Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 177 February 19, 1992 1) Klafte (Yude-Leyb Proger) 2) Style-switching (Meylekh Viswanath) 3) Ideology and orthography (David Neal Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 18 Feb 92 08:41:19 IST From: LEN Subject: KLAFTE I have already learned that _klafte_ is from Western Yiddish, but its sense there is more playful than in present- day Israeli "slang" (i.e. informal Hebrew) -- a Yeke I know tells me that Paula Ben-Gurion was the perfect _klafte_ and that you could tell someone "Don't be a klafte" without offense. The word is cited in a Nassau glossary by Frank as used by the rural Jews to mean 'boese Weib', yet Uriel Weinreich says somewhere that Alsace and other rural Jews used _klafte_ as a term for 'mare'. The word seems to have been created in Western Yiddish and exported eastward. Is there a similar word in Aramaic? Why did the _klafte_ form win out over the more paradigmatic _kelefke_? Apparently in Yiddish if you meant _bitch_ in a mean way you used _kalbe_ or _arure_ and _klafte_ was addressed to women who henpecked their husbands. Was there perhaps a diminution in the playfulness of the meaning as the word moved East, just as it is less playful in today's Israeli slang? My wife and daughter assure me that there are _klaftes_ and that they exist because a male-dominated society doesn't allow women the outlets of aggression available to males, which is why you get their devious, sneaky patterns of nastiness. A South-African friend tells me that in her Yiddish in So Afr. a _klafte_ was perhaps mean but not nasty, which again reminds one that words -- dictionary meanings notwithstanding -- mean different things to different people. Incidentally, the fact that I was asked by a local paper to say something about _klafte_ for an "entertaining" article again points to the widespread stereotype of Yiddish as ludic. Yude-Leyb Proger 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1992 16:54 EDT From: VISWANATH@DRACO.BITNET Subject: Re: Mendele Vol 1.172 >IS IT TRUE THAT THERE ARE YIDDISH-SPEAKING ORTHODOX JEWS >WHO AVOID USING WORDS OF HEBREW-ARAMAIC ORIGIN IN >CERTAIN PLACES OR SITUATIONS? > >Very Orthodox Jews in Ashkenaz 2 (and 3?) tried to avoid >words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin while in the bathhouse, a >place of lower order (compared to home or synagog or >mikve), as evidenced in the fact that it had no mezuza on >its door. Devoted as it was to physical hygiene, to >washing the _body_, it might aid in achieving holiness but >was not in itself a sanctified or sanctifiable place. Thus >an Orthodox Jew would avoid speaking the word _Shabos_ or >{Yiddish} _shabes_ 'Sabbath' on Friday afternoons when in >the _bod_ 'bathhouse', but referred instead to _der >zibeter_ 'the seventh (day)' (a case of style-switching). > I don't know about Orthodox Jews in Ashkenaz 2, but I for one do feel strange about using some words in the bathroom. e.g. sholem is supposed to be name of Hashem and so I avoid saying sholem aleykhem. I feel similarly about git shabes, although I don't have any defensible reason for that. I suspect that there may be other such people. So your hypothesis regarding Ashkenaz 3 is quite reasonable. (I presume that's what your 'and 3?' meant.) Meylekh 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 18 Feb 92 18:23:59 EST From: David Neal Miller Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.172 Why "mezuza" and "mezuzot" in L.P.'s posting to _Mendele_ 1:172? Is it not bowing to Hebraist hegemonism to privilege transcription from modern Hebrew? Vaynraykh has "mezuzah" (pp. 203, 553); I prefer "mezuze" (i.e. the standard romanization), italicized. "Mezuza" (sing.) is, I suppose, unmarked, hence unexceptionable, but "mezuzot" is a political statement conceding the "translatability" of modern standard Hebrew, but not of modern standard Yiddish. "Mezuzahs" makes of the item something Anglo-American, "mezuzes" something Yiddish, "mezuzos" (written thus in a local Chabad publication) something Ashkenazic, "mezuzot" something Israeli. Orthography, here as so frequently elsewhere, bespeaks ideology. David Neal Miller ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.177