Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 07.151 February 17, 1998 1) Mendele's elitism (Noyekh Miller) 2) The nature of Mendele (Ellen Prince) 3) Mayses/Maynses (Dan Gilman) 4) Americanisms in Yiddish (David Jonathan Justman) 5) Mark Twain in Yiddish (Lea Singer) 6) Yiddish for "breastplate" (Yankev Lewis) 7) "shmok" and German art (Diane Wolfthal) 8) Swiss Yiddish (Ronald Florence) 9) nivroko (Gabriella Safran) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 17:21:22 -0500 From: Noyekh Miller Subject: Mendele's elitism The Jews are said to have been refugees from the island Of Crete who settled in the remotest corner of Libya in the days when, according to the story, Saturn was driven from his throne by the aggression of Jupiter. This is a deduction from the name 'Judaei' by which they became known: the word is to be regarded as a barbarous lengthening of 'Idaei', the name of the people dwelling around the famous Mount Ida in Crete. (Tacitus, _The Histories_, Book Five) Tacitus would have felt right at home here on Mendele. The current dust-up over language comes hot on the heels of a similar one just a few months ago I think, and there have been several such in the past. They seem to boil down to this: who the hell do these elitists (professors, professionals, academics) think they are treating us proste yidn like second-class citizens? To which I have this to say: 1. First of all, forget this "professor" business. Wrong label. Think instead of specialists and non-specialists. Almost everybody on Mendele, almost every adult in the industrialized world for that matter, is a member of at least one _community_ of specialists, i.e. people who by virtue of training and time spent together have worked out sets of procedures, special vocabularies, criteria for judging work, etc. This applies to pants pressers as much as it does to linguists. And specialists who have spent a considerable amount of time and effort learning the ropes of the etymology game are understandably exercised when a latter-day Tacitus comes along with some nisht-geshtoygene confection or other. (If you have trouble with that, just remember the way you felt when someone totally unfamiliar with _your_ specialty reinvented the wheel.) 2. Are specialists never wrong then? A question! All the time. The history of scholarship is largely a history of controversy over errors large and small. But even if many of these arguments may seem to the outsider to repeat themselves in a sort of cycle (take the nature-nurture debates for instance) in fact the _grounds_ on which these matters are debated get more sophisticated from one cycle to the next and it therefore becomes increasingly hard for a non-specialist to wade in with something useful. Fact of life. In the 18th century it was possible for an autodidact like Benjamin Franklin to become one of the leading "electricians" (physicists) of his day. Obviously impossible now. Conversely, a very smart and very learned professor like Martin Bernal makes a fool of himself when he steps out of his field (_Black Athena_) and comes up with etymologies every bit as absurd as the ones recorded in Tanach or Herodotus. 3. Mendele an academic forum? Never. True, it began with a largely academic set of subscribers because, in 1990, few if any non-academics had access to Bitnet olev-hasholem or the early Internet, but that's not the same thing. Mendele has always been open to the lovers and students of Yiddish and I hope it always will be. 4. But: open to _all_ students. Which implies a civil reception for all, including grammarians and dialecticians. Mendele doesn't require that its writers be certificated intellectuals but it certainly prefers the writers of books to those who shun or burn books. Populist anti-intellectualism is cheap and demeaning, among Jews unthinkable. Surely we can live without it. 5. Finally, open to _all_ is not the same as open to _everything_. Mendele began as a place for the exchange of useful information and opinions. Never elitist, it has conscientiously shunned all mention of degrees, titles and assorted campaign ribbons. But it prefers quality to junk, seriousness to vulgarity, lively debate to whining. If that's elitist, so is the Forverts, Yugntruf, Afn Shvel, and just about everything else except for the shmates they sell in supermarkets. Noyekh Miller 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 11:50:23 EST From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: The nature of Mendele Herskovic and Fridhandler (et al, no doubt) both raise the issue of the nature of Mendele, both pointing out the obvious that this is 'not a scholar's list'. How true. However, both seem shocked that anyone might have ever thought such a thing and rhetorically ask 'Says who? Since when?', figuratively if not literally. Well, I must point out that this originally WAS, if not a 'scholar's list', at least a *serious* list -- that was its intent when it split off from Mail.yiddish (or whatever it was called -- sorry), which has since stopped operating, alas. To those who feel that it's perfectly fine to propose (or, nokh beser, state as fact) that some Yiddish word has this or that fantasized origin, may I ask if you would feel it equally fine to announce to a chemistry list that fire is produced by the movement of phlogiston? Or to announce to an astronomy list that the moon is made of green cheese? Or to announce to a classicist list that Latin is derived from Chinese? You may feel you are celebrating Yiddish with your exhuberance -- but one could argue that you are denigrating it by presuming that it, in contrast to all other human languages, takes neither training nor knowledge to explain its history and structure. And, for the record, contra Herskovic, I don't recall anyone ever criticizing anyone's *question* on Mendele -- it's