Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 2 no. 178
April 30, 1993

1) Yiddish videos (Moshe Waldoks)
2) Diminutives and plurals (Ellen Prince)
3) Ya-Tebe-Dam (Alan Rutkowski)
4) Ya-Tebe-Dam (Zev Bar-Lev)
5) W. Younin's book (cont.) (Bob Rothstein)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed Apr 28 10:44:36 1993
From: WALDOKS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU
Subject: Yiddish videos

Regina, whatever you do, make sure you have some of the
excellent Yiddish videos available from the National
Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis U. in Waltham
617-899-7044- a perfect distraction for an evening or
a rainy day

Moshe W.

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Apr 29 17:04:37 1993
From: "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Diminutives and Plurals

>...
>            Chasid sg.   Chasidim  pl.
>            Chasidl sg. w/diminutive
>            Chasidimlekh  pl. w/diminutive
>
>Is this an isolated case in Yiddish? - I doubt it.
>Where can I find anything written on the subject of the
>order of these morphemes? More examples?

hi, margaret/malkah (!). dave perlmutter did a paper on
this a few years ago, for which i have the following
reference:

Perlmutter, D. 1986. The split morphology hypothesis:
 evidence from Yiddish. Presented at the Milwaukee
 Morphology Meeting, April.

i think the proceedings have appeared, presumably with
his paper in them. to save the generalization that
inflectional morphology goes outside of derivational,
he proposes that the plural forms of any items which
don't have a 'regular' -n or -s plural are stored
separately as suppletive forms and there's no
'analysis'--you need that anyway for plurals with zero
morphology (ferd/ferd). btw, if i remember correctly,
there's one germanic noun with the m. semitic pattern
(where the -lekh attaches to an unambiguous plural
form): kinderlekh. (the other 'suppletive' forms have
the same stem for the singular diminutive as the plural
non-diminutive and diminutive: bukh, BIKH-l, BIKH-er,
BIKH-lekh.) (of course, yid. kind 'child' has no sg
diminutive, but bavarian has kindl, not kinderl.
bavarian kindl, btw, is apparently used to denote the
christ child, which i suspect is why it's missing in
yiddish.)

as an aside, i once did a little (unpublished) study of
language-mixing and looked at how plurals were treated.
it fits beautifully with perlmutter's analysis: yiddish
-n and -es plurals (his 'regular' ones) used in english
got english plural morphology (yid. yortsaytn vs. eng.
yortsayts), while his 'suppletive' forms tended to be
taken, at least for a generation, with their original
morphology (goyim, kinder), suggesting that they are
stored as such in the lexicon.

n.b.: i'm probably misremembering parts of perlmutter's
analysis! check before citing.

Ellen Prince

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Apr 29 18:27:38 1993
From: <ARUTKOWS%UALTAVM.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu>
Subject: Re: YA TEBE DAM.

This is Russian and it means "I'll show you!
(literally, "I'll give you"). It's what you say to a
bigshot, I guess.

Alan Rutkowski

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Apr 29 18:45:39 1993
From: zbarlev@sciences.sdsu.edu
Subject: Re: YA TEBE DAM

Ya tebe dam is Slavic (Russian at least) for "I'll give
you".  One can easily enough imagine larger contexts
(which is a good thing, since I don't know what the
larger context actually was).

zev bar-Lev

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Apr 29 22:45:17 1993
From: ROBERT A ROTHSTEIN <rar@slavic.umass.edu>
Subject: W. Younin's book (cont.)

The copy that Zachary Baker reported on in Mendele 186
may just be a photocopy of the _Forverts_ installments,
which were printed in double columns, each bearing a
page number.  The last installment was pages 193-94.

	Bob Rothstein

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End of Mendele Vol 2.178