______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.265 March 7, 1994 1) Plays on words (David Sherman) 2) Yiddish/English jokes(Daniella HarPaz) 3) Moshe Kapoyer (Moshe Waldoks) 4) Lekish Ber (Ellen Prince) 5) Cross-linguistic jokes (Ellen Prince) 6) Jews and numbers (Delphine Bechtel) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 10:38:15 1994 From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca (David Sherman) Subject: Re: plays on words > Are there many such play-on-words > jokes that cross from one language to another? We do them all the time at home. It's an automatic byproduct of switching back and forth between two languages all the time. This is the kind of stuff that caused Noyekh to despair of my original mail.yiddish mailing list and create MENDELE. At the risk of offending the literati, here's a sample: What do you get when you cross a chicken and a rabbit? Nisht a hin, nisht a hare. What do you call a bedbug in a test tube? A vants in a vial. I have lots of this kind of stuff on the old mail.yiddish archives. If anyone wants them, drop me a line. (There were 53 issues.) David Sherman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 15:21:19 1994 From: Daniella.HarPaz@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Yiddish/English jokes Just a note to Dan Leeson.... Did you ever hear of the old (not very complex) joke: What do you get when you cross a chicken with a rabbit? Answer: NISHT A HIN, NISHT A HER (the play on "hen" and "hare") Daniella HarPaz 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 11:58:44 1994 From: WALDOKS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU Subject: Re: Moshe Kapoyer The Yiddish Wrong-way Corrigan was a comic strip in a a New York Yiddish daily in the teens ands trwenties. It was very popular and reached the Yiddish readers of Poland as well. It was another in a long line of descriptions of ineptitude that Yiddish relishes. Someone who is beyond shlimil and shlimazal and does everything backwards. It was a favorite expression of many. Moshe Waldoks 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 12:09:31 1994 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: lekish ber as i eagerly await the answer to dan leeson's query about moyshe kapoye(r?), i'd like to add a question about another 'personality' who was alive and well in my house: lekish ber. he would make his appearance when someone rang the doorbell and someone inside would yell out 'who's there?'--someone else inside would invariably answer 'lekish ber'. ellen prince 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 12:09:31 1994 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: crosslinguistic jokes there was one oft-told joke about a girl who has a very 'american' suitor who was freaked out when he overheard the girl's mother telling someone in the kitchen to 'shit in the pot', meaning to pour [something] into the pot. btw, in my house, the line often uttered to dawdlers during poker games, 'shit or get off the pot', was (folk?-)analyzed as meaning LITERALLY 'put in your money or fold', where _shit_ was taken to be yiddish shitn 'pour' and _pot_ was taken in its sense of 'pile of money consisting of the antes and bets'. thus it was technically not vulgar but of course always evoked giggles. another giggle-evoking crosslinguistic line was my father's _azoy geyt di yorn_, which he pronounced 'azoy geyt di yurn', homonymous (for him) with english _urine_. now that i think of it, i don't know why it was _geyt_ and not _geyen_. any explanation? (he was truly fluent and literate in yiddish, btw.) could this be an instance of lack of number agreement with postposed subjects? (i came across a number of clear examples of this when i was working on postposed subjects, using olsvanger's _royte pomerantsn_ as my corpus.) and, finally, there was the line _a ki (= ku) est un (= on) a mese (= meser)_ 'a cow eats without a knife', which, in our central yiddish, was supposed to sound just like spanish _aqui esta una mesa_ 'here is a table'. there was also a line that was supposed to mean something in french and that was something like _avu tut ir a vey..._ but i can't reconstruct it. (azoy geyt di yurn... :) ) ellen prince 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 16:38:09 1994 From: DELPHINE BECHTEL Subject: Jews and numbers There is a tradition (is it a minhag? or halakhically documented) among Ashkenazic Jews not to count members of a community. For example when counting people present for a minyan, one would say "nit eyns, nit tsvey" etc. Or recently I read one of the problems Jews had with the German Authorities during the Age of Enlightenment was that the state wanted to know the size of the communities, the exact number of members they had, and Jews had a hard time explaining they would not give such an information. Does anybody have any information on the origin of that custom. Are there any other traditions linked with numbers? Thanks for helping Delphine Bechtel ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.265 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. 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 Mendele: Yiddish literature and language