Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.246 February 9, 1996 1) Pluperfect (Ellen Prince) 2) Pluperfect (Dovid Braun) 3) Bris-itse (Bernard S. Greenberg) 4) Gevald (Zellig Bach) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 07 Feb 1996 20:35:53 EST From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Pluperfect thanks, meyer wolf, for that crystal-clear summary [5.245] of the tense situation! your post is a 'keeper', as they say. my only addition is one that i personally believe impinges on some that you've mentioned: the loss throughout eastern yiddish of the germanic 'sequence of tense' system, replaced by the slavic style. i mean the difference exemplified below between english and yiddish: said on friday: montik hot er gezogt az er VET kumen mitvokh (ober er iz nit gekumen). monday he said that he WOULD come on wednesday (but he didn't come.) [notice you can't say in english 'monday he said he will come on wednesday' if you mean a previous wednesday.] anyway, once the sequence of tense system changed, the frequency of all these 'fancy' tenses (pluperfect, future perfect, past conditional...) had to drop enormously -- and i would bet that that's what inspired all these changes. one possibly irrelevant note: french has effectively also lost the preterite, at least in the spoken language-- but its pluperfect seems to be alive and well. and it has a germanic-style sequence of tense system rather than a slavic-style. btw, goldwasser (for whom i publicly thank the very kind jerry sadock, a discreet lurker in our midst :) ) also relates the changes in the pluperfect to the changes in the sequence of tense system but, if i understand him correctly, sees the causality the other way -- that the loss of the pluperfect killed the sequence of tense system. while i can't see that, i _was_ thrilled to learn from his paper that both hungarian and modern hebrew have a 'poorly developed' pluperfect _and_ have a slavic-style sequence of tense system. re modern hebrew, would you know if this is a recent development? what kind of sequence of tense system did biblical hebrew have, would you know? and what about its pluperfect? the plot thickens... :) nokh a mol, thanks for that great summary! ellen prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 07 Feb 1996 21:07:51 EST From: dovid@mit.edu Subject: Pluperfect, conditional, auxiliaries, hobn/zayn distinction To answer Meyer Wolf's question [5.245], there's a bit more to be said about the conditional. Sorry, I haven't the time maarikh tsu zayn, but here's a kitser-hadover: ven ikh het gevust... mekht ikh ... (still around for some speakers -- I know of litvishe and Bukovinan) ven ikh zol/visn geven visn (where I think *gehat is totally out) -- our beloved moderator Noyekh Miller is a consistent user of this type of conditional, where a plain old counterfactual conditional is intended, not necessary a perfect conditional (i.e. the form means 'if I knew,' not necessarily 'if I had known') ven ikh zol visn -- a counterfactual conditional using the typical subjunctive auxiliary _zol_. Coupled with _ven_, it gives you a counterfactual reading. ven ikh veys dos volt ikh (ge)kumen frier -- where the verb in the if-clause is in the present tense and the conditional is crucially introduced _ven_. (There are other 'if'-words in Yiddish, e.g. tomer, oyb, az, but curiously only _ven_ can be used in this context.) Dovid Braun Cambridge, MA 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 22:11:04 -0500 From: bsg@basistech.com Subject: Bris-itse -itsa is a Rumaninan feminine diminutive ending, for what it's worth... Bernard S. Greenberg 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 22:40:17 -0500 From: zellig@aol.com Subject: Gevald Shoshana Balaban-Wolowicz (5.244,2) questions my coinage "Gevald Nayn-Elf" in the sense of an emergency and "gevald geshrien" (or geshrign) as a scream for help. She bases her questioning on the meaning of the word "gevald in the folk song: Sha shtil, makht nit kayn gerider, der rebe geyt shoyn tantsn vider; sha shtill makht nit kayn _gevald_ der rebe geyt shoyn tantsn bald... I believe that in this instance "gevald" should be interpreted contextually within the described event. "Makht nit kayn gerider" says 'do not make a tuml' [tumult] and 'makht nit kayn gevald' conveys a plea to the rebbe's followers to give him spatial room and air for his joyous dance, and not to be carried away with it... So, I suggest, "gevald" here is a kind of poetic license, rhyme-induced by _'bald'_, and not to be taken literally. On the other hand, it may well be a lyricist's dittological device to repeat in different words the line 'makht nit kayn gerider' but with several decibels higher, namely 'makht nit kayn gevald,' since _gevald_ is indeed a 'geshrey' (or 'gesgray'), that is a loud, warning call, but here not an emergency plea but rather, again, a poetic way of raising the level of 'tuml'... And what if the anonymous writer of the song was a _misnaged_, an opponent to khsides, and the intent of the ditty was to make fun of the khsidim, of their unrestrained responses at the rebbe's every gesture and motion, and their interpreting them in "holy" ways, meanings, and messages?... According to this tentative suggestion, 'makht nit kayn gevald' would mean a plea to the khsidim not to get, at the sight of their rebbe's dancing, in a state of "hispayles" [enthusiasm], and, for no rhyme or reason (in this misnaged's view), lose their senses to the point of a "gevald"... Thus, it is all in the eye and ear of the reader... Zellig Bach ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.246 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. 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