Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 238 May 3, 1992 1) Various (David Sherman) 2) Yiddish word processing (David Sherman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 3 May 92 2:03:00 EDT From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.CA Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.218 and Vol1.228 1. I've just caught up on about 40 back issues of Mendele, having been rather busy for a while. I'll refrain from adding my recipe for matzo-brau, but can anyone comment on why I grew up knowing it as matzo-brau while I see it referred to on MENDELE as matzo-brie (presumably pronounced bry)? 2. > In this connection, I can mention that my mother, who > really knew no German, never hesitated to speak it; her > "German" was Yiddish with the consonants (especially the > "l") pronounced in something like the German manner. Lots of people do this with languages that are close. I can get by passably in Spanish by speaking Portuguese with certain standard vowel and consonant shifts. At the Homowack (resort in the Ketskills) a couple of years ago, I listened to one of the maids chatting with a janitor while they were working. She was from Brazil and speaking Portuguese; he was from elsewhere in Latin America (I forget where) and was speaking Spanish. Neither made the slightest attempt to modify their dialect to make it closer to the other language. But they seemed to communicate just fine. 3. > Name: Yitzhak Kertesz > Current interest: origins of the words "schlemiel" and > "shlimmazal". I'd like to hear more about this. I know what Shlemiel comes from shlumiel ben tsurishaday, in the Torah; and shlimazl, I presume, is a contraction of shlekht + mazl. Can you tell us more? 4. Re Yidlish: I recently saw the film "Mame-Loshn", which describes the history and current status of Yiddish (quite well, I thought). In one clip, a speaker points out three words that he's always thought sounded more Yiddish than English. I forget who the speaker was. the words are: - svelte - epic - fermented David Sherman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 3 May 92 2:31:00 EDT From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.CA Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.236 Re word-processing in Yiddish: I use a Macintosh. I don't need to write more than a word or two in Hebrew or Yiddish very often, but I recently had to do an article for Yugntruf. I didn't want anything that would "take over" my Mac, since I use it (heavily) for my real work, which is writing. (Canadian tax law, if you must know.) I didn't want anything with keycaps that would muck up my Mac keyboard; nor did I want to learn the Hebrew typewriter layout. But I did have a few fonts lying around, including one called Vilne that's a Yiddish font, quite close to the YIVO transcription. And, I can type YIVO-transcription Yiddish pretty fast, since I type in English all the time and I've written a fair bit azoy oyfn post-rshime. So, taking a cue from the program Raphael Finkel designed for UNIX a year or so ago, I wrote a program in Hypercard to do what I want. (Hypercard comes with every Mac.) I created two fields, one with a normal English font and one with the Vilne font with right-justified margins. I type, with YIVO transcription, into the first field. Then I click a button to run a program I wrote in Hypertalk that (1) converts the letters so they come out right for Yiddish; (2) reverses the order to read right-left; and (3) does line breaks every N characters so the lines come out right. Then it puts the output into the second field, and it comes out perfectly. The conversion program does things like insert an alef before certain initial vowels; convert "sh" to "w" (used by the Vilne font for shin); change m to M for lange-mem when it's at the end of a word, and so on. Most of the letters don't need conversion; e.g., u->vav, e->ayin, o->kometz-alef are how the Vilne font is set up. The only stuff I have to think about when typing is Hebrew-origin words, which end up looking weird in the English form. Aside from those words, which are relatively few at least in my dialect, my submission to Yugntruf looks just like something that would appear in MENDELE in the original, and comes out in perfectly-spelled Yiddish when converted. The program is crude, but it does exactly what I need. It has the advantage that you can write the original text using whatever word-processor you want, and then convert the whole thing when you're done. It's no Nisus, but if anyone wants it, let me know. As far as I know, the Vilne font, which I got from a friend a couple of years ago, is public domain. (It's also pretty ugly; I'd be happy to see a replacement.) David Sherman dave@lsuc.on.ca ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.238 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.