Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.093 August 26, 1993 1) Hilf gevinsht -- the real post! (Pierre L. Lewis) 2) Pronunciation alternatives (Nissen Goldberg) 3) Polish (?) geography (Zev Kesselman) 4) Corrigendum (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Aug 25 08:45:24 1993 From: "Pierre (P.) Lewis" Subject: Hilf gevinsht -- the real post! Tayere MENDELnikes ikh lern zikh tsur tsayt yidish gants aleyn. ikh vintsh mir emetsn vos mir ken helfen a bisl derbay: freges entfern vegn gramatik, farsendenish, kontekst un kultur (bayspiln speter). ikh volt gevolt kenen (hope this is correct wrt politeness!) a mentsh vos redt yidish vi a vaser, hot gramatik lib, un vos efsher ken a bisl taytsh nokh dertsu. nor a por freges (un minutn) a vokh, mer nit! ikh lez (conjugating leyenen is still too scary) tsur tsayt "yidishe kinder giml" un es geyt gants gut. un demolt kumt College Yiddish. di oysyes (training my OCR routines has been quite a bit tougher than anticipated) un di hebreishe verter makhn mir di greste shverikeytn. ikh bin a goy, un di mame-loshn iz frantseyzikh. ikh red oykh english un taytsh (un C++). Sample questions: - [translation]: "if i were a bird, i would fly to thee" (in German: "waere ich ein Vogel, floege ich zu dir"): how to translate German's Konjonktiv II? - [parsing]: "a koyne vi an arbes di groys": it means "a customer tiny like a pea", but I don't really understand the sentence structure (ie. what depends on what? -- eg. is "arbes" a genitiv, why "vi"? - [vocab]: "rivkale, di shabesdike, arbet in fabrik": what does shabesdik mean. Weinreich (or "vaynraykh" a la YIVO) proposes "festive". How can a person be festive? Maybe life-of-the-party is meant :-)? - [grammar]: modern German has both kennen (er kennt) and koennen (er kann, no T). Thus I expected to write in Yiddish: "zi ken (no T) nit kumen vayl zi kent (with T) nit dem veg". But Yiddish seems to have merged both. Is this correct? - [sound]: can I have heard "er hot mitgebrengt za (instead of zayn) fidele"? Just as German 'ein' matches Yiddish 'a', maybe German 'sein' can be matched (in some dialects) by 'za'. I expect most questions to be related to structure. A groysn dank, Pierre[le] Lewis P.S. The recent discussion on transliteration and transcription has been quite interesting. Besides clarifying the concepts, I have learned a lot about Yiddish dialects. I just wanted to mention that transliteration/transcription is done in the context of a given ("target") language (in the case of YIVO, English). Tsveyvovn become a V in English (because the sounds match), but would probably be a W if the context had been German (as in Salcia Landmann's book). And I would have found it much easier to write/read. (note: I'm not a linguist). Is "Weinreich" written in yet another transliteration system, or is it simply the German spelling? 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Aug 25 17:21:14 1993 From: xidak!poseidon!bob@uunet.UU.NET (Robert N. Goldberg) Subject: Pronunciation alternatives My point is admittedly shifting somewhat as this discussion proceeds. I don't quarrel with a standard orthography, although I think a better choice could have been made than the YIVO standard, but that's life. But I still say there should be a way to determine the pronunciation from the dictionary, and this means (gasp) that the southern dialect would have to be addressed by the standard in some way. This idea is not so radical. My Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1979) gives the standard pronunciation alternatives in common dialects, and even some non-standard pronunciations in some cases. For example, two pronunciations are given for "potato", and three for "postnuptial". Why not the same for Yiddish? Why not annotate Weinreich's dictionary with regional alternates? To save space, why not assume the most common vowel shifts (such as /kumets alef u/ for the southern dialect) and not bother listing alternatives unless they DON'T follow the dialect vowel-shifts? In Ellen Prince's by now famous /nokh/ and /nukh/ example, the pronunciation differs according to the meaning of the word, so there would be separate southern dialect pronunciations listed under the already separate entries for the different meanings of StY _nokh_. This would help people like me who wish to speak a common regional dialect and sing songs intended for that dialect, as well as give me an accepted authority to consult when obnoxious people correct my dialect into THEIRS on the grounds that my pronunciation is illiterate or just plain wrong ("nobody says /tipet/, it's /tupet/"). Bob "Nissen" Goldberg 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Aug 26 01:25:20 1993 From: "Zev Kesselman - Ext. 7306" Subject: Polish(?) geography I'm trying to figure out where my father's shtetl in Poland was. Maybe someone out there has some savvy in poilishe geography. The place was called Wolcza Dulna (pronounced vultcha-doolnya; anshuldikt mir, ehrliche orthographists!). My cousin claims it was punkt-farkert: Dulna Wolcza. I don't know if it's a village, city, county, region, or what. When my father left it, it was Austria; when my cousin's father left it, it was Poland. Oyfn greynitz? I ask, because we just discovered a possible family connection hailing from the cities Sonok/Linsk in Poland, and I would like to establish at least a geographic connection, if there is one. Email info to: Zev Kesselman Zev@Hadassah.Bitnet 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Aug 26 1993 From: nmiller@dot.trincoll.edu Subject: Corrigendum For having overlooked Zachary Baker's identification of Yehupets as Kiev, my apology. Vi shteyt in posuk: V'gam im yomar hechacham lodaat (afile ven a narr vil vern oys-narr) lo yuchal limtso (iz keyner nishto in d'reym). Noyekh ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.093