Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.161 December 10, 1993 1) Pavolye (Fish Kutner) 2) Daytshmerizm (Bob Hoberman) 3) Ufruf (Jeremy Stern) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 9 17:11:12 1993 From: Philip Kutner Subject: Pavolye A request has come in for the words to a song taught to this woman by her immigrant mother early this century. She thinks the title may have been PAVOLYE meaning SLOW. She recalls a line: IN AMERIKE IZ GEVEZN A REVOLYE........... She is from Pasadena, CA, and mentions her Yiddish club has 5 members under 35. I'll pass along any info you have. Fishl 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Dec 10 10:53:54 1993 From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Daytshmerizm Reyzl wrote (in 3.158): "But what has not been clear in the recent leynen/lezn discussion is that lezn is a daythmerish word. Despite the fact that lezn is an old term in Western Yiddish and one that reached a wide distribution in Eastern Yiddish since the late 19th century (but never in my immediate family), it's still daythmerish in Eastern Yiddish. It is therefore not recommended in Standard Yiddish." This appears to imply that Yiddish may borrow words from Polish, Russian, Hebrew, English, etc., just as all languages whose speakers know other languages borrow, but no German word may be accepted in Standard Yiddish no matter how long and how widely it's been used in Yiddish. You can't mean that no borrowing at all is permitted since the mid-19th century, though I think some people do feel that way. It's natural that there's a certain easy tendency (yeytser hore?) to borrow from German, and correspondingly a preference to resist excessive replacement of native Yiddish stuff (vocabulary, grammatical patterns, spelling habits) by elements from German, but why does this have to be pushed to the extreme? After all, the leyenen/lezn distinction is semantically useful and fits right in with bukh/seyfer and all the other "Jewish/Goyish" pairs, and so the distinction itself is very Yiddish indeed. After all, German doesn't have this particular distinction! In this connection, here's my very favorite quote from Max Weinreich (who, incidentally, is probably the one who first said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy). It's from "The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish", in TO HONOR ROMAN JAKOBSON, reprinted in NEVER SAY DIE! A THOUSAND YEARS OF YIDDISH IN JEWISH LIFE AND LETTERS, ed. by J. Fishman: "This applies to any field of culture: More often than not, it appears, the distance between Jewish and non-Jewish patterns is created not by a difference in the ingredients proper but rather by the way they are interpreted as parts of the given system." By this criterion, the leyenen/lezn distinction is as Jewish, and Yiddish, as anything could be. Bob Hoberman rhoberman@ccmail.sunysb.edu 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 9 19:59:23 1993 Thu Dec 9 19:59:23 1993 From: Jeremy Stern Subject: Ufruf Reyzl asked for specific places where modern Orthodox Jews say _ufruf_. The point I was trying to make is that it is a pronunciation that surpasses geographical divisions. (I would add that I believe modern Orthodoxy to have a _havore_, or several ones, all its own.) But, as Reb Yishmoel says, "Vekheyn shney ksuvim hamakhishim ze es ze, ad she yavo hakosev hashlishi veyahkria beyneyem," I decided to conduct some research of my own. So I asked members of the Orthodox community at Princeton, which contains Jews from cities as diverse as Chicago, LA, Dayton, what we call it when a man gets an aliah the week before his marriage. (One person responded, "Don't you mean the week _after_ the marriage?" She is of Sephardic ancestry, and her family calls it shabat hatan.) I did not hear a single instance of _ofrif_, _ifrif_, etc. True, I am not using sophisticated linguistic methods, but that was what I heard. There was variation in vowel-length, with some pronouncing the first "u" as in "foot" and some as in "food". I will try the same experiment in writing, though I suspect it will yield "ufruf" universally. Jeremy Stern ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.161 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. 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