Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.048 July 5, 1994 1) Ets, enk, un, knibbers (Yude Rozof) 2) On names (Michael Shimshoni) 3) Germans and Yiddish (Rick Gildemeister) 4) Germans and Yiddish (Adam Albright) 5) Adaptation/Translation:Semantics (Leah Zazulyer) 6) South German origin of Yiddish (Dovid Braun) 7) Vilna YIVO archives (Gaston L. Schmir) 8) Yiddish correspondence (Avrom Yitzkhok Blair) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 3 Jul 1994 12:30:31 -0400 From: jrosof@sas.upenn.edu Subject: ets, enk, un, knibbers I believe that it was I who recently broached the topic of ets and enk on Mendele. I have never heard of un and unz but I imagine that these serve the same function as ets and enk. Although my exposure to ets and enk and enker has been limited as far as I know they are not used to express dual number. What I mentioned in my letter on ets and enk and Bavarian German was that these forms derived from an ancient duel. As far as I know today they simply are a variant form of Ir, Aykh and Ayer, having lost their ancient dual significance. If in fact I am mistaken and a dual form lives on in the West Germanic languages I would be grateful to hear more about this. A new topic: on rare occasions, my father, a native of Brooklyn uses an expression "a little weak in the knibbers," to mean a bit out of it, not feeling all there, "nisht mit alemen." This strikes me as coming from that same Brooklyn goldmine that gave us "to make a shimilekhl." I cannot fathom the etymology of knibbers. Any suggestions Mendelniks? Yude Rozof 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 05 Jul 94 09:28:02 +0300 From: MASH@WEIZMANN.WEIZMANN.AC.IL Subject: On Names Martin Davis informed us: >For whatever interest it may have, my father's family name in Poland was >Hershel Davidowicz. In the US it became Harry Davis. I believe this was >his own decision. "Davis" had been chosen by my father's younger brother >who had immigrated somewhat earlier. It seems to be a very good choice. I understand that Davidowicz (and its many spelling variants) means Son of David, so does Davis mean in Welsh usage. After his Aliya may I suggest Ben-David or Davidi? :-) Michael Shimshoni 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 09:17:05 EDT From: EEGLC%CUNYVM.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: Germans and Yiddish To: S. Schapiro What you say about your wife is true for Germans in general (I'm one myself, American-born), who feel that Yiddish is not a language, or if it is, then it's a lower-class patois that comes out of a corruption of medieval German. In Endingen and Lengnau there is a native Yiddish dialect which is like the Alsatian dialect. Very few Slavicisms, more Hochdeutsch than Alemannisch and in the samples I've read, completely uncorrupted by Schwyzerduutsch, with which it lives side by side but not mixed. And it really has that Yidishn tam! In shul does the rabbi use the Litvak pronunciation? All the Lubavitchers I know do. The Endingen/Lengnau book was written ca. 1964, when there were already mostly old people speaking Swiss Yiddish. Drive over, check it out, and tell us what you found! I think the title of the book is Jiddisch in alemannischen Sprachgebiet. Rick Gildemeister 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 15:08:43 -0500 From: aca1@cornell.edu Subject: German attitudes toward Yiddish I think that this thread may have died out by now, but i see my original post fell victim to the internet dybbuks, so here goes again... i had been interested to read how many people felt germans/swiss/etc were negative or indifferent to yiddish, since this was not my experience at all. it may be simply a question of sampling population, since as an exchange student in germany most of my contact was with high school kids up thru parents born between 1935 and 1945. i hadn't planned on making a big deal out of the fact that i was jewish, since i was living in an extremely small bavarian catholic town. (in fact, when i put on my forms that i didn't eat pork, some german office worker somewhere processing my form marked me as a muslim!) BUT. as soon as i got to my family and was settling in, my yiddish was a matter of great curiosity and respect. maybe partly because they saw that it helped me with bavarian, but also because they really wanted to learn a lot more about judaism and yiddish. they of course had never heard yiddish spoken at all, and had great fun having me speak it to them. in school, one girl i met told me that her grandmother had spoken yiddish, and later i also met her mother who told me she wishes times had allowed her to learn it as well (but she had been taken in by a catholic family and raised as a catholic). most germans i talked to were amazed how much yiddish was like bavarian (since the prevailing vague notion seemed to be that it was a lot more like hebrew...) i'm sure that mendelniks in germany know a lot more about this subject than i do, but all in all my experiences in this area left me pleasantly surprised and hopeful-- was i being hopelessly naive, or does this signal a new trend among many younger germans? (i'm not sure how many yorn tsurik Yude Rozof's 'etlekhe'is.) i'm sure that it must have had a lot to do with the fact the my "informants" were too young to have lived through a time when being nonplussed by yiddish was advantageous. also their interest may have been higher because of the tremendous interest in maintaining bavarian as a cultural language, so i stood out as an american also preserving a