Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.240 February 1, 1996 1) Yiddish dictionaries (Andrew Sunshine) 2) Life and death of Yiddish (Ellen Prince) 3) Life and death of Yiddish (Hershl Hartman) 4) Suffix anomalies (Shleyme Axelrod) 5) Letzter Mohicaner? (Andrew Cassel) 6) Dona, Dona (Hershl Hartman) 7) Sholom Aleikhem on Tolstoi (Henekh Coleman) 8) Parent to child Yiddish (Morrie Feller) 9) Parent to child Yiddish (Shleyme Axelrod) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 16:21:01 -0500 (EST) From: als55@columbia.edu Subject: Yiddish dictionaries The work that--to my knowledge--comes closest to what Serge Rogosin describes is the _Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh_/_Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language_. Unfortunately, only the first four of a projected twelve volumes of this work have been published (the last c. 1980); these cover all words beginning in alef (to the innocent ear this will sound ridiculous; however, a disproportionate number of words/spellings begin in _alef_, including most of the words beginning in vowels). Draft entries have been written through _hey_, if my memory serves (I know Meyer Wolf is out there in Mendele-land; perhaps he can correct or supplement this account). The entries that are furthest along are those beginning in _beyz_; these were to constitute the fifth volume entirely or almost entirely. The manuscript material is currently housed in Butler Library, Columbia University (a duplicate of this material resides at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem). There haven't been too many requests to look at the ms., however, those which have been made have been honored. If I can help you find your way to this material, let me know. Andrew Sunshine 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 17:49:12 EST From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Life and death of Yiddish to arnie herschorn: you say 'a language is like a species.' ok, i'll bite -- HOW is a language like a species? imho, a language is a cognitive/social construct residing in the minds of the people who are said to 'know' it, tho its products fill the airwaves and the libraries, to be sure. its 'rights' cannot possibly exceed the rights of those people in whose heads it potentially resides. as for your eagerness to see tears, i'm not sure why you are so discounting those chassidim for whom yiddish is alive and well. you say yiddish will have a 'vestigial life' with them. nokh a mol with the biological metaphors! :) in what way is it 'vestigial'? as i understand it, a vestigial organ is an organ that has outlived its function and has deteriorated structurally such that it no longer _can_ serve a function. clearly, this is not the case with yiddish among the yiddish-speaking chassidim -- it's serving them just as well as any _other_language is serving its native speakers, and there is certainly no evidence of 'structural deterioration'. (oyf mir gezogt!) i'm not sure what you'd wish for, if you had your druthers. you despise those who are living the kind of life that yiddish evolved to function in ('like a mammoth preserved in ice in the wastes of siberia' were your words) and yet you are in deep mourning for yiddish. your wish for a 'concept' for a language that is 'not fully alive if it is the language of the last of the mohicans' reminds me of a hilariously funny thing i read once. my husband is an egyptian jew, one of the many who left the arab world (or were kicked out) after the suez war. his mother lives in brooklyn, near many of her 'landslayt', and they have their own sephardic community center. one day at her house, i was reading this community center's newsletter and i read that they were starting arabic classes for children. and it said 'our children must learn arabic -- so that the language doesn't die out!' funny, eh? obviously the scale is different here -- but i believe you are doing the same thing they were -- for _your_ group, the language has effectively died out -- and the others just don't count! :-) (or would you feel better if there were 100 million yiddish-speaking chassidim in the world? oy vey! :) ) ellen prince 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 13:15:15 -0500 From: hershl@aol.com Subject: Life and death of Yiddish Glad Morrie Feller (V 5.238) has introduced humor into this "life or death" question. Recently, following my lecture (in Yiddish) to the fabled L.A. Yiddish Culture Club (about to celebrate its 75th anniversary!), I was told another story about Khayim Nakhman Bialik: Once, on shabes, Bialik strolled in Tel Aviv, speaking Yiddish with his companions. When a passerby accused him of thus "violating the sabbath," Bialik replied that he was actually observing the strictures against exertion on shabes because: "af tsu redn ivris muz men zikh onshtrengen." (Speaking Hebrew is an exertion.) Hershl Hartman 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 18:35:03 -0500 (EST) From: ptyaxel@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Suffix anomalies In 5.225 and 5.236, Zellig Bach discusses a number of ways in which Yiddish can identify as female either the holder of an occupational title or the wife of the holder. Along with other valuable information, Zellig notes that in his 1968 dictionary, U. Weinreich uses the feminine suffix _-in_ [yud-langer nun] (e.g., _neytorin_ 'seamstress'; _kishef-makherin_ 'sorceress'), though Harkavy (1928) omits the yud (_neytorn/neytern_, _kishef-makhern_.) Harkavy thus appears to be more phonetically precise than Weinreich; as I understand it, the _i_ in the suffix is so reduced when spoken that it is left out of the pronunciation altogether, at