Mendele: Yiddish literature and language --------------------------------------------------- Contents of Vol. 1 no. 9 May 31, 1991 1) Reply to Dave Sherman (Ellen Prince) 1)------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 31 May 91 11:31:51 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: RE: Yiddish in English dave sherman writes: >...words like leyn and shiddukh don't >have a Jewish-only meaning in *Yiddish*, they do have >the very restricted meanings I referred to when used in >English. Is there a linguistic term for this kind of >borrowing, which restricts the meaning of the borrowed >term very narrowly? the general term, whether it happens to a borrowing or a native word, is specialization. it's very common with borrowings, however. the reason generally given is that the borrowed items have a restricted distribution (i.e. context of occurrence), so future generations, hearing them only in that context, inductively infer a concomi- tant restricted SENSE. some dramatic examples in eng- lish involve the following pairs: calf veal sheep mutton cow beef pig pork the first column are native english (germanic) words. originally, they were used both for the animal and for the edible meat of the animal. the words in the second column are borrowed from anglo-norman french (cf. modern french veau, mouton, boeuf, porc) and ALSO denoted both the animal and the meat of the animal. during the norman reign in england (1066-13??), the upper class spoke french and the servants and peasants spoke english. so the (upper class) lady of the house would tell the servant she wanted veal or mutton or beef or pork for dinner. that is, she was speaking french. but generations of servants, hearing french and therefore those terms only from the mouths of the upper class and the upper class talking about food, not animals, came to think the words meant only meat. of course, when the servant went to the peasant to actual- ly obtain the stuff, i.e. to slaughter and carve the animal, they'd speak english (calf, sheep, ...), so THOSE terms became specialized to mean the animal only and not the meat thereof, which is why they're not synonyms at all in modern english. (we can infer that the anglo-normans didn't eat horsemeat, unlike the rest of the french, from the lack of a term based on 'cheval' for horsemeat in modern english.) on this analogy, one could hypothesize that, for those people for whom shidekh means a match between jews, they (or their parents) heard it used only in contexts where the people being discussed were jews, 'match' or whatever being used in other contexts (perhaps by other speakers, e.g. on the radio or wherever). so shidekh was understood to MEAN 'match between jews'. my own private specialization was cottage cheese and pot cheese. i thought the first meant the pre-packaged stuff, like breakstone's, whereas i thought the second meant the loose kind that you bought some quantity of (in a little white bag). it turns out that cottage cheese was the native english word and the one general- ly used across the country, whereas pot cheese was the dutch borrowing in nyc (the dutch got there first, remember). so i saw 'cottage cheese' on the national brands but heard pot cheese used for the loose kind, and i inferred that the difference had to do with their meaning, not their history. (now 'pot cheese' has come to be used nationally--but it wasn't 35-40 years ago, i'm told.) as for 'in-group'-ness and language-mixing, if you like i can send you some references. there's been a lot said about it, mostly with respect to spanish code- switching/borrowing in the english of puerto ricans and chicanos, but it's been claimed for many other instan- ces as well. it should be pointed out, tho, that not all borrowings have this effect, and, once they really make it into the language as a whole, they lose it if they ever had it. you don't feel warm all over when you hear someone say 'bagel' or 'schmuck', i bet... zayt gezunt.