Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.155 December 21, 1996 1) Slavic influences on Yiddish syntax (Ellen Prince) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1996 20:40:44 EST From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Slavic influences on Yiddish syntax n.b. for those who do not care about the technicalities of yiddish grammar, please do not read -- or else do not kvetsh. ;) for those that do care, great! and please feel free to chime in -- i address what follows to the two people whose posts i'm answering, but i'm really speaking to whoever is interested and would appreciate feedback/input. thanks. dovid braun mentions multiple wh-fronting as an example of slavic influence on yiddish syntax. dovid, glad you brought this up. have you by any chance worked on this? several years ago i tried to -- the only naturally-occurring token i've ever found was olsvanger's 'zi veyst nit ver mit vemen es shlogt zikh' so i tried to elicit some others from two yiddish speakers. more precisely, i translated some simple examples of multiple wh-fronting in slavic from papers by catherine rudin on bulgarian and tina kraskow on russian. both yiddish informants rejected them outright. i don't remember them exactly but they included things like 'vu ver iz gegangen?' 'ver vos vet esn?' 'ver vemen ken?', with all permutations of the wh-words. are these ok, in your opinion? in any event, i concluded that the situation in yiddish is not clear but that it doesn't seem to be a direct syntactic borrowing of the slavic situation. btw, both informants (one from lithuania, like olsvanger, the other from romania) found olsvanger's sentence fine but parsed it as a conjoined subject, the kind with 'mit' instead of 'un' -- which, btw, _is_ a from a slavic influence, but at the lexical level. anyway, i'd be very interested in seeing/hearing about anything you've done on this -- interesting topic! meyer leyb wolf would like to know why the following are not examples of slavic influence on yiddish syntax: >1. The position of the reflexive pronoun after the infinitive verb when >the verb is the subject of the sentence 'bodn zikh nokh heyser arbet iz >a mekhaye" is like Polish, but unlike German. german, like old yiddish but not like modern yiddish, is 'sov' -- the normal word order is subject-object-verb. now this is partly masked in main clauses because german also has a 'verb-second constraint' -- in german, the tensed verb must move into second position in main clauses. if you look at german subordinate clauses, you'll see the sov word order. you'll even see traces of it in main clauses if you look at a complex tense -- only the tensed part is in second position, the participle is clause-final. now consider that the reflexive pronoun is like an object -- so its normal position is before the verb. so an infinitive would be 'reflexive - verb'. ok, so far so good. now to modern yiddish. modern (eastern) yiddish is svo -- subject verb object. (plus of course it has the verb-second constraint on top of that, plus it has extended that verb-second constraint into subordinate clauses.) this means that you'd expect to find the reflexive, which is a kind of object, following the verb, including the verb in its infinitive form. so there's no need to invoke slavic -- it follows from the general word order facts of yiddish. oh, don't be misled by the fact that object pronouns often occur _before_ participles in yiddish, e.g. ikh hob _im_ gezen. this is a fairly common phenomenon -- in germanic as in many other languages -- of 'light' things moving up, often called 'clitic-climbing'. btw, the change in yiddish from sov to svo word order may have been influenced by slavic -- but it would be a slow and indirect influence. but it may have been independent -- the same exact changes took place in the scandinavian languages (danish, swedish, norwegian, icelandic) and in english, without any help from slavic. in fact, the odd men out are modern german and dutch -- the only two major germanic languages that are still sov. in any event, i heartily recommend beatrice santorini's dissertation, a study of the generalization of the verb-second constraint to subordinate clauses in yiddish with the cooccurring change from sov to svo (univ. of pennsylvania, 1989 -- and not my student, btw, so i have no axe to grind, tho i do have a lot of nakhes from her ;) ). >2. The use of "negative" clauses of purpose after certain verbs, e.g. >'ikh hob moyre, dos kind zol nit veynen' -- I'm afraid the child might >cry -- is again like Polish, but unlike German. well, this could also be -- and probably has been -- attributed to french, where you get the same thing (j'ai peur que l'enfant ne pleure). what we would need to see is whether it occurs in old yiddish (pre-slavic contact) and whether it occurs in bavarian german or other germanic varieties. on the subject of negation, yiddish has 'negative concord' -- keyner hot keynem keynmol nit gezen 'no one ever saw anyone' -- which i've seen attributed to a borrowing from polish. unfortunately, bavarian german ALSO has negative concord (as do many nonstandard english dialects, btw -- it's clearly well-entrenched in germanic). and we find negative concord in old yiddish, before slavic contact. the whole issue of negation in yiddish is very interesting and cries out for research. >3. Regionally, negative imperatives are formed on the pattern 'nit >veyn', like Polish, but unlike German (and the rest of Yiddish). again, we'd have to look at old yiddish and the relevant germanic varieties before concluding a slavic provenance. in modern terms, one would say that the verb is not raising in these cases. we'd want to see if there are other instances of where no verb raises or if this is unique. btw, you can say 'nem!' and 'du nem!' and 'nem nit!' and 'nit nem!' and 'du nem nit!' -- can you also say 'du nit nem!'? if not, maybe it's just a verb phrase without an 'infl' node at all, in which case the _model_ may have been slavic but the _actual syntax_ would be just a piece of what they already had. in any event, it's a nice topic for study. speaking of imperatives, do you know of a possible analog in slavic for the yiddish double imperative, e.g. gey veys, kumt est? am i correct that these can't be negative? i mean, can you say 'nit gey tants' or 'gey nit tants' or 'gey tants nit'? i've been able to get informants to accept an imperative followed by an infinitive when it's negative -- 'gey nit tantsn' -- but not a negative double imperative. is that correct? that double imperative is a very curious construction, for sure... finally, i should add that that i _do_ believe there is a lot of slavic influence in yiddish syntax -- but i think that the influence worked to increase the frequency of certain native germanic yiddish forms, which then may have had an effect on how the next generation construed the grammar. for instance, i have a hunch (unprovable so far) that the weird pluperfect 'ikh bin gehat gegangen' results from a reanalysis of the original 'ikh bin geven gegangen/ikh hob gehat geredt' as containing an invariant particle 'gehat' -- _because_ the frequency of pluperfects dropped very low after yiddish borrowed the _semantics_ of the slavic tense system -- suddenly pluperfects were hardly needed so the kid hardly heard any and so didn't have enough 'data' to get the 'right' analysis. as minor support i offer the following tidbit: there are a grand total of 6 pluperfects in the entire royte pomerantsn (181 pp.) but several on nearly _each page_ of the early 16th century (pre-slavic contact) bove bukh... anyway, that's one way i believe slavic influenced yiddish syntax, but it's not the way that people usually cite. another way would be the possible scenario i hinted at for the 'nit veyn' case -- take the slavic form as a model or goal and see how close you can get using _yiddish/germanic_ syntax -- but here in fact there's no _formal_ change (tho there'd probably be a change in the frequency of the yiddish form chosen for the new 'work'). sorry for the verbosity -- you happened to hit on my great passion (as you knew you would ;) ). Ellen Prince ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.155