Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.085 August 19, 1993 1) Transcription, transliteration, and dialects (Bob Goldberg) 2) YIVO roman writing (Arn Abramson) 3) GrubYAN (Ellen Prince) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Aug 17 21:56:25 1993 From: xidak!poseidon!bob@uunet.UU.NET (Robert N. Goldberg) Subject: Transcription, transliteration, and dialects Thank you, Ellen Prince and Zachary Baker, for responding to my dialect pronunciation problems -- your messages were interesting and informative. Perhaps it was my omission of the finer details and the somewhat inflammatory way I worded the beginning of my message (YIVO ... a curse ...) that directed the discussion toward justifying standards, which I don't seriously question. Stated more carefully, my problem is: Given sheet music for Yiddish songs, from various sources, that uses inconsistent transliteration methods (inconsistent both from song to song and within a single song!): 1) How to determine what the pronunciation of words in the songs "ought to be" so that a) the rhymes come out correctly b) A consistent dialect of Yiddish is used (usually/preferably not "standard" Yiddish) 2) How to transliterate the dialect so that the singers use the agreed-upon pronunciation. Clarifying that dialect transcription is compatible with the YIVO system, Baker says that the answer to 2) is to use the YIVO system, e.g., "Ba mir bisti git, ba mir hosti 'it'". [I must have assumed this, given that that's what I did to pose the problem!] Problem 2) is solved. Problem 1) is not so easy for me. I read Yiddish (about 25% of my group can) and I have a good phonetic memory for my grandparents' dialect but a small vocabulary. YIVO-based written works don't tell me how to extrapolate standard Yiddish into any consistent non-YIVO dialect. At one point, I thought that I had a consistent set of rewrite-rules for changing YIVO vowels to my familiar dialect, e.g., "u" -> "i", "o" -> "u", etc., but Ellen Prince convinced me this does not work in general (several years ago in MENDELE). Ellen, can you suggest where I might find Prilutski's book on the west coast? I assume it is out-of-print. Bob "Nissen" Goldberg 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Aug 18 00:37:40 1993 From: "Arthur S. Abramson" Subject: YIVO roman writing I am much taken with the comments of the past couple of days on the Yivo roman writing of Yiddish. I learn from Zachary Baker, who has been at Yivo long enough to know, that the formulators of the system did indeed mean it to be a transliteration from the Yiddish orthography in Hebrew script to roman script; nevertheless, he points out that it is really an amalgam of transliteration and transcription, because the loshn koydesh in Yiddish discourse is normally not transliterated but transcribed as pronounced. Let me add this thought. The Yivo standard roman spelling does indeed represent the Germanic and, I guess, the Slavic components of the Yiddish lexicon letter by letter, but this reflects the happy fact that our standard spelling of Yiddish in Hebrew script was contrived, by and large, to be "phonetic" in the sense that Spanish writing, for example, is rather "phonetic." Thus it is that since standard Yiddish spelling was designed to have a phonological fit to the "standard" dialect, the transliteration letter by letter is automatically also a transcription of THAT dialect, although one can certainly read it out in another accent. "Vos zogs du" can be pronounced as indicated by either this roman spelling or the underlying Yiddish spelling, or, at the whim of the reader, can be pronounced according to the norms of another dialect, perhaps, vus zugs di, a shift easily handled by the Yivo system. Some of you out there have numbers in mind for the textual frequency of loshn koydesh words in Yiddish prose of one style or another. Opening to Chapter 1 of a book at hand, Di Yidn in Ukraine by Y. Sh. Herts (J.S. Hertz) (New York: 1949), I see this sentence: Di ershte yidishe aynvanderung iz gegangen fun mizrekh keyn marev, fun dorem keyn tsofen. 'The first Jewish immigration went from east to west, from south to north.' In this perfectly ordinary sentence of 14 words four are of Hebrew origin. The rules of Yiddish orthography do not indicate the pronunciation of them in any dialect. Thus, mizrekh is spelled mem, zayen, reysh, khes; marev is mem, ayen, reysh, veyz; tsofn is tsadek, fey, vov. langer nun, etc. My renditions in Yivo roman, if they are right, seem to symbolize pronunciations that are consistent with the accent of the rest of the sentence. Even so common a word as sakh 'much, many' is spelled misleadingly as samekh, langer khof! In effect, then, given the great frequency of words of Semitic origin, we are actually transcribing Standard Yiddish, even though, at will, one can read the sentence out in some other dialect. Contrariwise, standard English spelling is NOT generally taken to be a transcription of English speech, although some spellings can be seen as representative of abstract phonological forms that are realized phonetically according to the norms of a dialect or accent. Thus the spelling "glass" is pretty straightforward, even though I can think of 'four or five different pronunciations of it in the English-speaking world. The Romance element in English might be likened, in this purview, to the loshn koydesh in Yiddish, in that in neither one is the graphic representation of speech straightforward. Arn Abramson 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Aug 18 11:03:58 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: GrubYAN to khaim: good point about pejorative suffixes like -atsh and -ak taking stress in yiddish. however, i believe they're all from slavic, no? what i was balking at was the idea that grubYAN is ultimately germanic. do you know of any other germanic word in which the suffix is stressed? if not, then either this ain't ultimately germanic or else -yan ain't a suffix. that's all i meant. btw, i don't think anyone here has yet mentioned how the *german* version of grubyan is stressed. anyone know? a dank. ellen prince ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.085