Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.174 November 9, 1994 1) Call for Yiddish speakers (Miki Safadi) 2) "Belz"; "Oyfn Pripetchik" (David Ferleger) 3) Alte zachen (Abe Bloom) 4) Transcription, not romanization (Arn Abramson) 5) Bubbeh-baby games (Miki Safadi) 6) EEJH list (David Sherman) 7) Petrishke (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 08 Nov 94 08:32 PST From: izzydz3@mvs.oac.ucla.edu Subject: Call for Yiddish speakers I'm collecting samples of Yiddish conversation for my Ph.D. dissertation. I'm especially interested in finding young adults and children (or grandparents who live with grandchildren), who speak Yiddish regularly at home. If you live in the Los Angeles area and would like to participate in video and audio recording of conversation, please get in touch. If you live elsewhere, but have or can make recordings (preferably video, but audio is fine, too) of everyday sorts of conversations, I'd be grateful for those and for being in touch with others who recognize the necessity of keeping our beautiful language alive and promoting interest in it. Miki Safadi 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 08 Nov 1994 18:27:30 -0500 (EST) From: dferleger@delphi.com Subject: "Belz"; "Oyfn Pripetchik" Does anyone know the origin or writers of these songs? David Ferleger 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 21:13:45 -0500 From: abebloom@aol.com Subject: Alte zachen Chane (Alice) Honig writes about the origin of the word 'bunkie'. My parents also came from a shtetl near Byalistock, called Grajevo, and I do not recall ever having heard the word being used. Must be a family expression. On another matter, she wrote about the Molly Picon show she saw. I am brought back to memories as a child attending Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side on a regular basis. I also recall having seen the original Yankele played by Molly Picon and her husband, Jacob Kalish. Yes, she was something else. Also she loved to show her physical agility in moving around the stage, even when the calendar in later years told her to act her own age. Are there any other Mendelniks out there that have memories needing to be refreshed about the state of the Yiddish theatre in its heyday when Second Avenue was called the Yiddish Rialto and theatre patrons liked to look through the windows of the Cafe Royal to get a glimpse of their favorite stars. (This last comment does not apply to my sister, living in New York City, who also reads Mendele and has a pretty sharp memory as well.) Abe Bloom 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 09 Nov 94 00:32:41 EST From: abramson@uconnvm.uconn.edu Subject: Transcription, not romanization Leonard Mathless has raised the question of the treatment of Hebrew--and, I should think, Aramaic--words in the transcription of Yiddish; however, he thinks of it as romanization. In our work on the YIVO orthography for presentation on Mendele, one difference between Shleyme Axelrod and me has been my unhappiness with the implicit confusion between replacing the _letters_ of a non-roman script with roman letters and the _transcribing_ of the sound units ("phonemes") of a language. The YIVO tables as given here should enable any of our members who wish to avail themselves of it to write down Yiddish words or even full messages as they say them, whether it be in "Standard" Yiddish or any particular regional or socil variety of the language. Thus. it is unreasonable to demand of such an orthography that one be able to recover the original spelling of each word in its native script, even though this will happen to be feasible much of the time. Does the ordinary Yiddish speaker always know when he or she is using a word of Semitic origin? What about the Slavic component in the lexicon? Should one be able to read through a transcription and automatically recover the underlying Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian spelling? For our purposes here, the only virtue I see in the problem raised by Mathless is in the matter of code-switching. If the Hebrew-Aramaic word is integrated in the Yiddish lexicon, what I have been saying should be relevant. If, however, one is quoting the Hebrew Bible or, say, a Judeo-Aramaic passage from the Talmud, we might argue that the person is switching codes at that moment, i,e, switching from Yiddish as such to a quotation in another language either in speech or writing. (If Henry James writes in English, "Later we can stroll to the quartiers serieux" we have a similar situation.) At this moment, I have no answer for the last question. I doubt that it will come up very often in our exchanges.In a true _transliteration_ (not a transcription), the Hebrew or Aramaic is rendered by philologists in a letter-by-letter conversion from Hebrew script to Roman script. Thus the Hebrew word for 'ban' will be translitered h.rm, although a transcrip- tion for modern Hebrew might be /kherem/ and for its use as a Yiddish word, /kheyrem/. In code-switching, then, should a Hebrew quotation be rendered in the YIVO writing for Yiddish,giving the Yiddishized Ashkenazic Hebrew that is normal, or should some conventional LC system, or the like, be used? I don't know. To complicate the matter, it seems to me that the line between words from the Semitic component of the Yiddish lexicon and Hebrew or Aramaic quotations is sometimes blurred, because certain pithy sayings from the Tanakh or the Talmud could be said to have become lexicalized in Yiddish. The professional Yiddishists in our group may be able to shed light on this topic. Arn Abramson 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 09 Nov 94 09:26 PST From: izzydz3@mvs.oac.ucla.edu Subject: Bubbeh-baby games What bubbeh-baby games can Mendelniks suggest on the order of "patchie-patchie kikhelekh"? Does anybody know of a published resource, or can some of you describe some games like patchie-patchie to play with an infant? Much obliged. Miki Safadi 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 9 Nov 94 14:27:48 EST From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca Subject: EEJH list > *NEW* EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH HISTORY AND KHAZAR STUDIES LIST > majordomo@beacon.bryant.edu > subscribe eejh I should clarify that I have no connection with this list, other than having received the posting that I forwarded to Mendele. I subscribed briefly to make sure that the list was what it claimed to be and relevant to Mendele subscribers, and confirmed that it was. It seems to be quite active. I've unsubscribed now, but the ongoing discussion at the moment relates to the origins of the word "yarmulke" and whether the Karaites had a connection to the Khazars. David Sherman 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 19:02:13 -0500 (EST) From: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu Subject: Petrishke Mottel Lakin's question about "hefker petrishke" elicited a fair amount of comment and some question as to whether petrishke is a parsnip or parsley. Weinreich says the latter and so did a number of our correspondents, so parsley it is. Nevertheless it bothered me that petrishke _wasn't_ a parsnip or pasternak (pastinaca sativa). As a boy I was sent to the grocery pretty regularly to buy a petrishke mit a meyerl (two cents in real 1927 money, ober nisht dos bin ikh oysn) and I remember that along with the green stuff was a root that certainly looked like what I now know to be parsnip. Question: was the petrishke of that lost past the green stuff with an attached root or the root with some attached green stuff? As a reference point, the parsley I dug up the other day had a scrawny pitiful root. Not the kind I brought home from Mr. Gittis' grocery store. So there was a problem. Maybe I should have called this piece: "A la recherche du persil perdu"? Or "Ceci n'est pas une madeleine"? Yesterday comes a herb catalog from which I learn that parsley (petro- selinum) has not only a curled group P. crispum crispum ("French") and a plainleaf group P. crispum neapolitanum ("Italian") but a _third_ group P. crispum tuberosum ("Hamburg"). And this third variety is described as follows: Both leaves and its slender parsnip-like root are used. Roots are excellent for flavouring soups, stews, or steamed to serve with butter or sauce. That's more like it: azoy redt men! Though I can't swear that it's so I'm ready to believe. That, khusheve fraynt, is my contribution to matters botanical. And, Mr. Gittis, wherever you are, zayt mir gezunt. Noyekh Miller ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.174 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. 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