Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.092 August 25, 1993 1) Yehupets (Ellen Prince) 2) Yehupets (Noyekh Miller) 3) Rhymes (Ellen Prince) 4) Orthography and dialects (Ellen Prince) 5) Peretz (James Diamond) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 24 01:37:05 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Yehupets free association to zachary baker's _yehupets_: when my father didn't like some perfume my mother was using, he would ask if she was wearing 'evening in yehupets'. i still think of that when i smell a perfume i don't like. ellen prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Aug 23 19:04:13 1993 From: noyekh miller Subject: Yehupets Zachary Baker asks where Boiberik, Kasrilevke and Yehupets were located. Don't know about the first two, but wasn't Yehupets understood to be Kiev? Noyekh 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 24 01:37:05 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Rhymes to dave sherman: question: how come you don't say /kumets alef u/? that's how i learned it. re rhymes and dialects, as part of the study i did of the dialect in singing of sarah gorby, i studied her treatment of rhymes. it seemed as tho she enjoyed breaking rhymes in general but, in any event, she would very frequently break the rhyme when it was not a rhyme in her (bessarabian) dialect and she always broke the rhyme when the rhyme depended on some other regional dialect (e.g. central yiddish). examples: rhyme rendition _____ _________ avek/teg avek/teyg shpet/magnet shpeyt/magnet blumen/kumen blumen/kimen mekhutonim/sonim mekhitunim/sonim shtraln/faln shtraln/foln lang/bank long/bank zayn/shtayn (CY) zayn/shteyn, zan/shteyn frankly, i find it laughable when a singer maintains a rhyme at the expense of their language, e.g. kate smith rhyming _more_ with _sure_ in the song 'more'; she does not otherwise say /shor/ for _sure_. or what about the nursery rhyme about the lady who went to the cupboard to get her poor doggie a bone; when she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so her poor doggie had none? you wouldn't want your kids to rhyme _none_ with _bone_, now would you? see what i mean? ellen prince 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 24 13:44:19 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: on orthography and dialects to nissen: while the galitsianer in me often balks at what has been chosen as 'standard yiddish', i do think SOME arbitrary choice of dialect is inevitable for a writing system. for quite a few hundred years now, every language that has a writing system has a conventional orthography. (and it goes without saying that every living language has dialect variation.) so i really don't think we can ask of a conventional orthography that your grandmother's or my grandmother's pronunciation be faithfully reproduced. re how you would differentiate your grandmother's pronunciation of mouth and moel in a yivo-based PHONETIC system, it would be /mol/ (or /mowl/, depending on how detailed you want it) vs. /moyl/. i would suggest that we use slashes when we're representing the actual sounds rather than the conventional orthography to avoid confusion. re having an orthography that would teach semi-speakers or non-speakers how to pronounce a regional dialect, i think that's really too much to ask. the way you learn a regional dialect is to grow up speaking it or to study it in depth. to invent sound changes on the assumption that the odds are that you'll get it right produces a truly absurd (in my humble opinion) product. i had a yiddish instructor once who attempted to recreate central yiddish but came out with /er iz NUKH nisht gekimen/--she went with the odds that _nokh_ 'still' should become /u/ (as in fact is the case with _nokh_ 'after'), and she lost. and it sounded like a bad joke. for those who wish to retain their ancestral dialect, i would suggest that they use the regional variants when they're sure of them and the standard otherwise. in fact, most native yiddish speakers in the yiddish diaspora (i.e. today) switch between their native dialect and a/some standard quite a bit, so it's not that bizarre. plus, for us semi-speakers, it has the added benefit that we won't 'hypercorrect', i.e. create a pseudo-standard form by mistake. (for example, i can never remember if the standard yiddish word for 'cheese' is /kes/, /keys/, /kez/, or /keyz/, so i just stick with the central yiddish /keys/ that i grew up with. it may be jarring to the purists but at least it's yiddish and consistent with the other nonstandard things i say. of course, when writing yiddish in the hebrew alphabet, i have to consult a dictionary to know how it's spelled. my yiddish spelling is atrocious, as you can imagine, but /vus ken men tiyen/? :) ) ellen prince 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 24 23:57:09 1993 From: James Diamond Subject: Peretz I am an Adjunct Professor at Washington University (St. Louis), in the Dept. of Asian & Near Eastern Languages & Literatures. My field is Modern Hebrew Literature. I am on this list for now because I am interested in seeing the issues that are discussed here. How much I can contribute remains to be seen. Now a query: can anyone tell me anything about the sources or possible sources that underlie Peretz's story titled in Hebrew "Bein shenei harim"? I'd be grateful. James Diamond ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.092