Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 159 February 3, 1992 1) Yiddish in 'Shoah' (Ellen Prince) 2) Yiddish in 'Shoah' (David Sherman) 3) Dialectal variation (Ellen Prince) 4) Grayzen (Hershel Basser) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 02 Feb 92 15:01:57 EST From: Ellen Prince Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.156 >From: braund@linc.cis.upenn.edu >Subject: Yiddish absent from where it should be > >Yude-Leyb Proger's mention of the Andrzej Wajda film >reminded me of the absence of Yiddish in Claude Lanzmann's >film "Shoah". Seven (or how many?) hours of documentary on >the Holocaust in three (or four? five?) different >languages, with native French-, German-, Polish-speaking >interviewers and translators, and no Yiddish interviews. >(I don't think I saw the whole movie -- please correct me >if I'm wrong or confirm this if I'm right.) sorry, dovid, you should see the whole movie. there is definitely yiddish in it. lanzmann treats yiddish the same as polish and hebrew, the other two languages in the film that he doesn't speak--he has an interpreter. (he speaks directly with the interviewees who speak french, german, and english.) one scene in yiddish that i remember very vividly is of a barber in tel-aviv, a powerful scene. in fact, i asked lanzmann once about the choice of languages and he told me that he left it entirely to the interviewees. and, i believe, if you see the movie again, you'll find that the choices are exactly what you would have expected. ellen prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Feb 92 7:36:39 EST From: dave@lsuc.on.CA Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.156 [Same quote from Dovid Braun as above] I believe you're wrong. I taped the whole thing (8 hours) from TV and watched it at the time. I seem to remember some interviews in Yiddish. The whole point certainly seemed to be to get people's recollections in whatever language they were most comfortable in. Many of the interviews, of course, were with non-Jews. David Sherman 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 02 Feb 92 15:33:40 EST From: Ellen Prince Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.157 >From: leonard prager >Subject: widman >To sum up, I hear dialectal /zug/ twice as /zog/ (in the >first and fourth stanzas/, dialectal /mekh/ once as /mikh/ >(in the first line), dialectal /nukh/ as /nokh/, dialectal >/os/ (spelled _ous_) as /oys/, dialectal /tsat/ as /tsaat/ >and _mamen_ as /mame/. I wonder, too, why the transcrip- >tion gives us _ekh_ on l. 7, but _Ikh_ on l. 8. This is >correct as far as what one hears, but does this variation >occur normally in the Bukovina dialect? Is the word in >initial position always /iX/, but after all or certain >consonants /eX/? i'm not sure what you base your presumptions on, but all the research on dialectal variation over the past 25 years show that in fact there is VARIATION. very few dialect features are categorical in speakers' repertoires. and this is true of people living their whole lives in their original dialect region; the variation found in speakers who have moved to another dialect area, not to mention another language area like the singer you discuss, can only be greater. with respect to the dialect discussed, in fact it fits very well joshua fishman's introspective findings (mentioned in his book never say die, i believe) that o/u, e.g. zog/zug, vary more than e/ey, e.g. vemen/veymen. that is, southeastern (also central, i might add) speakers (when singing OR speaking) are more likely to say, for ex., /zog/ instead of their regional /zug/ than they are to say, for ex., /vemen/ instead of their regional /veymen/. it also fits the findings in a longitudinal study i did of bessarabian/standard variation over a 40-year period in the singing of someone born in kishinev. (1987. Sarah Gorby, Yiddish folksinger: a case study of dialect shift. Sociology of Jewish languages. Internatl. J. of the Soc. of Lg. 67.83-116.) >I appreciate the fact that singers may take certain >liberties as regards vowel quantity and quality and even >with stress. Was the singer distracted from her native >pronunciation by the Standard Yiddish text? nothing certainly in my study suggests that there is anything special about singing in this respect. it seems to be no different from careful, more or less self-conscious speech. >Had living in America with speakers of many dialects >contaminated her own? i just want to add here that 'contaminated' might be more appropriately expressed as 'influenced'. ellen prince 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1992 15:35:05 -0500 From: fishbane@epas.utoronto.CA Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.158 "grayzen" with the sense of error cannot come from gemoro looshen gri'es-- which after all seems to be found only as a singular and then it has to do with lack and deficiency, not error as such but a missing qualification which if there would render the object ritually fit. at root it means "a subtraction"-- do not add or subtract (tigra) from the words of the torah etc. Come to think of it-- the way i add, subtract-- even spell it could mean mistake, but there are better words for mistake, even if from hebrew, like toois. "Circles" kroyzen is a creative derivation but the jump to "error" is weak. Besides, it makes no sense-- the point would be-- even if noyech has 2 letters, it is complicated for a child to construct these letters-- so it would mean as the classical saying has it "small in quantity but mighty in strength." in the spirit of-- last is best. that is the way the phrase noyech mit siben grayzen should have developed had it referred to circles. But it did not and I wonder if we are not barking up the wrong dog to find the True Grayz. h basser ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.159