Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.177 November 26, 1995 1) Aderabe (David Lidsky) 2) Khanike, o khanike (Marti Krow-Lucal) 3) Israeli song (David Sherman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 24 Nov 95 23:27:32 PST From: fdlidsky@netvision.net.il Subject: The antithetical meaning of primal words In 5.145 Eliayahu Yuni and in 5.148 Shleyme Axelrod discuss the word "aderabe". Shleyme Axelrod says: >_A modne vort, "aderabe", mit tsvey kimat-farkerte meynungen_. Harkavy >(1898) gives both `all the better' and `on the contrary'; similarly, >Weinreich (1968) has both `not at all, on the contrary' and `in fact; by >all means' [also `you are welcome'. For the intensified >_aderabe-v'aderabe_, Weinreich has `by all means, with the greatest of >pleasure'.] So it appears that both the emphatically affirmative and the >emphatically negative are kosher glosses for _aderabe_, making both >Zellig's and Eliyahu's usages correct. Go figure. Sigmund Freud, in a paper first published in 1910 ("Uber den Gegensinn der Urworte"), translated in the Standard Edition of Freud's works as "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words") refers to the phenomenon of the same word having two opposite meanings ("aderabe" in Yiddish is an example of this, though not mentioned by Freud). The founder of psychoanalysis took a particular interest in this matter because of its similarity to a phenomenon which he claimed occurs in dreams: "Dreams feel themselves at liberty...to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative" (Interpretation of Dreams). Freud considered that the same psychological mechanism is at work both in dreams and in language (perhaps it's more correct to say that in dreams one object or event symoblizes its opposite, while in language a symbol, which is a w! ord, symbolizes two opposite meanings---not quite the same thing, but pretty close). I don't know whether he was right about dreams, and in any case, Mendele isn't the place to discuss that. However Freud does give many examples in his paper of one word with two more-or-less antithetical meanings and they are well worth quoting. Freud derived his examples from a pamphlet of Karl Abel's published in 1884 and bearing the same title as Freud's paper. He quotes extensively from Abel's pamphlet and acknowledges it as an important contribution to his theory of dreams ("I did not succeed in understanding the dream-work's singular tendency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by the philologist Karl Abel..."). Here are some of the examples which Freud quotes: In Egyptian: "ken" = strong, weak In Latin: "altus" = high, deep "sacer" = sacred, accursed "clamare" = to cry, "clam" = softly, secretly "siccus" = dry, "succus" = juice In German: "Boden" = ground, garret (compare in Yiddish boden=ground, boydem=atttic} In Old Saxon: "bat" = good, corresponds to the English "bad" German "kleben" = to stick corresponds to the English word "cleave" in the sense of to split (perhaps Freud could just have stuck to the English word "cleave" which means both to stick and to split) Freud gives quite a few more moderately convincing examples (and also examples of a similar phenomenon: words in which the phonetic structure is reversed, the two members of the pair having antithetical meanings---he sees an analogy between this also and the "dream work"). I cannot think of any further examples in Yiddish but I can in Hebrew: "adraba" = on the contrary, quite so (our old friend, a Hebrew word which apparently entered the Hebrew language from Aramaic---it would be interesting to know if it had two antithetical meanings in Aramaic---and which gave rise to the Yiddish "aderabe" which seems to have received both of its antithetical meanings from the antithetical meanings of the Hebrew word) "sekhel" = intellect, "ksil" = fool "khablan" = a terrorist who plants bombs, a police expert who removes bombs "sagi nehor" = blind, but in Aramaic, from which language this expression entered Hebrew, it means literally "enough light" or "full of light" (I guess that the business of the same word having antithetical meanings merges imperceptibly into other phenomena such as the consciously ironical ad hoc use of a word to mean the opposite of what it usually means; or the conscious use of a word to represent its opposite as a way of avoiding saying a word with an evil or frightening meaning, "sagi nehor" may originally have been an example of that). Apart from English I know some Yiddish and Hebrew, but none of the othe languages mentioned above. I should like to ask Mendele participants who_are_language experts: Does the phenomenon of antithetical meanings really exist? Could it just be coincidence? Are there other examples in Yiddish? Are there examples in all languages? And if the phenomenon is real what other explanations have been suggested apart from the Freudian one? David Lidsky Jerusalem 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 25 Nov 1995 21:31:50 -0500 From: kromobile@aol.com Subject: Khanike, o khanike Is there anyone who knows more about "khanike, o khanike" than the very sparse information I have? R. Rubin says that the melody is Hasidic and the lyrics (a little different from the ones I learned) are by M. Rivesman. Who was Rivesman? Where was he from? When did the song become popular? I would be very grateful for any information - a sheynem dank aykh. Marti Krow-Lucal Sunnyvale 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 26 Nov 95 4:28:31 EST From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca Subject: Wartime song from Israel with Yiddish lilt Mottel Lakin asks about possible Yiddish origins of "Nasser mechakeh le'Rabin, ay yai yai". I don't know its origins, but maybe this will help: it's on a record album I have (called Hava Nagila, CBS Records, 1973), sung by Mike Burstein, and attributed as follows: H. Hefer -- Folk -- D. Krivoshey I don't know what order the attribution is in (lyrics, music, etc.). David Sherman Toronto ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.177