Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 109 December 4, 1992 1) Sneezing (Nicholas Eshelman) 2) Introduction (Yankl Feldman) 3) Ts as phonaestheme (Norman Zide) 4) Offensive language (Dan Breslauer) 5) Offensive language (Ellen Prince) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 03 Dec 92 13:26:20 CST From: Nicholas Eshelman Subject: Sneezing Does anyone know why English speakers in the N. E. U.S. (& other places too, no doubt) DO tend to say something after a person sneezes (God bless, etc.) but in the Midwest one says nothing TO the sneezer, and the sneezing party is expected to excuse himself. Nothing to do with Yiddish, but I've always wondered. (My zayde says: "God bless you--if He has nothing better to do.") Nicholas Eshelman -- University of Kansas 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Dec 92 12:49:18 PST From: feldman@math.berkeley.edu Subject: Introduction / parodies In connection with Sheldon Benjamin's query about erev nitl, let me call attention to the work of Milt Gross, who - in addition to his writings about Looey Dot Dope - wrote many parodies, not in Yiddish but in Yinglish, among them a parody of "Twas the night before...". I remember it as very funny. By the way, let me introduce myself:Jacob (Jack, Yankl) Feldman, a Math. Prof. (soon to be Emeritus) at Berkeley. I was raised in Philadelphia; my parents and their friends were involved in Yiddish culture (deeply) and leftist politics (slightly) of the JPFO brand, and some of it rubbed off on me. I was grateful for the clarification, or maybe a better word would be elaboration, of the etymology of those all-important words "schmuck" and "putz" in recent issues of Mendele. Finally, here's a yak from childhood. Riding in an overfull car on a hot Sunday through slow traffic towards Atlanyic City, we would pass billboards advertising hotels. Minnie Silverman , with obvious delight, read aloud two of the names:"Stacy Trent, Hildabrecht". I was too young to understand. Yankl Feldman 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Dec 92 15:17:58 CST From: n-zide@uchicago.edu Subject: ts as phonaestheme; tsatske/chachke; sneezes My doggerel examples - Vol 2, l03 - I realized after I sent them all contained ts, and Gerald Phillips, in his welcome reply (where can I see the dozens of others he mentions ? who composed them ? who disseminated them ?) gives a nice example of ts where one wouldn't expect it in 'normal, colloquial Yiddish' - 'Tsadie' for 'Sadie' - my mother's name was Sadie, and none of her older - more or less monolingual (as regards English) Yiddish speakers - relatives said anything but 'Sadie'. The ts in tsrolley (with an initial consonant cluster) is even more anomalous. The translation equivalent in Yiddish of English s is s - EXCEPT apparently for certain EXPRESSIVE uses in a conventionalized, comical stage Yiddish dialect of English, where the 'Yiddishness' (and therefore much of the humor) is marked - heavily - by the use of ts and other markers, e.g. Yiddish e for the vowel in English 'pat' as well as 'pet', and, I suppose, most strongly, intonation - which doesn't survive non-technical transcription. The ts in Tsadie is a deliberate, for-comical-purposes, hypercorrection. Question: I would like to hear what the (dialectal, or whatever) distribution of ts versus ch is in tsatske/chachke (and elsewhere, - which probably complicates things considerably ) is for Mendelniks. Is there semantic specialization for those who use both forms (distinctively) - in Yiddish , or in Yiddish and English ? In my (Litvak) dialect the form is always tsatske, which has a secondary meaning (rejected by some) of an affectionate diminutive - term of endearment (tsatskele) - used as a term of address - for little girls. For me chachka is an English word - of Yiddish derivation, with similar meaning, but differences reflecting different cultural attitudes toward the objects in question, e.g. English chachka is more dismissive than Yiddish tsatske.Or is it ? Sneezes: the version I heard - similar in part to Albright's and others' - the second part (after tsu lange yor) is: tsu vaksn, tsu kveln/ a xupele tsu shteln. Norman Zide 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 04 Dec 1992 07:00:04 -0600 (CST) From: Dan Breslauer Subject: Offensive language P. Weichsel attributes the casting of derogatory terms into outer darkness to me. Not to my credit! That was Mendele's editor! My purpose in my posting, however, was to point to the Hebraic source of the Yiddish expression. I was not endorsing its use, but tracing its evolution. To paraphrase a well known saying applied to Gershom Scholem: The use of derogatory sayings is inexcuseable; the study of the inexcusable is science! Dan Breslauer 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Dec 92 13:22:06 EST From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Offensive language i wasn't going to reply to the shikse/sheygets issue, but i really don't see these as inherently pejorative terms. i believe the problem is that *what one reported* about gentile boys and girls was often negative, *not* the terms used for them. that the term is not pejorative seems to me especially true for shikse, where the most frequent collocation that *i* ever heard was _sheyne shikse_, the epitome of the cute, small-featured, light-complected debbie reynolds ideal. in fact, since there were so few light-complected gentiles in my neighborhood (most were italian, greek, black, or chinese), the term was *generally* used metaphorically for *jews*. as i may have already written on this board, i was often called a _sheyne shikse_ as a child, since i had a small nose and blond hair. (i remember vividly being troubled by this and asking whether i was supposed to say _thank you_ in response. my mother said yes, my father said no.) in any event, it's hard for me to think of _shikse_ as a pejorative term. _sheygets_ is more troubling since in fact, most of the time i heard the term, there *was* something negative being reported. this is especially true for _shkotsim_, which nearly always denoted a pack of james- dean-type 'hooligans' from an adjacent neighborhood that would often hang out around the schoolyard and terrorize the others. (they belonged to a gang called _pigtown_--how goyish can you get?!) but the singular was in fact a possible compliment for a jewish boy, if the boy was (a)light-complected and with regular features, and (b)physically fit, especially if also interested in sports--'oy, iz dos a sheygets, kinehore!' in a similar vein, i don't think _shvartse_ is inherently pejorative. what was pejorative was referring to one's cleaning person by her race, probably since it presumes that the only people of that race that one interacts with are maids. (if your teacher and your doctor and your nextdoor neighbor and your cleaning person were all black women, you couldn't successfully refer to just one of the as _di shvartse_--it wouldn't be sufficiently informative to 'pick out' just one of them.) imagine a situation where gentiles deal with jews *only* as moneylenders, where all the jews they know are moneylenders and all the moneylenders they know are jews. i would imagine they might then successfully refer to their moneylender as _the jew_. but i wouldn't want to say that 'jew' is a pejorative term and should be banished from the lexicon! in a different but related vein, does anyone share my intuition that *only* light-complected gentiles are/were called goyim, shikses, or shkotsim? in my mental lexicon, italians, greeks, asians, blacks, etc. aren't 'goyim/shikses/shkotsim'--these terms were/are reserved for irish/anglo/germanic/slavic/baltic exclusively. obviously, the term was used originally (in yiddish) for germanic/slavic/baltic people (not too many wasps or irish in minsk, i imagine) and then got extended here to anglos and irish. but what was the crucial factor--appearance? or the property of inspiring fear? (back in brooklyn in the '40s and '50s, at least, jews didn't fear italians/greeks/asians/blacks.) i asked my father once if gypsies were called goyim/shikses/shkotsim and he laughed--they were certainly not, to his knowledge. but again we can't tell whether it's complection or the fear-factor, since they were both dark and apparently non-fear-inducing... any thoughts? ellen prince ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.109