Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.182 November 14, 1994 1) Redt and ret (Meylekh Viswanath) 2) Redt vs ret; bistu vs bist du (Arre Komar) 3) Writing morphemes (Arn Abramson) 4) Bistu (Mikhl Herzog) 5) Bistu (Rick Turkel) 6) Gemination (Dovid Braun) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 14 Nov 94 10:06:18 EST From: pviswana@andromeda.rutgers.edu Subject: Redt and ret ikh hob gefregt tsi men transkribit 'redt' vi 'redt' tsi 'ret.' Hot mikhl derklert: > > zogn, zogt men take "ret"; shraybn, shraybt men ober "redt", say mit > yidishe oysyes, say ven men transkribirt zey. Farvos? > > The "terets" is simple. [...] > > A principle of Yiddish spelling, and the prevailing principles of its > transcription, is to preserve the morphological integrity of the word. We > must therefore distinguish "er zingt/shtert/redt" from "er > zinkt/shtekht/ret". Very informative, thanks. I definitely didn't know all that, esp. shtert -> shtekht. I didn't even know of retn = rescue, but I had thought of the possibility of such a word. Nevertheless, I wasn't sure to what extent YIVO transcription was strict. For example, we have 'farshemt' meaning 'renowned' and 'farshemt' meaning 'ashamed' both transcribed similarly (I presume) with no way of recovering the original. I realize that with 'redt' we have an easy way of distinguishing the two spoken possibilities. On the other hand, I understood transcription to make it possible to more faithfully express dialect differences. If this is so, then writing 'the yid. for speak' as 'redt' would not be helpful; if there were some dialect that actually did pronounce the 'd' in 'redt,' the system would not allow us to show that distinction. The answer to this 'what if' query may very well be that 'that does not happen' or 'it's not worth allowing for that possibility in the interests of the greater good.' I presume that the answer is the second one and in this case, the YIVO transcription rules don't follow (what I understand to be) the general rule of transcription. Meylekh Viswanath 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Nov 1994 15:20:31 -0500 (EST) From: komar@yu1.yu.edu Subject: redt vs ret, un bistu vs bist du I don't claim to be a professional Yiddishist however in a certain sense I am a native yiddish speaker since it was my first language at home as a child. I notice that when I speak I make a clear distinction between redt and ret. The former ending is slightly softer and more d-like than the latter. however when in comes to bistu it is a sharp clear t rather than a d as in the more germanic (or should I say daytchmerish) bist du. Arre Komar 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Nov 94 21:35:17 EST From: abramson@uconnvm.uconn.edu Subject: Writing morphemes In my two postings about points and questions raised by Dovid and Meylekh very late last night, I was guilty of an oversight. I said, "Curiously enough, there are instances in which the morphemic or lexical information is not preserved in the writing. On this board I have seen "bistu" for /bis du/ 'are you (fam.).' It also occurs in Yiddish script in the equivalent way way: beyz-yud-samekh-tes-vov! the rendition "tu" must be meant to reflect the lack of a contrast between /d/ and /t/ immediately after /s/ and the impression that the consonant is more like a /t/ than a /d/. (Leigh Lisker remarked on this in a posting some time ago . No one responded.) Compared with the writing of "redt," this is paradoxical. Why not preserve the information that it is the pronoun "du"?" Instead of /bis du/ for the more explicit form of 'Are you (fam.)' I should have written, of course, /bist du/. What must happen in running Yiddish speech, not surprisingly, is that the final voiceless /t/ of /bist/ is assimilated to the initial voiced /d/ of /du/, given that they are both articulated by the tongue tip at the ridge just above the upper teeth (alveolar ridge). The same thing apparently happens in /host du/ 'have you,' which is pronounced /hostu/ and is so written in Yiddish script and thus in the YIVO spelling. In her new textbook recently advertised here, Sheva Zucker introduces these spellings without comment, at least at first. Presumably, if I were in her class and wrote /host du/ or /bist du/, either in roman or Yiddish script, she would mark it wrong as an unconventional spelling. In such instances, I wonder how Mikhl Herzog's comment about preserving morphemic in formation, as in /redt/ rather than /ret/, is to be applied. Arn Abramson 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Nov 94 22:32 EST From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu Subject: Bistu Arn Abramson: I'm not at all satisfied that I can provide as reasoned an explanation for writing "bistu" as I was able to do for writing "redt" as against "ret", "zingt" as against "zinkt". (As an aside, note that "bistu" has a Litvish variant "bistE" with word- final stress, as in "un vu bistE geven" 'and where were YOU?'