Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.003 May 17, 1993 1) Buyze vyetchera (Zev Kesselman) 2) Irregular plurals (Moshe Taube) 3) YIVO Yi(d)dish Orthography (Meylekh Viswanath) 4) Idioms (Shleyme Axelrod) 5) Introduction (Martha Rubin) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 17 03:36:25 1993 From: ZEV%HADASSAH@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL Subject: buyze vyetchera My mothertongue-fluency Yiddish speakers here at work (from Poland & Russia) tell me that it means "a bad supper". While they weren't familiar with the full phrase as such (but liked it!), they say the ring of it is concerned less with the culinary value of the meal, but rather with its expected relaxing value in the evening after a hard day's work. Zev Kesselman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 17 11:06:14 1993 From: Moshe Taube Subject: Irregular plurals 1. Let me add two more non-hebraic names with a hebrew plural suffix. They are used in the synagogue, at the summoning to Torah reading, indicating the pledge of the summoned. karboynim from karb/n kerbl, and gildoynim from gildn. BTW the first one was mistaken by Wexler 1991:43 for korbn korbones and glossed 'sacrifices, victims'. For those who have not seen it, the full Reference is: Yiddish - the fifteenth Slavic Language. A study of partial language shift from Judeo-Sorbian to German. in International Journal of Sociology of Language vol. 91 (1991) 9-150. See also reviews following immediately in same issue. Moshe Taube 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 17 11:55:12 1993 From: VISWANATH%DRACO.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: YIVO Yi(d)dish Orthography My wife, Gitl was recently writing up an announcement for 'yidish-vokh' the summer retreat that yugntrug sponsors each year (which david sherman has frequently mentioned). She started out writing 'Yidish-vokh' with one 'd' as would be appropriate in YIVO orthography. Then she decided that a commonly used yiddish word such as 'yidish', which is commonly written with two 'd's should be written 'yiddish', even though YIVO orthography might dictate otherwise. Such a commonsensical approach is, in fact, common in transliterating other languages. Commonly used spellings are retained even if they might conflict with the particular transliteration system used elsewhere in a given article/book. I wonder what folks think about this issue. Should one adopt commonly used spellings even in 'standard' transliterated yiddish? Or perhaps only in a subset of writings? Meylekh. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 17 12:35:32 1993 From: Seymour Axelrod Subject: Idioms More for Elye Katz's collection: 1. "folg mir a gang" = [it's] quite a distance (U. Weinreich). The distance can be temporal: Yudl Mark's introduction to his *Gramatik fun der yidisher klal-shprakh* begins "Fun 1921 biz 1975 iz folg mir a gang." 2. "gey kakn afn yam" = approximately "go to hell." 3. "gey kebeyne [kebeynye?] matere". This one is a problem for me in two ways. First, what I give is the way I remember the expression, and may be wildly off--fun di kinder-yorn biz haynt iz folg mir a gang. Second, and much more important, I have been told that the words after "gey" are bad Slavic of one kind or another for something like "screw your mother." My mother, who used the expression, came from Vilner gubernye, and must surely have known what she was saying. But she was quite modest and respectable, even prudish. Are there any other Mendelenikes whose parents, though otherwise orntlekhe layt, used this one? 4. "gey veys" = who knows? who would have predicted this outcome? 5. "zikh arumdreyen vi a forts in rosl" = to wander about aimlessly 6. "oder dray, oder draytsn [dray hundert]" : said to (or about) someone who expresses widely disparate views or plans of action, or is uncertain about them. 7. "a farshlepte krenk" = a drawn-out (non-medical) unpleasantness 8. "a glik iz mir getrofn!" : ironic, said in response to a report that something supposedly good has happened. "The Democrats have retained control of the Senate." "A glik iz mir getrofn!" As with "es bayst mir in beytsim", the meaning is "Who cares?" --Shleyme 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 17 12:48:07 1993 From: nrubin@s1.csuhayward.edu (martha rubin) Subject: Introduction I am a professional musician, and a past student of german. I have an interest in yiddish because of my husband's slight knowledge of it, wanting to share a bit of that heritage with our 10 year old daughter, and because of my (not entirely fluent) knowledge of german. I also am interested in yiddish folk songs. martha rubin ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.003