Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 190 March 10, 1992 1) Yinglish/gendering?/English Yiddish (Ellen Prince) 2) Vaybertaytsh/post-vocalic -r (Mikhl Herzog) 3) More salad (Yude-Leyb Proger) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 09 Mar 92 22:33:34 EST From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.189 >From: davism@turing.cs.nyu.edu >Subject: correction to my note on yinglish in Berkeley > >My note said: > >>> Well! For years Berkeley had a restaurant called >"Balabos". > >Of course it was "Balabosta". Sorry, > >Martin i'm sure you're joking, but i can't resist: in regard to berkeley not being a yinglish area, the fact that there's a restaurant named balabosta is really not relevant. there are many many many restaurants with chinese names in berkeley, as i recall, but it ain't no chinglish area. for an ethnic dialect, you need an environment where children are raised hearing that dialect or the relevant foreign lg, where that's the *norm*. so san francisco chinatown yes, berkeley no. ---------------------------------------------------------------- >Date: Sun, 8 Mar 92 20:58:37 EST >From: Linda FELDMAN <42161_655@uwovax.uwo.CA> >Subject: mameloshn un Weiberdeutsch > >Also: are any of >you aware of any journal articles in English (French, >Yiddish, German, Spanish, Dutch ) which deal with the >gendering of Yiddish (feminized) versus Hebrew >(masculinized). this sounds like something one does to cattle, but that surely isn't what you mean. could you please explain 'gendering'? thanks. ------------------------------------------------------ >Date: Sun, 8 Mar 92 23:11:20 EST >From: dave@lsuc.on.CA >Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.170 > >Mikhl Herzog wrote: > >> For Hersh Basser: I'm very forgiving. Never mind >> grayz/gri'es. More important: evidence of language change >> in Toronto: those of my vintage (the kid in the >> above-mentioned photo playing the cymbals) said >> "apstEsiker", not "apsteyrzer". Most Toronto Yoiddish >> speakers in my day were of Polish, "r-dropping" origin. >> More Torontoisms: "a saydInteres", "a solifI:te", "a >> fletelet". Can you decipher? > >I'm mystified, even though I speak a Toronto r-dropping >Yiddish. Can you clarify, Mikhl? in brooklyn it was also apstesiker, or /apste:sike/ to be more precise. (we had no postvocalic r's in any language.) also nekstorike, by the way--same morphology. can i guess saydinteres? side interest? or did it have a more specific sense? (like extra-marital side interest?) my guess for fletelet would be small apartment, on the assumption that toronto uses the british 'flat', but that's a wild guess. no idea about solifite. what is it? Ellen Prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 10 Mar 92 16:57 EST From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.189 To Linda Feldman: the term "vaybertaytsh" refers to the font/the typeface used for printing Yiddish, in contrast to the square letters used for printing Hebrew. I should say, "used to be used". The distinction doesn't apply any more You might look at Max Weinreich's book "Di shvartse pintelekh" or, for a fuller treatment, a work (date? place?) by Herbert Zafron of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnatti. You could write to him there. Dave Sherman: I'm not sure how to elaborate except to say that the dropping of postvocalic "r" is a regional phenomenon, largely in Polish Yiddish, which leaves a variety of "r-colored" vowels in its wake: tsike, pite, a gite man; around Brisk (=Brest Litovsk), it's more like tsika, pita, a gita; we also hear tsiko, pito, eyr iz a gito. Maps in Volume 1 of the Atlas (forthcoming). Mikhl. Mikhl Herzog 3)---------------------------------------------------- *** LUDIC YIDDISH (with a sting) The Gashash Hachiver put on a sketch in Hebrew and then repeated it in Yiddish -- in a good spirit, but the association with Yiddish was clearly an association with humor (as well as with Ashkenazim). But the implication was that "normal" Israelis did not know this strange language and did not need to know it. One piercing note which may not have caught everyone's attention was a reference to an Israeli Sefaradi as an Arab, which reflects actual Israeli slang usage. Haifa's _Kolbo_ of 20 May 1988 reports on its front page the claim of a young Arab woman that her Jewish boss discriminated against her by forbidding her to speak Arabic with her fellow-employees in a Western Carmel supermarket. Stories of linguistic discrimation are exceedingly rare in Israel and this one may have little basis in fact. Normally, Jews do not care if Arabs speak Arabic to one another, but a boss might not want Arab workers talking when they could be working. Some Jews might also feel that the Arabs are talking about -.them-., a fear which would make them uneasy. Jews often used "targum-loshn" to make it impossible for gentiles -- who would understand the Germanic component of Yiddish -- to grasp what they were saying. **** "A Tale of Two Sisters" by Barbara Lebow In a review of this play by Andrea Jolles in -The Jewish Monthly- (June-July 1988, p. 31), we read: "Playwright Barbara Lebow explains that the Yiddish phrase is an expression of endearment and connotes "inner resources other that just a pretty face." This is a wholly confused notion. The two Yiddish words (whose correct transcription is -sheyne meydl-) may be glossed 'pretty/ attractive/nicelooking girl'. The particular dramatic context may suggest that the girl's good looks are only the outer side of her attractive person. There is nothing in the phrase itself that denotes more than 'pretty girl'. What we see here is Yiddish being romanticized thru erroneous translation. It is true that -a sheyner yid- is 'a saintly Jew'; -sheyner- in that phrase does -not- refer to physical appearance. There is, however, no analagous semantic development in -sheyne meydl-, which is not different from -sheyner bokher-, -sheyn kind-, etc.. To people who do not know French, -asseyez-vous- sounds like a lot more than just plain 'sit down!' -- but that is all it means. ***** CIRCASSIAN IN ISRAEL Those of you who are trying to teach your children Yiddish and Hebrew as well as English, can take heart from the example of the Israeli Circassians. (I had one in my class this year and he looked more Nordic than Heidi). It is interesting that the younger children in Israel's two Circassian villages are said to speak better Circassian than their older brothers, which at first seems surprising. The older children mingle their Circassian with many more Hebrew words than do the younger children. This is explained by the increasingly successful effort to teach the Circassian children their ancestral tongue in the elementary schools, an effort which deserves analysis. Circassian children study four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English and Circassian. Here is a marvelous laboratory for sociolinguists and also for Jewish interlinguists. The influence of a Jewish language (in this case, Hebrew) on non-Jewish languages falls within the scope of Jewish interlinguistics. ****** Yude-Leyb Proger ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.190