Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 1 no. 74
October 2, 1991
 
1) Kreplakh and Weinreich (Berl Hoberman)
2) Reply to Aren Abramson (Mikhl Herzog)
3) Talking about food (Noyekh Miller)

1)----------------------------------------------------
[Reposted from: Linguist List:   Vol-2-604.  Tue 01 Oct 1991.]
 
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1991 16:04 EDT
From: Robert D Hoberman <RHOBERMAN@ccmail.sunysb.edu>
Subject: Kreplach

        Somewhere I heard it suggested that the Yiddish
diminutive plural /-lax/ or /-lex/ was from a concatenation
of two separate diminutive suffixes, an *l one as in modern
standard German -lein and a *k>x one as in MSG -chen. They
do occur concatenated, though not as a plural, in some
dialectal German, as my wife's parents' Jewish Hessisch,
where the diminutive of /na:s/ 'nose' is /ne:zel$e/ (/z/ is
voiceless but lax, /$/ is like English SH, German SCH -- in
this dialect Fisch /fi$/ and Ich /i$/ rhyme perfectly).
(The plural of /ne:zel$e/ is, of course, /ne:zel$en/.)
Etymologically doubled diminutives like this are mentioned
by Max Weinreich in his History of the Yiddish Language, p.
522, but unfortunately he doesn't discuss the Yiddish
diminutive plural.
 
        By the way, Max Weinreich is OBVIOUSLY the source
of "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy", by an
elementary principle of historical linguistics.  Here's the
proof:  If we have in modern English both BROTHERS and
BRETHREN, the latter is obviously original because we know
of "the regularizing trend of analogic change" (Bloomfield
1933:410).  Well, the other candidates proposed for the
army-navy criterion, Sapir and Jakobson, are much more
widely known (distributed, not to say productive) than
Weinreich; if it was really Weinreich, we understand how
people might have come to think it was either of the
others, but if it was really Sapir or Jakobson, would
anyone have forgotten and called it Weinreich?  Q.E.D.
 
-Bob Hoberman

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 91  22:57 EDT
From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET
Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.73 

(Answer to Aren Abramson's query:)

Sounds right!


3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 1991
From: nmiller@trincc
Subject: Idishe makholim

Berl Hoberman's insightful comments about kreplakh serve to
open a whole savory area for discussion.  Maybe the time
has come (higia hazman) for us to put our heads together
and come up with a definitive and authoritative
vegvayser--a culinary mishna, umshtayns gezogt-- for
fressers yet to come who don't know much about Jewish food
but know what they like.

Un der iker, mit farshtand: what's the use of telling our
children about the joys of eating blintzes?  They know
already.  What they don't know (and neither does the New
York Times: see today's food section) is how kreplakh came
by the name.  < Russian < French?

That's one question.  Another has to do with food and the
Jewish calendar.  How come Shevuos is milkhik?  And how
come Sukkes alone doesn't have food of its own (only rain)?

But the big one is a comprehensive list of dishes with
their regional variants.  Does everyone on this list know
about prokkes for instance?  Stuffed cabbage.  Neither
Harkavy nor Weinreich (nor my Russian dictionary) list the
word.  Do Poles and Litvaks call them something else?  Are
prokkes related linguistically to other dishes with
confusingly similar names: pireshkes, pirogen?

Then there are the foods of the poor, the lakhmo anyo as it
were, that have vanished in a more affluent world: miltz,
lungen, pitsya.  Who, for instance, remembers shalote?
Pickled cabbage (and a mekhaye).  Mitsva aleynu l'saper..
You get the picture.

I'm assuming in all of this that Mikhl Herzog's
about-to-be-published Linguistic Atlas (af a gute sho)
doesn't deal with these matters in the detail that they
deserve.  On the other hand, given his famous discovery
about the correspondence between gefefferte and nisht-
gefefferte gefilte fish and certain speech patterns,
perhaps the job has been done for us.  From Mikhl we'll
hear.  Let's hear as well from the entire list.

Noyekh
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End of Mendele Vol 1.74