cultural language. or is this indifference mainly among german-speaking _jews_?? but now i've said way more than i intended to -- but i felt like i had to make a small defence for at least some germans here :) zayt gezint, adam albright 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 05 Jul 1994 12:49:50 -0500 (EST) From: WATSON@UNO.CC.GENESEO.EDU Subject: Adaptation/Translation:Semantics Oy, I think we are into a semantic problem, at the very least! The words translation and adaptation mean different things to different mendelniks. Some people write as though translation is MERELY word for word transliteration. For them adaptation has come to mean rendering the poem, etc., into an artistic entity in the second language. Thus for these people, translation is a "bad" word and adaptation is a "good word. For others, adaptation implies cavalier, wanton, and/or egoistic, opportunistic unfaithfulness to the original text. For them, translation is a "religous" act of cultural reincarnation, intrinsically good, faithful and true. (But they always are the first to claim translation is impossible.) No, no, no. A good, talented, conscientious translator is as faithful to the language of origin as possible, but adapts as conservatively and carefully as possible when necessary. Adaption, however, should never be a substitute for ineptitude or indolence, or whatever! Translation is not a political act, it is an art. That translation has political overtones is beside the point in this discussion, though decidely not irrelevant to such issues as "elevation". Besides, translation or adaptation of WHAT....content, form or structure, format, rhyme, assonance, local or dated dialects, quotations? ETC. For example, a translator may make adaptations in rhyme scheme or punctuation in order to more accurately translate the ideas, the mood. Jascha Kessler briefly describes the necessary process in good translation: " Paraphrase,... then metaphrase. Not idiom, not metaphor, not image....Logemes". My original post talked about how important it is not to short-cut or leap over any of this process even if one is translating with the assistance of a native speaker. But this is also true for the singular translator. Note we speak of translator, not of adaptors! Further: tranlations are not for eternity; they need to be redone as our language, or any language changes. Fact is a lot of so-called adaptations have been opportunistic on the part of translator, publisher, or even writer. Hope my thoughts are clarifying. it's a big issue. Leah Zazulyer 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 05 Jul 94 13:46:24 EDT From: dovid@MIT.EDU Subject: South German origin of Yiddish South German Origin of Yiddish (answer to Yude Rozof) Robert King has suggested in a paper some time in the last few years that the origins of Yiddish are more correctly in southern Germany -- Bavaria, e.g., -- than in the Rhine region, as Max Weinreich would have it. I'm sorry I don't have the paper or paper title handy. Dovid Braun 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 15:56:57 -0400 (EDT) From: glschm@minerva.cis.yale.edu Subject: Vilna YIVO archives Could anyone tell me what has come of YIVO's efforts to recover or at least to microfilm the sizable part of the YIVO archives which had been believed to have been irretrievably lost in the Holocaust and which were recently found to have been preserved in Vilna? The last issue of the YIVO journal Yidishe Shprakh to reach me is volume 38, no. 1-3, 1984/1986. Could anyone (like, for example, Zachary Baker) let me know if there have been any later issues, or, for that matter, whether this journal still exists. Gaston L. Schmir 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 08:31:06 -0600 (CST) From: "Allan Blair" Subject: RE: Yiddish correspondence To Leybl Botwinik re: your letter of 6/29/94 I read with interest your call for Yiddishe Fedder-Fraynt [pen-pals]. We are beginning just such a program. We are in the embryonic stage right now, and I am in the process of collecting American and European names. I am starting this program through Fishl Kutner's "Der Bay" and it would be terrific if I could use the good offices of Mendele to communicate with even more people. The first thing we must start with is the European correspond- ants. If you are currently writing in Yiddish to anyone in Europe or Israel (or ANYWHERE), ask them if they'd like to correspond with someone in the USA. I currently have four Israeli and European fedder-fraynt. It's a wonderful experience. I'm going to Latvia this Fall to visit a pen-pal in Riga. About the Yiddish Resource Center: everyone agrees that we need one. But where? I have contacted the National Yiddish Book Center 0twice and they to "host" it, and keep it headquartered in their offices. So far, I haven't heard one word from them (except a request for money)! Nu, herr zakh ein, Mendelniks! Be sure to get yourself to the Toronto meeting October 7-9, 1994. It will be a terrific meeting and much of the above stuff will be discussed. For more info about THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF YIDDISH CLUBS, contact: Bess Shockett of Sylvia Lustgarten Committee for Yiddish Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto 4600 Bathurst Street Willowdale, Ontario M2R 3V2 Canada Avrom Yitzkhok (Allan) Blair ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.048 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Archives available via gopher on: gopher.cic.net Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu