Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 158 February 2, 1992 1) A brivele fun front (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 1 Feb 92 18:22 EST From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET Subject: Various Hello Leonard. Welcome back. It's time for me to surface, too, if only for a little while. I'm in the throes of trying to get a handle on Atlas Volume 3. (Volume 1 is in press and it's just possible that I'll have a (n unbound) copy in hand at the June Conference in Jerusalem. Volume 2 is nearing completion. Volume 3 doesn't leave me much time for anything else. Your Cairo material was a revelation, the Yiddish Shakespeare material informative, your piece on "ludic" Yiddish impressive (even moving). The "bus" item reminded me of a call I received from the US patent office some years ago. To their credit, they check out things like this. They were inquiring about the potential offensiveness of a patent application for some kind of paper cup to be called "goyisher cup". Songs of the type that you mention are legion, of course. In the late forties, they were constantly blaring from loudspeakers at record shops in the Times Square area. Mickey Katz (Joel Grey's father) was their chief exponent. They remind me of a story about Gershon Sholem at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The late Saul Lieberman is reported to have introduced him as follows: "Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, mysticism is nonsense but, as Professor Gershon Sholem will soon demonstrate, the study of nonsense is scholarship". Mark Slobin demonstrates much the same. A propos of the "playfulness" issue, there may be a rather special claim that one can make for Yiddish speakers, rather than for the language itself, that's worth mentioning. It involves a more than usual language-consciousness, what Max Weinreich calls "komponentn-visikeyt", that may be implicated in the feeling that the language itself is playful. Traditionally, the native Yiddish speaker was, by definition, nearly always bi- or multi-lingual. It was part of his/her "condition". S/he was always "in contact" with one or more of the stock languages that contributed to the making of Yiddish in the first place: Hebrew/Aramaic texts, German, a Slavic language. Interlingual punning was possible and frequent; "etymologizing" was (and remains) a favorite sport. Interdialectal word-play is no less frequent and may provide a class of unambiguously Yiddish jokes where, among other things, roosters and hens, fathers and furs, etc. are confused. About "Yiddish jokes", more later. Part of the same syndrome (resulting from multilingual contacts) is the authority with which Yiddish speakers make judgments about what is or is not a "Yiddish word". I've spent hundreds of hours interviewing native speakers (and hundreds more listening to interviews conducted by others) and the subject of what constitutes a Yiddish word for speakers of different regions is always amusing and sometimes quite startling. The changing perception of what is Yiddish, German, Polish, Hebrew is worth some study in itself. In Jerusalem (!), I interviewed an informant from Western Poland who told me, in reply to a question about the expression "skotsl kumt" (skocl kimt, that is) "Nayn, ints omer nish geret kan Ivrit in der haym". (Anyone out there know the expression, or a variant of it? What does it mean?) Concerning the matter of STY which you've raised, transcription and otherwise: To those who are resentful of what appears to be Litvish chauvinism, I hope I don't have to defend my credentials as a khosid of distinctive dialect differences. Three things though: i) It's not just more difficult for others if everyone makes "shabes far zikh" with respect to rendering Yiddish in latin letters, it's disrespectful to the language to treat it as if there were no standards. Our newspapers and journals try very hard to respect the prevailing standards of transcription from Cyrillic, Chinese, etc. Why shouldn't we insist on the same with respect to Yiddish? ii) As a rule, we transliterate. Transliteration is a rendering of "letters" not of "sounds" (EXCEPT with respect to the Hebrew-origin words) from one alphabet to another. There's an advantage to the 1-1 relationship between letter(s) and sounds in the STY system. To elaborate on the difficulty that Bob Goldberg has with non- standard romanization, think of the problem of having to decide