Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.176 December 21, 1993 1) Shnayd durkh dem shvartsn plonter.. (David Neal Miller) 2) More about Tante/Mime//Onkl/Feter (Marnen Laibow-Koser) 3) Century-old Yiddish (Khaim Bochner) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Dec 19 15:36:38 1993 From: David Neal Miller Subject: Shnayd durkh dem shvartsn plonter fun mayn zel I share my colleague Neil Jacobs' interest in the recent discussion of daytshmerish, and concur that It is important [ . . . ] 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. . . . The literary/non-literary (not precisely coterminous with written/spoken) axis is of particular importance to the study of daytshmerish and, more broadly, to that of the influence and place of New High German in modern Yiddish letters. While the topic begs a book-length discussion, I shall note here the unmarked availability of borrowings from New High German in (especially, but not exclusively, pre-khurbn) Yiddish literature generally, and especially poetry. Nor were these borrowings the exclusive prerogative of authors wishing (nusekh early Glatshteyn) to distance themselves from Hebrew or, conversely, to invoke or participate in the (predominantly germanophile!) world of socialist discourse. Consider, for example, the poet Mani Leyb (Brahinski), surely as careful a stylist as Yiddish literature possesses. A line such as "Shnayd durkh dem shvartsn plonter fun mayn zel"--beautiful, vintage Mani Leyb--bespeaks neither stylistic laxness nor antipathy toward Hebrew (or at least toward recherche elements of the Hebrew/Aramaic component of Yiddish): what is asked to "shnayd durkh dem shvartsn plonter fun mayn zel" is, after all, "pashtes klore." Indeed, one might well assert that literary borrowings from New High German such as Brahinski's are anything but unmarked. Consider, for example, the tantalizingly complex issue of Yehoyesh's translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Though Bloomgarten's elevated Germanic style owes much, as is generally acknowledged, to the sacred penumbra of ivre-taytsh, it owes, I submit, no less to the notion of NHG as Kultursprache. In literary terms at least, borrowings from NHG are not only typical, but even defining, of much of American Yiddish poetry of broad cultural and ideological provenance. David Neal Miller 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Dec 20 16:41:35 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu Subject: More about Tante/Mime//Onkl/Feter Michael Shimshoni shraybt: : : While all these terms *are* German kinship ones, both Vetter and : Muhme are used less and less. Anyhow in German Muhme was never a : term for a cousin but for and *aunt*. Vetter is exclusively used : for a *male* cousin, the female term being Base. : for people known less intimately. Hmmmm....I thought "Muhme" meant "cousin" since I saw it used that way in an opera translation (and in a place where "Tante" would have fit the meter), but those can be notoriously inaccurate. As for the sex of "Vetter", I think I've heard "Vetterin" or some such for "female cousin"; I don't think I've ever encountered "Base". Was "Cousin" used for male, female, or both? (Incidentally, in Danish, "faedre" is male cousin and "cousine" (or maybe "kusine") is "female cousin".) Sorry if I've opened up a can of daytshmerishe worms here.... Marnen Laibow-Koser 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Dec 21 10:02:06 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: re: Century-old Yiddish Arre Komar writes: > As a guide to > what the newly arriving Yiddish immigrant community felt comfortable > with I turned to a century old English-Yiddish dictionary that I > inherited from my father and looked up several of the words that > have been subject to dispute and caviling. The dictionary is: > Complete English-Yiddish Dictionary by Alexander Harkavy and then points out that this dictionary gives words like "hokhtsayt" and "broytigam" as translations for "wedding", "bridegroom", etc. The question is, what should we make of this? Here's an interesting point of comparison. The same Alexander Harkavy wrote another Yiddish dictionary, his "Yidish-English- Hebreisher Verterbukh", published in 1925, revised in 1928 (and reissued in 1988 by Yivo). This dictionary contains many more Yiddish words than his earlier dictionary, since it doesn't have the English to Yiddish section. And in the foreword he says (transliterating his spelling): "Mit dem verk iz geven mayn kavone tsu geben a verterbukh fun yidish, vos zol bafridign unzer oylem in a fil greserer mos, vi di yidishe verterbikher, velkhe zaynen aroysgegeben gevorn frier." Since the most popular Yiddish dictionary in America at the time was his own earlier dictionary, I would conclude that he must have meant the new dictionary to be more complete than his earlier one. And the interesting thing is that the newer dictionary doesn't have the words "hokhtsayt" or "broytigam" at all. Now, when the older dictionary translates wedding as "hokhtsayt, khasene", giving "hokhtsayt" first, while the newer one by the same author doesn't even list "hokhtsayt" as a Yiddish word, I have to think there was something artificial about the style of the earlier dictionary. Unfortunately, Harkavy's brief introduction to the newer dictionary doesn't address this issue. The new introduction by Dovid Katz (of Oxford) does mention it; interestingly, the Yiddish text on the bottom of page xxxiii says more than the English translation on page xv. Since it's a modern opinion, I won't take time to quote it here. If anyone knows that Harkavy did discuss it in his other writings, and can supply a reference, I'd be interested in looking it up. By the way, I first learned to read Yiddish from the introduction to my parent's copy of the old Harkavy dictionary. I'm off to Klezkamp tomorrow; zayt mir ale gezunt un shtark! Khaim ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.176 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