Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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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" <ABRAMSON%UCONNVM.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu>
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" <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
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

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.085