Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 213 April 13, 1992 1) The YIVO system (Zev Bar-Lev) 2) Transcription (Brett Kessler) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 10 Apr 92 08:54:18 -0700 From: zbarlev@sciences.sdsu.edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.211 The following is the YIVO system for transcription, as presented in Weinreich's "College Yiddish" (ignoring the use of brackets to enclose the transcription, and the use of capitals), where it is used to explain the sounds of Yiddish to the American student. I add additional Yiddish examples after ** at my own risk. b,d,g: ** Yidd. examples: bakn, dank, gey avek ("bake, thanks, go away") p,t,k as in Yiddish post, teler, ken ("mail, plate, can") f,v,s,z as in Eng. "far, very, seem, gaze" **finf, vos, beser, zingn when -t or -st is added to a word ending in b,d,g,v,z, the consonant changes in sound but not spelling: lebt, redst, zogst, ... sh as in Eng. **shadkhen zh as g in rouge, s in measure **kum-zhe h,y as in Eng. "have, yes" **hob, yor kh like German ch in "lachen" **khapn, makh, ikh, gikh, rekht, khaver ts: tsu, tsi, alts, zetser tsh: mentsh, tshepen, petsh l: two varieties are distinguished, with italics used for the "softer" one. (but this is not renderable on e-mail): ful, mol, vs. biLik, Libe. m, n, ng: mame, **nudnik, yung notice also "syllabic" n (vowel n): lipn, hobn, shraybn, zokn, zogn r: rekhn, lerer, shener, merer, firer VOWELS: a,e,i,o,u [as in MAMA JET SKI NO GURU]: mame, vaser; beser, kenen, himl, yidish; lomir, nokh; kumen, muzn (e is thus also used for the shorter, unstressed vowel in beser, etc.) ay as in Eng. "fine": tsayt, vayt ey as in Eng. "vein": veynen, sheyn, meydl oy: groys Hope this helps anyone interested. Zev Bar-Lev 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 10 Apr 92 10:46:27 -0700 From: Brett Kessler Subject: transcription As a new participant, I don't know whether requests for transcription standards are so frequent that they are traditionally answered by directly mailing a canned response to the requestor, or whether the silence to recent requests is due to everbody holding back in expectation that somebody will proffer The Official YIVO Standard Reference. I don't have the latter (but would appreciate any bibliographic references), and if the former situation holds, I invite the moderator to suppress my posting. The YIVO standard is not a transliteration scheme, but a system for transcribing Yiddish sounds in the Roman alphabet: the crucial distinction is that words of Hebrew/Aramaic extraction are transcribed phonetically, without reference to their Hebrew/Aramiac/Yiddish spelling. And yet, the following is also true: -- The granularity of the transcription is exactly the same as that of the Yiddish orthography. For example, no notice is taken of stress, of syllabicity in /l/ and /n/, of palatalization in /l/, or of the distinction between yud as a true consonant and yud as a marker of palatalization. -- Indeed, if you were to spell the Hebrew and Aramaic words according to the rules of the phonemic orthography (as they used to do in Russia), the transcription could be implemented as a completely automatic element-by-element transliteration of the standard orthography. -- The Roman letters chosen to represent the sounds of Yiddish happen to match up with no particular dialect, but rather with the pronunciation that the Hebrew letter is most directly evocative of. Thus 'gut', not 'git', as suggested by vov; 'groys', not 'greys', as suggested by vov yud; 'vayn', not 'vaan', since no one would think of using yudn to represent an /a/ sound. [This is a moderately contentious way of looking at things. One could argue, *almost* as convincingly, that the sounds are the more conservative pronunciations, or that the scheme blatantly favours Vilne.] So the idea is to write down your Yiddish in the standard orthography, but treating Semitic elements as if they were Germanic/Slavic elements that you had to write out phonemically. (I'm ignoring the question as to what the standard orthography is, since it's rather a longer point to answer. I hope most people already know it.) Then apply the following conversions, ignoring shtumn alef: a pasekh-alef o komets-alef b beys g giml d dalet h hey u vov v tsvey vovn oy vov yud z zayen zh zayen shin t tes y yud konsonant (or sign of palatalization) i yud vokal ey tsvey yudn ay pasekh tsvey yudn kh khof l lamed m mem n nun s samekh e ayen p pey f fey ts tsadek k kuf r reysh sh shin It is understandable that German spelling conventions are not followed; somewhat more surprising that Eastern European conventions aren't followed either. In fact, the system seems downright Anglic. The only apparent exceptions are the vowels, but I would claim that European vocalism is already incorporated as a subscheme in English: note for example how many people mispronounce "Punjab", because they can't believe that "u" would be sounded as in "pun" in a word of foreign origin. So was this scheme adopted only after Yivo moved to America? If so, was the scheme promulgated for the use of English speakers, or was it intended from the start to be a system for all users of the Roman alphabet? Disclaimer: this is mostly from memory, based largely on long exposure to the Library of Congress standard (a slightly elaborated version of the Yivo standard) and books published by Yivo. I apologize for any misstatements and invite corrections. Brett Kessler ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.213 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.