Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.108 September 21, 1994 1) Dutch Yiddish (Meyshe-Yankl Sweet) 2) Kibosh vs. kibush (Zev bar-Lev) 3) Romanization (Yude Rozof) 4) On Zellig's strictures (Shleyme Axelrod) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 19 Sep 94 03:46:32 CST From: msweet@facstaff.wisc.edu Subject: Dutch Yiddish Interesting article in a recent Forverts, by Dovid Katz, about the Dutch Jewish linguist Hartog Beem, whom I've seen mentioned before on this list. Are there any Batavo-yiddishists who know if Beem's books are available anywhere? Especially his large lexicon "Yeroshe". Are there any Judaica bookstores in the Netherlands that might have this? Meyshe-Yankl Sweet 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Sep 94 11:59:18 PDT From: zbarlev@zeus.sdsu.edu Subject: kibosh vs. kibush and transliterating hebrew words in yiddish 1. objection! it takes more than a meaning connection (or even meaning identity) to establish an etymological link. there's got to be a path for it to take. i have no special point of view of my own here, not remembering the earlier discussion. but how and when did /kibush/ supposedly enter English? there are all sorts of books out there (altho not as many as in the 18th century), in which someone "proves" that one language (often hebrew, but often the author's native language, e.g. there is a 20th century exmaple of arabic and an 18th century example of dutch) is the source of all languages. doesn't "source" come from hebrew shoresh? i'm not accusing charles eisenberg of going so far, but his QED is overstated. 2. i second the idea that it's ok to transliterate (not transcribe phonemically) hebrew words in yiddish. linguists may often prefer phonemic transcription, but there's nothing illegitimate about a transliteration. (there very handy in libraries, for example.) if "standard yiddish" wants to abolish such special spellings, it had better abolish the special spellings in yiddish (a la sovietish heimlant). zev bar-Lev 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 12:16:51 -0400 (EDT) From: jrosof@sas.upenn.edu Subject: response to Aharon Meytahl re: romanization In the last installment of Mendele Aharon Meytahl sharply criticized the principle which I expressed, that Yiddish should be romanized in approximate accordance with pronunciation. I reproduce here a portion of that letter: "...[Yude Rozof says...] Since in Yiddish there is no difference between 'heth' and 'khav' (sic) the transliteration should have the same sign for both of them. I fail to follow the logic." The letter goes on to explain a far more "logical" system of transliteration: letter by letter. In fact as I shall demonstrate, such a system would lead to hefkeyres. This can be easily realized by comparison with the difficulties involved in writing English in Yiddish: "high school" is written in Yiddish characters as "Hay skul" and not as "high skhul." How should the Yiddish reader of English, unfamiliar with the finer points of English spelling discern between the "gh" in high, enough, and weight? In order to know how to read English thus transliterated into his language, the Yiddish reader would have to already be familiar with the whole English language and spelling system, in which case he would be better served to read the transliterated text in the original. Transliteration is only as helpful as its ability to communicate the reproduction of the spoken sentence graphically produced. To return to the problems of Yiddish romanization, we are faced by the fact that the same letters in Yiddish can have a two fold pronunciation. Thus the 9ayin could represent either an ancient Semitic gutteral consonant or the vowel e in the literary dialect. The kaph could represent either a /k/ or could follow the laws of begedkepet-bheghedhkhepheth, and be pronounced as a khaph. The yodh (Yiddish yud) is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. The Hebrew waw represents in Yiddish a /v/ or a /u/. It is ridiculous to consider transliterating the Yiddish "Mame lebn, gib mir epes broyt, zay azoy gut" as /m@m9 l9bn gyb myr @9p9s brwyt zyy azwy gwt./ Yet this is what uniformity demands if we are to assign the same transliteration to yiddish letters in all words irrespective of origin. Aharon Meytahl justifies his transliteration scheme by claiming that it gives more information to the reader. Does it really? To someone who knows no English spelling, what good is "high" transliterated letter for letter: the reader is deprived of the most basic information: how to read the foreign word. He is not interested in the fact that in ancient English the gh represented a gutteral. If he is a linguist and he is interested, than he ought to study English in its own alphabet. Thus to recap: letter for letter transliteration is not practical in Yiddish, a language with multiple pronunciations of some letters and merged pronunciations of others. Secondly, even if one does transliterate letter for letter, which values does one assign to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet? Modern Hebrew is not generally romanized according to reconstructed Masorite pronunciation. One writes echad, rather than 'eh.odh in most situations. Should Yiddish outdo Hebrew and write ma@ribh for mayrev? Or maybe even magharibh (the Biblical pronunciation reconstructed by linguistics). I think not. The Hebrew alphabet should serve Yiddish, Yiddish should not serve the Hebrew alpahbet. Aharon Meytahl is further convinced that those who disagree with his view are khas-vekholile anti-hebreistn: "I suspect it has to do with the old, now defunct struggle, with Hebrew. As a matter of principle, everything that smells of Hebrew should be oyfgekert or God forbid the use of Hebrew words davke azoy." Punkt farkert Reb Arn! 