Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 135 January 11, 1993 1) Emes (Moshe Taube) 2) Emet/emes (Berl Hoberman) 3) Jewish Forward (Mischa van Vlaardingen) 4) Reflexive (medio-passive?) (Eli Katz) 5) Yiddish typesetting (Jane Peppler) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 08 Jan 93 13:28:36 EST From: Moshe Taube Subject: RE: emes The question about the dagesh is in place. However emes does take a dagesh in t he final consonant when followed by an affix, e.g. emet la'amittah, or the adj. amitti. Same with bat `daughter' bittah 'her daughter' (comp. Arab. bint), as o pposed to bayit `home' beytah `her home' (without dagesh).Berl's explanation r eflects the commonly accepted etymology of emet from *amint-, which, as far as I know, is not controversial. Moshe Taube 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 Jan 1993 14:01:07 -0500 (EST) From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: RE: Emet/emes This is, by now, way outside the field that Mendelenikes usually take an interest in. I promise I'll stop after this. --unless, of course, somebody asks another question. In discussing the origin of emet, I suggested it had a history something like this: ement > emett > emet > emeth ( >emes in Ashkenaz). Now Meylekh asks why, if the final 't' comes from *nt via *tt, doesn't it take a dagesh? "I suppose," he says, "there is some additional rule governing that." There is: you don't have a dagesh after a vowel at the end of a word. That's why, for instance, the word for 'bear' has the singular dov, from *dubb, cf. the plural dubbim. There are lots of cases like this one. When 'emet has a suffix, the letter 't' does indeed have a dagesh: 'amittekha 'your truth'. (Dagesh after a consonant at the end of a word occurs only under special circumstances.) The only exceptions I can think of are /att/ 'you (feminine singular)' and /natatt/ 'you (fem. sg.) gave', where I'm using the double t to stand for the anomalous t-dagesh, which marks feminine singular. Compare these with /latet/ 'to give', which is also from a form ending in -nt (the root is ntn), but has no dagesh--it isn't fem. sg. Compare /laqaHat/ (without dagesh -- the H is the letter khes) 'to take' with /laqaHatt/ (with dagesh) 'you (fem. sg.) took'. Exactly how this /tt/ was pronounced is a matter of debate (among those who debate about such matters); my opinion is that it sounded like a plain t, while 't' without dagesh was like English th. ("Was"? When? That's a separate question.) Berl 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 9 Jan 93 0:41:26 MET From: santen@dutiws.TWI.TUDelft.NL Subject: Jewish Forward Scholem aleichem, Due to a technical problem with my pc, I haven't been able to read nor respond to mendele for almost 6 weeks. So, although a bit late, I would very much like to thank the person who arranged for me to be send a subscription form for the Jewish Forward. Thank you very much ! I also lost a lot of my mail, so I don't know who that person was. Secondly it's been nice to see that there is now a second dutch Mendelnik. Wie ben jij? It sure feels great to be on the net again !!!! Mischa van Vlaardingen 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 10 Jan 93 16:33:29 -0800 From: katz@Sonoma.EDU Subject: reflexive (medio-passive?) Apropos of Bob Rothstein's fine discussion of the Yiddish reflexive, family lore tells this about my father's "onkl yoshe" (the Vilna aunts and uncles were called 'onkl' and 'tante', the shtetl (Mikhalishok) aunts and uncles were called 'feter' and 'mume') who emigrated to the US around the turn of the century. He was a skilled glovemaker who actually lived and worked in Gloversville, N.Y. for a short time. He had already passed through the Maskil stage, and was a frank atheist. This was puzzling to younger glovemakers who were remained orthodox, but nevertheless respected both his character and his craftsmanship. Apparently they too called him 'onkl' (or so the story was transmitted to me). "Onkl," some one once asked him, "farvos gleybt ir nit?" His response: "Ikh veys? Es gleybt zikh epes nit." Eli Katz 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 10 Jan 93 20:09:46 EST From: jpeppler@acpub.duke.edu (Jane Peppler) Subject: Yiddish typesetting [This message was forwarded to Mendele by David Sherman.] I wondered if you have contacts who are conversant with Yiddish typesetting procedures. I am working on books with two separate musicians, most of the book (music, transliterations, translations) will be in English but each of them also wants the text of each song printed out properly. I have gotten catalogs from Davka and Kabbalah software companies, but they are focused on Hebrew exclusively. I use Wordperfect 5.1, with Type 1 fonts imported using Primetype. I also run Fontographer through Windows -- it has the capability of cating and altering characters, so so theoretically I can take a regular Hebrew font and alter it for Yiddish and map the keyboard phonetically (my own Yiddish is minimal). However, I don't want to be reinventing the wheel if such work has been done already by somebody else. Jane Peppler ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.135