Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.082 August 17, 1993 1) YIVO transcription (Arn Abramson) 2) Standardized transcription (Howie Aronson) 3) Cultural Borrowings/Sukkah lights (Moshe Waldoks) 4) Motl Grubyan (Yossi Galron) 5) Grubian (Moshe Taube) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Aug 16 23:59:21 1993 From: "Arthur S. Abramson" Subject: YIVO transcription I have just read, with much sympathy, Nissen Goldberg's plaintive note in Vol. 3.080. Of course, we want to be able to represent the various dialects of Yiddish in roman transcription. (By the way, I regret the continuing confusion of transcription and translitera- tion; they are not the same!) What puzzles me, as one who is far from being a scholar in Yiddish linguistics, is why Nissen sees a problem in the Yivo transcription system. Am I wrong in understand- ing that it can be used without much trouble to represent the various regional and social accents of Yiddish. Hasn't Nissen himself demonstrated that by writing both oyf and af, etc.? That is, we must distinguish between a regrettable practice, on the one hand, of assuming that any Yiddish text, including song lyrics, must be writen in Standard Yiddish only, and, on the other hand, the aability of the Yivo transcription to handle other accents and dialects. When Nissen writes, "Ba mir bisti sheyn," is he not writing a form of Southern Yiddish in Yivo transcription. As a phonetician, I cheerfully manage, both for narrow phonetic transcription and for broad "phonemic" transcription, to get along pretty well with the phonetic alphabet of the International Phonetic Association, of which I am, of course, a loyal member, but I know that the special non-roman letters and diacritics of this system are impractical for widely based publications,so I cheerfully accept the Yivo system in the absence of anything that I know to be better. Another of our members recently commented that we should view writing Yiddish in a conventional roman orthography just as we do writing, say, French or Polish in roman script, each according to its own orthographic rules. The only emendation needed to that, in the case of Nissen's complaint, is that the possibility of writing non-standard dialects or accents is important; happily, the Yivo TRANSCRIPTION enables us to do that better, if my knowledge of Yiddish serves me well enough, that the orthographic rules of English enable authors or scholars to write regional or social variants of that language. Witness the orthographic contortions that novelists and the like go through, with misleading results, in an attempt to do that. (Note, by the way, that a TRANSLITERATION system simply can not handle this, since it is simply a set of rules for going, letter by letter, from one alphabet to another.) Arn Abramson 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Aug 16 23:38:02 1993 From: hia5@midway.uchicago.edu Subject: Standardized transcription Bob Goldberg complains about the "standardized" (YIVO) transcription of Yiddish.But the YIVO transliteration is a one-to-one Latinization of the Hebrew letters used to write Yiddish. It really doesn't reflect any dialect, since, e.g., transliterating giml-vov-tes gives a sequence of letters "gut," which just as giml-vov-tes is pronounced either /gut/ or /git/. But to -transliterate- giml-vov-tes as "git" is impossible--giml-yod-tes is /git/. I can't see any reason to oppose the YIVO transliteration. As for the YIVO orthoepy--it's wierd. I know of no other language where the only acceptable stage pronunciation (a Southern Yiddish) is diametrically opposed to the "literary norm," self-proclaimed by YIVO. As a Litvak, I'm very happy that YIVO arbitrarily chose basically a Litvak norm for their "literary norm." And as a teacher of Yiddish I'm even happier, because, unfortunately, there is -no- way of arriving at a stage pronunciation (Galitsyaner yidish) from the orthography. Howie (Itsik-Ayzik) Aronson 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Aug 13 10:58:57 1993 From: WALDOKS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU Subject: Cultural Borrowings/Sukkah lights Zum ersthens- Not only is the Christmas/sukkah light an interesting phenomenon, but I am also intirgued with the fact that many of the Jewish groups who adamantly retain dress codes of an earlier era consciously (beyond the requirements of tzinies- are rapidly adopting American food culture- The retainig of the strieml and spodik is important, but we all need glatt kosher moo goo gaipan-. Cholent many be Jewish soul food, but kosher fast food (with all its mediocrity) is on the rise. Wouldn't you have expected to see franchises of Cholent Express and the Gala (p'scha) Gallery. Hiner Fislech Delight and Helzele Take-Away. What does preserving a cultural heritage mean for the glattniks. zveytns- I have discovered the perfect sukkah light- they are strings of lights that come in the shapes of fruits and vegatables. they look great and drive the wasps, bees, and squirrels mishigeh. mit kovid Moshe Waldoks 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Aug 16 22:57:43 1993 From: "Joseph (Yossi) Galron" Subject: Motl Grubyan In response to Dovid N. Miller's posting about Motl Grubyan, I would like to mention that according to Berl Kagan's (z"l) *Leksikon fun Yidish-shraybers* (1986), Motl Grubyan was born in the Ukraine 1909, and died February 9th, 1972 in Moscow. Joseph (Yossi) Galron 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 17 09:32:29 1993 From: Taube Moshe Subject: grubian On the etymology of grubian. Vasmer's Etym. Dict. of Russian mentions, without preference, the possibility of derivation from the Slavic adj. `grubyj' as well as the possibility of a loan from German `Grobian' (first attested in 1494 in S. Brant's Narrenschiff), which is in German a jocular derivation a la Latin, `grobianus'from `grob'. Polish `grubian' too is considered to be a borrowing from German. The Yiddish word, then seems to be a borrowing from Slavic of a word which possibly was earlier borrowed into Slavic from German (notwithstanding the place of the accent). Moshe Taube ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.082