Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 193 March 21, 1992 1) Yiddish music query (Itzik Finger) 2) Introduction (Ronald Rabin) 3) Vaybertaytch un targum-loshn (Dovid Braun) 4) Mostly about Purim (Dovis Braun) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 19 Mar 92 10:33:19 PST From: jfinger@adobe.COM Subject: Yiddish Music Anthology I have an anthology of Yiddish music called "Yiddish Anthology" Vols I-IV which contains everything from Nechama Lifschitz to Paul Robeson(!). Where it originally came from I do not know, but I heard that it was from Hebrew University. I would love to get the original, pay the appropriate person rather than continue to enjoy my purloined copy, etc. Also, the quality on mine is pretty bad, including, I think, a 50 cps to 60 cps speedup that results in poor Ms Lifschitz sounding like a bird. Does anyone know what anthology this might be? Thanks a lot. -- Itzik/Jeff Finger -- 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1992 20:44 EST From: RABINRL@SNYBUFVA.BITNET Subject: Introduction I am Associate Professor of Communication, NY State University College at Buffalo. I teach college students how to stand up in front of an audience and not embarrass themselves or the audience. I also teach them how to program computers (as a secondary appointment). I grew up in a home where Yiddish was spoken, and they spoke it to me, but did not bother to teach it to me. I learned to understand enough that I could tell if I was in trouble and the nature of that trouble so that I could refute it; but I refuted it in English. I joined the list to learn. Ronald Rabin 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 21 Mar 92 19:04:07 EST From: David Braun Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.190 > >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. In Joshua A. Fishman's _Yiddish: Turning to Life_ (1991, John Benjamins, Philadelphia) the author has an article which addresses the questions: what are the reasons and what is the significance of the switch from printing Yiddish in vaybertaytsh to printing Yiddish in oysyes meruboes ('square letters', loshn-koydesh letters)? >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. "der orl iz meyvn beloshn" ('the goy understands [our Germanic] language [= Yiddish]') is usually the formula that introduces the switch into this code. But is the code actually called _targem-loshn_? I think it's referred to as _loshn-koydesh_ (another formula, I think, is: "lomir dabern loshn-koydesh"). Naturally it's not real loshn-koydesh. Dovid Braun 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 21 Mar 92 19:50:35 EST From: David Braun Subject: tikn-toes un andere zakhn -------- 1) tikn-toes ('errata') tsum purim-lid: >shoyshanes-yankev >tsoholo vesomeykhe darf zayn: vesomeykho > far amolike yesurim > hobn mir haynt a yonyev purim darf zayn: yontev 2) >[Zogt der shames l'koved Purim: Darf men oykh bamerkn >az ven me zogt 'vu ikh ker zikh un vu IKH VEND zikh' iz >faran take a remez un a dervayz az fun donent vaksen di >fis.] mistame a fayne khokhme, nor kh'farshtey zi nit. vos iz dos taytsh? git tshuve, reb noyekh! [Entfert der shames: nisht aza groyse khokhme; dakht zikh mir as Sorbish un Vendish hobn eyn bubbe..un efsher zaynen zey nokh neyenter.] 3) >To Noyekh and Dovid, I say: > >Do you two think this flew past the true Mendele crew, >without giving to them their due, too? You do rue that >claim. Chew on that. Nu? > >'Nuff said. > >David Sherman ikh tsi tsurik, ikh tsi tsurik! I take it back, bad hypothesis! (Was this your attempt at a purim-gram, by the way?) ven ikh volt ober geven an akshn... I'd say that notice most of these /u/#-words (i.e., the /u/ is at the end of the word) are not nouns, so maybe it's marked with nouns? Or maybe ikh drey mitn grobn finger. Be that as it may, what struck me and motivated me to look for an answer from phonology was the following: have you ever heard English-speaking kids imitate Chinese? (Or, as a native English-speaker yourself, do an imitation of Chinese.) Some of the most favorite consonants are /sh/, /tsh/ and /j/ and as for vowels -- /u/. (A Yiddish song which imitates Chinese [and would now be deemed politically incorrect] begins "tshing tshang tshu / ver veys vu", from a children's poem written by Rifke Galin.) Somehow I feel the combination evokes something in English which _Joe_, _cat_, or _negotiate_ don't. Something foreign, something marked, something je ne sais quoi. 4) >(convert from/to Judaism); and bukh/sefer (the latter >referring to a religious book; are the terms mutually >exclusive, or is sefer a subset of bukh?). seyfer is, I guess, a subset of bukh/bikhl (in your dialect: sayfer and bi:kh/bikhl) in the sense that, when talking about book production for example (and not specifying what kind of books) you'll talk about bikher-produktsye. Otherwise they're mutually exclusive (relatively speaking). If you know the book you're talking about is a book of a Jewish-religious nature, you'll refer to it as a seyfer and not a bukh/bikhl. If you see a book laying on the table and don't know what it is, you'll refer to it as a bukh/bikhl (until someone corrects you in the case that it's a seyfer). With the meeting of Yiddish and Ivrit ('Modern Hebrew', as opposed to loshn-koydesh) in Israel, you'll often see seyfer and maymer ('article') used in Israeli Yiddish publications. In Mod. Heb. these terms are purely secular as are the English _book_ and _article_, but in non-Israeli usage of Yiddish, they mean 'book/article of a specifically religious nature'. As for seyfer, perhaps Yiddish authors in Israel are using it figuratively to exalt the book being discussed, i.e., raising it to the spiritual level of a religious publication. But maymer (Mod. Heb. maamar) is used in reference to any newspaper/magazine article, no matter what its subject matter or importance. Dovid Braun ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.193