Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 188 April 30, 1993 1) Various (Dovid Braun) 2) Re: Diminutives and Plurals (Khaim Bochner) 3) Slippers (Bob Rothstein) 4) Yud-yud (Michael Shimshoni) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Apr 29 22:53:14 1993 From: David Braun Subject: various Malke Winters, David Perlmutter has an article that is right up the alley of your friend interested in khsidimlekh (the morphology of the word, that is). Punkt itst I can't find the paper. Ellen, would you please inform if you have it handy (since you were the one to introduce me to it)? Skirt is: rok, spudnitse, (halbe) kleydl -- depending on dialect. _rok_ for ot other Yiddish speakers is a coat/jacket (whence _rekl_ 'jacket'). Also shlofrok 'bathrobe'. _lehavdl_ IS in fact of Turkish origin. Perhaps I will share the etymology at a a later date. Dovid Braun 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Apr 29 23:26:09 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: Re: Diminutives and Plurals Malkah Winters writes: > 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? First, some bibliography: Bochner, Harry(84), "Inflection within Derivation", The Linguistic Review, 3: 411-421. Perlmutter, David(88), "The Split Morphology Hypothesis: Evidence from Yiddish", in _Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistics_, ed. by M. Hammond & M. Noonan, pages 79-100. San Diego: Academic Press. (My old friend (and mentor) David Perlmutter and I draw opposite theoretical conclusions, but we mostly agree on the facts ;-) There are brief discussions in: Birnbaum, S.(1922), _Das hebraishe un aramaische Element in der jiddischen Sprache_, Gustav Engel, Leipzig. Mark, Yudel(78), _Gramatik fun der Yidisher Klal-Shprakh__, Congress for Jewish Culture, New York, page 165. Spivak & Blumgarten(1911), _Yidish Verterbukh_, Farlag Yehoyesh, New York, page xv. and the facts are also referenced in: Stump, Gregory(91), "A Paradigm-Based Theory of Morphosyntactic Mismatches", Language 67: 675-725. Ok, now the facts in brief: Words whose plurals are formed with -im regularly have plural diminutives in -imlekh: khasanimlekh, sforimlekh, khatoimlekh, khaveyrimlekh. Note also: poyerimlekh, naronimlekh (from germanic roots). The only quirk is that this doesn't happen if the meaning has shifted too far: e.g. khosidl can mean "Hassid (dim.)", in which case the plural is khasidimlekh; but it can also mean "a Hassidic dance", in which case the plural is khosidlekh. The corresponding thing happens, at least sometimes, with Hebrew (or Aramaic?) nouns ending in a consonant that take the ending -es. nisyoyneslekh "temptations", khesroyneslekh "defects". Spivak & Blumgarten say this happens regularly, but the other discussions don't mention it. I've encountered both oysyeslekh & oysyelekh (sic!) as plural diminutives of os "letter". Note that this doesn't happen with nouns that add -s to a stem ending in -e: *menoyreslekh. That's probably more than Malkah bargained for, so I guess it's more than enough ;-) The origin of the pattern is an interesting question; I'd like to see anything that Carol Chapman writes up on this. Khaim 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 30 00:51:50 1993 From: ROBERT A ROTHSTEIN Subject: Slippers Some of the Yiddish terms for "slippers" have a Slavic connection. Polish has _papucie_ (sing. _papuc'_) for a kind of soft slipper, which apparently comes from Turkish _papuch_ 'shoe'. In Old Russian _papuchi_ referred to some kind of Turkish footwear. There's also a dialectal Russian form _babusha_ for a kind of slipper, said to be borrowed from German _Babuschen_ or from French _babouche_, which comes from Arabic _babush_, which may or may not be related to the Turkish word. _Podeszwa_ is Polish for 'sole' (of a shoe or a foot)--from the prefix meaning 'under' and the root of the verb 'sew'. The same elements are in the Ukrainian word _pidshivka_ 'thread used by shoemakers to sew soles'--which Harkavy suggests as the source for the Yiddish expression _mit ale pitshevkes_ 'with all the details'. Bob Rothstein 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 30 04:34:21 1993 From: Michael Shimshoni Subject: Yud-Yud Arnold Kuzmack writes in a reply: > In Mendele 2.181, Stephen Dowling suggests that >the alef-yud spelling for yid, yidish, etc. resulted >from religious scruples over writing yud-yud. I had >never heard that before. Is there confirmation of >this? If it's true, how can they bear to write the >thousands of other words that contain two yud together, >such as eyns, tsvey, dray, etc.? I think that Arnold is correct, I am not aware of any ban on any yud-yud, also not in Hebrew. One example may be enough. yayin, wine, is spelled yud yud nun. Some other combinations are banned by the very Orthodox like yud heh (also not always, I think it *is* used in words like Yehudi, only at the end of the word some drop the heh). Also yud vav is verboten by some. In using the letters for their numerical values, it is well known that 15 and 16 are *not* yud heh and yud vav, but tet vav and tet zayin respectively. A Gutten Shabbes, Michael Shimshoni ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.188