Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.071 October 5, 1997 1) Mein Veib's Fis (Robert Werman) 2) davening (Sema Chaimovitz Menora) 3) Song Lyrics (marvin engel) 4) Yiddish Anarchism (john patten) 5) chemical glossary (Stanley F. "Shimke" Levine) 6) galerete (Wolf Krakowski) 7) languages and dialects (Alexander Maxwell) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 01 Oct 1997 05:21:44 +0200 From: Robert Werman Subject: Mein Veib's Fis Ron Robboy writes: "The Litvish speaker would characteristically pronounce the sounds /s/ and /sh/ in the same way, as /s/. Thus the word _fish_ (fish) would be pronounced /fis/, becoming a homonym with _fis_ (feet)." While a patient in a Jerusalem hospital, my next bed neighbor, a Litvishe speaker, said to me, "Ich hab lib mein veib's fis." I was initially confused, thinking he meant that he was a foot fetishist. Only after some thought did I realize he meant he loved his wife's fish. A sisse, gesunte yahr. Bob Werman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 02:11:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Lights4607@aol.com Subject: davening The American Jewish History listserv had a request for the origin of the word "davening." There were many interesting responses and I would like to hear what our esteemed Mendele sages have to offer on this word. A gut gebensht yor to all. Sema Chaimovitz Menora Chicago, Il 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 01 Oct 1997 13:10:45 -0400 From: marvin engel Subject: Song Lyrics I have listened closely many times, but can't catch all the words to a song that appears on the Yazoo Records CD: Dave Tarras, Yiddish-American Klezmer Music 1925-1956, track #13. It is listed as: A Vaibele A Tsnien, The Bagelman Sisters with Abe Ellstein Orchestra (1942). The Bagelman Sisters were aka The Barry Sisters, if that helps. Thank you all in advance. Its great to know you are out there. a gliklikhn nay yor aykh alemen. Marvin (meyer) Engel 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 19:03:29 +0100 From: john Patten Subject: Yiddish Anarchism Dear Mendele, a very belated reply (sorry!) to Gertrude Dubrovsky's message about the Stelton colony: Paul Avrich's 'Anarchist Voices' has a large section on this (I've been told). On the subject of Left-wing song, which seem to have broken out of late, readers might be interested to know that recordings of a couple of David Edelstadt's songs are still circulating around the Anarchist movement here. john patten 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 21:26:22 -0400 From: "Stanley F. (Shimke) Levine" Subject: chemical glossary Steve Cohen asks about where he can publish his chemical glossary [7.059]. Although he has already spoken to Dr. Schaechter, perhaps he should return to him and ask whether the League for Yiddish, which he heads, would publish it. They have published a number of glossaries authored by Schaekhter himself, including a botanical lexicon. Stanley F. "Shimke" Levine Aiken, SC 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 01 Oct 1997 23:51:09 -0500 From: "Wolf Krakowski, Paula Parsky" Subject: galerete Regarding David Herskovic's posting regarding "galerete' or "gale" [7.070]: In my house, it was called "galer", and none of the children would eat it. Imagine green garlic jell-o... It is interesting to hear about the connection of this dish with the Gerer Khsidim. My Mom comes from Czestochowa and two of her uncles were indeed, Gerer Kh'sidim. Her father, who supported his two brothers , was a follower of the Zuryker Rebbe. Would any Mendelyaners happen to have any information about the Rebbe? A git, gezint, gliklekh un gebensht yuer. Wolf Krakowski 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 01 Oct 1997 23:24:28 -0500 From: Alexander Maxwell Subject: languages and dialects As long as we're on the topic of languages and dialects, I thought I'd put in my two bits. The difference between a language and a dialect is not well-defined, nor well-definable. The obvious test of mutual comprehensibility, has many wierd counterexamples: swiss understand High German, but not vice versa, Afrikaans-speakers understand Dutch, but not vice-versa: so are they different or not? Peter Slomanson also alluded to class considerations that one doesn't associate with language: Consider an uneducated speaker of cockney english and an uneducated Mississippian with a strong southern accent. Probably they would have great difficulty understanding eachother, yet if both of them went to University and learned their respective standard pronunciantions, they would understand eachother easily. Who is learning whose language/dialect? What IS important are written languages. Written languages are always a little bit artificial, because everyone's common speech is subtly different from the 'correct' form of their speech... I notice that in my own (native speaker) english I omit the helping verb in