Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.339 May 1, 1994 1) Western Yiddish (Leah Zazulyer) 2) Western Yiddish (Marion Aptroot) 3) Yiddish /R/ in Russian (Arn Abramson) 4) Introduction (David Zelitch) 5) Zhid and zhidlen (Paul Ritterband) 6) "Fritshunes"? (Shleyme Axelrod) 7) Kortn (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 20:29:35 1994 From: WATSON@UNO.CC.GENESEO.EDU Subject: "Western Yiddish" An excellent resource person would be Professor Astrid Starck at 12 rue de l'ours, E68100 Mulhouse, France. Phone: ;85-32-2885. Deeply involved in Alsastian Yiddish, etc. Leah Zazulyer 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun May 1 00:27:20 1994 From: aptroot@husc.harvard.edu Subject: Western Yiddish In reply to Yude Rozof's questions on Mendele 3.337. Yude Rozof's proposal to include Western Yiddish into the Yiddish family since "the language of the Ashkenazim may be viewed as an East-West continuum" is well intentioned, but makes the Western Ashkenazi raise his (her) eyebrows. For centuries we've known that our eastern brothers and sisters spoke the same language as we did, and we exported Yiddish books to them. This worked rather well because of the West-East (!) continuum. The standard literary language was based on Western Yiddish and differences in pronunciation were masked by a standard orthography wich did not reflect the dialectal differences. Except for those who insisted that Jews in the German lands spoke perfect German, and that the language was "corrupted" in the East by Polish Jews, scholars have always thought that Yiddish was one language, divided into dialects. The two main dialects are Western and Eastern Yiddish. The boundary between the two is defined according to the isogloss a:24/44 (a: is a long a). The numbers refer to a system devised by Max Weinreich and represent hypothetical vowels in proto Yiddish which I can't transcribe properly without the phonetic alphabet, but I'll try: vowel 24 or E4 refers to *ej (shwa-j). Vowel 44 or O4 refers to proto Yiddish *ou (open o-u). a:24/44 means that speakers of Western Yiddish say _ka:fn_ and _fla:sh_ (Standard Yiddish _koyfn_ and _fleysh_). There are also lexical boundaries between East and West, e.g. _davnen/orn_ 'pray' and _sider/tfile_ 'prayer book' Yiddish in Germany was identified as a separate language from coterritorial German by the first Christian scholars who devoted attention to the language of the Jews, e.g. Johann Buxtorf the Elder in his _Thesaurus Grammaticus Linguae Stanctae Hebraeae_ (1609). He is the first in a line of speakers of German whose interest in the languae of the Jews led them to do serious research into Yiddish. Since the beginning of this century much has been written about Western Yiddish and once the complete Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry is published, we will all be able to have a better insight into the distribution of the dialects. Untile then, it might be interesting to have a look Beranek's language atlas (Westjiddischer Sprachatlas, 1965) although that book has serious flaws, or read some of the many articles about Western Yiddish dialectology, e.g. Florence Guggenheim-Gruenberg and Johannes Brosi on Yiddish in Switzerland, Richard Zuckerman on Alsatian Yiddish, Hans-Peter Althaus and Ulrike Kiefer on Yiddish in Germany, Hartog Beem on Dutch Yiddish, and Uriel Weinreich, Paul Garvin, C.J. Hutterer, and Pavel Trost on Yiddish in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (and others I can't think of at the moment - my apologies, this is not a reflection on their work but on my memory at this late hour). And then there are studies on the dialectology of pre-modern Western Yiddish... There are also some overview articles on Yiddish dialectology which pay attention to Western Yiddish, from Uriel Weinreich's brief and clear remarks in his article "Yiddish Language" in the _Encyclopedia Judaica_ to Dovid Katz's "Zur Dialektologie des Jiddischen" in Werner Besch a.o., eds., _Dialektologie_ (1983). P.S. Yes, the Western Yiddish verb did have a preterite. Marion Aptroot 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 22:45:42 1994 From: ABRAMSON@UConnVM.UConn.Edu Subject: Yiddish /R/ in Russian To: "V.U. Novick" Varna, Your explanation is surely right. It is notorious among Russians of a certain generation that Jews use a Yiddish /R/ (probably uvular) in their Russian, yet, as you say, there are those who don't. The "genetic" explanation is, if I may say so, just silly. Arn Abramson 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 23:04:47 1994 From: TBMP@delphi.com Subject: Introduction I am the last generation to have spent my youth in Philadelphia, conversing with my parents in Yiddish, reading the Yiddish daily papers and listening to the nightly news in Yiddish. Just a few weeks ago I attended a concert featuring the son of the old Yiddish Theatre actor, Jules Adler. It was a delight for me, but when he asked for a show of hands of those who understood Yiddish, no one under 65 raised their hand. I look forward to sharing the Joy of Yiddish with you. David Zelitch 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 23:17:41 1994 From: uap@cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu Subject: zhid and zhidlen I recently came across the word 'zhidlen' which Weinreich renders as to curse or to call names. Does this in turn come from 'zhid'? As a derivative question, it seems that zhid is a perfectly respectable word for Jew in Polish but is essentially 'kike' in Russian usage where the preferred polite term is 'ivrey'. Questions? Why would Yiddish adopt an insulting term for Jews if in fact zhidlen is negative and derived from Russian use of the word? Why is zhid respectable in Polish, where it seems to have been invented but insulting in Russian? Is this a general pattern of Russian borrowing from Polish such that words take on very different nuance once borrowed? