Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.213 January 14, 1996 1) Introduction (David Jacobs) 2) Introduction (Blossom Miller) 3) Pluperfect (Neil Jacobs) 4) Pluperfect (Alan R. King) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 96 11:40:44 -0800 From: david_jacobs@mindlink.bc.ca Subject: Introduction So I did not realize that I was supposed to introduce myself. I am sorry that my Yiddish is not up to this, I am only a beginner at Yiddish and it is for me a tenth language (of which I only claim fluency in the first six). So I am 47, live in Vancouver, work in a hospital and am largely an autodidact. I am unconventional in my views on most things. Why an interest in Yiddish. If I go back five generations (via Australia and England), my ancestors who I think came from Gostynin spoke the language, so in part it is to recover part of my ancestral past. Partly because the language is interesting in and of itself both for its idioms and for words that do not seem to translate very well into other languages. I am slowly working my way through Uriel Weinreich's textbook. My only other Yiddish books are a complete set of Shalom Aleikhem in the original. David Jacobs 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 14:16:02 -0500 From: milltax@aol.com Subject: Introduction Shalom Chaverim! This is to introduce myself. I grew up in a home in Chicago where no Yiddish was spoken and always felt that I was missing something. For many years I was a Group Tour Co-ordinator for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, organizing and encouraging Ministers to take the members of their congregations on a Holy Land Tour. I have returned to Yisroel 21 times since 1960 and on many occasions have felt the need to converse in Yiddish as a substitute for Hebrew. A few years ago I joined a Yiddish Literature Class at Santa Monica Emeritus College and through this group discovered "Mendele". What a mechiah! I signed on just a few months ago and think I have learned more Yiddish through your contributors than in the classroom. Its been a "lebideke velt far mir, und far dos, Shames, a shanem, hartzikn dank". Blossom Miller 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 11:15:59 -0500 (EST) From: njacobs@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu Subject: Pluperfect On Ellen Prince's mention of the pluperfect in Yiddish: I don't know when it "dates from" in Yiddish (written? spoken?). The "extra gehat (German *gehabt*) construction is found in Southern German dialect speech, however. Thus, see, for example, Werner Abraham's (1991) article "How much of the German tense system is 'Aspect' and 'Aktionsart'", in the volume *Perspectives on Aspect and Aktionsart:, Carl Vetters & Willy Vandeweghe (eds), pp. 133 - 150. Thus, Abraham (141ff) writes in section 4 "Double perfect and double pluperfect in Upper German": "Upper German ( = Bavarian, Austrian, and Alemannic) provides another example of strict dependency upon Aktionsart and aspect. It is a well known fact that preterite forms are missing in upper German (this is the so-called "Upper German preterite deletion"). In some rare cases, Upper German uses double preterite constructions; see examples in (24) and (25) ... (24) Sie haben es auf ihn abgesehen gehabt (25) Er ist schon angekommen gewesen See also Charles V. J. Russ (ed), *The Dialects of modern German: A linguistic survey* (1989), Stanford University Press, for examples from various Upper German dialects. Neil Jacobs 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 17:56:40 +0100 From: mccay@jet.es Subject: More on the pluperfect Since the subject of the Yiddish "pluperfect" has come up (the quotation marks will be justified later), I wish to throw in a couple of ideas/questions for those far more knowledgeable than myself to provide enlightenment on, if possible. My first point addresses the original question posed by Ellen Prince of origins, though from a somewhat different angle. I do not have access to many Yiddish grammars and I futhermore speak as an utter layman, but it strikes me that the phenomenon of the Yiddish "pluperfect" tense, including the apparent variations (or confusions?) regarding the choice between auxiliaries _zayn_ and _hobn_ (for both conjugated and participial parts of the construction), very likely reflects Slavic influence in Yiddish. Does anyone agree (or disagree)? My reason for suggesting this is as follows. If you will kindly make allowances for a gross over-generalization, then perhaps I will be permitted to say that the "hardware" of Yiddish is Germanic while quite a bit of its "software" is Slavic in inspiration. (And who knows, maybe the "operating system" is Semitic :-) !) If a language is characterized by what it does with its raw material as much as by the identity of that material, then Yiddish is quite strongly Slavicized. One example, tangential to the main point here (the "pluperfect"), is the way Yiddish, although remaining Germanic in the way it forms the past tense with either _hobn_ or _zayn_ plus participle, acts more in concert with its Slavic neighbours in the way it has generalised just one past tense, the periphrastic one, eliminating the older simple past, getting rid of (this way of expressing) the aspectual distinction found e.g. between standard German _war_ and _ist gewesen_. Yiddish has not assimilated to Slavic to the extent of generalising the use of the _zayn_ auxiliary here (so _ikh hob gezungen_ rather than *_ikh bin gezungen_), making the form closer to Germanic; yet the resulting set of available tenses and the values of each tense are closer to the Slavic model (and then there is the Slavic-style incorporation of aspectuality into the system, of course). Regarding the Yiddish "pluperfect", _ikh hob gehat gezungen_ etc. (with the variants mentioned in other recent contributions), I think there are closer parallels and paraphrases in Slavic languages than in German, and so am led to suspect that it was formed on, or at the very least re-formed according to, the Slavic model. But then the question would arise, in the process of (re)formation, which auxiliaries the Yiddish construction should contain. According to the Slavic model it ought to be _zayn_ (and _geven_) throughout, e.g. ??_ikh bin geven gezungen_. On the other hand, internal grammatical consistency within Yiddish would probably favour using _hobn_ with verbs taking _hobn_ in the past, e.g. _ikh hob gehat gezungen_, by extrapolation from the past tense model (_ikh hob gezungen_). Thus conflicting motivations for one or the other formation would naturally arise. Does that explain the variety of forms actually found? Next I want to ask whether someone can clarify the uses and meaning of the Yiddish "pluperfect". On the one hand there is the question of how common it is, and related to this, of its stylistic standing. S.A. Birnbaum (1979:269), for example, describes it as "not much used". Is it possible to expand on this information? Is it more common in some sorts of context than others? Is it, by any chance, a feature of literary rather than colloquial Yiddish? Also, I wonder whether it might be considered in any way an artificial construction from the point of view of the spoken language? If so, then Meyer-Leyb Wolf's statement, "Ellen Prince's question on the pluperfect... might better be: who decided on the form she cites and when", would make a bit more sense to me than otherwise. Lastly, what, I'd like to know, is the real meaning of this so-called pluperfect? The label "pluperfect" seems to suggest that _ikh hob gehat gezungen_ means the same as "I had sung" in English. Is that exactly right? It doesn´t seem to apply for some of the uses I have noticed in Yiddish literature. Here is one such example from Sholem Aleykhem's short story "Vekhalaklakes" (_Gants Tevye der milkhiker_, New York, 1937:223-230), and the same few pages also contain another two examples of a similar kind: "Ikh hob aykh shoyn, dakht zikh, a mol gehat gezogt, az..." which I think means "I think I (have) already told you...", not ??"I think I had (already) told you...". In such cases the so-called "pluperfect" appears to have the meaning of a special variant of the past tense, not of a pluperfect as normally understood. How common is this kind of usage, and does it too have Slavic precedents, I wonder? Alan R. King Gipuzkoa, Basque Country ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.213