least in "Standard" Yiddish. Weinreich himself, in a footnote to lesson 28.2 in his textbook (p. 262 in the 5th edition), says "_-in_ is sounded as a syllabic (N); e.g., _leyenerin_ [LE'YENERN]." That is, not [LE'YENERIN]. I wonder why the standardizers, whom Weinreich follows, did not call for dropping the yud in these words, as Harkavy did. Another curiosity: in view of the evident desire of the standardizers to be systematically phonetic in the orthography of the non-loshnkoydesh-derived lexicon, why did they not put a pasekh under the tsvey yudn in the suffixes _-hayt_ and _-kayt_, as in _frayhayt_ and _kleynikayt_, so as to show that the pronunciation is not _-hEYt_ or _-kEYt_? After all, they have pasekh tsvey yudn for the first syllable in _frayhayt_; why not for the second syllable as well? (Az ikh fleg fregn bay der mamen vegn epes vos ikh hob nisht farshtanen, "Why?", flegt zi mir amol entfern " 'y' is a crooked letter.") In personal communication, Zellig has suggested that these inconsistencies in the spelling of Standard Yiddish may be the results of compromises among the speakers of the several dialects represented in the standardizing group(s). Is/was there a dialect that has _frayheyt_, or one that gives full value to the _i_ in _neytorin_? Shleyme Axelrod Puzzled in Buffalo, New York 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 20:57:08 -0500 From: andrew.cassel@phillynews.com Subject: Letzter Mohicaner? In 5.238, Arnie Herschorn of Toronto wrote: "A language is not fully alive if it is the language of the last of the Mohicans." I'm unqualified to enter the alive-or-dead debate, but I am quite curious about this very American phrase, which I have noticed cropping up in Yiddish too often to be just a coincidence. When my zeyde, olevasholom, passed away in 1941, the obituary in his landsmanshaft bulletin referred to him as "one of the last Keidaner Mohicans." Later I was struck to hear in the film "Partisans of Vilna" an excerpt from a partisan marching song in which the term "der letster mohikaner" is used to rhyme with "partizaner" (sorry I can't recall the verse; efsher ken emetsn mir helfn). Anyway, I wonder; did this bit of U.S. slang make its way back across the ocean in time to be incorporated into 20th century Litvish Yiddish vernacular? Ver veyst? Andrew Cassel Elkins Park, PA 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 22:14:48 -0500 From: hershl@aol.com Subject: More Dona, Dona It should be noted that the song--in both its Yiddish and English versions--is included in the just-published "Apples and Honey: Music and Readings for a Secular Humanistic Observance of the Jewish New Year Festival." The English version includes a new verse, written at a workshop of the Conference of Secular Jewish Organizations, publisher of the anthology. The verse, we're told (p. 91), was written "to remove blame from the victim." "Flying over, knowing freedom As the swallow began to laugh; Soaring down upon the wagon With its beak untied the calf." Many of the songs and readings in "Apples and Honey" are taken from Yiddish literature and almost all of these appear in the original, in transcription and in translation. The large-format (8-1/2 x 11) 128 pp. book is available at US$19.95 ($3.50 p & h) from: CSJO c/o Roberta Feinstein, 19657 Villa Drive North, Southfield, MI 48076. Hershl Hartman 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 01 Feb 96 11:17:38 EST From: 102670.3200@compuserve.com Subject: Sholom Aleikhem on Tolstoi Thank you, Louis Fridhandler, for "giving over" that extraordinary brif of Sholom Aleikhem. The deeply religious Christian Tolstoi might have been even more surprised to find himself described as a crypto-Jew than you were to see "mortification of the flesh" on Sholom Aleikhem's list of Jewish attributes. This is something still done in our day on Yom Kippur and numerous other days of the years, even by the most marginally frum! One can see how the heart of the great writer bled for his nation, and felt no need to say that its suffering was the same as any other suffering -- indeed, as you say, his day *was* different from ours. The saddest part about it was his prophetic words, albeit not the way he had hoped -- that there should never be talk of a Pale of Settlement, or a Jewish Question. Nebakh. Henekh Coleman 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 20:19:11 -0700 (MST) From: feller@indirect.com Subject: Parent to child Yiddish First of all, a mazl tov to the Lewis' on their forthcoming blessed event as announced in Mendele 5.238. In answer to their request, I would recommend "Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood - An English-Yiddish Dictionary" by Mordkhe Schaechter. Published by the Yiddish Language Resource Center, League for Yiddish, New York, 1991. Morrie Feller Phoenix 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 01 Feb 1996 13:53:35 -0500 (EST) From: ptyaxel@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Viazoy redt men tsu kleyninke kinderlekh? Yankev and Yoyne-Brayne Lewis want to raise their forthcoming child (Mazl-tov aykh; zayt ale dray gezunt un shtark!) with Yiddish, and ask about materials. Mordkhe Schaechter (editor of _Afn Shvel_, and author of _Laytish Mame-loshn_, _Yidish Tsvey_ and other contributions to Yiddish) has compiled from a number of sources an excellent English-Yiddish dictionary of _Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood/Trogn, Hobn un Friike Kinder-yorn_ (New York: League for Yiddish, 1991). It includes nursery-talk for a variety of terms, among them those denoting anatomical parts. Shleyme Axelrod Buffalo, New York ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.240