Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 107 November 21, 1991 1) Khali, ayin, sissel bread (Berl Hoberman) 2) Nasalization (Fred Van Doren) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1991 15:11 EST From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Khali, ayin, sissel bread Here are some inconclusive comments about several interesting topics that have come up recently in Mendele. (1) khali. My Litvak grandfather pronounced many, maybe all, of the words that have final unstressed -e in other dialects with -i. He's been gone several years now, but I'm quite confident about khali, kali, khaneki, matsi, meydeli, meyshi (Moshe). He called my daughter Sarah soreli. I don't think it was merely a slightly higher and fronter [e] than in other dialects, and had crossed the English perceptual boundary to English -i. It was well within the range of Yiddish /i/ as in /mit/ 'with' and /vi/ 'how'. (2) Hebrew ayin. If not for Khaim Bochner's mention of yandes and bansher, in which Yiddish has /n/ where Hebrew has hey or alef plus khatef patakh, I too would have thought the /n/ in Yankev, ma:nse had something to do with ancient Hebrew ayin. Nowadays phoneticians can drop little fiber-optic TV lenses into the back of your throat to watch you pronounce things from the inside (Ameriki ganef, my zeydi used to say). They've demonstrated that in pronouncing a pharyngeal ayin as in Arabic or Middle Eastern Hebrew the back of the tongue retracts, narrowing the pharynx, and also the epiglottis tilts down to partially close the pharynx. It seems to me that speakers could have accompanied or replaced this with a gesture that is articulatorily not too different: tilting down the velum (soft palate) allowing air to pass from the pharynx into the nose, producing a nasalized vowel. (3) Sissel bread. Here's a wild guess. Yesterday my aunt gave us some special seeds for our bird feeder. The package was marked Niger, but she mentioned they are in fact ... THISTLE! They're small and black, but I don't know whether they're edible by humans. Incidentally, she and her husband, both from New York, but one a Litvak and the other a Galitsyaner, remember bread and rolls with what they pronounce as tsharnetshkes, but which other people called, in a near-perfect calque, "little black seeds". She can't say whether they were the same as the bird seeds. By the way, a friend mentions that sissel bread was sold 15-20 years ago in Newton, Mass. Berl 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1991 From: vandoren@dickinsn.bitnet Subject: Nasalization A thought on nasalization. All the examples you cite could be due to regressive assimilation. I don't know the original forms, but "s" and "d" are both dental consonants. Whatever originally preceded them may have assimilated that dental quality, yielding "n". That might explain "manse" or "yandes". The example "Yankev", presumably from "Yaakov" could involve assimilation of a velar quality: i.e. "k" to "ng" (written "n"). Do you say "Ya[N]kev" or "Ya[NG]kev"? Don't know about "bansher". Perhaps the "n" there was a gutteral variant. Fred. ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.107