Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 07.175 March 18, 1998 1) Yiddish/Russian h/g variation (A Manaster Ramer) 2) /h/ vs. /g/ in Yiddish toponyms (David Braun) 3) g and h (Ellen Prince) 4) g/h (Hugh Denman) 5) Why does Russian use G and not H? (Rick Turkel) 6) Why does Russian use G and not H? (Bob Hoberman) 7) kurve one last time (A Manaster Ramer) 8) kurve (Hugh Denman) 9) Yosef Guri's book (Morrie Feller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 19:19:00 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Yiddish/Russian h/g variation I do hate to disagree with Eliyahu Juni, but I must dissent from his proposal that: "The regular sound change involved, I think, is as follows: (Some) Slavic languages have (or had) a voiced H, while Yiddish has a voiceless H, but no voiced H. Yiddish speakers "heard" the voiced H (which is a guttural sound) as /g/ (which is a voiced sound made at the back of the mouth: same voicing, similar place of articulation), and thus used /g/ in place-names (and other words?) whose Slavic parallels had a voiced H. They could have just as well substituted a voiceless /h/ for the voiced H (same place of articulation, different voicing)--and sometimes did, resulting in double Yiddish place-names (e.g. Horodne/Grodne)." The fact is much simpler, namely, that Yiddish borrowed place names (including sometimes the SAME place name) from more than one Slavic language, namely, from Russian or Polish (which have 'g') as well as Ukrainian or Belorussian (which have 'h'). The example of Horodne/Grodne in fact proves this. Note that the two forms do not differ just in having 'h' or 'g', but also in having 'oro' vs. 'ro'. This is a dead giveaway. Polish has 'r' + vowel in words where Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian have vowel + 'r' + vowel as a very general rule (reflecting sound changes that took place a thousnad years ago give or take), e.g., Polish krowa 'cow' but Russian korova. There hundreds of such examples. Hence, Grodne is borrowed from Polish, while Horodne is from Ukrainian or Belorussian (since I dont remember where this town is I can't tell). A Manaster Ramer 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 22:06:15 EST From: David S Braun Subject: /h/ vs. /g/ in Yiddish toponyms Eliyahu Juni has said: "In most cases, Yiddish got its place-names from Russian (and other dominant languages), and not the other way around; the explanation required is for why Yiddish replaces /g/ with /h/ in words borrowed/acquired from Russian." The place names fraynd Fridhandler may be talking about are Belarussian and Ukrainian, in which case the Yiddish forms were probably taken directly from those languages. Those languages have /h/ and not /g/ for the alternation in question. (Chernigov, Drobogich, Gomel', Grodno, Gorodish, Nowogro'dek, etc. etc. all have or had /h/ and not /g/ in the local languages of the native Slavs.) David Braun Cambridge, MA 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 23:07:39 EST From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: g and h Re Eliayahu Juni's discussion of why Yiddish has /h/ in place-names where Russian has /g/ -- I doubt there's any sound change going on since we do not otherwise have g --> h (g turning into h) in Yiddish. What is, IMO, more plausible is that Yiddish took the place-names in question from Ukrainian or German (or Old Yiddish!) or some other language that hadn't switched /h/ to /g/. An interesting factoid I read once is that, after WW2, just about every Jew named _Hitler_ changed their name, whereas few Jews named _Gitler_ changed their name. Clearly, the sound change was long since over and these were perceived as two different names, just as are _Gerzog_ and _Herzog_ or _Gorevits_ and _Horowitz_ or _Halpern_ and _Galperin_, etc. (Goffman/Hoffman? Gersh/Hersh? Gelman/Hel(l)man? Geller/Heller? Are these also instances? What are others?) Ellen Prince 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 15:11:51 +0100 From: Hugh Denman Subject: g/h Why are we all making such heavy weather of this g/h issue? In essence it's as simple as this: East Slav has an isogloss dividing Belarussian and Ukrainian from (Great-)Russian. West of this line the phoneme represented by the fourth letter of the Cyrillic alphabet is realised as [h], east of the line as [g]. The precise phonetic realisation of both the putative Proto-ESlav phoneme and the divergent outcomes in the individual languages is interesting, but irrelevant. Native Slav words and toponyms have the appropriate pronunciation depending which side of the line they are encountered. Yiddish renders such words with gimel or hey depending where the borrowing takes place. As for the 'Gamburg'/'Gaml'et'-phenomenon, one needs only to reflect that written lexical items that travelled 'on foot' from the west swapped alphabets more or less where the railways change gauge and that the Cyrillic letter changed from [h] to [g] as it crossed the isogloss. More recently, when words travelled less ponderously, and Russians had an opportunity to hear the original sound they started transliterating it with the more closely approximating x (i.e. kh). Hugh Denman 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 12:12:15 -0500 From: rturkel@cas.org (Rick Turkel) Subject: Why does Russian use G and not H? Eliyahu Juni wrote in mendele 07.171: "In most cases, Yiddish got its place-names from Russian (and other dominant languages), and not the other way around; the explanation required is for why Yiddish replaces /g/ with /h/ in words borrowed/acquired from Russian." I'm not convinced that this is really the question that needs to be asked here. It's far more likely that those place names with /g/ were borrowed from Northern Russian or Polish, while those with /h/ came from Ukrainian, Belorussian, Southern Russian or possibly Slovak, all of which have no /g/ except in borrowed words. Of the languages in both of these groups which use the Cyrillic alphabet, the identical letter is used for both sounds, which alternate in native words. It seems to me that this is a far simpler and more reasonable explanation for this phenomenon than: "They could have just as well substituted a voiceless /h/ for the voiced H (same place of articulation, different voicing)--and sometimes