Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.008 May 25, 1994 1) Introduction (Tami Echavarria) 2) Zishe (Tami Echavarria) 3) Yiddish first names (Pierre Lewis) 4) Stem construction (Beatrice Santorini) 5) Fonye ganef; "a makh" (Meyske Alpert) 6) Tikn-toes (Dovid Braun) 7) Dropped pronouns (Zev bar-Lev) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 24 13:41:42 1994 From: Tami_Echavarria@UCSDLIBRARY.ucsd.edu Subject: Introduction My name is Tami Echavarria. I am the Reference Desk Manager at the University Library of the University of California, San Diego. My subject background underlying my MLS is a BS, MS in International Agricultural Development. I am a first generation American, born of immigrant parents; my mother is Lithuanian Jewish, and my father was a Spaniard. I am trilingual: Spanish, Yiddish, English. I am literate in Spanish and English, but just barely in Yiddish. I can read Yiddish at a very slow pace, sounding out the words in vernacular since I don't know spelling. My interest in Mendele is to have an avenue to practice reading and speaking Yiddish, albeit in tranliteration. I would prefer the vernacular, if anyone has suggestions on how to accomplish this. I am not a Yiddishist, Judaic Studies bibliographer, learned scholar or authority. I am just a native speaker, a litvak dialectically. If you are willing to tolerate that, I would like to join you. Tami Echavarria 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 24 16:22:47 1994 From: Tami_Echavarria@UCSDLIBRARY.ucsd.edu Subject: Origin of Zishe "Zishe" means "sweet" and "Zisle" is a woman's name with the same meaning (my Lithuanian Jewish grandmother's name). In naming me after her, the folks gave me the middle name "Honey" being an anglicized version of Zisle. I have no etymological expertise so I can't guess at language origin of this word, though. Tami Echavarria 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 24 16:41:36 1994 From: lew@bnr.ca Subject: Re: Yiddish first names Is there any standard work (that I can expect to find at the McGill library where they have thousands of Y books) that contains a list of [the more common] Yiddish first names with: - The spelling (Hebrew oysyes) - Yiddish and/or Hebrew transliterations into English - English equivalent. Hypothetical example (which might be roughly right): daled-veyz-vov-reysh-hey Dvoyre Dvorah Deborah mem-??? Mathew ? Dictionaries seem to never cover this. Weinreich has some names, but not in an organized fashion (unless I'm blind). Usually context makes it clear it's a name, but it isn't always obvious tsi froy oder man, and sometimes that's important to the story, and knowing the English equivalent can sometimes help a lot in searching one's memory for pertinent information. A dank, pierre (p.) lewis 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 24 16:43:53 1994 From: beatrice@zora.ling.nwu.edu Subject: stem construction dovid, thank you for your detailed response to my msg. i'm a little confused, though, about what you're saying. if the verb-adjective order is associated wtih the adjective being new information, shouldn't (c) be felicitous, and (d) infelicitous, exactly contrary to what you say in your message? i've repeated the relevant parts below.j > c. s'iz geven a sheyner tog. di zun hot geshaynt. bin ikh mir > aroysgegangen fun shtub un mit a mol bin ikh gevorn nas. imetser hot af > mir oysgegosn an emer mit vaser! > vs. > d. ...aroysgegangen fun shtub un mit a mol bin ikh nas gevorn. ... > Methinks (c) is awkward, infelicitous. Do native speakers with very, > very fine judgments concur? have i misunderstood what you are saying? beatrice santorini 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 24 16:52:22 1994 From: Meyshke@aol.com Subject: Fonye (Ganef) + "a makh" Another (self)-educated guess in regard to the origin of "Fonye" to denote a (male) Russian or Russians and by inference the Tsar, or vice versa: I've always seen "Fonye" likely originating from Russian "Afonia" or "Fonia," nicknames derived from the Russian male given names Agafon or Afanasii. Both names were popular in the nineteenth century and especially associated with Russian peasants and/or priests. In my experience, "Fonye" refers not only to the Tsar or other individuals, but is at times also analogous to the African-American usages "the man" or "honky," in collectively describing (Tsarist) dominant-culture authority in general. The "ganef" part seems fairly clear, as Rick Gildemeister (a gezunt em in di beyner arayn!) points out. How "Fonye" came to particularly connote the Tsar remains, of course, a good question, since I'm hard pressed to think of a Tsar Afanasii or Agafon dating from the past couple of centuries (and don't have my "Cavalcade of Tsars" pocket calendar handy at the moment). Possibly the association went from bottom to top of the social hierarchy, starting with priests, recruiting officers or draft board authorities and extending upward to The Big Pirozhok himself. No doubt Bob Rothstein and other Slavicists are about to leap into the fray on this very issue with their learned counsel. Re "a makh" (mit der hant, u.a.v): Begging pardons if I'm restating a point already made here (I'm not always able to keep up with the frenzied pace of Mendele discourse), but does not "makh" in the sense of "gesture" or "wave" derive from Slavic "makh/mashat', etc. ('wave', 'gesticulation'), bearing only coincidental resemblance to the Germanic-origin verb "makhn" (make, do)? Clearly, the two meanings seems to have been conflated in Yiddish to a large extent, despite their separate origin. Or does someone have the inside story that Slavic "makh" has a Germanic origin, or is a cognate of the Germanic verb? Meyshke (Michael Alpert) 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed May 25 14:19:36 1994 From: dovid@MIT.EDU Subject: tikn-toes (erratum) [Regarding "Yiddish scrambling/V+Adj. vs. Adj.+Verb word order"] I misreferred to one of my examples in the discussion of scrambling in Yiddish, so it seems that my illustration counterexemplifies my point. Sorry. This is what I _did_ mean: The (a)-utterance is good but the (b)-utterance, perhaps, isn't: (a) s'iz geven a sheyner tog. di zun hot geshaynt. bin ikh mir aroysge- gangen fun shtub un mit a mol bin ikh GEVORN NAS. imetser hot af mir oysgegosn an emer mit vaser! *(b) s'iz geven a sheyner tog. di zun hot geshaynt. bin ikh mir aroysgegangen fun shtub un mit a mol bin ikh NAS GEVORN. imetser hot af mir oysgegosn an emer mit vaser! Very, very, very subtle (if at all correct). Dovid Braun 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed May 25 15:22:10 1994 From: zbarlev@zeus.sdsu.edu Subject: dropped pronouns i can't speak to the yiddish details, but i'd like to suggest that inflection for pronouns, while it may be a factor in dropping of pronouns, is not determinative. japanese, for example, has no person conjugation, but often omits pronouns -- especially first and second person. context and, most important, big-time inferencing, take up the slack. (you wouldn't want to be too clear in japanese.) russian makes more inflectional distinctions than polish, for example, but russian generally does not drop pronouns, while polish does so, at least a little more readily. e.g. jak sie ma "how are you/he/she" is common, perhaps more so than kak pozhivaete "how are you" in russian. even in spanish and italian, the classic cases, the stem-form is used for 3rd person masc/fem, and also polite sing. "you", e.g. parla italiano? "do you/he/she speak italian?" but the pronoun is most often omitted. the textbook's claim that they are present to resolve ambiguities is disingenuous: native speakers can handle ambiguities more readily than american learners. french, in contrast, at least distinguishes "you" polite from "he/she" in inflection, but still requires the pronoun. Zev bar-Lev ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.008 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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