Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 89 October 21, 1991 1) Kosher lettuce (David Sherman) 2) Germanic and Semitic (Nicholas Eshelman) 3) Calves' foot jelly (Bob Hoberman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 11:43:13 EDT From: dave@lsuc.on.CA Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.83 > lettuce? it's kosher? go know. the only green thing we ate > was pickles. Actually, it's a serious question. Because of the possible presence of bugs, many people won't eat lettuce unless they know it's been checked carefully. Standard practice among many kashrus-keepers is to remove each leaf and soak it in salt water, then examine it carefully under the light. (This is more of a problem for romaine and Boston lettuce than iceberg lettuce.) 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:32:48 CST From: Nicholas Eshelman Subject: Germanic and Semitic With the discussion of "heiraten" and "lasche" on my mind, I happend to come across an article titled "On the possiblilty of lexical borrowings from Semitic into Proto-Germanic or dialectal Proto-Germanic" by Gerald L. Cohen In 1975 Mid- America Linguistics Conference papers. Lawrence, Kansas: Linguistics Dept., KU, 1976. This is sort of a related thesis,if rather more likely. Cohen deals wi th the possible Semitic origin of proto-Germanic words including *par (Hebrew par=bull), *kas (Hebrew kæos), *kwelb (Arabic kulyab=small dog) and others. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 14:52 EDT From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Calves' foot jelly My grandmother from Byelorussia called calves' foot jelly /petshA/, definitely two syllables with stress on the second. But my grandfather, from just a short distance away in southern Lithuania (Vilkovishk, near Kovno), whose dialect was very similar to hers, called it /fisnogi/. Clearly, /fis/ is 'feet', /nogi/ is 'feet' in Russian, but why the duplication? I wondered about this for years, until someone mentioned a phenomenon that is said to occur further north in Lithuania and in Latvia, in the land of "Sabesdiker losn", where the /sh/ sound had become /s/, merging with original /s/. There, /fis/ is both 'feet' and 'fish'. According to my unfortunately second- or third-hand informant, one could avoid misunderstanding by saying, for 'feet', /fisnogi/! (My informant didn't know whether anything like /fisribi/ was possible for 'fish'.) My grandfather's dialect was south, he had no merger of /sh/ and /s/, but apparently the term /fisnogi/ had spread south of its home territory in the sense not of 'feet' but of 'petsha'. Incidentally, lack of uniformity in vowels is not limited to Galitsyaners. Among us Litvaks, though the dialect was closer to Standard phonology, there was similar irregularity to that mentioned by some of our Peylishe colleagues. For instance, my other grandmother, from the corner of northeastern Poland where the dialect was essentially Northeast Yiddish ("Litvak"), had [oy] or [ey] in most words with vov-yud /oy/ in Standard, but [ow] in a few. E.g. /boykh/ 'belly', /eykhet/ 'also', but /yowkh/ 'soup'. Gey veys. But where there was REAL vacilation was in the gender and case system. One thing my Brooklyn-born mother became convinced of in the Sholem Aleykhem Shule was that she doesn't know Yiddish, because she can't handle the standard gender/case system. No linguistic relativity for her. Bob Hoberman ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.89