Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 103 November, 1991 1) Dialects in America (Ellen Prince) 2) Sitnik (Victor Bers) 3) Nasalization (Mikhl Herzog) 4) Koyletch (Bob Rothstein) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 12:02:01 EST From: Ellen Prince Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.101 on khali/bubi/..., harry bochner writes: >From: bochner@das.harvard.edu >Subject: RE: "holly bread", etc. >Ok, now speculation. Mike Alpert, who grew up in the Boston >suburbs, commented on this to me once. Summarizing with a >linguist's terminology, he says that in Litvishe dialects >final -e is higher and more front than in most other Y >dialect areas (this sounded convincing when he >demonstrated). And he claims that the Boston area has a >high proportion of Litvaks. So the idea would be that the >litvish pronunciation of -e crosses some perceptual >boundary for English speakers, such that it gets perceived >as "ie" rather than the "uh" that -e otherwise gets >anglicized as. In places where the proportion of Litvaks is >high enough, this could influence the local patterns of >anglicization, even for speakers not of litvish background. >(And vice versa.) > >And the puzzling word by word distribution could result >from anglicized pronunciations being borrowed from >neighborhood to neighborhood. > >BUT I don't know how many of the premisses of this >explanation hold up. great. so i'm supposed to believe that boston yinglish influenced brooklyn yinglish?! we should live so long... (and there were not a high proportion of litvaks in brooklyn, that i know of. the fancy jews were german and of course didn't speak yiddish.) also, if it's litvak in origin, it should be babi or bobi, never bubi, which is what it was. the mystery remains... 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 12:38 EDT From: VBERS@YALEVM.BITNET Subject: "Sitnik" A question on the grenitz of language and cuisine that I hope Mendele might accommodate: My parents speak of a mechayeh of a bread they used to eat in Riga called "sitnik." Can anyone tell me what this is/was? Best would be a recipe, of course, or reference to one. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 13:12 EST From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.101 Re: nasalization: the exception to the sequence patah--hataph-patah as the explanation for nasalization is th word "daanges/daynges" 'worries'. There still remains the issue of Sephardic nasalization of ayin which yields 'ngayin' for the name of the letter itself (in Holland, for example), as well as forms like 'yetser harang', etc. (see Primo Levi, for example, in the Periodic Table). Dutch Yiddish also sports words like 'neshires', 'nevejre' alonside their Ashkenazic Hebrew equivalents: 'neveyrO' etc. These probably differ from modern Eastern Yiddish 'a neveyre', etc. which probably derive by metanalysis from 'an aveyre'. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Nov 91 00:19:02 -0500 From: ROBERT.ROTHSTEIN@SLAVIC.umass.edu Subject: Reply to Mendele Vol 1.102 In re koyletsh: The Polish word kolacz mentioned by Margaret Mikulska has its counterparts elsewhere in Slavic (e.g. Russian kalach, a specially shaped white wheat bread; Slovak kolac [with a hacek, as in Dvorak, over the c], which is the generic term for cake). But it's the Ukrainian kolach, which can refer to white bread in general, that probably brings us closer to Yiddish koyletsh. Note the following from the original Mendele's "Di alte mayse" (cited in M. Kosover's article in the Yuda A. Yofe-bukh, p. 125): "Dervayl, in dem groysn tararam, kumt grod eyner a melamed fun yene vayte mekoymes dort ergets in Volin ... un varft arayn in dem shmues fremde, volinishe verter. Anshtot [...] 'krupnik' -- 'kolish', un 'kitke' heyst bay im 'koyletsh'." (Kosover has a lot more, including citations from Rashi, but I don't have the time--or enough Hebrew--to summarize it. In a 1947 article (Yidish shprakh 7:74) on Lithuanian Yiddish vocabulary, L. Feinberg defines kitke as "a geflokhtene khale, vos der ukrainer [yid] ruft on koyletsh." In his Lithuanian dialect koyletsh is the name for "a bonde [?], ongefilt mit hakfleysh oder lung, un gebakn in shmalts. Es vert gegesn mit yoykh. Kon oykh gemakht vern mit kez un gebakn in puter." Bob ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.103