Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.091 August 24, 1993 1) YIVO and Southern Yiddish (Nissen Goldberg) 2) Dos un yents (Dovid Braun) ______________________________________________________ The shames would greatly appreciate your cooperation in these small matters: If your message is intended for MENDELE, please write to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu If you want to discuss personal business, please write to: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Please provide a Subject: line. Please sign your articles. A dank. 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date:Mon Aug 23 20:40:18 1993 From: xidak!poseidon!bob@uunet.UU.NET (Robert N. Goldberg) Subject: YIVO and Southern Yiddish To clarify my point about the older orthography, I'm not saying we should go back to it, merely that the "extra" letters sometimes served a useful purpose. The fact that the extra letters did not ALWAYS guide pronunciation and were based on German orthography was a good reason to clean up and standardize the spelling, but not a justification for adopting a minimalist spelling standard for Yiddish. Question about YIVO to our YIVO experts: How do you represent a long "o" sound in YIVO transliteration? I'm thinking of how to distinguish the Yiddish word for "mouth" from the Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew word moel. My grandmother referred to her mouth as "man mOl" (where I use capital "O" for a long "o"), and the moel as a "moyl". I realize there's no problem in YIVO orthography because the latter is spelled in Hebrew, but how would I write my grandmother's southern dialect in YIVO transliteration? To Dave Sherman, re: Oyfn pripetshik: we (my family) sings it "kumets alef u". It rhymes that way and reflects the most common pronunciation of komets aleph in sefardish ("southern") Yiddish. The number of exceptions to the rule is small compared to the number of times it works for southern Yiddish. So do teach it to your children that way! By the way, "kumets alef = u" also works for the southern European pronunciation of Hebrew. In my grandparents' shtibl, I heard such things as "burikh atu ... hu-oylam" and "v'imri umayn", which reflect "kumets alef = u", "vov = i", and Hebrew long O = "oy" (which makes its way into STANDARD YIDDISH words like "oysyes"). My unsubstantiated gut feeling is that mmodern Yiddish orthography reflects both a distancing from German (which I approve of) and rank chauvinism against the southern dialects of Yiddish (which I find insulting). vegn dos ikh vil epes fun di YIVO meyvns heren. Bob "Nissen" Goldberg 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 24 01:39:18 1993 From: David Braun Subject: dos un yents A por inyonim: 1. To Paul Ritterband: please give my regards to your wife, my former high school principal. 2. David Sherman: Ask shver-un-shviger how they were taught. I'll bet they were actually taught "pasekh-alef [a], kumets-alef [u]". The fcat fact that you sing it (and Surele sings it and maybe your in-laws too) with [o] is because that's how it's most commonly sung. So there should be no problem. 3. Yiddish folksingers often break rhymes (or what look like they were originally meant by the original songwriter) to be rhymes. Not just in folksongs -- in counting-out rhymes, etc. Take, for instance, a song I recorded from my grandmother (it's in Prilutski's early collections), which starts out: a mol iz geven azoy un azoy a man hot avekgeforn a yunge froy. This is a perfect Standard Yiddish rhyme. Volt dokh gedarft zayn gut. But... there was no Standard Yiddish as we know it today when this song was first recorded (by Prilutski in 1911 or 1914 and in my family - circa 1910 but probably within the twenty years before that). I recorded this song, as mentioned, from my grandmother, of Suchowola, Poland (between Bialystok and Grodno) where the one StY _oy_ is pronounced [ey] (the classic litvish-marker) and the other -- [ou]. My grandmother's rendition: sometimes (a) and sometimes (b): a mol iz geven azey un azey (a) a man hot avekgevorfn a yunge froy (b) a man hot avekgevrofn a yunge frou [OOPS. A few lines up I meant to say that the other diphthong correspond- ing to StY _oy_ is [oy] or [ou] -- there's variation between the