an informal request: "want a banana?" instead of "do you want a banana?" But written standards differ from eachother in definable ways. But then this issue of dialects does not arise. If you write a letter in written Serb anyone can see immediately that it's not written Croat. Even if the words would have been the same in the latin alphabet, there's still no confusing one linguistic standard with the other. The key to this language/dialect issue is that languages are more prestigious, and are associated with nation-hood. I am a history student, and my topic is comparative Slavic nationalism, and let me tell you: every group that wants to call itself a nation, claim independance etc. etc. routinely claims that their local speech is different from the standard language used by the group they're rebelling from. And people who are against that group, they respond by saying, no, no, you just speak a dialect of whatever, it isn't another language at all. It reaches absurd lengths: I've had Slovaks tell me that Slovak is totally different from Czech, that Czechs and Slovaks can't understand eachother, and we have this conversation despite my never having studied Slovak, with me speaking my (at the time not very good) Czech. The Bosnians are in an even more unenviable position: Serb and Croat don't always get the respect they crave as different languages, even though they have different scripts, so you gotta pity the Bosnian (Muslim) nationalist who has to try and convince the outside world that Bosnian is a distinct language from either. (They use the latin alphabet like the croats, and have been introducing arabic and turkish words to try and differentiate themselves.) If anyone says that scripts and consciously introduced words is not a function of linguistics but of politics, I respond Yes, that're precisely my point. Linguistics is interesting and a great pleasure, but you shouldn't try to use it to justify political points. Manaster Ramer's observation that Weinreich was "at least part of the time" a linguist is absolutely correct, but he wasn't being a linguist when he claimed that mideaval Yiddish was a language not a dialect, he was propagating his conception of Yiddish nationalism based on a language. All the linguistic-based nationalisms I've examined, and there have been several, project the distinct national sense as far back into the past as is even remotely plausable. (The Slavic Macedonians have the nerve to claim that Alexander the Great was one of them: not merely the claim that Alexander was not Greek, which assertion can actually be made vaguely tenable, but he was the direct ancestor to the Slavs who migrated in the sixth century!) Yiddish national identity is of course extremely contested: there's a great quote where Stalin (of Birobozhidan fame, unless I have my dates wrong) says that the Jews aren't a nation, because they haven't got a national territory to inhabit. Strange what people will look for as necessary components of 'nation'-hood. Weinreich was covering his bets in an extremely conventional way. These status games are still important today: the current criteria for getting a group established as an official minority in Austria include the possession of a distinct language. I learned this from an Austrain Roma politician. The status of the Roma 'dialects' as a 'language' means the difference between official recognition and subsequent financial support by the austrian government. This is about politics, not linguistics. It is also worth pointing out that politics can change written and even spoken languages: words and even grammatical constructions are adopted for political reasons. German "Augenblick" comes from an anti-foreigner wave back at the time of the 30-years' war: before that time the Germans said "Moment" like everyone else. (They also wanted to introduce 'Gesichtshorn' for nose, but that failed to fly.) American 'hot dog' is from the first world war: Wiener was clearly undesirable; stinking austrian dogs, etc etc. Anyway, Linguists as such aren't interested in this status debate over languages and dialects. If you tell a linguist that Yiddish has a strong 'verb-goes-in-the-second-place" word order rule, just like German, the similarity is interesting to him. If you tell him that Yiddish reflexives don't decline by subject, but German ones do, that's interesting too. But if you use such factoids to argue that Yiddish obviously therefore is a dialect of German/is it's own language distinct from German, the pure lingust shrugs his shoulders, whatever you say, buddy. I hope that my fellow mendele khaverim are neither too put out by my slavic examples nor bored by my ranting, but I _am_ after all writing my theis on these very issues and simply could no longer sit idly by! Zeyt gezunt! Alexander Maxwell ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.071 Mendele on the Web: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html