Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.154 December 4, 1993 1) Henry Einspruch, D.D. (Zachary Baker) 2) Word order (Ellen Prince) 3) Grammar and rules (Bob Hoberman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Dec 3 11:15:16 1993 From: Zachary Baker (bm.yib@rlg.stanford.edu) Subject: Henry Einspruch, D.D. Seymour Axelrod asks (MENDELE 3.153) about the Yiddish New Testament translation, Henry Einspruch/Khayim Aynshprukh. A brief bio- bibliography appears in the "Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur" (vol. 1, cols. 77-78). Einspruch was born in Tarnow, Galicia, the child of an iron-merchant who is described as a learned man (lamdn) and a Sandzer Hasid. His mother was the daughter of the cantor of the main synagogue in Jaroslaw. In short, good yikhes. He received both traditional Jewish and secular education and in his adolescence gravitated toward the Poale Zion (Labor Zionist) move- ment, and was active (together with Yitskhok Shiper -- who I assume is the same person who later became a famous historian of Polish Jewry, also known as Ignacy Schip[p]er) in organizing strikes among tailors, retail sales clerks and "belfers" (assistants to melamdim). He emigrated to Eretz Yisrael (Ertsisroel [!]) in 1909, lived in the agricultural colony of Merhavia, then (1911) moved to Egypt, and in 1913 emigrated to the U.S. (Cleveland and New York City), where he worked in a restaurant and an iron foundry. Later, he moved to Chicago, studied at McCormick Theological Seminary; Baltimore, where he enrolled at Johns Hopkins; and received a doctorate (1920) from Gettysburg College. From 1920 onward, he lived in Baltimore. "Although E. did not officially convert [to Christianity], he was the leader of the 'Lutheran Jewish Mission'," writes the anonymous bio-bibliographer. He wrote for the Poale Zion journal, "Der Yidisher Arbeter" (circa 1908-09), and after 1915 wrote for missionary journals and authored pamphlets in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian and English. The first edition of his N.T. translation, as noted by Seymour Axelrod, appeared in 1941. "He learned how to set type himself and his publications appear in a correct and modern Yiddish." I do not have ready information regarding his presumed year or date of death. (His name does not appear in Berl Kagan's 1986 "Leksikon fun Yidish- Shraybers.") After reading the bio, I don't know what else remains to be said! Zachary Baker 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Dec 3 11:40:13 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: word order to jason berman and hal berman: i personally will take shleyme axelrod's sage advice and drop this discussion right after this final note, which is not on word order but on methodology, since my plea to look at the data was misunderstood by both of you. to get at the facts of a language, any language, one does NOT ask a speaker what the rules are, since that would enlighten us only on their METAlinguistic beliefs, not on the actual 'rules' in their heads that govern their linguistic production and comprehension. to acquire insight into those 'rules', we alas must do the research OURSELVES, rather than expecting our informants to do it for us, by COLLECTING AND ANALYZING LINGUISTIC DATA, i.e. what they in fact produce naturally or in a well-designed experimental context. to see, e.g., how the blood system works or how the human body manages to maintain an upright position, one does not ASK people how they do it, right? asking people how their linguistic system works is analogous. Ellen Prince 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Dec 3 14:23:24 1993 From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Grammar and rules On the question of Yiddish word order, we seem to have accumulated a variety of contradictory observations and conclusions. Let me add some thoughts about methodology. One of the most important discoveries linguists have made in the last few decades (I'm thinking of the work of William Labov, who incidentally collaborated with Uriel Weinreich and our own Mikhl Herzog on some fundamental work in historical linguistics [not particularly on Yiddish!]) is that speakers of a language do not reliably know what they say. Over and over again people working on English and many other languages and with educated and uneducated speakers alike find that speakers will tell you "I never say X and no one I know says X and it would be silly to say X" and then you tape record their conversation and they say X. And you play them the tape and they say "Oh, yeah, well that has a special meaning" or "It's very rare" or "Nu, so I say it but it's not really correct" and so on mit alerley terutsim. I have a feeling that if the Yiddish speakers who rejected verb-first sentences took a look at some IN CONTEXT in stories, they would bring themselves to accept them as natural. (It's worth a try.) The fact is, native speakers' intuitions based on introspection is only one kind of data about their language. As the people who do political polling know, you get different results depending on how you ask the questions, which order you ask them in, who the questioner is, and so on. And if speakers are unreliable when they tell you "I would/wouldn't say X" they are far less reliable when they try to state generalizations about the language. Generalizations are hypotheses; they have to be checked against data. Introspective judgments are one kind of data; another extremely important source is the examination of natural samples of speech or writing -- samples that weren't composed for the purpose of grammatical analysis, but for real communication. These two ALWAYS yield contradictions (this is not to say that they never coincide), and frequently neither one is consistent within itself. Which one tells you what is "grammatical" or "grammatically correct"? That is a matter of definition. The main thing is that it takes a lot of data, thought, work, trial-and-error, etc., to figure out what is going on. Bob Hoberman ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.154 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files