Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 206 April 6, 1992 1) Introduction (Henry Breitrose) 2) Please and ay/aa (Brett Kessler) 3) Introduction (Dorota Szafranska) 4) 'The song' (Vicki Fromkin) 5) Introduction (Ira Robinson) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Apr 92 15:40:18 PST From: hbreit%leland.stanford.edu@YALEVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: Introduction I'm a new subscriber to MENDELE, and every issue git mir a tzitter un iz fahr mir a machiah. My problem is that I learned Yiddish as a child and have never seen it transliterated from the Hebrew orthography, as can be seen from the above attempt. Until BITNET/INTERNET acquires a Yiddishe Kop, where do I find the appropriate rules about transliteration. -Henry Breitrose Department of Communication Stanford 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Apr 92 19:03:41 -0800 From: Brett Kessler Subject: please and ay/aa In re Zev Bar-Lev's questions: > Is _ish > bet_ ever used to request something, and/or that someone do > something? Sure, "ikh bet dikh" can be used for "please". > (2) Is the diphthong _ai_ always contractable to _aa_ (long > _a_), in those dialects that have this change? I've seen a > whole bunch of these _aa_ (i see much more yiddish in > transcription than i hear), but don't know if those who do > it, do it all the time. E.g. I know a lot of people say > _zaa gezint_, but do _vaan_ and _flaash_ (for "wine" and > "meat") occur as well? In other words, is this across-the- > board sound-correspondance? That's a fair approximation. I think some dialects are more likely to preserve the y-glide word-finally, but that's a detail. One could also cite a few words where the -y- is originally intervocalic; words like "khayel" sound rather like "khayl" even in the southern dialects. "fleysh" of course is a different matter; words pronounced "ey" in Yivo-loshn are "ay" (flaysh) most places in the south. To make things interesting, *some* of these "ey" words, "fleysh" among them, are pronounced "aa" in West Yiddish (e.g., Germany, etc.), but the correspondences are more complicated (it works only of the MHG was "ei"). Ikh hob fargesn tsu dermonen dem vikhtikstn yoytse min haklal tsu reb Zevs oyfdekung: Any word borrowed in relatively recent times from a foreign language will keep the /ay/ sound in all the dialects: words like 'may' (the month) and 'pay' (the food) would be pronounced /ay/ even by a southerner. Brett Kessler 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 3 Apr 92 14:51:06 EST From: Dorota=Szafranska%users%LW@cc3.kuleuven.ac.BE Subject: introduction Hallo, es iz sheyn zu sehn az es zaynen do mentshen farinteresirt in Yidish. Mayn nomen iz Dorota, ikh voyn in Belgie un lern zikh Yidish shoyn dos zvayte yor. I am not sure what kind transkription you use, German and Dutch language prefer to use sch instead of sh. I am most intrested in literature. At the moment I'm collecting everthing about early years of Dovid Bergelson. Biografy, translations, articles, phd.thesis . I will be glad to see more of your "dialog" so that I can see if I can be useful. The texts of Bergelson, read in Yiddish, I have to comment in Dutch of german, mostly in German. Once a month I see prof. Niborsky in Paris, he gives the best of Yiddish that you can get in Europe, I supose. But you don't have something like you have in Oxford around him and that's a pity. I am a Polish national, living in Belgium, fron 1980 and I've learned Yidishe oysyes for the first time about three years ago. Greetings. Dorota 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 03 Apr 92 07:57 PST From: Vicki Fromkin Subject: 'the song' Re the 'song' -- my mother used to alternate between 'hop mayne homentashn' and 'hop meyne gretchaniki'. Vicki Fromkin 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1992 14:04 EDT From: ROBINSO@Vax2.Concordia.CA Subject: Introduction I teach Judaic studies and am chair of the Department of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. I am presently working on a book entitled _A Kabbalist in Montreal: the Life and Times of Rabbi Yudel Rosen berg_ which deals, among other things, with the publication and dissemination of "Hasidic" tales--in Yiddish and Hebrew--in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ira Robinson ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.206 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.