'Eineni klal ve-klal mitnaged la-9ivrit ha-hidusha asher hitkayema beyameinu 9al adamatam shel ha-yehudim. Barukh hashem, she-teileikh ve-tigdal beli 9ayn ha ra9. 'Ani 9as.mi ohev gadol shel ha-safa ve-ka9eit ani mit9aseiq be-lemidat sifruta shel ha-9ivrit ba-mikhlala. I would say that in the Kulturkampf between modern Hebrew and Yiddish, Yiddish was the true victim. The Zionist movement in British Mandatory Palestine and later the State of Israel went out of their way to hammer the nails into the coffin of Yiddish, and Yiddish printing presses were faced with terrorist threats. Never did Yiddishists turn on loshn-koydesh with such venom. To this day, flyers on El-Al may read any of a host of Israeli papers printed in foreign languages in Israel in German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, etc. Yiddish, represented in Israel by a variety of regularly appearing periodicals, is conspicuous by its absence. Whether in Hebrew or Yiddish, all I seek is koved ha-loshn, kbhwd hlshwn. Yude Rozof 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 13:08:30 -0400 (EDT) From: PTYAXEL@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: On Zellig's strictures: Toward a case for inclusiveness Shoymer-yidish Zellig Bach (4.102) offers a counsel of perfection: Romanize (transcribe) into English according to the "strict and long-accepted rules of Yiddish spelling." The advice is reminiscent of Roman Jakobson's dictum in his preface to Weinreich's _College Yiddish_: "Full mastery or illiteracy-- _tertium non datur_." So who can argue with "Do it right"? But even if we grant that the YIVO conventions (rather "young", as ellen prince [4.104] notes) ought to be followed in serious scholarly and literary efforts, we should face up to the nature of Mendele in the real cyberworld. An inquiry last week revealed that there were 534 subscribers. It's anyone's guess what proportion both know the YIVO conventions of Yiddish spelling and are able to romanize in YIVO style easily; but judging from the last couple of years worth of issues, if "Do it right" entails "or don't do it at all", then there will be many who will be turned off and away from Mendele--a saddening prospect. Why not acknowledge that there are at least two groups of Mendelenikes, those who can without great effort follow Zellig's counsel, and those who haven't learned to do so and don't have the training, the time, or the energy to learn to do so? The second group is surely more sizable than would be indicated by the almost unanimous support Zellig's posting has so far received, and surely there are many in the second group who, more intimidated than Bert Steinberg was (4.104) by Zellig's post, have been too diffident to respond. As others have asked in past interchanges on the topic, Is the number of lovers of Yiddish these days so great that we can afford to dismiss a whole group for non-compliance with orthographic, grammatical, and transcriptional norms? Why can't we have it both ways, Group 1 striving toward functioning as a learned society, the members of Group 2 enjoying Mendele for their own less scholarly and less technical reasons? (Zellig's fight with the U.S. Census Bureau, now--that's a different story; the passage from the Bureau's Yiddish "Guide" for interviewers that he reproduces in Afn Shvel (No. 292, Oct.-Dec. 1993) is indeed outrageous. The difference is that the Bureau certainly had the resources to assess the correctness of its Yiddish, resources that an individual Mendelenik, deriving pleasure from the language however imperfectly remembered from his/her youth, does not have.) I recall reading with pleasure many years ago an account of young people --Yugntrufnikes, I suppose--picketing the Forverts building, carrying signs demanding "Derekh-erets far yidish!" But what it is reasonable to demand of the then-daily major Yiddish newpaper in the U.S. (and the U.S. Census Bureau) may be too much to ask of individuals who want to maintain a connection, however tenuous, with a cherished part of their early lives that included Yiddish as an important element. Where else can they go? Mendele is after all not Di yidishe shprakh or Afn shvel or Di goldene keyt; by their nature, electronic lists are informal, even ephemeral (though thanks to Noyekh Shames and Bob Rothstein, archives of Mendele are now available to those who want to refer to them.) Let's not drive anyone away. Let two flowers bloom. Shleyme Axelrod ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.108 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) 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 Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu