Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no.31 June 25, 1991 1) Various (Mikhl Herzog} 2) Moyd un meydl (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 24 Jun 91 12:22 EDT From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET Dear Noyekh 1. Of the 5 expressions you propose, only number 3 causes me to raise my eyebrows. I hesitate to say "you won't hear it"; you obviously have. I'd like to know where the speaker is from. There is a device, largely in parts of Poland, as I recall, that compensates for the loss of an old grammatical distinction between the use of certain prepositions sometimes with the accusa- tive, sometimes with the dative. In Modern Standard Yiddish, ALL prepositions take the dative. Regionally, now, we find distinctions like "er iz in hyz" but "er geyt in hoyz arayn"; "er voynt in shtot" but er fort in shtot arayn". In any event, it's meaning is clear, although I think the usage is questionable in this case. There is no "motion towards" evident in the sentence. The others sentences are perfectly acceptable. (I should say, by the way, [or have I already said it?] that dialecto- logical field-research demonstrates that virtually anything you can think of, that's not completely off the wall, you're apt to find somebody saying. As for the meaning of "es geyt im (nisht) in lebn", I'm hard put to find anything "negative" in its implications. It seems to me to refer to the degree of urgency or concern that one has for the matter in question: "es geyt mir veynik/shtark/nit shtark/gornit/in gantsn nit in lebn". 2. A propos of "shum", in Lite, it's even inflected for number: zi hot nisht keyn shumE kleyder. In general, except for Sadan, I don't know of anyone who has really done the kind of thing you're looking for. I mentioned once that I thought that Jean Jofen may have done some work on the Talmudic sources of some Yiddish expressions but I don't know. Is Hebrew shum davar really a reborrowing from Yiddish? When I'm back in the city, I'll look it up in Even-Shoshan who often provides some interesting comments. A case in point: I was at the home of a friend in Jerusalem some years ago and found his Sabra son chuck- ling over a weekly humor supplement to the newspaper Davar. I was struck by the fact that the supplement was called "Davar akher". I asked the young man what that meant and he was surprised that I didn't know. The point was that he didn't know what I knew and that the joke was on him and probably on most of the readers. Test it at your June 27th meeting or anywhere else. Harkavy glosses Yiddish "dOver-Akher" as 'pig', 'hog', 'abominable' person. As I recall, Even-Shoshan provides a similar gloss for its use in the "safah meduberet", i.e., presumably, in Yiddish. It goes over the heads of most Israelis as far as I can tell. As for the general question of Hebreisms in the safa meduberet, one should note the view, expressed by Dovid Katz, that there is no Hebrew component in Yiddish; that the Hebrew-origin words in Yiddish are all derived from Aramaic. In other words, (Jewish) Aramaic has a (distinguishable) Hebrew component and Yiddish has an Aramaic component (which carries with it many Hebrew-origin words). An interest- ing idea. In any event, in many cases where the meaning of a particular Hebrew word or phrase in Yiddish seems to differ from its cognates in Hebrew, we often find that the Yiddish nuances reflect the Aramaic ones. Not surprising in view of the lernen-tradition; and, Arama- ic was, after all, the "mother" of all our vernaculars, the "proto-safa meduberet". 3. Finally, a propos of my message to Sigrid last week. I referred to Yiddish "dos mentsh" as a dialectal form meaning 'woman'. What surprised me some years ago was to learn that in many places "mentsh" means 'man' only. "Haish im hayayin": 'Der mentsh mitn vayn'. "Dort geyt a mentsh mit tsvey froyen" ' . . . . a man and two women'. In such cases, Yiddish "man" means only 'husband'. More grist for the feminist mill? Regards to your class. Mikhl 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 24 Jun 91 12:49 EDT From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET Subject: More on moyd and meydl There is a true difference between "moyd" and "meydl"; "moyd" might well be glossed 'a meydl in di yorn', say, a 'meydl of advanced years'; also 'servant'. By the way, (even some parts of Eastern) Yiddish know the WY variant "maad", probably [ma:t]; (cf. the cognate "Maat" as in Maatjes Herring!). ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.31