Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.089 August 23, 1993 1) Yiddish orthography (Khaim Bochner) 2) Yehupets (Zachary Baker) 3) Introduction (Paul Ritterband) 4) Pronouncing songs (Daniel Moishe Sherman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Aug 20 13:36:30 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: Yiddish orthography Bob "Nissen" Goldberg writes: > The older orthography used in the dailies DER TOG and FORVERTS had > some advantages over YIVO orthography in this regard. For example, > as I recall, the dipthong ayin-hey was used in places where I would > say "ey" but that are now spelled with just an ayin, e.g., lehbn -> > lebn. Well, I don't have old copies of the Forverts on hand, but in the old orthography as I'm familiar with it (as in the usual edition of Sholem Aleykhem's collected works, for instance), this just isn't true. Would that it were! I don't recall _ever_ seeing "lehbn" or "gehbn", even though these words have long "e:" or "ey" in most dialects. Why weren't they written that way? Because they aren't written with an "h" in German. Similarly, Nissen points out that spelling "ihr" with a "h" supplies a hint that this word has a long vowel, unlike the short vowel of "mit". True. But "ihm" was also written with a "h", even though no Yiddish dialect I've heard uses the same vowel in "ihr" and "ihm". (My dialect has "eym" as a variant, but that's another matter.) And again, this same long vowel was spelled yud+ayin in "liebe". Another hint. But "zieben" was written the same way, and it certainly doesn't have that long vowel. Examples are endless. The point is that the old orthography, as it was practised, didn't attempt to reflect the sounds of spoken Yiddish of _any_ dialect. It was designed, by maskilim who hated Yiddish, to resemble standard German as closely as could be done with Hebrew letters. Nissen is right that you could, in theory, design a system that reflected a broad base of dialects. But it wouldn't be the old system, it would have to be a completely new creation. Good luck getting anyone to use it! The current orthography takes a lowest common denominator approach, discarding the vowel distinctions that not every one makes. I'd love it if we had a richer system, but look at how hard it is just to get everyone to write the pasekh to distinguish "ay" from "ey". I'm afraid that if they had held out for a richer system, we'd still be stuck with the old chaos !! :-( -- Khaim 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Aug 20 16:14:41 1993 From: Zachary Baker (bm.yib@rlg.stanford.edu) Subject: Yehupets Speaking of supposedly fictitious place names, I have often wondered about the etymology of Yehupets, the Kiev stand-in portrayed in Sholem Aleichem's works that has been transmogrified into (or was this its original connotation?) the equivalent of "the sticks." Anyway, Ivan/John/Yohanan Petrovsky, of Kiev, hypothesizes that the name Yehupets derives from Ukrainian "[Y]Ehipet," meaning "Egypt" -- with Kiev perhaps signifying the fleshpots thereof. I am no Slavicist, so I leave it to the likes of Robert Rothstein to shoot down this theory. Incidentally, in my "Responsa" column for the 1986-87 issue of "Judaica Librarianship" (vol. 3, no. 1/2; pp. 133-134), I discussed the following question that had come my way: "Where are Kasrilevke, Boiberik, and Yehupetz [sic] located?" This is NOT the definitive discussion of the issue, however, as Prof. Avraham Nowersztern tactfully pointed out to me a few weeks ago. Zachary Baker, YIVO Library 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Aug 22 20:46:05 1993 From: uap@cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu Subject: Introduction [I'm] a sociologist of the Jews located at the City College and Graduate Center of CUNY. I have just completed a vlume on the evolution of Jewish Learning in American Universities and am now working on population history of NY Jews. Paul Ritterband 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Aug 23 02:44:54 1993 From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca (David Sherman) Subject: Re: pronouncing songs We have the same problem at home, though it's unrelated to transliteration or orthography. When teaching songs to our kids, I put them into our dialect. Since my in-laws are from Staszow (Poland), the vowels are what's commonly referred to as "southern" pronunciation. [This next part gets a little difficult to describe; I'm using YIVO transcription below to show pronunciations.] So we teach the kids "Ofn pripetchik brent a fayerl, un in shtib iz HAYS" (not "heys"). And so on, rhyming with alef-BAYS. Fine. ... gedenkt zhe tayere, vus ir larnt [sic] DU, Zug zhe nokh a mol, un take nokh a mol, kometz alef ... what? U? That rhymes, but we don't say kometz-alef U, we say kometz-alef O. Even though we read many (not all) words that contain kometz-alef as "u". So we seem to be stuck with saying kometz-alef O and not rhyming. Comments? David (Daniel Moishe) Sherman ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.089