Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.014 June 5, 1997 1) The Forward and YIVO transliteration (Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan) 2) Shemeritsi (Claus Buryn) 3) Biographies of some authors (Estelle Souche) 4) Whence Mendele's Pen Name (Dan Leeson) 5) Yiddish Capable Web Browser (Mark H. David) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 22:14:56 -0400 (EDT) From: SHirshan@aol.com Subject: The Forward and YIVO transliteration Es kumt undz a mazl tov. Oy vi sheyn es iz geven tzu zen the May 23 issue of the Forward Classifieds suddenly boast the new YIVO spelling for _mentsh_. On May 11, I Emailed a letter to the Forward describing Mendele and its subscribers. Who could not revere such a group! And then quoted some of Leonard Prager's data about the word _mentsh_ . I requested that they respect the YIVO transliteration and change the spelling.. A small request, so easy to honor. Un azoy iz take gevorn. Much energy has been expended on Mendele (add in the calories I too have burned) to bemoan the lack of caring on the part of the young new English-oriented Fast Forward editors. How can we motivate them to revere the Yiddish and Yiddishkayt of the Forverts, we have asked ourselves. And continued to bemoan our fate amongst ourselves. Efsher zoln mir in der tzukunft ale shraybn undzere forshlagn, undzer Email to the Forward anshtot shraybn eyner dem tzvaytn oder Mendelen. Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan North Conway, New Hampshire 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 13:04:31 +0200 From: troia Subject: Shemeritsi Khoshever her Andrey Bredstein, A dank far dem protimdikn entfer in Mendele 7.011:2 bitshuve mayn kashe vegn der etimologie fun 'shemeritsi'. Ir vayzt on az di kashe "shlept nokh zikh nokh a tsveyte: vos far a proshek hot Eli gehaltn in a papir". Es dakht zikh az es vet blaybn a sod, vi azoy eyn proshek ken zayn tsvey proshkes un vi 'shemeritsi' ken zayn roytlekh un gelb. Ikh gib di farbundene shteln in seyder: X. A GAS NIST 'Der proshek iz roytlekh un tseribn din, wi shmek-tabek. Rufn ruft zikh es "shemeritsi"' ' Loz men im nor araynlozn ergets mit zayn proshek - azoy blaybt nisht eyn moyz! Zey tseloyfn zikh. A sakh peygern avek. Nishto mer keyn mayz! 'Ikh ze, az khuts dem roytn proshek, iz do ba im nokh a proshek. Oykh gut tsu mayz. Nor me darf zayn mit dem gehit! - sam-hamoves!' 'Di mayz, zogt er, hobn dershmekt dem proshek, zaynen zey zikh tselofn.' 'Er hot faynt " ligunim". Er zogt, az traybn traybt er mayz nit mit keyn shprukh, nor mit a proshek. Er hot a proshek azelkn, vos az di mayz dershmekn im, tseloyfn zey zikh.' 'Zol ikh zayn a novi, az der zak vet platstn, un es wet zikh gebn a shot oys fun im epes a gele zakh? Dos iz take der geler proshek, vos mayn bruder Elie fartraybt mit im di mayz. Er hot aza sharfn reyekh, az me kon khaleshn!' 'Der aynbinder geyt arayn tsu undz in shtub arayn, un shpringt aroys mit a gelekhter: - Ikh veys shoyn, voz dos iz! Ikh hob a shmek geton! dos iz sheme - tshkhi! tshkhi!' ' Fun eyn zayt iz farblibn a shtikl nit-farbrent papir, koym-koym vos me hot gekont iberleyenen: sh-e--m-e-r-i-ts-i.' Dear Mr. Andrey Bredstein, Thank you for your very detailed answer to my question about the etymology of the word 'Shemeritsi" (not 'Sheremitsi'), found in Sholem Aleikhem's "Motl, Peysi dem Khazn, chapter X, "a gas nist". You indicate that my question gives rise to another one, concerning the nature of the "proshek" used by Motl's brother Eli. It seems that it will remain a secret how one powder could be two powders and how 'shemeritsi' could be red and yellow. Claus Buryn 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:42:05 +0200 (MET DST) From: esouche@ens.ens-lyon.fr Subject: Biographies of some authors I had posted a previous message looking for biographical information (for a friend) about the following authors: Reyzl Zhinkhlinski, Sholem Shtern, Pesye Pomerants-Honigboym (Hershfeld-Pomerants), Yuri Sul, Meyer Frumkin and Avrom Bik. Thanks to some helpful Mendelyaners, to the online catalog of the Library of Congress and to the Social Security death index, I have found that Pesye Pomerants-Honigboym (sometimes spelled Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum) was born in 1900 and passed away on August 8, 1978 in Chicago, that Yuri Sul (spelled Yuri Suhl) was born in 1908 and passed away in 1986 (the Social Security registers include an Irving Suhl with the same years of birth and death, but I don't know if it's the same person), and that there was a Meyer Frumkin in the Social Security registers who was born in 1880 and died in 1963. I also have found that Sholem Shtern was born around 1901. I haven't found anything about Avrom Bik and Reyzl Zhinkhlinski. Estelle Souche 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 09:23:36 EDT From: Dan Leeson Subject: Whence Mendele's Pen Name I read with my normal admiration of anything that Zelig Bach posts, his comments about the selection of Mendele Moykher Sforim's pseudonym. His comments were, of course, as a consequence of Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan's post, "Mendele's Pseudonym." Marjorie's post suggests that the name change was commonplace among Jews of that era and was a dodge derived to avoid conscription for 25 years in the Russian military. The suggestion that this phenomenon existed and was commonplace is one of the central elements of a long standing discussion on "JEWISHGEN," a list that deals with questions of Jewish genealogic interest. I do not suggest for one moment that I have found the key to this problem, but frankly I have had and continue to have great difficulty with the essence of that suggestion; i.e., that by the simple expedient of a name change, one was able to avoid conscription. Research that I did on the matter confirm my belief that the entire Russian conscription process was a great deal more refined and precise than is believed to be the case. In fact, central to these stories about a name change is the general understanding that Russian conscription authorities were so stupid that all one had to do was change one's name, and bang, you were out of the army. I did a long piece on the subject of the accuracy of some of the bobe meises that were being put forward on this subject, and it is still an active file. I must get 10 notes a year on the matter, most of them saying that my suggestions cannot be correct because that person's grandfather did indeed undergo a name change to avoid conscription. I enclose below the entire file for whatever purpose it serves to illuminate this discussion of Mendele's pseudonym. [Moderator's note: The file "Military conscription in 19th century Russia" is available at JewishGen web site (http://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/ru-mil.txt) or by sending blank e-mail to RU-mil@mail.jewishgen.org]. Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 22:57:31 -0400 (EDT) From: Mark H. David Subject: Yiddish Capable Web Browser I am pleased to announce that there is now a Yiddish capable Web browser. It's by Alis Technologies, of Montreal, Canada. Their browser can handle web pages in Yiddish using standard (YIVO) orthography, encoded in the internationally recognized Unicode (ISO 10646) standard character set. The current version of their browser, 3.0, is available for free trial download off of their web site (http://www.alis.com/). It is supported for Microsoft Windows 95. The company plans to release a new version, 3.1, which will work on Windows 3.1, Windows '95, and Window NT 4.0. This is the first commercially released browser that handles the Hebrew characters of Unicode sufficiently to render Yiddish text. In addition, the program's keyboard system supports the minimal set of keyboard keys needed to input Yiddish text. This is used in the mail program included with this program. The mail program, by the way, can be used to send Yiddish text via e-mail. It is also important to note that the program can handle Hebrew (full nikud), Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and many other languages. There are many other capabilities beyond the scope of this brief announcement. The technologies included, and necessary to achieve the Yiddish capability, are: - implementation of the Unicode Bidirection Algorithm - Unicode and ISO 10646 Hebrew characters sufficient to support Yiddish according to its most widely accepted orthography - The UTF-8 encoding of Unicode - A Font for Hebrew with the capability to render all 22 Hebrew letters, 5 final forms, 11 character combinations (see http://world.std.com/~yv/uyip/combinations.html), and 3 digraph characters (see http://world.std.com/~yv/uyip/digraphs.html) - HTML in Unicode/ISO 10646 - Language tagging in HTML - Bidirectional HTML - Character set specification in HTML - Does not rely on OS support to handle bidirectional text formatting and rendering There is no other browser for any platform that has all of these capabilities. Upon request, I will comment further as to the specifics of other browsers which prevent them from being considered capable of supporting Yiddish- language web pages. Some of the issues have already been discussed on the UYIP mailing list. Congratulations to Alis Technologies for being the first browser to support Yiddish-language web pages! Mark David Mailing List Moderator, UYIP (Understanding Yiddish Information Processing) http://world.std.com/~yv/uyip/ ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.014