Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.401 April 30, 1995 1) Yiddish on cd-rom (Pinyeh Weichsel) 2) Yiddish on cd-rom (Louis Fridhandler) 3) Itzik Manger for Mother's Day (Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan) 4) Oysyes in idiomatishe oysdrukn af yidish (Zellig Bach) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 14:49:26 -0500 From: weichsel@math.uiuc.edu Subject: Yiddish on cd-rom A gezunt oyf dayn pipik! Your suggestion about placing the corpus of Yiddish treasures on cd-rom is nothing short of spectacular. I have no idea about what kind of work would be involved and I hope that the computer mavins will come foward to tell us. To the extent that there is some dog work involved, I am sure that it would not be difficult to assemble a small army to get the work done. I hereby volunteer. Please pursue this idea! Pinyeh Weichsel 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 1995 13:43:28 -0400 From: lfridhan@aol.com Subject: Yiddish on cd-rom Nu, vegn Noyekh Miller's forleyg: makhn a CD-ROM far lernen Yidish, un leyenen di ale yidishe mekhaberim. Dos iz take vikhtik un rirndik. Yidish iz nokh nisht keyn losh far diskutirn Computer technology darf ikh shraybn English. I, too, would guess the technical problems are not insuperable. The financial one is probably great. I can imagine very wonderful possibilities. A dictionary on CD-ROM can be bilingual, trilingual, etc., and there need be only one such file. That file could be searched to find any word, even those within the definitions or the translation. Such a file could include several romanization forms, if necessary (or useful). Searches can be applied in any direction, English-Yiddish or Yiddish-English, or what you will. Help files for grammatical rules fitting the context could be developed and included. What a JOB! But, what a help that would be for beginners and veterans. One CD-ROM can include 650 megabytes of information. That's enough for an encyclopedia with pictures, such as Funk and Wagnall's. Without pictures, it could incorporate the equivalent of about 40 or 50 substantial volumes. Halevay! Ver ken es onheybn? Louis Fridhandler 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 1995 11:03:11 -0400 From: shirshan@aol.com Subject: Itzik Manger for Mother's Day In search of a program for Mother's Day for our Vinkl, I came upon a poem by Itzik Manger in a wonderful anthology, "onions and cucumbers and plums 46 Yiddish poems" by Sarah Zweig Betsky (Wayne Statre University Press Detroit 1958). A matone for all who love Yiddish and poetry: Libshaft Shlanke hirshn oyf farshneyte berg, di zilberne herner fartshepen di levone un di levone iz gut tsu zey. Mayn mame hit zey. Geyt zey nokh fis-trit. Di velf in vald zoln nisht derniukhen. Farlesht zi di shpurn oyf shney. Mayn mame iz shoin zint yorn toyt, nor ir libshaft geyt arum in roym mit ofene orems farn vint. Zi shlefert ayn dem umru fun di shtrozn, shprekht op a "gut oyg" di kleyne hozn un dos mindste veriml ruft zi "kind." Di libshaft lozt zi nisht in keyver ruen. Ot efnt zi di tkhine far di shtern un zogt un zogt, az got zol derhern. In mayn kholem laykhtn ire trern... Love Tall deer upon snowy hills their silver horns hooked into the moon. The moon is benevolent. My mother guards them. Follows them on foot. Forest wolves must not find their spoor. She blows from the snow their scent. My mother has been dead for years, but her love roams through space with arms open to the wind. She lulls the unrest of the streets to sleep, conjures up a good eye the little hares can keep, and the least worm she calls "child." Her love does not let her rest in her grave. Here she opens her prayer book for the stars and prays and prays, that God may hear. In my dream gleams her tear. Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan Boynton Beach, Florida 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 30 Apr 1995 01:36:54 -0400 From: zellig@aol.com Subject: Oysyes in idiomatishe oysdrukn af yidish I concluded my post "Ale yidishe oysyes zaynen vikhtik" (4.398,5) with the statement that all Yiddish-Hebrew letters of the alefbeys are vikhtik (important), all major, none minor." There are a number of Yiddish idioms in which a letter from the alefbeys figures to illustrate or emphasize a specific characteristic of a person or a situation. Herewith several examples: 1. "She told me the entire story _from alef biz sof_, which is, of course, the same as "from A to Z." 2. "Loy mit an alef" (lamed with an alef) is said in Yiddish as an emphatic rejection. In Hebrew _lamed alef_ means "no," as distinct from the Hebrew _lamed vov_ which means "to him." 3. "Er veys nit fun kayn tsures alef" -- he does not know the face of an alef, said contemptuously of a illiterate person. 4. "Er vayzt dem ferd a hey in sider" __he shows his horse (the letter) hey in sider (prayer book), instead of feeding him real, nutritious hay. [A play on the homonymic "hey" and "hay."] 5. "Er vet nit optretn afile af a koytse shel yud" -- he won't yield even the tip of a yud, that is the smallest particle of the letter yud, although the letter itself is the smallest in the alefbeys. 6. "Dos pintele yid awoke in him," said about a Jew who in many ways became alienated from Jewish life and its usual concerns, but in an hour of a great tragedy to the Jewish people manifested in a dramatic act his sense of Jewish responsibility ("all Jews are responsible for one another") by some outstanding gesture of involvement and connectedness. It is usually said about a person, and "dos pintele yid" is a reference to the core of one's Jewishness, even if it is only a "pintele," a small dot, a tiny spark. But it may also be a reference to the letter _yud_, since in many Yiddish dialects "yud" is pronounced "yid," the initial letter of yid (Jew), yidish (yiddish), yidishkayt (Jewishness). Since the letters of the alefbeys are often referred to collectively as "di shvartse pintelekh" (the black dots), as in the expression "er iz bo'ky in the shvarftse pintelekh" -- he is a learned man, totally at home in Jewish letters -- it is quite likely that the idiomatic expression "dos pintele yud (yid)" carries _both_ connotations, to a person as well as to the letter yud proper. 7. "A tsadik in pelts" -- a pious man in a pelt, one who only pretends to be pious. In other words, he is pious only in the _word_ pelts, spelled pey, ayen, lamed, (langer) tsadek, but not pious in real life. It is a play on the homonymic tsadek (letter) and tsadik (pious man, also khasidik re'be), similar to the "hey" and "hay" in example 4 above. The accent in both "tsadek" and "tsadik" is on the first syllable, so when spoken there is no significant difference in sound between them, thus allowing for the letter ("tsadek") to be also perceived as "tsadik," a very frumer (pious) yid hiding in a fur coat... Zellig Bach ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.401 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 Send change-of-status messages to: listserv@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele nomail b. 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