Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.138 November 20, 1993 1) Froy un mentch (Hershl Berman) 2) 2nd sentence unit (Hershl Berman) 3) Past participle of leyzn (Marnen Laibow-Koser) 4) Standards--spelling (Khaim Bochner) 5) Standards--vocabulary (Khaim Bochner) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Nov 19 12:11:55 1993 From: Hal Berman Subject: froy un mentch I take exception to Khaim Bochner' use of the above terms. A mentch is a person, not a man. The correct term is Froy un Man. Hershl Berman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Nov 19 18:17:48 1993 From: Hal Berman Subject: 2nd sentence unit Shleyme Axelrod: I'm afraid there are always exceptions to the rule. in: Der Man zet a ber. Git er a geshray. The only reason that you can put Git in the position it's at is because it is modified by the previous sentence. The correct grammatical structure for the second sentence is: (to) git er a geshray (where the "to" is optional, but if not there, it is implied). You cannot start off with the verb on its own. It's all in Weinreich. Hershl 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Nov 19 16:58:20 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu Subject: Past participle of leyzn Robert Hoberman asked what the past participle of leyzn is. As I said in my intro to this list, my Yiddish isn't that great, but my German's pretty good. In German, the past participle of lesen is gelesen (if I'm not mistaken). "Ikh hob geleyzn" sounds plausible to me; any comments? Shalom, Marnen Laibow-Koser 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Nov 20 00:01:10 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: standards -- spelling Bob Hoberman writes: > I feel the same way about standardizing Yiddish spelling. I don't > think it's necessary Sough, hau due ioo leik itt wenn eye speal inglisch foni? Ignoring standards makes things a bit harder to read, doesn't it? Sure there's variation in Hebrew spelling. There is in English spelling too. I was furious when a highschool teacher took off a point because I prefer "grey" to "gray". And they taught me "travelling", but nowadays they seem to be teaching "traveling". ugh. But that doesn't mean English doesn't have spelling rules. What's so great about not being able to tell whether some one means "leyb" (lion) or "layb" (flesh)? "geyn" (infinitive) or "geyen" (1st/3rd pl.)? Different dialects pronounce these words differently, but they all distinguish them. Why shouldn't we be able to tell them apart in writing without guessing? In the usual edition of Sholem Aleykhem you can't even tell "a" from "eyn". (They couldn't write "a", of course, since there's no such word in German ...) Sure, to read literature you need to learn to cope with all the crazy spellings you'll encounter, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know a system, and see those other things as variations (or aberrations ;-). As far as I'm concerned, the idea that it doesn't matter how you spell Yiddish is a reflection of the old-fashioned notion that Yiddish isn't _really_ a language. And that's indefensible. One more anecdote: My mother and her sisters normally speak Yiddish to each other. Certainly not Polish. After all Yiddish is their first language, and Polish is their second (and English is their fourth). They only speak Polish to keep my generation from understanding. And they all read and write Yiddish. Or at least they know how. But when they write to each other, they write in Polish. Why? Well, they went to Polish speaking schools. And got drilled on things like spelling, punctuation, etc. And even though they complain about the difficulty of expressing themselves in Polish after all these years, they still find it easier to do that than to write in Yiddish, and have to think about how to spell each word ... Khaim 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Nov 19 23:14:39 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: standards -- vocabulary Let's make sure we distinguish two things here: disagreeing with particular opinions about standards, and disagreeing with the idea standardization in general. Is "vinde" just as good a "Yiddish" word as "fentster"? Is "kitshen" just as good as "kikh"? Or how about the lovely "briefenshteler" style of 100 years ago: Is "broytigam" just as good Yiddish as "khosn"? Is "hokhtsayt" just as good as "khasene"? OK, those are extreme examples. But the point is that a word doesn't automatically become Yiddish just because some one, somewhere, once used it in an (otherwise) Yiddish sentence. After all, there are Yiddish words I use in English sentences when I think the people I'm talking to will understand, but that isn't enough, in itself, to make them English words. Do you really think it was a great loss when the 'purists' condemned "hokhtsayt" as "daytshmerish"? I don't. So I hope we agree that it is sometimes useful to draw a line. Of course, that doesn't mean it's easy to draw the line; in fact my guess is that you can almost never do it without offending some one. In the case of "lezn" I'm inclined to agree that Weinreich went too far. But I'm still glad that he gives his stylistic recommendations, instead of accepting everything uncritically. In fact, I guess that's the point. Words _don't_ all have the same status. Some are slang (like "vinde"), some are pretentious (like "hokhtsayt"), some are humorous (like "pitshevke"). If the dictionary doesn't tell you this, it isn't telling you the whole story. Probably no one is completely satisfied with the way Weinreich treated the large grey area. But I think it's silly to say that he should have ignored the whole problem. By the way, I would say the past participle of "lezn" is "gelezn". Khaim ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.138 Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files