______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.244 February 23, 1994 1) Oxford Summer Program (Lisa Jenschke) 2) Zachary Baker (Shmoyl Leyzer Wolitz) 3) Yiddish Text to Speech (Martin Minow) 4) Index to Yiddish Periodicals (Heidi Lerner) 5) Introduction (Anatole Beck) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Feb 22 10:25:42 1994 From: Lisa A Jenschke Subject: Oxford Summer Program re: Michael Sweet's post Having attended the Oxford Summer program last year, I know from experience that all ages, nationalities, religions are welcome and represented. The age range last year was from 18 to 93, and all ages interacted to everyone's benefit. Many of the students were retired couples who wanted to improve, learn, or use their Yiddish. Perhaps half of the students were younger people (undergraduate and graduate students 18-30) who were interested in Yiddish for their studies. Regardless of age, the students interacted and learned a lot from each other. I don't think anyone, of any age, would feel out of place. zayt gezunt Lisa Jenschke 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Feb 22 11:10:04 1994 From: Seth Wolitz Subject: Zachary Baker I wish to publically express my appreciation to Zachary Baker of Yivo for all the years of superb service he has rendered us Yiddishists outside of New York and when we visit his shrine. He has done such wonderful service in helping us track down refenerences and texts and sent them along speedily. His contributions to Mendele are always invaluable and his modesty proves he is an ISH KHESED. Were Yiddish Studies more populated with such sterling examples of living Yiddishkayt! Shmoyl Leyzer Wolitz 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Feb 22 12:17:23 1994 From: Martin Minow Subject: re: Yiddish Text to Speech I'm one of the people who developed DECtalk (small world, isn't it). While there are a number of Yiddish phonemes that DECtalk doesn't know about (and no way to add additional phonemes to the original set), you could probably cobble together something that would be better than nothing. If nothing else, Yiddish -> Roman alphabet transliteration -> DECtalk would probably be minimally understandable. The core algorithms that DECtalk uses (The Klatt synthesizer) are published, and there are C implementations that run on several workstations. These are available on Internet. Be warned, however, that to go from the algorithms to a working synthesizer for a new language is a very difficult task (certainly worth a PhD) as you must essentially develop a theory of the linguistics for that language. You'd need a decent workstation, too. Yiddish could be a very interesting language to develop a text-to-speech system for since its vocabulary derives from several language families. It's been about ten years since I worked on DECtalk, but I'd be happy to try to answer any specific questions you might have. Martin Minow 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Feb 22 13:26:03 1994 From: "Heidi Lerner" Subject: Index to Yiddish Periodicals I thought that the following might be of interest to Mendelniks. The Index to Yiddish Periodicals is available to ALEPH searchers who can display Hebrew characters. (ALEPH is the online catalog of five major Israeli universities.) This Index is put out by by Professor Abraham Nowersztern of the Yiddish Department at Hebrew University. Currently seven periodicals/newspapaers are represented in this Index: Idishe Vokhenblat, Haynt (Warsaw), Haynt (Ekstre oysg.), Haynt (Byalage), Haynt: mitog oysg., Der Moment (Warsaw), Der Moment: mitogblat. Searchable indexes include author, title, and subject. To access the Index to Yiddish Periodicals, searchers need to telnet RAM1.HUJI.AC.IL. Heidi Lerner, Hebraica/Judaica Cataloger 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Feb 22 17:57:42 1994 From: Anatole Beck Subject: Introduction I am a native speaker of Yiddish (which used to be called Jewish, and is still called Juif in French) and as a child took post-school training in the language for a few years, to the point where I can read and write it now, though only with difficulty. As a professor of Mathematics, I learned German and the two languages interfere with each other in my mind, so that I speak a very juedisch German and a very daitschish Yiddish. I have found Yiddish speakers all over Europe and even in Israel, where the language survived a vicious assault by Hebraists in the 30s & 40s and is now so dead that it can be the subject of an attempted restoration. I have been interested for some decades in the possibility of creating a genuine transliteration scheme which would be a letter-for-letter transposition rather than an attempt to reconstruct the sound of the language in English language conventions. I am looking for something which would enable a typist to transcribe the language without having to be able to read it. I do think that for those who do not read Hebrew, the letters are a major bar to learning Yiddish. I also have a small interest in Ladino, having studied Spanish in HS, but there seems to be even less Ladino around than Yiddish. Anatole Beck ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.244 To subscribe, send SUB MENDELE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME to: LISTSERV@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. 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