Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 196 March 26, 1992 1) Housekeeping (Noyekh Miller) 2) Purim echo (David Sherman) 3) Ultramontane bialys (Tom Wasow) 4) Hebrew Yiddish/psycholinguistics (David Sherman) 5) Recorded Yiddish music (Itzik Finger) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 09:08 EST From: NMILLER%TRINCC.BITNET@YALEVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: More housekeeping Two items: 1. Recent mail says that a lot of Mendele's readers have been shortchanged in recent weeks due to erratic deliveries, etc. When everything is in place you will have two options: 1) retrieve missing issues directly from Yale, or 2) get them from the shames in the usual way. HOWEVER, the first option has not yet been installed. So if you're missing back numbers, write to the shames. 2. I would like to suggest a departure from the standard way of running Listserv lists. In Mendele's case, messages to the list aren't distributed directly to the readers; first they get bounced back to the shames/editor and only then distributed. There's no good reason why time and resources should be thus wasted when you could, as heretore, send your material directly to Mendele. So let's do it that way. Details at the end of this issue. Noyekh Of course, if you _insist_ on using Yale, makhtese. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 11:39:12 EST From: dave%lsuc.on.ca@YALEVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.192 Dovid Braun writes: > homen hot gevolt di yidn umbrengen > hot er zikh geton aleyn ufhengen > iz af di yidn geven a tsore > iz er aleyn gevorn di kapore This is what we sing (Simone learned it from her parents, but our kids know it now): homen hot gevolt di yidn umbrengn hot er zikh aleyn ofgehongn aleyn is er geven a kapore oy, iz dos a gesrukhe! [gesrukhe = bad smell] 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 9:15:57 PST From: Tom Wasow Subject: bialys west of the Hudson There is a bagel bakery here in Palo Alto that makes bialys (and I'll bet there are many in Los Angeles). Tom Wasow 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 12:19:57 EST From: dave%lsuc.on.ca@YALEVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.193 [Yude-Leyb Proger (Vol 1.190) writes:] > Jews often used "targum-loshn" to make it > impossible for gentiles -- who would understand the > Germanic component of Yiddish -- to grasp what they were > saying. I once heard Sam Norich telling the anectode of some Jews in Russia who needed to communicate with the local authority (police officer, whatever) about some crime that had been committed. But they didn't speak Russian, so they found a Russian who spoke German. Then one of the Jews begins telling the story of what happened -- and (as Norich told it) it came out with a wonderful collection of Hebrew-based words that would make it totally incomprehensible to a German-speaker. I'm afraid I don't have the vocabulary to generate this stuff. In the interests of improving our Yiddish (for some of us, anyway), can someone come up with a couple of examples? (A paragraph or a short story, not just a phrase or two -- I can manage that much.) I guess if you stretch it, just about any Germanic-based word can be replaced with a Hebrew-origin word. ************** Dovid Braun writes (re "Jew", "tshu", etc.): > Somehow I feel > the combination evokes something in English which _Joe_, > _cat_, or _negotiate_ don't. Something foreign, something > marked, something je ne sais quoi. I've learned to be wary of the assumption that the sounds that make up a word convey any particular associations. It's tempting, of course. Consider the English expletive f--k, which is (once you know what it means) the epitome of a "hard-hitting" word; and the phonetics seem to back up this perception. But do the phonetics really lead to certain connotations? Or does the meaning that we know the word has *result* in our associating certain characteristics with the sounds? I've tried to watch my own reactions to this phenomenon, and have an interesting data point. I'm fluent in Portuguese, having lived in Brazil from age 10 to age 12. Since I returned (1970), I've used it on and off, but only in casual conversation; so my vocabulary remained at the level of a 12-year-old. (This may sound familiar to some Yiddish speakers...) A few months ago I began reading a Brazilian newsmagazine (called VEJA -- quite similar to TIME magazine) fairly regularly. In the process I've learned the word for "rape", which is "estupro". (Having left Brazil at age 12, it never entered by vocabulary.) My first reaction on running into the word, when I realized what it meant, was "gee, that's a relatively `calm' and `meandering' phonetic sequence for a word like that". (I hope you understand what I mean here -- it's hard to put it into words.) After all, this is another word where the English is a hard-hitting, single-syllable, Anglo-Saxon word. Over the months, however, I've now come to be influenced by the meaning of the word, and "estupro" now comes across as a "nasty" or "hard-hitting" word, even just in the phonetics. Reactions to the phonetics of words are certainly in the eye (or ear) of the beholder. Do the linguists on the list have any comments on this issue? (Or are we straying too far from Yiddish?) David Sherman 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 08:53:23 PST From: jfinger@adobe.COM Subject: Yiddish Recorded Music Yes, I was referring to 4 cassettes that had been copied a number of times. Sorry for the confusion. >> I just received the Arbeiter Ring's most recent Jewish >> music catalogue and am astounded at the collection of >> recordings they've assembled. >> Sholem Ruveyn (Sheldon Benjamin) Could you let us know how to get the Arbeiter Ring's catalog? Many thanks, -- Itzik -- ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.196 If you wish to send something to Mendele's readers, write to: mendele@trincc or mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu If you have technical problems or simply want to have a private shmuess with the shames, write to: nmiller@trincc or nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu