Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.182 December 23, 1993 1) Posuk/verse (Pe'rets Mett) 2) Onkl, tante and the whole family (Pe'rets Mett) 3) "Latin v.Yiddish: 'Oys" Have It (Tova Stabin) 4) A retenish vegn a lidele (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 23 14:21:37 1993 From: P.Mett@open.ac.uk (Percy Mett) Subject: posuk/verse Maybe I haven't really understood the question, but a posuk is rather like a sentence. So I suppose I would happily say zats. If a verse means a verse or stanza in a poem what about 'fal'. We certainly use 'fal' for the parts of a song or tune (not found in Weinreich). pe'rets 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 23 14:32:11 1993 From: P.Mett@open.ac.uk (Percy Mett) Subject: onkl, tante and the whole family Whilst I am busily pontificating to the mendele readership, here's another thought of mine. I was brought up on mume and feter (I can't remember any more whether tante was used), and shvesterkind (not kuzen) but ... nefe (for nephew). In fact I only became aware of another (Russian?) word for nephew when I came into more contact with litvaks (real and naturalised) who started talking about plumenik. I am reminded about this because my (Polish born, mame-looshn speaking) uncle was in Israel a couple of weeks ago and of course he visited my son there. When they went to the beysmedresh together he was asked by some of the 'locals' whether Efrayim (my son) was his 'plumenik'. He had to find out what plumenik meant!! pe'rets 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 23 14:45:00 1993 From: Tova Stabin Subject: "Latin v.Yiddish: 'Oys" Have It though somewhat dated (12/3/93), i thought this article would be of interest. it's from the new york times, reprinted (actually retyped) w/o permission. tova "Latin v.Yiddish: 'Oys" Have It by James Barron Oyez! Oyez! Make that oy, vay! oy, vay! All persons are requested to draw near and give their attention. A linguistic tribunal is now in session, Judge Alex Kozinski presiding. The Verdict: Yiddish may be replacing stuffy Latin phrases "as the spice in American legal argot." Judge Kozinski, a Federal appeals court judge in Pasadena, Calif., and Eugene Volokh, his former clerk who is now clerking for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court, used the Lexis information-retrieval service to count Yiddish words in court decisions. Their tally, just published in the Yale Law Journal, shows that judges have a lot of chutzpah. That word turned up in 123 opinions, all but 11 since 1980. The scores for its English counterparts were 200 for "temerity" and a mere 10 for "unmitigated gall." Schlemiels and Nebbishes Five judges used shlemiel. But as Judge Kozinski and Mr. Volokh noted, "One is in a quote from testimony, which doesn't count, one is in the name of a book and two are descriptions of Woody Allen's screen persona." (The authors relegated their own semantic footnote, "Woody Allen's characters have always struck us more as nebbishes than schlemiels," they wrote opting for the Yiddish term for "pitifully inept" over the outright "bungler.") The judge said the search began when he caught a law clerk sticking the work shtick, a "piece of misconduct," into one of his decisions. That led to some in camera kibitizing, or joking, and when the judge realized that the clerk in question was Irish-Catholic, to a finding of fact: "You don't have to be Jewish to use a little Yiddish," he said in a n interview. With that, judge and clerk hit the computer. Judge Kozinski said that because Yiddish is written in its own script, based largely on Hebrew, some allowances were made for English spelling. Chutzpah, for example appeared as chutzpa, hutzpah and hutzpa, while shmooze, to chat, turned up as schmoose. The Lexis search found Yiddish to be particularly popular in Georgia, where an appelant's tsoris, or troubles, was mentioned in a 1974 opinion. That was two years after the first reported use anywhere of "chutzpah" in a decision from Georgia's top court about a robber who broke into a sheriff's office to steal guns. that "qualifies as chutzpah in our book," the authors said. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Dec 23 14:39:16 1993 From: noyekh miller Subject: A retenish vegn a lidele I recently found myself in a Vietnamese establishment (fregt shoyn nisht) and after a while realized that I was listening to a Yiddish song. That is to say, it _wasn't_ a Yiddish song, it was Vietnamese, but it was exactly to the last detail a Yiddish song of the sort we used to hear on Yiddish radio in the 30's: pre-Mantovani Russianoid shmaltz. There was even a singer who specialized in it (not Sheyndele di Khazente) but I forget her name. Anyway, for those who might want to check it out, here are the facts. Disc: Diem Xua Singer: Y Lan Song: Chia Khoa Tinh Yeu (Key of Love) And to Mendele's musically-gifted who of course have known about this (and much more) all along: please explain. Noyekh ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.182 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