Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 190 May 4, 1993 1) Diminutives and Plurals (Howie Aronson) 2) Introduction (Ken Miner) 3) IdYid/id (Meylekh Viswanath) 4) Id/Yid: alef or yud (Berl Hoberman) 5) "Shtokh" (Robert A. Levene) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun May 2 23:47:53 1993 From: hia5@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Subject: Diminutives and Plurals This pattern occurs also with the word for 'child': kind / kinder, but kinderlekh. It is -regular- with most nouns taking -im (with stress shift??) in the plural: khazn: khazndl/khazonimlekh; dokter / doktorimlekh, etc. For what it's worth, a similar phenomenon occurs in Bulgarian masculine diminutives in -ec, e.g., grad 'city,' plural grad-ov-e'; grad-e'c 'little city,' but plural grad-ov-c-e'. (Note that in the plural form the suffix -ec loses the vowel 'e' regularly.) I suspect that the same pattern is found also in Macedonian. I am not aware of it in other Slavic languages. Howie Aronson 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 3 07:08:31 1993 From: MINER@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu Subject: introduction *Gikher* a brief introductory statement, says he. OK. I'm a non-Jewish linguist with, as they said in _The Book Peddler_, a Yiddish obsession. Unlike Ellen Prince, Moshe Taube, Len Talmy and the other linguists I recognize among the subscribers, I don't know enough about Y. to claim it as a speciality (my specialty is Amerindian). I just think it's a very interesting language. Ken Miner 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 3 09:46:54 1993 From: Meylekh Viswanath (viswanath@draco.rutgers.edu) Subject: IdYid/id Mikhl Herzog writes: >Traditionally, ALL Yiddish words beginning with a >vowel, EXCEPT for the "e" vowel, are spelled with an >initial aleph. This is simply a continuation of the >Hebrew pattern which requires words to begin with a >consonant. Both alef and ayin (which renders Yiddish >"e") are consonants. I think this calls for more explanation. Is a 'yud' not considered a consonant for these purposes? In Hebrew, it certainly is. If so, then what is the problem with 'yud,yud,daled' for 'yid'? (I understand that in Yiddish, 'yud' is not always a vowel, but then neither is alef or ayin.) Meylekh. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 3 11:16:17 1993 From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Id/Yid: alef or yud The practice of starting words like "id" with an alef rather than yud may not be simply an arbitrary spelling convention. At least some of my grandparents (from the Lithuania-Belarus-Poland border area, Litvaks all) said /an id/, NOT /a yid/, proving that in their pronunciation these words started with a vowel (hence alef, as Mikhl pointed out), not the consonant /y/. I don't know whether this use of /an/ was before all words which in the standardized spelling have yud-khirekyud, though. Do other people actually say /yid/ with a distinct y-i sequence? Berl/Bob rhoberman@ccmail.sunysb.edu 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 4 13:27:22 1993 From: levene@aplpy.jhuapl.edu (Robert A. Levene) Subject: Shtoch Question: I've heard the term "shtoch." I'm curious about its origins. I have two guesses: * Germanic cognate for "stick" as in "stick it to them" * From the Hebrew "shtk" meaning to "shut them up" as in what one should do to a heretic. (i.e. mesechta megilla, 3rd perek I think) Refoyel ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.190