did, resulting in double Yiddish place-names (e.g. Horodne/Grodne)." This latter is a perfect example. The -oro-/ro- alternation is typical of native Ukrainian vs. native Polish cognates. E.g., Ukr. horod (town) vs. Pol. gro'd (castle). Rick Turkel 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 14:06:09 -0500 (EST) From: "R. Hoberman" Subject: Why does Russian use G and not H? Eliyahu Juni pointed out the the original questions was about place names which vary between g and h within Yiddish. I suspect that the same place names vary between g and h even among non-Yiddish speakers. Say a place was in or near Belarus. Belorussian (how do you spell it nowadays?) has been described as having a gh sound -- like a voiced kh -- in words that have g in Russian and h in Ukrainian. So local Belarussians would say Ghlusk while Russians would say Glusk. Before the Soviet regime Belarussian was considered a substandard form of Russian. So would a Yiddish speaker say Hlusk or Khlusk to sound something like the local people's pronunciation of the name or Glusk to follow the Russian form? Maybe both. I wonder if names of villages and towns in which Jews had lived for centuries varied in Yiddish in the same way as did names of cities, in which Jews may not have lived long at all. Bob Hoberman 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 19:33:45 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: kurve one last time I am thrilled to hear from Ellen Prince about the Old Church Slavic attestation of this word, but methodologically I want to emphasize that even if we had no such information, the facts cited earlier by Meyer Wolf and in more detail by myself would be entirely sufficient to show that this canNOT be a borrowing from Hebrew into Yiddish. It is of paramount importance that we agree to treat Yiddish etymology, like that of any other language, as subject to the usual linguistic principles I alluded to earlier and not to merely look for words than subjectively seem to sound alike. The principle is and must be that there are correspondences between the sounds of an earlier and a later stage of a language as well as between a donor language (e.g. Hebrew) and a borrowing language (e.g., Yiddish) which hold true for large numbers of (ideally, for all) examples, and this is sufficient to make the Hebrew theory of kurve utterly impossible. I know that this emphasis on linguistic methods may bother a lot of people, but what we have here is exactly analogous to the situation in any science. Take biology. A whale may look like a fish but it just isn't one. Similarly kurve may look like some Hebrew word but it just isn't that word. Biologists have methods which allow them to determine what the real relations are and so do linguists, and the only difference is that nonspecialists are educated from a very young age to accept whatever biology (or any natural science) teaches (and usually on faith!) but are not taught to accept the results of linguistics (or of anthropology or a number of allied fields, though archeology for some reason IS more or less respected). I dont blame any one for this state of affairs, and I do not think people should acept linguistic results on faith, but we have to try to make it clear that there is a fundamental difference between real etymology and amateur etymology. I dont know how good a job I am doing of making this distinction clear, and I would certainly appreciate any help. A Manaster Ramer 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 16:36:49 +0100 From: Hugh Denman Subject: kurve I am afraid this topic must fast be developing into one of those tedious sagas of which fellow mendelyaner have so often complained, so in responding to fraynd Manaster Ramer [07.171:8] I will be as brief as possible. First, I would like to thank him for the item of information that 'kurve' is pronounced [kurve] in all dialects. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, this is negative evidence which proves nothing. Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree with him that we should strive to eschew volksetymologisch guesswork and aspire to some degree of scientific rigour in our discussion of matters of this ilk. However, let us look at some of the 'premises' that he adduces in his Euclidean QED. He tells us that 'kurve' cannot be derived from 'qurvah', since the expected outcome would be '*korbe'. Furthermore, he claims, a veyz is not possible in this position (pace all decent Hebrew dictionaries) and he seeks to demonstrate the logic of his argument by adducing the analogous case of 'Hurbah'. I won't attempt to enter into a discussion of principle, but the simple facts speak against him. Hebrew does have 'qurvah' with veyz, 'Hurvah' with veyz exists as a variant of 'Hurbah' with beyz and, as surely everyone knows, 'khurve' is the Yiddish outcome. Ellen Prince and Meyer-Leyb Wolf make a more interesting point by adducing Church Slavonic 'kuruva'. Assuming, however, that the not always totally reliable Skeat got this right, we have to remember that, however old OCSl may be, it was also remarkably pertinaceous, surviving in relatively active (as opposed to merely liturgical) use into the eighteenth century. [Even the polnoglasie could, after all, be a back-formation!] The fact that a language has a word does not necessarily imply that it had that word ab initio. And if this is indeed the origin, it is remarkable that Slavist etymologians don't say so. All this having been said, I AM NOT trying to prove a H/A etymology, simply pointing out that the candidacy of such a derivation continues to stand. Wovon man nichts weiss, sollte man schweigen. Hugh Denman 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 17:53:26 -1000 From: feller@indirect.com (Morris Feller) Subject: Yosef Guri's book In response to Bernard Katz (07.172), my entire leyenkrayz bought Yosef Guri's "1,000 Yiddish Idioms". It took two months to get it from Israel, but it was well worth the wait. We were all thrilled with the beautiful way the book is put together, and we laughed at the many humorous drawings. We found the idioms to be truly enjoyable. This book is a real gem. Buy it! Morrie Feller Phoenix ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 07.175 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