Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 101 November 16, 1991 1) Pronunciation: the Sephardic and Ashkenazic 'ayin' (Hersch Basser) 2) Pronunciation: Anglicization (Khaim Bochner) 3) Pronunciation: the French connection? (Khaim Bochner) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1991 12:59:35 -0500 From: fishbane@epas.utoronto.CA Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.100 yankel, yeinkiv has been taken to be a sephardic ayin, other sephardiisms are supposed to be ashenazik yad=hand where yod would be expected and some other cases-- but ashkenazic ayin does strange things, young women= neireh, plural "neires"-- like meile, meiles-- a quality, my crowd goes in the opposite direction also-- not dreitsin-- but drahtsin, fahrtsin -- etc. , and while were on pronunciations my uncle zeydel could never begin with a vowel -- a yid was always a "heed" etc. and he definitely said shufki, this was no yinglish.-- hersch 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 91 14:20:53 -0500 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: RE: "holly bread", etc. WRT khali and other such pronunciations, first some facts, then some speculation: The pattern is anglicization of Yiddish final -e differs in different regions. "Bubbie" and "Zeydie" are pretty much universal (in the US), but here I think we probably have convergence with English diminutives in -y, like mommy and daddy. In Buffalo, where I grew up, I don't recall hearing _any_ other Y words pronounced in English with final "-ie". In Boston (and Eastern Mass. in general), on the other hand, many words are pronounced this way, including "matsie", which Ellen cites as _not_ having this pronunciation in her dialect. I've even heard "chepie" ("Don't chepie me" = "tshepe mikh nisht")!! Ok, now speculation. Mike Alpert, who grew up in the Boston suburbs, commented on this to me once. Summarizing with a linguist's terminology, he says that in Litvishe dialects final -e is higher and more front than in most other Y dialect areas (this sounded convincing when he demonstrated). And he claims that the Boston area has a high proportion of Litvaks. So the idea would be that the litvish pronunciation of -e crosses some perceptual boundary for English speakers, such that it gets perceived as "ie" rather than the "uh" that -e otherwise gets anglicized as. In places where the proportion of Litvaks is high enough, this could influence the local patterns of anglicization, even for speakers not of litvish background. (And vice versa.) And the puzzling word by word distribution could result from anglicized pronunciations being borrowed from neighborhood to neighborhood. BUT I don't know how many of the premisses of this explanation hold up. -- Khaim 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 91 14:42:19 -0500 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: RE: "maanse" ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET writes > Fayvl: how about that nasalization in your "bube-maanse". > Any justification in Hebrew classical phonology for the > nasalization of "ayin": manse. ya(y)nkef and consistently > among Sefardim, in Judeo-Italian, etc. Anyone else on this? "maanse" and "maynse" are very common pronunciations, especially, I think, in SE (Ukrainian) Yiddish. As Mikhl points out, the example of this phenomenon that everyone knows is "Yankev". But it doesn't have to be around an ayin, others of the Hebrew "guttural" consonants will do: bansher