Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.170 December 17, 1993 1) Daytchmerismen (Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 16 15:38:54 1993 From: Roslyn Kalifowicz-Waletzky <0005943838@mcimail.com> Subject: Re: daytshmerizmen-- to Bob First of all, Bob, I knew you would give me an argument about that posting and I am ready for you. Most of the contents below were written before my posting to Khaim (discussing specific daytshmerizmen). But, because I wanted to check on the biblio I included below, I am sending it out 2 days later. This posting should have preceded the one to Khaim. Daytshmerizmen (I am not sure what the English equivalent term is so I'll stick to the Yiddish one) are not all German words with which Yiddish speakers came into contact from the late 19th century onward. Like all natural languages, Yiddish, whether standard or not, is open to influence from all the languages with which it comes into contact. Recently-coined terms borrowed from another language, be it Russian, English, Polish or modern German, enrich Yiddish when there is no native equivalent. When the Haskala movement in the late 19th and early 20th century wanted to eradicate old Eastern European cultural and social patterns, they knew they had to get that Jewry not only to read the literature of the Enlightenment, which was largely in German, but also destroy the language in which Yiddish culture operated. Hence, modern German vocabulary was inserted wholesale into Yiddish texts, among other things, replacing associations with religion, folklore, folk belief, etc. The hope was that with this German vocabulary, the reader would slowly and unconsciously learn German so that when s/he came upon German literature, the ideas expressed there would be more easily absorbed. This German vocabulary was presented as more sophisticated, esthetic, whole, and progressive than the bastardized "zhargon" it was replacing. As a result, hundreds of perfectly good old Yiddish words, some as old as a thousand years, e.g., a sakh, leyenen, which reflects so much history and Jewish linguistic creativity (namely, the Jewish transformation of that Italian word), were restricted at best or usually replaced by forced foreign ones with little or no connection to Eastern European Jewish culture, history or shprakh-gefil. That is a great injustice to Yiddish. Yiddish lost a great deal and gained little. If the new terms didn't exist in Yiddish, then their addition was welcome, but then, Yiddish linguists demanded that those go thru the linguistic cooking process and conform to Yiddish linguistic patterns before they could be fully accepted into the standard language. The fact is that thousands of daytshmerizmen have still not gone through this natural process, even 100 years later. I don't remember what the count on this is, but I believe that of the many thousands, only about 100-200 are still to be found in the speech of native Eastern European Yiddish speakers (writing may be higher). Perhaps 20 or 30 of those have achieved a wide distribution. (Counting the shvarts pintelekh and drayiklekh in Weinreich will give us a more accurate account.) We aren't even talking about the widespread concomittant campaign to thoroughly Germanize Yiddish spelling, e.g., inserting heys and ayins to Yiddish words so that they look like their German cognates, e.g., writing gheyn instead of geyn, zogEn, instead of zogn, etc. By pushing Yiddish writing back to what it looked like in the 1200s or 1400s, they were trying to de-evolve the language and eradicate all the creative uniqueness of what made it a discrete language of its own. I guess the goal in that de-evolution was to stregthen their claim that Yiddish was only a cant. If you think that the decline of Yiddish is not in part, or no longer, effected by this movement, you are a naive linguist. The struggle against daytshmerizmen began in Europe and part of any revival or maintenance of the language must include cleaning up the toxic effects of this movement. It must include it, because when you look at the Zionist (and I am one) and Hebraist {I am also a proud native speaker of Hebrew} arguments against Yiddish, you see that they bought them at face value from the Haskalaniks who in turn completely bought into the German nationalists attitude vis-a-vis Yiddish. The misconceptions, simplifications, patronizing of Yiddish, including from native Yiddish speakers themselves, are still strewn all around "di Yiddishe gas" and I don't agree that talking today against daytshmerizmen is like playing fiddle while Rome burns. The Hebraists took and disseminated both the German anti-Semitic arguments againest Jews being a parasitic, non-creative people who not only warped the German they procured, but also the arguments of the self-hating Jews againest "zhargon" to further their own agenda in replacing Yiddish with Hebrew as THE Jewish language of Ashkenazi Jews. (These guys were not concerning themselves with Sephardim who were speaking Djeudezmo--their diaspora Yiddish.) You can still see an example of the persistence of these effects in the ridiculous, ignorant statements made even as late as yesterday about Yiddish from someone who not only reads Mendele but even posts here quite often, Marnen Laibow-Koser. Where in God's name can someone come on here and say that the rules of Yiddish grammar are "loose" just because they are unlike Latin's rules? Or just because you accept that the rules of Yiddish word order are "looser" than the Berman's understanding of what Weinreich presented in College Yiddish? How in God's name can someone misconstrue this point unless they come on Mendele with a whole bunch of convenient misconceptions about Yiddish in 1993? No one would dream of saying that about any other modern language which I think/assume/hope every one here agrees Yiddish is. Such statements I believe reflect not only laziness in learning Yiddish by its own rules, but are the result of the lethal effects of the daytshmeristn's campaign and later Zionist self-serving campaign against Yiddish. Having sentimental feelings toward Yiddish or wanting Yiddish to survive doesn't preclude you from having misconceptions about the language. Anyway, the above is the basis for a large part of the argument against daytshmerizmen, presented here afn shpits meser. BTW, some of the Yiddishized German terminology are more successful than others. Some of these are for me personally more foreign than the few daytshmerizms in my own family speech, e.g., I'll take the word zelbstmord over aleyn-mord, etc. Anyway, the overwhelming majority was rejected because their use was superfluous and/or affected and the Yiddish terms were deemed "good enough". Others have quite widely disseminated, like, onfangen, yetst, lezn, fil (=a sakh), aynladn, etc. and have taken root in some circles. The arguments for e.g., onfangen and lezn, being accepted at this point is that they have dialectal variants-- a sign of rootedness. But I personally and many others still abhor them (why? next post). You feel that the daytshmerish clean-up job has gone to extremes. When it comes to certain daytshmerizmen, I can see an argument that some of these words should be considered synonyms of the old Yiddish ones and hence they would reflect renewed contact between German and Yiddish in the late 19th century. I can accept that if the old Yiddish terms are not only not discarded but allowed to stay with their own koved. Then of course the very goal of the daytshmeristn would be thwarted. It is their premise, judgments and goals that is being fought when one rejects their linguistic cure of a superfluous German corpus. Gaining this terminological repertoire as alternate equivalence to the existing Yiddish corpus IS NOT the issue; it's the fatal arrogance and patronizing that motivates and accompanies it that's the problem. We, in monolingual America, can't feel the danger of either German or old German attitudes today but that's not so in Europe or Israel where German and German thought is known by or has diffused among a greater proportion of the population. The German issue is definitely charged since the Holocaust, but the fight against daytshmerizmen was fiercer in the years preceding W.W.II. than after it. No matter how daytshmerizmen glittered to the poor Jews before W.W.II, today many of us understand that "fil" isn't any more beautiful or superior to "a sakh", and "virklikh" isn't prettier than the old word "emes", etc. Perhaps the problem is not only that most of this generation today doesn't feel the past or the remnant threat of German, as much as it isn't aware of the shadow the attitudes and assumptions of the daytshmeristn left on Yiddish. This shadow dealt a deathblow at the same time that it stimulated in response a new vibrant Yiddish literature. I say deathblow because the image of Yiddish's corruption and unwholeness vis-a-vis its German linguistic source is what convinced Zionists of the early period to take the extreme position that they did, namely, that only with the death of Yiddish could Jews "recover" from their Eastern European culture. For those who can still see the source of that long shadow, the struggle against daytshmerizmen is connected to the struggle of Yiddish for respect as an independent, aesthetic language, viable for sophisticated intellectuals. Even Ab. Cahan's plainly-stated goal in inserting so many daytshmerizmen and later "angletsizmen" in the Forverts was for Jews to assimilate so well that the Forverts would die off on its own. Well, in a few years, he is going to achieve his dream. Another problem is that students who find daytshmerizmen in old Yiddish texts, don't always know what to do or think about them. I think that a historical perspective should be given, including how we understand today this period in the history of Yiddish. As for your quote from Max Weinreich, I will point out his article " written as early as 1938 "Daytshmerish Toyg Nisht" (in Yiddish Far Ale, Vol. 1) as his position on this issue not the one you quoted. To better understand this issue and why its use is a "baleydikung" to Yiddish (quote by Dorothy Bilik here), I suggest some more bibliographical data of which I know about but never read. There is also Kalmanovith's article "Der Shoyresh fun daytshmerish" in Oyfn Shvel and in the original Yiddish Far Ale, 1938. Others who have written about this are S. Birnboym, Nokhum Shtif, Prilutsky, Z. Reyzn, Zhitlovsky, Giniger, Aren Zeitlen, Opatoshu, Elberg, M. Shafir, M. Schaechter among others. Now I think I've said everything I had to say on this point. Sorry it was so long. But I figure few people here heard the argument. Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.170 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. 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