two.] (There's actually a lot more that could be said about this: was this song then composed in the small area where the oy/ey or oy/ou merger took place to yield the situation we have in so-called StY? Or does this harken back to the hypothesis, I think of Max Weinreich, that there was actually a form _frey_ 'froy'? Another example is the counting-out rhyme (like English eenie-meenie-miny-moe:([) eyne deyne dutke datke tsibele bebele broyne kladke eyne deyne doys vemen s'kumt aroys {For the less proficient in Yiddish: there are nonsense words in here, so don't be surprised if you can't find half of it in the disctionary.) Now, I heard the rhyme at the end as a full rhyme, or often it was broken, vi keyn mol gornisht, as such: eyne deyne dous vemen s'kumt aroys or eyne deyne doys vemen...arous If you listen to the Megile-lider of Itsik Manger, you'll hear people breaking intended rhymes quite often (I'm talking about the Burstyn family's rendition, I think the only recorded rendition). Mike Burstyn sings: ...a mol ...ayzn un shtul (='shtol') In this case, the rhyme could have been fully successful in his dialect (unlike the froy-azoy example above, in which the rhyme is unacceptable in any spoekn dialect [except for the small merger area]). Burstyn might have been wavering between "teater-loshn" and "di literarishe shprakh" or whatever he spoke/speaks at home. I could bring more examples from my folksong collection (with my grandmother as informant -- a blatant rhyme-breaker) but none come to mind at the moment (especially bec of the hour). This definitely should be looked into. Itsik Gottesman has told me that his grandmother, a tape of whose singing he produced (Az di furst avek) and of whom some 300 songs/ballads/etc. were collected, was also a blatant rhyme-breaker. Ellen, what can you tell us about Sarah Gorby? She, on the other hand, was a professional performer -- did she break rhymes too? Bekitser, rhyme-breaking is a possibilty in folk tradition (and perhaps profesional tradition as well) in Yiddish. Of course this could be a disturbance in chorus-singing, though. The rhyme-breaking takes place, of course, when there's variation within one dialect (or within the speaker's repertoire of dialects, e.g. Burstyn) or when a rhyme created in one dialect (presumably) is picked up by speakers of another. 4. Khayim: Shloyme Birnboym proposed a spelling system that would reflect everybody's variation. It's in his early works and in his 1979 _Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar_ he uses the "eynhaytlekher oysleyg", aka YIVO system, alongside his system. (It's act ually very unreliable in that book because of the multitude of typos.) His suggestion in the 1920s or 1930s was to differentiate between the alef written with a komets underneath and an alef written with a dot above it -- the one with the komets is Northeastern Yiddish [o], Southern Yiddish [u]; the one with the dot is [o] in all dialects, e.g. in kop. His vov is everybody's [u], e.g. literatur, but otherwise it's melupm-vov for So Southern Yiddish [i] and Northeastern Yiddish [u]. He also uses khirik-yud for the long [i:] as opposed to short [i], a distinction absent in North- eastern. While the standard Yiddish orthography (and the non-standard variants ) are an extra burden for the speaker of Southern Yiddish (these people have to learn that [kimen] and [finf] are spelled with different representations of the vowel [i], Birnbaum's system creates the extra burden on the litvak, since s/he has to unmerge his [i], know when his [o] corresponds to [o] and when to [u], etc. etc. Lifshits also tried to introduce some superdialectal spelling conventions in his dictionaries (Yiddish-Russian and Russian-Yiddish in the 1880s, if if memory serves me corectly): he had an umlaut over the alef which was for him [u], as opposed to the alef which is [o], e.g. kopirn. 5. der mentsh trakht un got lakht -- I plan to leave the computer a half hour ago and what happens? Ikh tseshrayb zikh. But one last word: I'm moving to Boston in a week and would like to be in touch with Yiddish-speakers, young and old, in that area. Please drop me a line if you have any referrals! Thanks! Dovid Braun braund@babel.ling.upenn.edu ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.091