Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 08.018 June 22, 1998 1) pamelekh: fun vanen? (Refoyl finkl) 2) a shande und a bisheh (Alex Rosenblum) 3) "khorbene" (Yosef Gilboa) 4) Yiddish Goes West (fishl kutner) 5) Yiddish names (Bob Hoberman) 6) Yiddish via e-mail (Morrie Feller) 7) izn iz er (Ellen Prince) 8) Ganef (Yosef Gilboa) 9) mezuze (Peter Gutmann) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 22:52:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Raphael Finkel Subject: pamelekh: fun vanen? fun vanen shtamt dos vort "pamelekh", vos meynt "pavolye", "nit gikh", "langzam"? tsi ken men oykh zogn "pamelekhlekh"? Refoyl finkl 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 17:52:06 -0400 (EDT) From: ASR4749@aol.com Subject: a shanda und a kharpe ; a shande und a bisheh As a student in the Peretz Shule in Montreal in the late fifties, Lehrer Shtern would occasionally call upon me to iberteich a few sentences in the T'nakh from Hebrew to Yiddish. Never a scholar in any language, I would plod my way through a line or two. Usually, Lehrer Shtern would look to dei himlen and mutter, " A shanda und a kharpe, a yiddisher bokher zol redden Yiddish mit a goyeshin kop." If my iberteichen was particularly poor, his mutterings would include, "A shanda und a bisheh!" Almost 40 years later, I ask for an explanation and a comparison of two expressions which still bring back fond memories. Alex Rosenblum Brooklyn, NY 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 04:27:50 -0400 (EDT) From: AJ Gilboa Subject: "khorbene" Feivel Halpern writes: "I recall hearing " a khorbene shanda", which refers to a "khorben", the Hebrew word for "sacrifice"". Not likely that "khorbene" is derived from "korban=sacrifice". A better guess is "hurban (het resh bet nun)=destruction" Yosef Gilboa 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 08:21:53 -0400 (EDT) From: "Philip \"Fishl\" Kutner" Subject: Yiddish Goes West Choices to attend a Yiddish conference, seminar or institute, only a few years ago, was very limited. Mendele's list has grown from a small number, and as the year 2000 approaches, having our numbers match that of 2 millennia is a real possibility. This growth has been true not only in the U.S., but in Canada, Eastern Europe, and Israel as well. Each gathering has specialties to attract attendees from afar. Earlier this year we read about Yiddish Goes West. It is the first time that The International Association of Yiddish Clubs will be having its Conference on the West Coast. It is the first time that this area will showcase the very best of the West with favorite presenters from Canada and the East. From August 27-30, this summer, the beautiful Conference Center on the campus of UCLA will be the site of this Conference You will be able to select 8 seminars/workshops from among this group and presented by 30 specialists. A New Yiddishism for the 21st Century A Slide Show of the Life of Sholem Aleichem A Walk Through the Shtetl in Song Afro-Americans in Yiddish Literature Der zeyde mendele Developing Materials for Yiddish Clubs, Classes, & Leyenkrayzn Di geshikhte fun yidish in amerike Di shpilers Dos ort fun hebreyishe verter in di yidishe shprakh Highlights of the Yiddish Theater Marketing Yiddish Culture Moishe Nadir: Yiddish Word Creator Nayntsik Yor Nokh Tsernovits NYBC Educational Projects One-Hundred Years of the Bund One-Thousand Years of Yiddish History Peretz: Rebel-Romantic-Realist Programming Our Vinkl Read Yiddish in One Session Sam Lipson: His Life and Works Sholem Asch: How Jewish Was He? The History of Jewish Music The Molly Picon Lecture The Poetry of Avrom Sutzkever The Unknown Sholem Aleichem The Wonderful World of Yiddish Use of "Transliteration" in Storytelling Y. L. Peretz: moderner yidisher literatur Yiddish for bobe-zeyde for Pre-Schoolers Yiddish on the Web Yiddish Proverbs Yiddish Writers Who Should be Better Known Every evening there will be entirely different entertainers. Readers of der bay have been following the monthly updates. For an application online or more information contact Mel Rogow, Conference Co-ordinator, at mrogow@loop.com or fishl at fishl@WELL.COM fishl kutner San Mateo, CA 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 10:02:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "R. Hoberman" Subject: Yiddish names Rella Cohn's University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, completed four or five years ago, is on Yiddish names: their various forms, nicknames, etc., and their etymologies. If I remember correctly, it lists all Yiddish names known to have been used within the last couple of hundred years, both rare and common ones. I have a copy, though not at hand right now; if anyone's interested, I can supply the title, date, etc. Bob Hoberman 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 15:02:41 -0400 (EDT) From: feller@indirect.com (Morris Feller) Subject: Yiddish via e-mail I am pretty excited about a way of sending and receiving e-mail in real Yiddish. It was Noyekh Miller who pointed me in the right direction, and it is all made possible by that wonderful Yiddish Typewriter which Refoyl Finkl has on the Web. Here is how it works: (1) Access the Yiddish Typewriter on the Web. (2) Type your message in transcription. (3) Choose PDF as the transcriber. Save the message on your hard disk. (4) Open up the message with Adobe Reader, and save in the Adobe file as PDF. (5) Send the message as an attachment. (6) The recipient opens the message with his Adobe Reader. I know this may sound complicated, but it is really quite straightforward once you get the hang of it. Since the Adobe Reader can be downloaded from the Web for free, and access to the Yiddish Typewriter is also free, there is no reason for not being able to carry out this communication in Yiddish. I have sent a short Yiddish message to Yankl Halpern in Japan, and to Leybl Botwinik in Israel using this procedure. Both of them were able to read it with no difficulty. So anybody and everybody can correspond in Yiddish no matter where in the world they are! Morrie Feller Phoenix 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 23:23:41 -0400 (EDT) From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: izn iz er... In response to Mikhl Herzog and Serge Mitelman (and _pace_ Elke Falkovich), there's no real evidence that I know of that you ever get a real infinitive in first position. The cases where it *appears* that you do, e.g. _Tantsn, tants ikh nit_, are simply cases where the verb is regular and where the infinitive = stem + (e)n. And in fact this description -- stem + (e)n -- can account not only for the regular verbs but also all the irregular ones, e.g. _Veysn, veys ikh gornit_, _Veln, vel ikh nit_... True enough, in *writing* one finds genuine irregular infinitives, e.g. _Zayn, iz er a kabtsn_ -- but this could be a self-conscious hypercorrection as it does not appear to occur in spontaneous discourse. Moreover, I had a wonderful exchange with a Yiddish speaker who was a Central Yiddish speaker (Karpato-Rus). I gave him a bunch of simple sentences like _Ikh zing nit_ and asked him to change them into the _Zingen zing ikh nit_ form. In the middle of the lot, I gave him _Ikh hob gornit_. And he instantly replied, _Hobn [hobn] hob ikh gornit [gurnisht]_. Note the form [hobn] -- speakers of this dialect categorically have [o] in the forms of the present tense [hob, host, hot, hobn, hot, hobn] but equally categorically pronounce the *infinitive* as [hubn], e.g. Zolst du nakhes hobn fun dayne kinder = [zolsti nakhes hubn fin da:ne kinde(r)]. Ok, so I asked him to repeat it and he did and finally I asked him whether it would also be ok to say '[hubn] hob ikh gornisht', i.e. with the genuine CY infinitive. He pondered it a few moments and then replied, 'Neyn, that sentence you have to say like a Litvak.' :-) Therefore I conclude that, in the grammar in at least one Yiddish speaker's head, sentences of the form _Zingen zing ikh nit_ do *not* involve genuine infinitives but rather a copy of the stem of the finite verb in the clause with the infinitive ending added -- which of course is identical to the genuine infinitive in the case of regular verbs but which is quite different with the irregular ones. As for the origin, there's the possible source in Hebrew, which Mikhl noted. However, there is also a not-too-different construction in Swedish, where the finite verb phrase is fronted and a finite pro-verb is left in its original site (e.g. _La"ser boken go"r han nu_ 'Reads the-book does he now'). While not too similar in appearance, the Swedish and Yiddish cases are quite similar structurally, since both seem to involve copying a finite verb into initial position -- Swedish copying the whole thing and Yiddish copying merely its stem and adding the ending of the infinitive. (And both are killers, for the same reasons, for most current syntactic theories!) If anyone's interested, there's a 1988 paper by Gunnel Ka"llgren and me comparing the Yiddish and Swedish constructions that's downloadable from my Web page (http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen/home.html). Also, I must add that the West African language Kru has something almost identical to the Yiddish form! -- but I don't claim any influence in either direction. ;) Ellen Prince 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 04:24:40 -0400 (EDT) From: AJ Gilboa Subject: Ganef All this discussion about "ganef" reminds me of something that I saw (over twenty years ago) in a Swiss-language weekly newspaper published in Zurich. (Swiss German is rarely written, so this newspaper is itself an oddity). There was a headline about a robbery in which the thieves were referred to as "ganovim" (sic!). Using the Hebrew plural as in proper Yiddish makes it crystal clear how this word got into Zuercherdeutsch. Yosef Gilboa 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 12:43:47 -0400 (EDT) From: gutmann peter <97111001@brookes.ac.uk> Subject: mezuze In Mendele 08.011, A. M. Ramer asks about an Eastern Yiddish usage of "mezuze" as "a girl who is too free with her favors", stating that there is such a usage in Western Yiddish dialects. I am a bit puzzled about that and would appreciate any reference to an entry of "mezuze" with this meaning in a Yiddish dictionary. So far as I know, "mezuze" is used in Yiddish only in its original meaning. However, the word has been adopted into Rotwelsch, the secret vocabulary of German speaking thieves and fences (dating from the 19th). Salcia Landman writes in her _Jiddisch: Das Abenteuer einer Sprache_ (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1988): "Mesuse: (Im Jid. ausschliesslich gebraeuchlich fuer die kleine Kapsel mit dem Ausschnitt aus dem Deuteronomium [...]" [Mezuze: (In Yid. only used for the small capsula with the extract from Deuteronomy]; and cf. as well Siegmund A. Wolf's _Woerterbuch des Rotwelschen. Deutsche Gaunersprache_ (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1956), word no. 3573, where he gives Yid., meaning only the 'capsula', as the source for Rotwelsch. Like many borrowings from Yiddish (Rotwelsch consists only of borrowings, mainly from Yiddish, German dialects and Romani-languages), "mezuze" has undergone a ridiculing (blasphemous) change in meaning. Some (if not many) Rotwelsch-terms have then been adopted into colloquial German (the secret terms had only a short life as such, for as soon as they had been decoded, they were of no use to the criminals any more; but, especially as complex idioms and phrases, they could be and have been an enrichment for modern German). Unfortunately, the ethymology you encounter mostly for the now-German words is unjust towards Yiddish: It acknowledges the Yiddish origin of the `word', but implies the (corrupted, ridiculing) Rotwelsch-meaning into it, thus doing great harm to the reputation of Yiddish with many Germanisten. To the second question: According to Landman (op cit), you first touch the mezuze and then the lips. Peter Gutmann ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 08.018 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