03 -0400 (EDT) From: sweiss@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us Subject: "Big" Here's an update on the "big" issue. It seems that the Forward's usage is not as original as we thought, according to the Dictionary of American Slang, Vol. 1 (A-G): Big. n 1. Big Shot. 1948. Lait and Mortimer New York 121: "(Street gang) war counsellors (are) known as "bigs." 1972 N.Y. Daily News July 20 (14) "Mob Big Denies tie to Sinatra." 1980. N.Y. Post (July 2 (4:44) GOP bigs call for ERA in plank. 1983. Nat.Lampoon (Mar) 37 "Lydia...is the ten ear old daughter of a Politburo big. ...un azoy vayter Sam Weiss Baltimore 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 19:05:22 -0400 (EDT) From: yivo1@metgate.metro.org Subject: Jewish folklore from Ukraine Some time ago, I believe, I reported on the large collection of wax cylinder recordings in the possession of the V. I. Vernadsky Library, in Kiev. These recordings were made by Jewish ethnographers during various expeditions in search of folkloristic material in cities and towns in the Ukraine (especially Podolia and Volhynia) and Belarus. On Friday (May 16th) I received a flyer describing the recordings and the work that has been done to transfer them into other sound media. A CD has also been prepared, including a selection of 41 items from the Vernadsky collection. Here is an extensive excerpt from the flyer (minor grammatical and spelling adjustments have been made): "The National Library of Ukraine stores the world's greatest Jewish musical folklore collection recorded on Edison phonograph cylinders. The collection contains more than 1000 cylinders with sound duration from 2 to 7 minutes. This collection includes in fact all the records made in the first half of the 20th century (from 1912 till 1947) on the territories of Ukraine and Belarus in towns and boroughs with traditionally numerous Jewish populations.... "The collection was initiated by the Jewish Historical/Ethnographic Society in Petersburg in 1911-1914... The idea of conducting the [folklore] expeditions belonged to a well-known Jewish writer and folklorist S. An-sky (1863-1920), and they were financed from the funds of the patron G. O. Ginzburg [=Guenzburg]. Besides S. An-sky, other outstanding representatives of Jewish culture participated in these expeditions in different years: composer and music expert J[oel] Engel (1867-1927), folklorist Z[inovy] Kisselhof [=Kisselgoff] (1878-1939), artist S[olomon] Judovin [=Yudovin] (1892-1954) et al. During 1912-1913... the expedition managed to visit and research ethnographically Volyn and Podiliya, its participants were able to record on the phonograph the enormous... amount of various genres of traditional music samples: wordless chants, instrumental plays, songs, parts of synagogal liturgy.... ".... The phonograph materials collection became one of the principal Jewish Historical/Ethnographic Museum collections opened in Petersburg in 1914. "In Soviet times the Cabinet of Musical Folklore of the Ethnographical Section of the Institute of Jewish Culture in Kyiv became the carrier of the pre-Revolutionary folklorist traditions beginning from 1912. At the Cabinet the individual phonogram archives were organized and constantly enriched with materials of every new folklore expedition. "The outstanding folklorist scholar M[oyshe] L. Beregovsky stood at the beginning of the phonogram archives' establishment. Owing to his efforts the Cabinet expedition work became wide-ranged and regular, and the recording and deciphering of material, their documenting still strike the modern researchers with their high level of scientific approach to the expedition work. The known centres of Jewish culture (Kyiv, Odessa) were in the field of vision of Beregovsky and his colleagues as well as the separate places of Jewish residence in Volyn and Podiliya, Western Ukraine... with its historically formed specific feature (e.g., agricultural Jewish colonies of South Ukraine). "In 1930 the phonoarchives of the Petersburg Jewish Historical/ Ethnographic Museum were handed over to Kyiv and they essentially supplemented the collection of the Ethnographic Section of the Institute of Jewish Culture. "Approximately at that time J. Engel's daughter passed to Kyiv a collection of phonocylinders which showed J. Engel's participation in S. An-sky's expeditions. Later, in 1940, the phonogram archives of the Cabinet of Jewish Culture (in 1936, the Institute of Jewish Culture [was] transformed into the Cabinet) were essentially supplemented once again: the materials of Z. Kisselhof's private collection were handed over by the late folklorist's daughter Antonina Kisselhof. For a long time the phonoarchives were not in scientific and cultural usage as the way of sound reproduction from the wax cylinders [i.e., it was not technically possible to transfer their contents to another medium -- ZB]. "The efforts in rerecording the cylinders were initiated in November 1995 by Professor O. Onyshchenko, Director of the V. I. Vernadsky National Library, and Professor V. Petrov, Director of the Institute for Information Recording, and unique results were received in the shortest time. "The Institute for Information Recording developed the original method of cylinders rerecording which allowed [it] to take the sound by... not destroy[ing] their physical state." The following e-mail address is given for the Institute for Information Recording in Kiev: petrov@ipri.kiev.ua (URL: http://www.ipri.kiev.ua). I would also like to give a few examples of the contents of the CD, which I must emphasize I have *not* seen or heard. Descriptions (slightly copy-edited) are taken from the flyer which has been quoted at length here: 1 Kurtse bagrisung dem yidishn etnografishn muzey // Short greeting to the Jewish Ethnographic Museum. Peformer: Sholem Aleichem. Petersburg, 1914. 1:44 4 Ve-kakh haya omar // And so He said. Performer: Medzhibizh rabbi. Medzhibizh, 1913. 1:14 15 Ikh zits mir in shenkl // In the pub I sit. Performer: Arn Shmuel Kagan [or Kahan]. Proskuriv (Podilska province), 1913. 1:30 19 Ekh, khorosha sluzhba nasha yevreyskaya // Oh, good is our Jewish service. Performer: Berl Galaster. Medzhibizh (Podilska province), 1913. 0:27 27 Di shtot Beynazeres // Buenos Aires. Performer: Sima Guralnic. Woman worker, Bila Tserkva (Kyiv region), 1929. 3:56 30 Two children's counting verses: Vermicelli Ha, Zokhinu ila zakatyla. Performers: children. Kremenets (Volyn province), 1913. 0:55 33 Akhashverosh-shpil (fragment; recitative). Performer: unknown. Kalinkovichi, Belarus, n.d. 2:18 39 An Oster nign. Performer: Arn Shmuel Kahan [or Kagan]. Proskuriv, 1913. 1:24 41 Ahava raba (from the repertoire of Pedotser, outstanding violinist and klezmer). Performer: Motl Shteinbard, Pedotser's pupil, 1913. 1:41 Zachary M. Baker ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.003