Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.196 December 17, 1995 1) Holy fool (Ramona Koval) 2) A home page for klezmer music? (Mark Pinson) 3) You say tsures, I say tsores (Zachary Baker) 4) Chanuka o Chanuka (Ted Steinberg) 5) Khanike o Khanike (Zellig Bach) 6) Convergence-dialects in modern Yiddish (Mark Southern) 7) Der tunkeler vegn nudnikes (Peter Kluehs) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 15:48:00 +1100 From: koval.ramona@a2.abc.net.au Subject: Holy fool I have been asked by an academic friend of mine in Social Studies of Science at Deakin University, Australia, to ask the mendelyaners this question: "Is there a Jewish Trickster myth? A little hard to formulate concisely especially when I guess the obvious answer in the Jewish Joke which is so dependent on ironic deflation of authority. Is there the equivalent of the fool or the trickster or the jester in Jewish storytelling, mythology or vernacular whose role is jointly to transgress boundaries and to deliniate them or as Kerenyi says 'to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted.' " If anyone has any references I can give him, or any ideas I'd be grateful and he would too! Ramona Koval 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 18:30:18 -0500 (EST) From: mpinson@husc.harvard.edu Subject: A home page for itinerant klezmer music? While listening to some klezmer music on the radio today, reading something compiuterish - it suddenly hit me - for us klezmerphiles a home page including record/tape/CD titles, news of upcoming concerts, articles/reviews, perhaps description of major library holdings of music [any medium, including scores ..] would be - poshet, a m'khaye nefushos! But there may already exist such a thing, or on some other Jewish site all this kind of info is already assembled. Gut yontef, Mark Pinson 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 95 16:37:22 PST From: bm.yib@rlg.stanford.edu Subject: You say tsures, I say tsores The "Week in Review" section of today's (Dec. 17, 1995) "New York Times" has an article by Nicholas D. Kristof (former Beijing correspondent) entitled "Dung! What an Unusual Name!" The article deals with what the author (confusingly) describes as "one of the foreign policy problems that Americans face -- transliteration, the messy task of transcribing foreign names and words into English." Examples include Roh (pronounced "Noh") Tae Woo and Deng (pronounced "Dung") Xiao Ping. In his article, Kristof writes: The difficulties of transcription are particularly acute in Semitic languages. Arabic, for example, has a letter called the ayn that is simply unpronounceable by Americans; it comes from the back of the throat and sounds like you're about to cough.... Yiddish offers similar difficulties. Leo Rosten, the author of 'The Joys of Yiddish,' offers tsuris, tsouris, tsoriss and tsuriss as spellings for the word that rhymes with 'juris' and translates as 'troubles.' When faced with those four choices, Sol Steinmetz, the author of 'Yiddish and English,' favors none of the above. He prefers tsores or tsures. Transliteration needs to be distinguished from transcription. Transliteration refers to letter-for-letter matches between alpha- bets; transcription deals with rendering the pronunciation of one language into the writing system of another. In any event, I would not wish tsures or tsores on anyone! Zachary Baker 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 10:37 pm EST (Mon, 18 Dec 95 03:37:58 UT) From: steinberg@fredonia.edu Subject: Chanukah o Chanukah A happy holiday to everyone. My wife would really like to have the Yiddish words to Chanukah O Chanukah, and I would be deeply appreciative to anyone who could supply them. Thanks. Ted Steinberg 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 21:28:15 -0500 From: zellig@aol.com Subject: The spell[ing] of "Khanike, O Khanike" The various spellings, or rather misspellings, of the word "khanike" probably rival in number the proverbial spelling of the name "Noyekh mit zibn grayzn" (that is, spelled with seven errors). The khanike card this year of the giant designing and printing concern of the Hallmark greeting cards reads: "It's Chanukah! Time for People Everywhere to Repeat those Familiar Words of the Season," and inside the card it shows several narrow cartoon-like balloons with questions, supposedly asked by different people: "Is it one /K/ or two?" "Well, is there an /H/ on the end?" "Do I pronounce the /Ch/ like I'm clearing my throat?" "How many /N's/ are there