Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.051 June 27, 1993 1) Classification of languages (Bob Hoberman) 2) The Shadow (Fishl Kutner) 3) Self-review (Bob Werman) 4) Macaronic??? (Yitzhak Kertesz) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Jun 25 15:55:02 1993 From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Classification of languages A couple of comments aroused by Khaim Bochner's last posting: The Israeli linguist Uzzi Ornan once argued that Hebrew is not a Jewish language: Biblical Hebrew, because it was not the product of the chain of Jewish language shift, and Israeli Hebrew because it is not embedded in a traditional Judaic culture. Ornan saw himself as a Canaanite. Shoyn oys Yid. The whole "Yiddish, the fifteenth Slavic ..." business is connected with the question of whether a language can have a beginning. "Genetic" classification of languages is based on the idea that a language can have only one true parent, which can usually be discovered by looking at its basic vocabulary and grammatical structures. In this, Yiddish is unequivocally Germanic, and didn't truly begin when Jews started speaking it, but is just a much modified (by contact with other languages, etc.) continuation of Middle High German and Indo-European before that. Another view is that occasionally a language can have two or more parents, and new languages do (but extremely rarely) come into existence. The best treatment I know of of these two possiblities is the book Language Change, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, by Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman (U. of Cal. Press, 1988). Thomason and Kaufman describe the handful of such cases that are known, and assert that for such a language genetic classifica- tion is meaningless. Thus if Yiddish were an instance of such a phenomenon, it would be NEITHER Germanic NOR Slavic NOR Semitic. But according to their criteria Yiddish is very far from being such a case. The possibility that Yiddish is Slavic or that Hebrew is Yiddish, if you follow Thomason and Kaufman (which I do), doesn't come into the arithmetic, as they say in Hebrew (is that a Yiddish idiom?) Hope this helps. Bob rhoberman@ccmail.sunysb.edu 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Jun 26 09:43:37 1993 From: Philip Kutner To: Subject: The Shadow Genug! From a forensic perspective all of the guessing about Philologus is off base. S/he is a brilliant inidvidual who from the start planned to keep the identity a secret. I for one don't care, but have read and learned by the articles. While this hidden identity may be a source of annoyance, it does add a modicum of intrigue. If one were to approach this from a truly forensic angle, then as a criminal one would do all possible to throw you off of the trail. It is obvious that all of the guesses are wrong, for the initial premise of location is incorrect. If one were to be in this brilliant mind, one would throw you off the trail from the start. Lurking among us is the culprit. What an enjoyable time s/he is having. Did you think that such a brilliant mind would not be privy to our discussions? Throwing you off the trail by taking opposite viewpoints is one way this is done. Someday there may be a slip-up, but I for one enjoy the excitement of the intrigue more than our feeble attempts to unmask this genius. One cannot understand the actions of a chess champion like Fischer. His bizarre actions must be a price for genius. Fishl 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Jun 26 17:37:59 1993 From: RWERMAN@vms.huji.ac.il Subject: Self-review Ellen takes me to task for my suggestion that self- review might be a fantasy that we all share. She says that my passing remark that an editor duped into publishing such an animal should be strung up is horrendous. [Not to speak of the editor who is an active accomplice; he/she might be put into a hole in the blazing sand of the Sahara and painted with honey to attract the giant ants.] She even cites history; the editor in this case suffered, for two painful years, for believing Wexler. Khaim is even more down on me; he does not buy my idea that self-review might be a universal academic fantasy. Instead, he suggests that this event is singular, a major embarrassment to the field of Yiddish studies. [Parenthetically, this surely proves that Yiddish studies is now truly establishment, having its first major embarrassment.] I approve of your seriousness but remember that fraud, in various forms, is not singular to your field. We have fraud in science and in medicine, too, where lives are at stake. In one marvelous case, the perpetrator, once discovered, was fired from his university research job but allowed to continue to practice medicine. The purity of science had been upheld. And seriousness should have its limits, too. Look at Dr. Fabrikant of Concordia University, who responded to being rejected for tenure by killing four (Or was it five?) colleagues. Forgive my hubris, now that I have listened to your moralizing. Let me direct the attention of the linguists to one aspect of the difference between linguistics and literature. My suggestion, I do intimate, of self-review being a universal academic fantasy has literary -- if not linguistic -- value. I am convinced it could provide the basis for a great story, or even novel: the man/woman who reviews him/herself. __Bob Werman 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Jun 26 22:59:20 1993 From: "Yitzhak Kertesz" Subject: Macaronic??? I wish I could share L. Pra/oger's enthusiasm regarding Sander Gilman's book ("Jewish self-hatred and the secret language of the Jews"). I intend to discuss his analysis of the Jewish jokes in greater details, but to lend support to Dr. Werman's comment about academic life, let me ask: How do people feel about an author who printed 17 pages 3 times with no changes and with no references to the other appearances? (He doesn't even need a wordprocessor, just a copier.) Mauscheln (no umlaut) was the verb used by the German non-Jews to refer to the dialect spoken by the Jews (Western Yiddish, Judeo- German, take your pick) It is mildly derogatory. As a matter of accuracy, let me point out that the word was only used in Germany (Prussia, etc.) -- in the South (Bavaria, Saxony) and in Austria the comparable word is ju"deln. For R. Hoberman, and other connoisseurs: Im Jodeln der Steierma"rker, Im Ju"deln ist der Meier sta"rker. (Steiermark is the name of a province in Western Austria, home of the Alps) N. Zide, would you post the title of the book about Kafka where mauscheln is mentioned? - thank you. Yitzhak Kertesz ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.051 If your message is intended for MENDELE, please write to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu If your node is Bitnet-only and is not connected to the Internet, please send your message to: mendele@yalevm If you want to discuss personal business or have a shmues with the shames, please write to: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.