whether "hun" is 'rooster' or 'hen'; whether "breyt" is 'bread', 'board' or 'broad'; iii) Finally, be consoled (and grateful?): although STY pronunciation is nearly the same as Litvish, STY grammar is about as far from Litvish as you can get. This is where our Noyekh and other Southeasterners get their due. The STY case and gender system is largely that of the Ukraine (oops! of Ukraine, that is). Your message to Meylekh/Melekh was much to the point. "Melekh" belongs to that group of Hebrew seg(h)olate nouns that merge with tseyre in Yiddish. There are three groups of seg(h)olate nouns in Yiddish (there's an interesting paper by Dovid Katz on the subject): i) emes, elul--always e (as in 'bet'); ii) khesed--(like the words, regn, betn, lebn)-- regionally, e (as in velt), ey (as in English 'gate'), i (as in 'kiss'; iii) melekh, pesakh--regionally ey ('gate') or ay ('might'). There's a very telling example in the film "Image Before My Eyes": you may recall a woman singing "Moyde Ani" in a song that combines Hebrew and Yiddish. She sings: (Heb.) "moyde ani" (Yidd.) "ikh dank dikh"; "veymen dank ikh?" (Heb). "meylekh" (Yidd.) "deym maylekh". What DOES make a "Yiddish" joke, particularly when it's rendered in another language? I remember that in one of my first classes with Uriel Weinreich we tried to come up with criteria. Setting language and culturally determined topics aside, we tried to arrive at structural criteria. What (theoretically universal) devices that made things "funny" were favored? Try the following: i) The "superclimax". After you've got them laughing, hit them with the punchline; e.g. the first anecdote on the record "You don't have to be Jewish" ("A call from Long Island"): "Does that mean you're not coming?". ii) The quantification of non-quantifiable qualities: "She's only a little bit pregnant" or (if you recall the item in Royte Pomerantsn) "Oykh mir a shtot!". iii) The subversion of one's own interests, as when the shadkhn says "megst redn hekher, zi'z nokh a bisele toyb dertsu". Whaddaya think? Anyway, it's good to hear from you again. Thanks for regards from Kieve Ziv (ne Finkleman). An old, old friend. But, who is Shifra? His daughter (in-law)? His wife is Naomi. Speaking of friends, you apparently preceded me in Vandans last summer. I spent a wonderful week with Hugh and Edith in August (then in London in November). Did you get to visit the Jewish Museum in Hohenems? The recording of Hugh's rendition of a Western Yiddish text is quite impressive. Speak to you again soon. Mikhl. ------------ Mina Graur: There is no connection between Yiddish "khoyzek" and the Hebrew root "hzq". The spelling in Yiddish, which may be the result of it having been interpreted as of Hebrew origin, reinforces the assumption. It's "Hebreoid" like the names "Zalman" and "Kalman", spelled zlmn, klmn. I think Max Weinreich offers a Low German etymology (but since his Yiddish text has no index, I can't be more specific than that now). _______ Moyshe-Non Eytan: Yiddish "grayz" is probably derived from (Ashkenazic) Hebrew "gri-es" (gr'iuth). Dov Sadan attributed the expression "Noyekh mit zibn grayzn" to the reinterpretation of "krayzn" 'circles' as "grayzn" 'mistakes'. Somewhere, at some time, children were apparently taught to write in a manner similar to the "join the numbers" games. They joined patterns of circles to form each letter. I don't think I can reproduce it here but "nun" is written by joining three 'krayzn', "khes" by joining four 'krayzn'; together, zibn krayzn gives you "Noyekh". The etymology, of course, doesn't change the fact that the expression "shraybn Noyekh mit zibn grayzn" means precisely what you said it means. ________ Bob Goldberg: Despite my promise, I hesitate to get back to the matter of "Heirat" and "harey at". I can understand that you bristled at my assertion (not theory or hypothesis) that there was no relationship between the two, (although, I wouldn't bristle if you made some assertion about computers), but I don't understand your saying that you remain "unconvinced" by the evidence provided by Aren Abramson. Before going on, perhaps you should explain the nature of the evidence that you would find convincing. Linguists, after all, work with different tools than computer specialists. Of necessity, the nature of the evidence we adduce in support of our conclusions is going to be different. ________ Back to work! Mikhl Herzog ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.158