the *assertions* that have induced the gagging. (And know that those who've gagged publicly are but a small percentage of those of us gagging privately.) The Internet is 'a free country' and anyone can post whatever s/he likes to an open list -- but those who are motivated by a desire for warm and fuzzy feelings and who are guided by Herskovic's sentiment that 'Ignorance is bliss' should not be surprised when some of the response is disgust. Ellen Prince 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 01:26:41 -0500 From: Dan Gilman Subject: Mayses/Maynses Once again, a question coming from my grandmother: Since she never learned to read Yiddish, my grandmother and others of her generation learned Yiddish only by ear, and didn't speak it very regularly, either. So, there are various minute errors in her pronunciation. Recently, she told me that she saw a program on TV called "Bobe-Mayses," and she was amazed to find out that there's no "nun" in mayse. Moreover, all her friends and peers of her age seem to share this misconception. Why do non-literate speakers think that "mayse" is pronounced "maynse?" Mit farlangen far a "Paks" Mendeleyaner :-), Dan Gilman 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:51:02 +0000 From: djust@mail.netvision.net.il Subject: Americanisms in Yiddish One frequently sees in Mendele attacks on anglicisms and americanisms in Yiddish. All languages, as far as I know, take from other languages, and considering the history of the Jews, it is easy to understand why Yiddish has taken more than most. Why are Americanisms caused by let's say, 20th century migrations to America somehow worse than slavicisms caused by late medieval migrations to Eastern Europe? I would also like to know by what miracles of electronics, chemistry and genetic engineering the idea of 'purity of language' (and prescriptive linguistics in general) has been preserved in its moribund state among Yiddishists long after other linguists have fed its decrepit corpse to the vultures. (I believe prescriptive linguistics is still being sponsored by certain government agencies, but that is obviously not the case here.) It is comforting to know that Mendele now has a psychiatric social worker. Thank you. David Jonathan Justman 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 06:39:20 EST From: RivkaLea@aol.com Subject: Mark Twain in Yiddish I want to thank everyone who sent me bibliographies of Mark Twain's books in Yiddish, which are available in university libraries. What I would like to do is BUY books. Though the National Yiddish Book Center once listed a few books, none have been available to purchase. Which I would still like to do, especially now that I know about Mr. Twain's sentiments on copyright (NYTimes Feb. 16). I have been presenting multi-lingual events for New Americans in Yiddish-English-Russian, and Mr. Twain is a favorite of the Russians. Living here in Missouri now, I thought a Twain event would be interesting. R. Lea Singer 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 07:50:10 -0500 From: justin.lewis@utoronto.ca Subject: Needed: Yiddish for "breastplate" What is the Yiddish word for the "breastplate" of a Sefer Torah? Weinreich is not much use for these religious matters... Yankev Lewis 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 06:59:39 -0700 (MST) From: diane wolfthal Subject: "shmok" and German art Mendele is for those interested in Yiddish Language and Literature, but sometimes a broader cultural view has something to add. Marvin Herzog recently wrote of the derivation for the word "shmok" (i.e. penis). There are medieval German poems that refer to the penis as a serpent or tail, but even more so are they equated in 16th century German art. Diane Wolfthal 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:32:44 -0500 From: ron@mlfarm.com (Ronald Florence) Subject: Swiss Yiddish A variation of ``Swiss Yiddish'': My dear aunt Jennie traveled often, as a tourist, from London to various corners of the world. When I asked what she ate (she kept kosher at home) and spoke on her travels, she explained her morphology of cuisines and languages. She recognized three major categories of cuisine: English, Jewish, and Chinese; French or Italian cooking were only sub-categories of ``English'' food. She did recognize the existence of many languages (``You never read about Bebel in the Bible?''), but claimed that English and Yiddish were all she needed to travel anywhere. When I asked about her most recent trip, to Switzerland, Aunt Jennie said that they served only English food, which was a problem for her, but that at least they spoke Yiddish. I said that as far as I knew there was very little Yiddish spoken in Switzerland, that the language she heard was a Swiss dialect of German. Aunt Jennie smiled at the naivete of an American graduate student. ``I didn't say they speak _good_ Yiddish.'' Ronald Florence Stonington, CT 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 11:47:16 -0500 (EST) From: "Gabriella S. Safran" Subject: nivroko In a short story by Isaak Babel, "El'ia Isaakovich i Margarita Prokof'evna," a Jewish character says "nivroko" several times. I haven't been able to find the word in any Russian dictionaries, but a friend from Kishinev says she's heard older Jews use it. It seems to mean the same thing as "kinahora" (or "ken ain-ha-ro") -- it's a formula used to avert the evil eye when one says something complimentary or optimistic. My questions, then: 1. Have any of you heard it used? Can you expand on its meaning or stylistic weight? 2. Any ideas about its derivation? I have some theories, but I fear they're pretty hare-brained. I'd love to hear other people'sthoughts. Thanks! Gabriella Safran ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 07.151 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