Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.005 May 18, 1993 1) Additional idioms (Bernard Katz) 2) Transcription and transliteration (Ellen Prince) 3) Transcription and transliteration (Meylekh Viswanath) 4) Yid(d)ish (Seymour Axelrod) 5) More on alef/ayin (Meylekh Viswanath) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 18 11:50:20 1993 From: bkatz@epas.utoronto.ca (Bernard Katz) Subject: Additional Idioms A Yiddish idiom that I am quit fond of is: "Er kukt vi a hon in B'nai Odam." The literal translation, "He looks as a rooster does in B'nai Odam," is not very helpful. The reference is to the ritual of kaporos on eruv Yom Kippur: a man, picking up a rooster (a woman, picking up a hen), recites a prayer (in Hebrew) that begins with the phrase: "B'nai adam yoshvei choshech v'tsalmavet" (= Children of man who sit in darkness and the shadow of death). The point of the idiom, I take it, is that the object of the lampoon has as much comprehension of some item that he is examining as the hapless rooster in the kaporos ritual has of the Hebrew text at which he is staring. Bernard Katz 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 18 13:14:55 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Transcription and transliteration i agree heartily with arn/arthur that we should be consistent in orthography. the one real problem i had for a while was with 'mazel/mazl tov'--'mazl tov' just looked so wrong to me in an (otherwise) english note! finally, i've made peace with myself by deciding that, in the context of english, the term is actually a borrowing and, in ENGLISH, is spelled _mazel tov_. in the context of yiddish, of course, it should be spelled rendered as _mazl tov_. any other opinions on this one? after two years, could someone please please tell me one thing: why do we use only 2/3 of the screen on mendele? is there anyone out there in mendeleland for whom this is an advantage? a dank. ellen prince [When Mendele was being planned, someone with experience in typesetting and layout advised setting the right margin at about 55, presumably to increase legibility. There is no other reason. If readers prefer a wider margin, like this one, that can easily be arranged. Please send your votes directly to: nmiller@dot.trincoll.edu] 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 18 13:15:07 1993 From: Meylekh Viswanath (viswanath@draco.rutgers.edu) Subject: Transcription and transliteration Arn Abramson writes: >I would like to remind our friend Meylekh that the Yivo >Yiddish orthography is a broad transcription of the >sounds of a variety of Yiddish speech. A transliteration >is a direct transposition, letter by letter, from one >alphabet to another. Thus his name transliterated into >roman letters from the original Hebrew would be mlk, >whereas a transcrription of a modern Hebrew pronuncia- >tion of that name might be /'melekh/; the spelling >actually used by him, Meylekh, is a transcription of a >Yiddish pronunciation of that name. The virtue of a >transliteration for certain purposes is that, with a >table of equivalents in hand, you can recover the form >in the script of the other language. Perhaps I misunderstand Arn, but I have absolutely no idea as to what aspect of my original posting he is responding to. I certainly don't have any disagreement with him on any of the above. The only suggestion was that it may be preferable to trade greater intelligi- bility for consistency, in some cases. Whereas for a word like khanuke, there are many variant translitera- tions used popularly, this is not so for the word 'Yiddish'. Hence retention of the spelling 'Yiddish' may be useful (in preference to Yidish). As I pointed out in my previous posting, this tradeoff of wider intelligibility for consistency is not uncommon with other languages. My only fear was that perhaps Yiddish was not part of a small subset of words (although it seems to me that it is so), so that adopting the suggestion of retaining the popular spelling would wreck havoc with the use of the YIVO orthography. Or perhaps there are other nafke mines that I have not considered. Meylekh. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: May 18 13:27:41 1993 From: Seymour Axelrod Subject: yid(d)ish Meylekh Viswanath argues that Yugntruf's "yidish vokh" can be publicized as "yiddish vokh" (2 d's), because the word "yiddish" is commonly so spelled. It's true that the names of many well-known Yiddish writers are commonly (though not always) transliterated in ways not in keeping with YIVO conventions (Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, I.L. Peretz, H. Leivick, for example). But surely that's no reason to write a phrase half in English (yiddish), half in Yiddish (vokh)? Either "yiddish (or Yiddish) week" OR "yidish vokh", it seems to me. --Shleyme 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue May 18 13:47:13 1993 From: Meylekh Viswanath Subject: More on alef/ayin Mikhl, thanks for your (re)explanation of alef/ayin/yud in the beginning of a word in Yiddish. I found it very interesting especially the historical information about the use of hes and vov, where we now use khof and fe in the beginning of a word. However, I am not entirely convinced about that theory to explain 'aleph, yud, daled' for 'yid/id', rather than 'yud,yud,daled.' (But I am still thinking on that.) Meanwhile, I figured out your additional comments on my parenthetical remark. You said: >Meylekh, I just noticed the parenthetic remark in your >message of May 3--the one I was ostensibly replying to. >I think you may be confusing the issue when you say >that "ayin" is not always a vowel in Yiddish. It is, >except in the traditional spelling of words of Hebrew >origin, where it's simply an artifact of a totally >different system. As for "alef", it too, it, too, is >either a vowel (as in the case of [a] and [o]) or >strictly an orthographic symbol, either as a "dummy" >consonant in non-Hebrew words, or as whatever, in the >traditional spellings of Hebrew words. Yes? No? My original parenthetical remark was: >I understand that in Yiddish, 'yud' is not always a >vowel, but then neither are alef and ayin. What I meant, however, was: I understand that in Yiddish, 'yud' is not always a _consonant_, but then neither are alef and ayin. Since your explanation for the initial occurrence of aleph in 'aleph, yud, daled' was that a consonant was needed, and alef was a consonant, the query (contained in my parenthetical remark) was: alef a consonant?! yud is more of a consonant (in yiddish) than alef; at least yud is sometimes a consonant in yiddish; alef and ayin never are! Unfortunately, I mistyped 'vowel' for 'consonant' leading to the confusion. Meylekh. ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.005