______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.266 March 7, 1994 1) Netizne-gelt (Delphine Bechtel) 2) 'Gay' in Yiddish (Mikhl Herzog) 3) Lezbyanke (Jeremy Stern) 4) Shprintsaleahs (Mark Flumerfelt) 5) Nasality in ayin-words (Arn Abramson) 6) Feygelekh and friends (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 16:38:25 1994 From: DELPHINE BECHTEL Subject: netizne-gelt Would anyone know the yiddish word "netizne-gelt". It appears in a mayse of Der Nister, I couldnt find it anywhere, from the context, it could mean something like "alms" Delphine Bechtel 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 12:14:13 1994 From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Subject: 'gay' in Yiddish In my long message of March 2, I said I'd be content to accept Yosl Mlotek's word that "feygele" was used in Yiddish in Poland to mean 'gay' Heybt zikh nisht on! Having just spoken to him, let me report the following: i) He says he was never approached on the subject by a DARE editor (as I know I was); ii) He denies any knowledge of the word having been used in Yiddish, certainly not in Poland (though he did know one or more gays). I consider us back at square one on the subject, ready to go to battle for my "seductive" theory that "feygele" in English is a Yiddishoid extension of "fag" (or, how about "fey"?). Mikhl Herzog 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 17:52:28 1994 From: Jeremy Stern Subject: Lezbyanke "Lezbyanke" cannot be a recent formation; the word was borrowed from Russian. Incidentally, does Yiddish allow the word "lezbyanitshke" as Russian does? Jeremy 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 20:07:38 1994 From: Mark Flumerfelt Subject: Shprintsaleahs I have a few more queries for the mavens at Mendele. First, in my family (Russ ian Jews who settled in Montreal), we used the term "shprintsaleah" to describe spoiled Jewish girls. Interestingly, we did not have a comparable term for spoiled Jewish boys. I have been having a debate with my friend. I believe the term is a diminutive of the Yiddish word for princess. My friend believes that it is a combination of two womens' names -- Shprintse and Leah. Who is correct? Second, I refer to my grandmother as Babi and my grandfather as Zeda. Jews in Toronto usually pronounce it Bubbi and Zedi. My fiance, who is from South Africa, pronounces it Bobba and Zeda. Why is there a difference? Is it a Russian, Polish, Lithuanian thing or is there another reason? Mark Flumerfelt 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Mar 3 20:30:11 1994 From: "Arthur S. Abramson" Subject: Nasality in ayin-words I'm glad at least one person, Zachary Baker, agrees in having heard nasalization in the diphthong of mayse (=[may~se]. Of course, in a dialect in which such words do not have a diphthong we might hear [ma~se] although, as some of our people have said, [manse] or [maynse] might occur too. The other day I mentioned the pronunciation of /mayse/ by my colleague Arnold Dashefsky, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at UConn. Yesterday we had one of our Yiddish Table gatherings. It happens that he had to use the word /mayse/ several times. One of our members asked him later about his "strange" pronunciation with an "n." Now I was not surprised that a man whose dominant language is English would hear the nasality on a vocalic stretch as the consonant N, but it is also true that Dashefsky in replying thoughtfully and carefully, gave a deliberate citation-form pronunciation with a consonant rather than a nasalized diphthong, [maynse]. If you will be kind enough to trust my field phonetician's ear, I can assure you that in casual speech he just nasalizes the diphthong. Given this alternation between speaking styles and the existence of the dorso-velar nasal consonant [ng] (in phonetic transcription, impossible here, this would be a single symbol, an n with a descender), linguists would probably want to link any nasalized vowels or diphthongs with an "underlying" nasal consonant. An analog in English is that in, e.g., Greater Metroplitan New York English, words like "can't" with a final voiceless [t] are pronounced by some with a nasalized vowel and no [n], whereas words like "canned" with a final voiced [d] and a longer vowel are not. Arn Abramson 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thur Mar 3 11:51:33 1994 From: MILLERN@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU Subject: Feygelekh and friends It seems to me that there's been substantial agreement regarding "feygele", i.e. that it's a North American word. The question about European terms for homosexual remains open. For what it's worth, here's my experience. I'm one of those who doesn't recall ever hearing about such things from my parents. They came to America when they were past 40. But from my aunt, who had emigrated when she was a girl and who lived up the street, and from her children (indeed recently from one of her grandchildren) I heard "feygele". Not that I knew what it meant until I was about 19. Years go by. One day I ask my father. He gives a nervous laugh, looks to my mother for support, and says: "Binyumin Bes Petzke". Suddenly I realize that I _had_ heard it before--and more than once-- but I'd heard it with the inattentiveness of a kid bored with his parents' constant jawing about landslayt named Moyshe Khane Rivke's and the like. So I say, "Binyumin Bes Petzke?! Fin vonen aza tchidne numen?" (I spoke mother-lode Podolian in those days.) My father answers: "Ikh veys? S'iz geven ba inz a Binyumin, azoy ot men im gerifn". He was clearly anxious to move on to another topic and we did. I have a _very_ tenuous theory to account for all this, but I'd much rather hear from the sociolinguists among us. Noyekh ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.266 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