Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 75 October 3, 1991 1) Housekeeping (Noyekh Miller) 2) Gey in drerd (Aren Abramson) 3) YIVO rules (Bob Goldberg) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 02 Oct 91 From: nmiller@trincc Subject: Is the mail getting through? This question is (I think) primarily directed to subscribers who get their issues of Mendele via an Internet address. From time to time Internet mail bounces or fails to arrive. If you have reason to believe that such has happened to you, please let me know. I'm trying to get a better distribution system at this end. If you happen to have a Bitnet address, that would probably help matters. Please send it to me at your convenience. A dank. Noyekh 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 02 Oct 91 10:28:02 EST From: "Arthur S. Abramson" Subject: gey in drerd In a separate exchange, Bob Werman and I talked about his pronunciation of the expression above as /gey in dred/ rather than /...drerd/.I wonder whether this comes from English-speakers' suffering interference from English phonetics and not picking up on the Yiddish postvocalic /r/, probably a uvular trill, at least in some dialects. Does it also occur in the speech of native speakers of Yiddish? If so, the phenomenon here, perhaps for the English-speakers as well, could be dissimilation. That is, the two occurrences of /r/ flanking the vowel may be "too much," as it were, for some speakers, leading to the dropping of one of them. For those in the group unfamiliar with such things in language history, let me mention widespread pronunciations of "February" without, in this case, the first /r/. (The English /r/, of course, is phonetically different from the Yiddish /r/.) Thus it could be, if all this is plausible, that some Yiddish speakers would say /in dred/ but otherwise /erd/. I would Mikhl Herzog's reaction, as would Bob. Aren 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 2 Oct 91 14:50:11 PDT From: xidak!poseidon!bob@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Yiddish transliteration Few Yiddophiles (how's that for a mixture of languages?) that I've run into seem to be aware that there is a standard for transliteration from Yiddish into the English alphabet. Weinreich's Yiddish dictionary describes it. I'm fairly certain that it comes from YIVO. I find it difficult enough to translate non-standard Yiddish transliterations that I find myself skipping them, which seems to defeat the idea of this mailing list. I'd like to suggest that the editors publish the YIVO rules, as this might encourage readers to use it, and thus become contributors. ... Bob [A good idea. Any volunteers? NM] ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.75