.) Two things come to mind: the first may simply be fortuitous, and may be said to "permit" the accepted spelling; the second may, by some stretch of the imagination, be said to underly it. I'm not happy with either as "explanations" but, I offer them, off-the-cuff, as somehow, relevant. I've never given the matter any thought before. As for i: The spelling "bistu" is permissible and tolerable because there doesn't seem to be any actually occurring ambiguity. There is no distinction between "bistdu" and "bistu" to parallel that between "zingt" and "zinkt". As for ii (and this is more tortured), tell me first why you suggest that the spelling "bistu" is "for the expression /bis du/" rather than for the expression /bist du/, in which -t and d-have merged and assimilated as [t] to the preceding unvoiced [s]. I don't disagree, but perhaps for different reasons--unsatisfactory ones, maybe, but what the hell? Aren't we dealing with a word that was historically "bis"? Thereafter "bis + du", with the assimilation of "d" to the preceding "s", yielded [bistu], but could as easily have yielded the litvish type *bizdu--do you remember that for Uriel "the fact that" was "the [fagthat]"? Ultimately, metanalysis of [bis+du] in Yiddish and in German produced "bist" but left "du" (in this context [-tu]) unchanged, the consonant serving two masters; in English, I am guessing, and in Dutch(?), on the contrary, the pronoun gave up the consonant; thus "you"/"U". In other words, writing "bistu", preserves the _historical_ morphology represented by your writing /bis du/, even if it misrepresents the synchronic morphology, the preservation of which dictates the distinction "redt" and "ret". Whew! Will you buy that? Mikhl Herzog 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 14 Nov 94 00:38:46 EST From: rturkel@cas.org Subject: Re: /bistu/ Arn Abromson recently discussed the pronunciation of /bistu/, which he derives from /bis du/. If this were correct I'd say that the /s/ devoices the /d/. However, /bistu/ is really /bist + du/, and it's the /t/ that devoices the /d/. Rick Turkel 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 02:29:59 EST From: dovid@mit.edu Subject: gemination ('doubling of consonants') After composing my entry on double consonants, I reread it and took a double-take, realizing that, as it stood, I was claiming what Arn Abramson says I claim. And after intuiting a bit and thinking back to the Yiddish linguistic literature I've read that touches on the matter, I was satisfied with my claim: normal spoken Yiddish has a phonological (postlexical, if you will) rule of degemination. Wherever you have two like consonants meeting, pronounce the sequence as if there were only one. "madam meyerson" is syllabified as [ma.da.me.yer.son]; "onnemen" is syllabified as [o.ne.men]. In "careful speech", a speaker might lengthen the consonant for purposes of disambiguation or phonetically preserving the integrity of each morpheme, but in casual speech, this is lost categorically. This being the fact, the codifiers of the Soviet Yiddish spelling system were able to go ahead and propose _orthographic_ degemination (within the word); the Soviet spelling is thus: o-n-e-m-e-n. The following two sentences should illustrate that gemination is not contrastive. (It might be difficult to level out the intonational differences between the sentences; but after you do bearing in mind that this should be said in casual style, the two sentences should come out equal.) ay, onnemen dem shuster far a man? ayo, nemen dem shuster far a man? Dovid Braun ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.182 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. 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