again?" My answers, in the above order: One /k/; No /h/ at the end; /Ch/ like throat-clearing , but _/Kh/_ instead; and one /n/, thus "khanuke." Phonetically it should be spelled "khanike," with an /i/ in place of the /u,/ but "khanuke" would also be acceptable, reflecting the Hebrew spelling from which the word derives. Zellig Bach 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 21:44:35 -0600 From: m.southern@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Convergence-dialects developing in modern urban Yiddish among Chasidic communities A request for research leads: A fellow-Mendelyaner told me recently that there had been some discussion a few months ago on Mendele of the newly-emerging convergence-dialects of post-1945 modern urban Yiddish, notably among Chasidic communities - specific to sizeable Chasidic centers such as New York, Montreal, Toronto, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Paris, in anglophone countries (US, Canada, Australia) and elsewhere (Argentina, France). To my knowledge no linguistic, dialectal or sociolinguistic investigations have yet looked at this in detail. I'm especially interested in the sociolinguistic mechanisms whereby these dialectally distinguishing features would have arisen, and might be spreading, between relatively self-contained individual Yiddish-speaking Khsidishe communities in particular cities. If any Mendelyaner have more information on this question, or better still evidence, references, or sources for tracking this phenomenon, I'd be very grateful if you could let me know. If possible I'd also like to be able to look at the comparative impact of Yiddish's principal bilingualism-partner languages - historically German, East and West Slavic, and now, recently, English, Hebrew, Spanish, French, etc. The new convergence-based dialectalism has important additional linguistic and sociocultural implications for issues of the emergence of standard dialects (as opposed to artificially-imposed norms), which was the focus of some of the debate on Mendele a little while ago, in relation to "standard" Yiddish in general. A sheynem hartsikn dank foroys, Mark Southern 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 17 Dec 1995 18:14:00 +0200 From: pete@pko.rhein-main.de Subject: Der tunkeler vegn nudnikes [2] hemshekh fun mendele vol. 5.193 ershtns, vi azoy derkent men zey? vi zaynen di simnim zeyere, az men zol zey derkenen? es zaynen do farsheydene simnim un onvayzungen, vi untertsusheydn a meshugenem hunt fun a klorn, shlekhte milkh fun guter, a frish ey fun nisht keyn frishn, a dokter fun a feldsher, a meydl fun a vaybl, a dokter meditsin fun an advokat-filosof, brilyantn fun glezlekh un azoy vayter. vu zaynen ober di simnim, loyt velkhe men zol kenen untersheydn fun a mentshn a nudnik un a mentshn nisht keyn nudnik? geyt zikh a mentsh oyf tsvey fis, mit a noz, mit tsvey oygn. a mentsh vi ale mentshn un - a nudnik. der nudnik iz ale mol nudnik, on untersheyd fun rase un elter, geshlekht un rang, klas, profesye, religyezer onshoyung, vuks, kolir fun hor. er hot nisht keyn bashtimte kleydung, keyn bashtimte uniform un keyn bashtimtn kol - er ken zayn a bavaksener un a plikhevater, brunet, blondin, populyate, kurts-gevaksn, hoykh, dik, din. er ken hobn velkhe melokhe ir vilt: a stolyer, a dokter, a tintmakher, a matritsirer un afile a damske shnayder. er hot nit keyn bashtimt gebit far zayn nudneray. er ken aykh nudyen oyf ale gebitn: politik, visnshaft, literatur, poezye, proze; er kon aykh nudyen mit drame, muzik - fun bine, fun tribune, fun balemer, merkhets un, lehavdl, in beys-medresh; un er ken aykh nudyen mit "libe", mit aforizmen, gramen un on gramen; in "shvartse ferzn" un "vayse ferzn"; er ken aykh nudyen mit muzik az"v, az"v. er hot oykh nit zayn bashtimt plats, zayn bashtimtn varshtat oder fabrikl far nudyeray, men zol visn, az fun yenem ort badarf men vaykhn un oysmaydn. neyn, er hot shtendik zayn getsayg in der hant. zayn portsye nudnekeyt hot er mit zikh. er vet aykh khapn in gas, in shtub, untervegns, in vagon, in shul, in merkhets un, lehavdl, in beys-medresh; in teater, oyf a kontsert, oyf a maskn-bal; in byuro, in restoratsye, in kafe - un vu nisht? ir vet zikh fun im nisht oysbahaltn. un oyb ir zayt arayngefaln tsu im vi a korbn, vet ir shoyn fun zayne hent nisht antrunen vern. hemshekh folgt peter kluehs wehrheim, germany ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.196 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. 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