Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.022 June 28, 1996 1) Yiddish proverbs (Zellig Bach) 2) _Tam-tam_ (Meinhard E. Mayer) 3) _Tam-tam_ (David Lidsky) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 19:26:10 -0400 From: zellig@aol.com Subject: Yiddish proverbs In Mendele 6.019,5 Paolo Agostini cited ten proverbs some of which, in his opinion, are "characteristic of Yiddish only." This characteristic is not applicable to most of them. Proverb No. 3, for instance ("a halber emes iz a gantser lign"), is a universal given, and the same idea is expressed in many adages in various languages. Agostini's first proverb reads: "Tsen goyim zaynen nor tsen goyim, ober tsen yidn zaynen shoyn a minyen" [ten non-Jews are a mere ten non-Jews, but ten Jews already constitute a minyen]. While this proverb draws a comparison _between_ non-Jews and Jews, may I add the folowing saying, pointing to an interesting comparison _within_ groups of Jews, namely: _Nayn rabonim zaynen nit kayn minyen, ober tsen balegoles zaynen a minyen._ [Nine orthodox rabbis do not constitute a minyen (the minimum quorum of ten Jewish males for praying together as a collective), but ten balegoles (draymen, wagon drivers) do.] The sum total of the accumulated religious knowledge of the nine rabonim is, of course, very weighty in the context of Jewish life and the immense esteem of religious education, as succinctly expressed in the popular proverb "Toyre iz the beste skhoyre" [the Bible is the best merchandise].*) However, when it comes to "dos pintele yid," the heart and soul of each individual Jew, even balegoles, who, as a rule, probably did not advance in their religious learning beyond kheyder, count more on the scale of forming a minyen for religious services, and ten balegoles, therefore, constitute a minyen while nine rabonim do not. A rare but very interesting estimation and love of _amkho_, the great jewish masses without the exalted mantle of learnedness. __________ *) This translation, while not intentionally, trivializes the encapsulated philosophy in this proverb -- the great yearning of generations and generations of Jewish parents for their sons achievements in religious studies and the life-style of the people. Zellig Bach Lakehood, NJ 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 21:46:41 PDT From: hardy@lynx.ps.uci.edu Subject: _Tam-tam_ Unfortunately Tam-tam chose to distribute in PDF format, which is unreadable for us hard-core Unix users. Why not HTML, or offer a choice? Meinhard E. Mayer 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 28 Jun 96 16:38:07 PDT From: fdlidsky@netvision.net.il Subject: _Tam-tam_ The appearance of the AEDCY's "Yidisher Tamtam" on the Internet is a cause for rejoicing (I see that it's been around for a few months but I've only just learned about it from Mendele, as I guess have many other people). This Yiddish Internet zine is particulary exciting because it is produced in such an esthetically pleasing form. Well done AEDCY! And yet...This visually beautiful zine is in the Acrobe Acrobat pdf format. The Acrobe Acrobat reader is an enormous piece of software (the 3.0 beta 1 version is taking up almost 3 mega of precious space on my small hard disk). It's running slowly on my computer and in other ways is not problem-free. I would have been happy to have received the Yidisher Tamtam in ASCII. Would that then have meant not seeing it in letters of the Yiddish alphabet? I seem to remember that the question of Jewish versus English letters in internet Yiddish has been discussed in the past on Mendele. I'm not sure if anyone has suggested a solution quite like the following. Yiddish texts on Mendele appear in English (or "Latin") letters in various forms of transcription which aim to reproduce the sound of the Yiddish. They are not in transliteration, that is to say that no direct attempt is made to indicate the letters which would be used to write the same words by means of the Yiddish alphabet. This is probably the only practical solution for two reasons. Firstly because, though Hebrew letters may be sent via e-mail, special software is needed and in my experience it does not always work (the technical details are beyond me but I think that what I've said is true). Secondly because many Mendele subscribers feel more comfortable reading Yiddish in English rather than Yiddish letters and would object strongly to Yiddish letters on Mendele even if the technical problems could be solved. However, in Yiddish, a transliteration and a transcription of a text do not need to be too dissimilar. A quick glance at, for example, the table of the Yiddish alphabet in Weinreich's "College Yiddish" shows that the sounds of the letters may be transcribed in a form in which the pronunciation of the Germanic and Slavic-derived parts of the lexicon is immediately and intuitively clear to an English speaker and yet the original Yiddish letters may be unambiguously reconstructed with, I think, only one exception. A slight modification of Weinreich's transcription would remove that exception and produce a system which would allow the sounds of Yiddish to be written in English letters at the same time as it would indicate the exact spelling in the letters of the Yiddish alphabet. Thus a Yiddish text could be sent by e-mail in a transcribed form in which it could be easily read by those who want to read it that way (as already happens on Mendele). And a simple software program could be used to turn it into Yiddish letters by those people who wish to do so. All of the above applies to those parts of the Yiddish lexicon which are Germanic-Slavic in origin. Words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin could be transcribed in the same way producing something like the form in which they appear in Soviet Yiddish spelling when turned into Yiddish letters by the software. That would be no terrible thing. If it were ever desired to produce the original "Hebrew" spelling of Hebrew-Aramaic derived words that could be done with a somewhat greater complexity in the system of transcription. Thus those portions of the text would be tagged (say with an asterisk at their beginning and end) and the software would translate them into Jewish letters according to a different paradigm in which: (1) English consonant letters only would be turned into Jewish letters except that the small number of vowel letters used in Hebrew words would be indicated by special English combinations (thus, for example, the Yiddish word tam, meaning taste, might be transcribed ta'm, a' being equivalent to ayen---if it were written as tam the vowel letter in the middle of the word would be ignored by the software). (2) Those consonant letters which appear only in Hebrew-Aramaic-derived words would be indicated specially. Thus while s would would = samekh, as usual, s' might = sin and s" might = sof; while kh would = khof, as usual, kh' would = khes; while v would = vov, v' would = veyz and so on. Admittedly the existence of a separate (and less unambiguously transcribable) spelling system for the Hebrew-Aramaic portion of the vocabulary does mightily complicate matters. But the reproduction of that sort of spelling in Jewish letters would only be for special occasions. For those people who are used to reading non-Soviet Yiddish in Yiddish letters reading Soviet Yiddish is no big deal (in fact it can be a lot of fun). My hypothetical software would usually produce something similar to Soviet orthography for the Hebrew-Aramaic words. Of course for all of the above to work one would have to be careful to stick to a uniform, standardized (but simple and intuitive) system of transcription of Yiddish. I'd be interested to receive people's reactions to my idea. Will I ever be able to receive Tamtam on the internet in that form which I have suggested? David Lidsky ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.022