Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.071 July 30, 1995 1) Yiddish nowadays (Miriam Isaacs) 2) An index for Mendele (Morrie Feller) 3) An index for Mendele (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 30 Jul 1995 11:14:30 -0400 (EDT) From: miriamis@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu Subject: Yiddish nowadays I have done some study of Yiddish among the haredim in Israel, which inspired me to pay attention to the use of Yiddish in Boro Park and Williamsburg. The use of the language and the user's proficiency is quite variable, from what I have heard and in Williamsburg there is a tremendous amount of mixing of Yiddish and English, with errors. But as others have commented, errors are offset by the fact that the speakers are actively using the language. In the study of language acquisition- and language deterioration, error analysis is an important indicator of what it happening to a language. What I found in Israel among the Yiddish using haredim is a pattern in which parents have chosen to go back to Yiddish and consciously speak a flawed Yiddish, Hebrew being the language they are most comfortable in, for ideological reasons. Perhaps this is happening in New York too. This bodes well for the revival of the language. the other kind of flawed Yiddish is the variety where it is fading into disuse and that is mainly in the secular Yiddish world, as we all know. To counter this it is necessary to promote "real" use of the language. Even on this network I find myself writing more comfortably in English, even though I am bilingual, because I imagine that more readers will understand and because I am not comfortable with the conventions of the phonetic transcriptions, though I will make an effort. My Yiddish is galitzianish, and I like it that way. I find it awkward, in latin letters, to sound litvish, but I can try. In terms of error correction, the best way is to model the correct forms back to the speaker unobtrusively, but to remember that dialect differences are not errors. True errors are rules of English or some other language that are superimposed onto Yiddish. Miriam Isaacs 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 18:10:28 -0700 (MST) From: feller@indirect.com Subject: An index for Mendele Ever since I have been a Mendelnik (almost a year), I have been telling my friends what a wonderful source for Yiddish related topics it is. I have pointed out the fact that much of the information on Mendele is not available in books or journals because it is based on personal experiences and remembrances. Now, our shames has done an outstanding job of making all this information available in archives which can be accessed in several ways as indicated at the end of some of the Mendele numbers. However, if one were interested in pursuing a single topic such as the origin of Yiddish, the various aspects of Sholem Aleikhem's writings, the meanings and usage of a particualar Yiddish word or idiom, the varieties of Yiddish as a function of geography, etc., it seems to me that an index, like the ones found at the end of textbooks, would be a most useful tool to accomplish this purpose. I realize that it is easier to suggest an idea than it is to carry it out. But if this could be done for the past five plus years, and then continued on an on-going basis, what an even more wonderful treasure Mendele would be! It would be like the Syntopicon which Mortimer Adler created to follow any theme through the entire Great Books series. Morrie Feller Phoenix 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 30 Jul 1995 From: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu Subject: An index for Mendele This is a partial answer to Morrie Feller's request, partial because the ultra-high technicalities are beyond the abilities of a shames. Iosif Vaisman and other experts are urgently invited to provide additional comments First of all, the functional equivalent of an index exists. It is available on the Wide World Web to all users of Netscape. http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mewais.html It is part of Iosif Vaisman's wonderful Virtual Shtetl, the address of which is: http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/shtetl.html At the first-mentioned address the user can initiate a search (be sure it is a _whole_ word) and get back very quickly a list of the first 40 occasions in the which the word is found. An additional click brings up the file itself. Not bad. Even Windows-haters can come to like it. Second, it is possible _in principle_ to do the same search without Netscape, as long as the service provider offers Lynx. The trouble is that Lynx (at least the version available to the shames on two separate hosts) cheerfully announces that you've discovered a bug un az es kumt mazeltov. Maybe they'll fix it. Third, the Contents files that are available via the Mendele archive can be downloaded to the user's machine, then searched by means of a utility program such as grep. There are many available in the public domain. The Contents files list all of the Subject: lines since the first issue and were devised by Bob Rothstein, one of Mendele's prime benefactors. Finally, those with a large hard drive can simply store all of Mendele and search the files at will. At this time, this remains the best option for those who have the space. It is fast and the search procedure more flexible than what is currently available on the Web. As an alternative it's been suggested that Mendele on a compact disk would be a useful and cheap storage medium. Same ease of search. Now let the experts speak. Noyekh Miller ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.071 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) 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. To resume delivery: set mendele mail c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu ****Getting back issues**** 1. Anonymous ftp archives are available. ftp ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files A table of contents is also available, along with weekly updates. 2. Mendele archives can also be reached as follows: via WWW: http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mewais.html via gopher: gopher://sunsite.unc.edu/11/../.pub/academic/languages/yiddish/mendele via ftp: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/languages/yiddish/mendele