______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.256 March 1, 1994 1) A Purim lid (Dvosye Bilik) 2) Nasality (Arn Abramson) 3) Maynses, etc. (Meyshe-Yankl Sweet) 4) Klezmer (Ellen Prince) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Feb 27 14:09:45 1994 From: Dorothy_BILIK@umail.umd.edu (db28) Subject: A Purim lid Tayere Mendlnikes: Miriam Isaacs asks me to seek among you for the words to a Purim lid vos zi hot gehert fun ir mamen. siz do transcripirt oyf ir loshn: A gitn purim malakh vi ikh gay falakh der burd iz mir lang das vab iz mir krank -------------------- --------------------- Gib mir a grushn un varf mir aras. Efsher kenen Meyshe Alpert oder Eli Kats undz aroyshelfn? Anander inyen--"feygl" My brother used to hang around in greenwhich village and informed me that there were many bars with bird names that were predominately "gay" bars. They were called "the bird circuit". also in Yiddish literature and folk songs there are references to "kanarik" and "kanarikl" which strongly suggest effeminancy. Any connections you linguists and folklorists? Zaytshe mir ale gezunt, Dvosye Bilik 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Feb 27 14:37:07 1994 From: "Arthur S. Abramson" Subject: Nasality If I take Roth's writing of manseh, as cited by Philologus, to mean a fully articulated dental or alveolar n-consonant, I must agree with Zachary in not ever having heard it for Yiddish mayse. If, however, this is simply Roth's way of trying to make English orthography convey an impression of some kind of nasality in utterance of that word, it is a different kettle of fish. I do indeed know of people who pronounce mayse with nasalization of the diphthong ay~: may~se (the tilde, which should be over the [a], means nasalization of the vocalaic stretch, the diphthong). At The University of Connecticut, Arnold Dashevsky, the scion of a Philadelphia Yiddishist family, always pronounces the word that way at our Yiddish luncheon meetings. The topic of nasality in Yiddish words spelled with ayin has come up before in Mendele. In a name like Yankel, even if originally it started with nasality in the vowel [a], it seems to have undergone assimilation to the consonant [k] yielding a dorso-velar consonantal articulation that we render in roman script as -ng. Arn 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Feb 27 16:17:17 1994 From: msweet@facstaff.wisc.edu Subject: Maynses etc. Am surprised that Zachary Baker finds "maynses" in Roth's novel to be curious. That's the only way it was pronounced in my family (of Ukrainian origin), in such phrases as "bobe-maynse" and "a maynse on an ek". In my partner's family, Galitsianers, it was pronounced "manse", just like Roth. I never heard of "mayse" until I began the formal study of Yiddish with Weinreich's text--undoubtedly a Litvakism (??). There's a word that's puzzled me for years, that's perhaps Yiddish. There was a child's game we played in Brooklyn in the '50s, a variation on hide and seek, in which one of the players would trace the outline of a face on the hider's back, before running to hide. What was said, in doing this, was "make a shimmelekha on the old man's back." What could this be? From shimml plus lekhe(l) "moldy little hole". Any surmises, or anyone else who knows this word? Meyshe-Yankl Sweet 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Feb 27 22:24:57 1994 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: 'klezmer' to: meyshe alpert oy, that was a line to remember: 'funny, you don't look klezmer'!!! since the beginning of its revival, i found something a bit weird about the use of 'klezmer music', but i couldn't put my finger on what it was, other than that it was being used to denote a much broader range of music than originally. very very funny, meyshele! of course, the problem with 'jewish' being broader than 'yiddish' is not unique and, also, not solved. it's not unique since the same sort of problem arises with many other terms, e.g. french people also speak breton and provencal, italians speak sardinian and sicilian and piemontese and..., etc. and it's not solved, at least not IN yiddish, since 'yidish' still means BOTH 'jewish' AND the traditional language of the ashkenazi jews. what are you gonna do... btw, there's a funny sort of naming crisis wrt french these days. 'french literature' conventionally denotes the literature of france, plus belgian and swiss lit in french. but what about the literature in french of canada? of senegal? of cambodia? that has come to be called, at least in academe, 'francophone' literature. so you get a sort of paradoxical situation whereby balzac and proust aren't francophone... go figure. re 'yivo' and what it stands for, what do other people tell editors who see it in your bibliography and want it 'spelled out'? they act like i'm severely dyslexic when i tell them. in one instance, the editor refused to believe me so i changed it from YIVO to Yivo, trying to hide its bizarre acronym-ness. ellen prince ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.256 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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