Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 116 November 26, 1991 1) Negative concord (berl Hoberman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1991 10:46 EST From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Negative concord I think it was William Labov who pointed out that every variety of English that has ever existed anywhere, except one, has had negative concord. The exception is, of course, modern standard English. This is an exception simply because Latin's lack of negative concord was imposed on English by 17th-18th century grammar teachers. Among the languages which require negative concord are Russian, modern Hebrew, and to some extent French, so Yiddish is in good company. For example: /shum yeled lo akhal levivot/ means 'No child ate latkes'. No Hebrew speaker would say or write */shum yeled akhal levivot/, and if a learner of the language said that I think the result would be puzzlement: "So did anyone eat or didn't they?" (Note that /shum yeled/ is really negative: Who ate latkes? Shum yeled. 'No child.') Further: /SHUM yeled AF paam LO akhal levivot be-SHUM mesiba/ 'No child ever ate latkes at any party.' Or, Have you every been to Eilat? Af paam lo. 'Never, keyn mol nisht.' All perfectly familiar to Yiddish speakers. I don't know when all this came into Hebrew. I'm pretty sure Biblical Hebrew does not have negative concord. It might very well be due to Yiddish influence. I don't have my copy of Haim Blanc's article "Some Yiddish Influences on Israeli Hebrew" from The Field of Yiddish at hand. One minor detail: /yeled lo akhal levivot/ means there is a particular boy who didn't eat latkes, but /ish lo akhal levivot/ means 'No one ate latkes'. /ish/ is a negative word in such contexts, and does not imply necessarily male, either. (If you said /ish lo akhal levivot/ when no man but several women had eaten latkes, hearers would assume you were pulling their legs.) But /adam/ 'a person' and /isha/ 'a woman' work like /yeled/: to say 'no woman ate latkes' you must have /af/ or /shum/: /shum isha lo akhla levivot/. Is there anything like this in Yiddish? Thanks, Ellen, for your interesting points about the specific/nonspecific contrast with /keyn/. I'll have to try it out in Hebrew. Berl/Bob Hoberman State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355 516-632-7462, -7460 ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.116