Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.174 December 19, 1993 1) Incorrect citation (Ellen Prince) 2) Tante/Mu(h)me/Vetter/Base/Cousin(e) (Margaret Mikulska) 3) Daytshmerish, Yiddish, & Jewish German (Neil Jacobs) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Dec 18 17:38:41 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: incorrect citation To: Marnen Laibow-Koser >As Ellen Prince said >so beautifully, we must sing to keep the language alive: too much >rigidity will kill Yiddish. i'm afraid you have me confused with someone else. languages remain alive so long as they have a speech community that grows up speaking them as a native language. i doubt that your singing will keep yiddish alive, and i can assure you that mine would only make it want to die faster... :) btw, what i DID say is that yiddish grammar is no 'looser' than any other. and that includes german. if you have evidence to the contrary, i'd love to see it. ellen prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Dec 19 00:39:08 1993 From: Margaret Mikulska Subject: Tante/Mu(h)me/Vetter/Base/Cousin(e) > From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu > > I don't know how many Mendelnikes know this, but "Tante", "Muhme", > "Onkel", and "Vetter" (German spellings) are *all* German kinship > terms. There would be nothing particularly unusual about this, > except that in German "Vetter" and "Muhme" mean "cousin"! (I think > "Vetter" is usually, but not exclusively, male; I'm not sure about > "Muhme".) Anybody know how this shift in meaning came about? I know of no source, alive or printed, according to which "Muhme" means "cousin" in German. Two old-fashioned and even obsolete terms are "Vetter" (male) and "Base" (female); modern German uses "cousin/cousine". "Muhme" can be traced back to Middle High German ("muome") and even Old High German ("muoma") and was originally a term of endearment for mother, and subsequently for the mother's sister. Around 1700, under the influence of French, the French word "tante" replaced "Muhme". Interestingly, "tante" comes from a Latin word for the _father's_ sister. In any case, there was no shift of meaning you're asking about. -Margaret Mikulska mikulska@astro.princeton.edu 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Dec 18 22:59:04 1993 From: Neil G Jacobs Subject: Daytshmerish, Yiddish, & Jewish German The recent discussion found in Mendele concerning daytshmerish has been interesting. Concern over the issue of New High German influence on Yiddish is not new, as pointed out by others in this current discussion (citing, e.g., Max Weinreich's article from the 1930s). Linguistically, Yiddish and German clearly have enough "in common"--enough of a resemblance, for whatever historical reasons--that Jews and non-Jews have long been concerned with issues of "why A is/isn't more/less like B" (on history of Yiddish linguistic scholarship, see Borokhov 1913, or Max Weinreich's dissertation, recently brought out in published form thanks to Prof. Frakes). In some of the recent Mendele debate, there is argument over what is "really Yiddish", what is "really" daytshmerish, etc. It is important, I believe, to keep in mind that there are several issues at work here: linguistic registers of individuals and speech communities, geographically-patterned variation, and time frame, etc. Furthermore, the issue of written vs. spoken language can also be important; Max Weinreich (1928, "Di yidishe shprakhforshung in 17-tn yorhundert", in *Tsaytshrift*) notes a difference in the amount of German influence in written documents versus what must have been the spoken Yiddish of the time. It may also be fruitful for us to distinguish between borrowing of New High German elements into Yiddish, versus the process of language attrition in post-Haskole Western Yiddish. I am scheduled to present a paper on this point at the upcoming LSA meeting in Boston (title of paper: "Borrowing vs. language shift among 19th-century Yiddish speakers"). Basically, I try to use the model of Thomason and Kaufman (1988) to distinguish between the massive influx of New High Germanisms into Jewish speech in the 19th century in the West vs. in the East. In the case of Western Yiddish, Jewish speakers' increasing use of Germanisms was part of a process of language shift (WY > German), whereas, the daytshmerish in EY was *borrowing*, and part of a process of language consolidation, expansion, etc. According to Thomason & Kaufman, language shift and borrowing leave behind different types of identifiable linguistic residue. I think this to be, at least to some extent, at least part of the total picture we are all after. A few articles of value are: Lowenstein (1979) "The Yiddish written word in 19th century Germany" (Leo Baeck Yearbook, 1979), Shpirn (192-6-?) "Di yidishe shprakh in ungarn"), and Y. Matras (1991, ZDL) on Jewish German of the "Judendoerfer". Also: Anton Ree's 1844 work on Jewish German speech, discussed as well in Max Weinreich, and elsewhere. Neil Jacobs ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.174 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