Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 183 April 25, 1993 1) Noun Phrase Constituent Order (Debra H. Biasca) 2) Joseph Opatoshu (Rosa Lehmann) 3) Introduction & Comments (Arnold Kuzmack) 4) tender turban (Yitzhak Kertesz) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Apr 25 14:48:20 1993 From: Debra Halperin Biasca Subject: Re: Yiddish Noun Phrase Constituent Order I am doing a typological study on Noun Phrase (NP) constituent order-- the order of articles, adjectives, adverbs (like "very"), numerals and possessive adjectives with respect to the noun. If you are a native Yiddish speaker, I'd very much appreciate it if you could give me your Yiddish translation of the following phrases: 1. my seven very big very beautiful balloons 2. these seven very big beautiful (not very beautiful) balloons 3. these seven (not very) big very beautiful balloons 4. a very beautiful balloon 5. a very big (not very) beautiful balloon 6. a (not very) big very beautiful balloon If there is more than one way to translate and you adjudge one way more "common" or "natural" than the other, please give me both and identify the more common/natural version. If the results are interesting in comparison with the other languages examined, I will be happy to report them back to Mendele. I have a suspicision, fun mayn onheybers yidish, az iz do an interesante farglaykh mit Turkish, speaking of 'lehavdil!' Thanks for your help. Dvoyreh Halperin Biasca biasca@ucsu.colorado.edu. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Apr 25 15:02:44 1993 From: DAVIDN@SARA.NL (Rosa Lehmann) Subject: Joseph Opatoshu In the "New Member" welcome I was asked to actively participate, so here goes. I would like to admit that I am not a fluent Yiddish speaker, my Polish is all right and my Dutch is even better. Still I have a reason to join this list which is my interest in Jewish culture in Poland. I have a question and I think this place is the right place to ask that question. In his book "The Jews in Polish culture" Aleksander Herz mentioned a story of the Jewish writer Joseph Opatoshu. It was one of the last stories Opatoshu wrote before his death in 1954. Aleksander Herz (1988, p. 5) summarises the contents as follows: In a formerly Jewish town in Poland, there are no longer any Jews. All that remained is a dim memory of the strange people who once lived there. Of the town's present inhabitants only one, grey-haired old man, saw those Jews as a child and still remembers something of them. The young people of the town, having by chance heard of its former inhabitants, try to find out from the old man who those people were, what happened to them, why they perished. Thus begins the legend of those who had ceased even to be ghosts, and the legend seems to bring them to life again. I would like to know the title of this story and the book (or anthology) in which this story was published. And I (of course, you think) is there any translation (in English, German, French, Dutch, Polish) available. Thanks for any information, Rosa Lehmann, Amsterdam. (c/o David Niemeijer, DavidN@sara.nl) 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Apr 25 19:01:01 1993 From: lkuzmack@sytex.com (Linda Kuzmack) Subject: Introduction & Comments I have been quite interested in reading the last couple of months of Mendele and would like to introduce myself. Please excuse the English, but the transliteration tsebrekht di finger. My name is Arnold Kuzmack (my wife, Linda's, name is on the Internet account, so her name will automatically appear on messages). As a child, I studied Yiddish at Arbeter Ring schools in New York for four years, then four years of mitlshul. My grandparents spoke Yiddish among themselves and with their friends and also took me to various meetings and functions that were conducted in Yiddish. As an avocation, I did a fair amount of reading in Yiddish linguistics in college but have not kept up with it. I am now active in Yiddish activities in the Washington, DC area and edit the Yiddish section of the newsletter of Yiddish of Greater Washington. My day job is as a specialist in water pollution at EPA. I'd like to comment on some of the subjects discussed recently: Du and ir ========= We were taught that ir is used as the plural and the polite form. Apparently, who one uses the polite form with varied in different social circles. We used it with parents and other relatives as well as adult family friends. In other languages/societies with similar forms, using the wrong form was a faux pas of considerable magnitude. Using it with a woman married to someone else could get you into a duel. (Avade nisht bay undz!) I believe the great Russian poets wrote love poems using the polite form, and when the woman allowed a suitor to use the familiar form, it meant acceptance. Years ago, I read that a then newly-independent French-speaking country passed a law forbidding Europeans from saying "tu" to Africans without permission. Re dutsn and duken, I checked Harkavy's 1898 "Jewish-English English-Jewish Dictionary", and it also had only dutsn. Could duken be by analogy with Russian (and I presume other slavic) tykat'? BTW, Russian also has the much more expressive byt' na ty s... Arnold Kuzmack 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Apr 25 20:38:33 1993 From: "Yitzhak Kertesz" Subject: tender turban 1. Regarding "tsart", there is a regular German word "zart" which, according to my dictionary, means "tender", "soft" (color), or "delicate" (health). While this word is written with an "a" (pasekh), its derivates (zaertlich, zaertlichkeit) all have an "umlaut". 2. Dr. Herzog surprised me once again (no, not with lehavdil) with the Turkish origins of the "yarmulke". I had been told that the word comes from the Polish "yarmuk" (cap) with the regular Yiddish diminiutive "--li" (does this make it "smallcap"?) Yitzhak Kertesz, the always tender bm.lbh@rlg.bitnet ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.183