Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 204 April 1, 1992 1) Hebrew's career (Meylekh Viswanath) 2) 'Matri'/Wexler (Zev Bar-Lev) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1992 11:57 EDT From: VISWANATH%DRACO.BITNET@YALEVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.202 ellen prince's reply to my query: > >[Meylekh Viswanath writes:] > >>...Also, I have heard that on the >>basis of syntax, modern Hebrew seems to be turning >>Indo-european (e.g. the relative lack of usage of smikhut >>forms, as opposed to 'x shel y', as in the book of the boy, >>in English). >>Meylekh > >please note that this change would be morphological, not >syntactic, since np -> np pp was always grammatical in >hebrew. (i.e. a noun phrase consisting of a noun phrase and >a prepositional phrase.) > Good point. > >in addition, a language cannot 'turn >indo-european'--indo-european is a genetic classification. >a language can come to look more like an indo-european lg >than like another type of language, which is frequently the >case where there is significant language contact, >(actually, one of the most famous examples of this is in >your native language! i'm thinking of emeneau's stuff on >dravidian/indic constituting a 'linguistic area' with >certain common features.) but a language cannot 'become' >indo-european. the issue with wexler's claims is whether >hebrew IS indo-european, genetically, not whether it has >borrowed certain elements from indo-european. Pardon my imprecise language. In any case, I'm still waiting for further comments on this theory(?) that Hebrew is "becoming" Indo-European (using the term as convenient short-hand for your more precise phraseology). Given your comments re the influence of french on middle english, would it be more accurate to say that hebrew is "becoming" more romance? I could sort of hypothesize why hebrew, arabic, japanese or any other language would be becoming more 'english-like' but why romance-like (or french-like)? meylekh 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 1 Apr 92 09:02:36 -0800 From: zbarlev@sciences.sdsu.edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.202 since someone asked, i hasten to translate: russian _(idi) k yabinoy materi_ means "(go) to the [qri: your] f*cken mother" (yabini"y being a passive participle of the verbal root which is also heard in russian _yap_ "f*ck". ellen prince is totally correct: the roots of the shel construction in hebrew are found in biblical le- as a possessive (e.g. mizor le-david), with the help of asher, shortened to she- as early as the mishna. arabic has also developed such a "periphrastic possessive" with mal "property", or beta"- (whose original meaning i've forgotten if there was one), e.g. el-bayt mali "the house of-me". personal nouns so far resist this construction -- but the original suffixed form of these persists in hebrew too: bni, biti, etc., are less literary than beti, susi, ??mekhoniti. arabic shows few other signs of indo-european-ification. i don't know what wexler is saying, but arabic for ex. preserves a tolerance for "non- aristotelian sets" such as "people and children", and also non-chronological conjunction, as "mohammed came and the arabs were in the dark" (meaning, pragmatically, they were in the dark before he came). older hebrew has equivalents. E.g. "ma nishtana ha-layla ... mi-kol ha- lelot" (from the point of view of english and modern hebrew, it sounds better with "from other nights"); and "ve-atem yeda'tem et nefesh ha-ger" meaning "because you know ... (as a result of your knowing ...)", and other examples. (if anyone wants more, i've published a few articles on these and related issues.) Zev Bar-Lev ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.204 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.