Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 07.096 November 3, 1997 1) yidishe shraybmashinke (Refoyl Finkel) 2) Yiddish Voice Radio Features Singer Perl Teitelbaum, Wed, Nov 5 (Mark David) 3) Parshe-fun-der-vokh reshime (Sholem Berger) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 14:50:00 -0500 (EST) From: Raphael Finkel Subject: yidishe shraybmashinke far di vos viln nitsn di yidishe shraybmashinke (http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html) oder vos viln araynklapn tekstn tsulib mendele loyt dem yivo-transkriptsye standard, ot zaynen etlekhe klolem. If you want to use the Yiddish Typewriter or enter text for MENDELE according to the YIVO transcription, here are some guidelines. Yivo transcription format uses the following consonants: b g d h v z kh t y l m n s f p ts k r sh tsh zh dj and the following vowels: a e i o u oy ay ey In particular, don't use "tz" for tsadik; use "ts". Don't use "j" for a yud (as in German) or as a khof (as in Spanish). The combinations "ay" and "ey" and "oy" should not be replaced by such forms as "aj" and "ei". Don't use capital letters except for the first letters of Hebrew proper names (like Refoyl and Binyomen). You can use the | character as a nonprinting character to circumvent usual orthography rules. For instance, write "oys|heyln" instead of "oysheyln" to avoid the "sh" turning into a shin; write "elt|stn" instead of "eltstn" to avoid the "ts" turning into a tsadik. It is not necessary to say "t|sh" when you mean "tsh". If you really need a vov at the start of a word, you can use "|u". If you want a compound built on a Hebrew root, separate the Hebrew root from prefixes and suffixes by |. For instance, "farkholemt" should be written "far|kholem|t" so that the Hebrew lookup succeeds. Many Yiddish verbs from Hebrew have an extra "en", as in "harg|enen" and "ganv|enen". Even though the words "*harg" and "*ganv" don't exist, use these pseudo-roots as in the previous sentence. If you have a number, write it forwards (1997, not 7991). This rule also holds for numbers with embedded punctuation, all of which is treated as a region of left-to-right text within the normal right-to-left rendition of Yiddish (such as 5-17-1997). If you need a Hebrew word, spell it phonetically. Unaccented vowels often should be spelled with an "e", as in "borekh", "bimkem", "maskem". If the spelling checker accepts your input, it should be spelled fine in the output. If you have misspelled slightly, the spelling checker will suggest a substitute. Otherwise, mail will be sent to the maintainer, and the word should appear shortly on the spelling list. If you need Hebrew before then, or if the word you want is unlikely to be used in standard Yiddish texts (such as Biblical quotations), you may use the following letters: aleph # veys B khes H kof K ayin e sin Q sof T tof W If you are using the Yiddish Typewriter, then you can insert TeX commands to control the output somewhat. These commands must be on lines by themselves; they all use the \ character, and any line with one of those characters is not processed by the other software. Here are some of the available TeX commands: (1) To change font: \font{n} where "font" can be any of these: jerusalem (handsome angular line form) deadsea (standard book form) calig (nice calligraphic form) frank (somewhat blocky book form) telaviv (OK thick line form) classic (ugly prayer-book form) oldjaffa (ugly thin line form) and "n" is the size. You can currently use 1000, 1500, or 2000. (2) English inserts should be on lines by themselves, surrounded by \english{}. (3) You can force a new line by \\ and a new paragraph by inserting a blank line. The Yiddish Typewriter gives you options for output style. If you ask it to check your spelling, it will compare each word with a spelling list. The list currently contains about 8,000 words, counting all grammatical forms as separate words. This list has been assembled by hand. In the future, I hope to generate it from roots using morphological rules appropriate to Yiddish. Then all forms of each word will be represented. As it stands, you will often find words flagged as misspelled that are just unusual forms of words that are already known. For instance, "farzikhert" is in the list, but "farzikherte" (an adjective meaning "insured" in the plural form) is not (yet). Most users first check their spelling and then ask for a GIF image. The result will show on your web browser, but won't be particularly high quality. It is a picture of a fairly low-resolution rendering of the text you have specified. PostScript gives you a much higher quality image. But to see it, you either need a PostScript viewer (standard on Unix, available via a link on the Typewriter web page for PCs) or a PostScript printer (more expensive than usual printers). If you have the Hebrew Language Option for either Macintosh or MS-Word, you can select one of those output forms and see your text in whatever font you have loaded. Unfortunately, I don't know of any fonts for these platforms that contain all the Yiddish symbols (such as pasakh-tsvey-yud), so you might not be satisfied with the results. Complain to your font manufacturer. If your browser supports Unicode with the full bidirectional algorithm and Hebrew/Yiddish font (only the Tango browser comes close at the moment), you can select UTF-8 format, which is a standard encoding of Unicode. Unicode should be the wave of the future; it will theoretically support texts in any language or mixture of languages. If your browser doesn't support Unicode, complain. Please direct any suggestions and questions to me. Refoyl Finkel 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 23:47:11 -0500 From: "Mark H. David" Subject: Yiddish Voice Radio Features Singer Perl Teitelbaum, Wed, Nov 5 Yiddish Voice Radio Features Singer Perl Teitelbaum Introduces the New Recording of Yiddish Children's Songs The Yiddish Voice, a Yiddish-language weekly radio show, will feature an interview with Perl Teitelbaum on its upcoming show, Wednesday, November 5, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m on WUNR 1600 AM in Boston, Mass. Perl Teitelbaum, a native speaker of Yiddish who was born in Poland and immigrated to the US as a teenager, has been performing as a Yiddish singer for several years. She was prominently featured along with other young musicians on the recording "Zumerteg: 20 New Yiddish Songs", featuring songs by the poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. Her latest recordings appear on the "Di Grine Katshke" ("The Green Duck"), a new CD recording and songbook produced by Living Traditions, Inc. The recording of "Di Grine Katshke" includes 25 Yiddish children's songs about animals, and features, in addition to Teitelbaum's, performances by such leading Yiddish singers and klezmer musicians as Lorin Sklamberg, Adrienne Cooper, Henry Sapoznik, Jeff Warschauer, and Lauren Brody. In the interview, Teitelbaum discusses the history of the project to produce "Di Grine Katshke", as well as some background on the songs included. She also talks about her experience as both a teacher of Yiddish language to adults and as a mother of Yiddish speaking children, both of which activities served to motivate her involvement in the project. In addition to the interview, several selections from "Di Grine Katschke" will be played, with introductions by Teitelbaum. The Yiddish Voice, which began broadcasting in July, 1994, features music, poetry, comedy, interviews, news, commentary, and announcements of current events, all of it in the Yiddish language. For further information, mail, telephone, or email to: Mark David The Yiddish Voice WUNR Radio International 160 N. Washington Street Boston, MA 02114 Phone: (617) 738-1870 Email: yv@world.std.com Web: http://www.yv.org/ For "Di Grine Katshke" Lorin Sklamberg Living Traditions, Inc. 430 West 14th Street, Suite 514 New York, NY 10014 Phone: (212) 691-1272 Fax: (212) 691-1657 Email: livetrads@aol.com 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 15:07:27 -0500 From: "Zackary Berger" Subject: Parshe-fun-der-vokh reshime Dos iz di tsveyte meldung, vayl efsher zaynen do Mendelyaner vos hobn nokh nisht gehert dervegn. S'iz tsurik mit etlekhe khadoshem oyfgekumen af der velt a reshime far azelkhe, vos viln arumredn di parshe fun der vokh--af mame-loshn, farshteyt zikh. Es darshnt yeder vokh an anderer onteyl-nemer--s'bateylikn zikh say ekspertn, say proste yidn. Balonem, lozt mikh visn. This is the second notice, since maybe there are those who didn't get the first. For several months now a group of people have been writing and distributing droshes on the parshe of the week--in Yiddish, of course. We switch off writing, so that everyone gets a chance. Interested people should let me know. Sholem Berger Nyu-york ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 07.096 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html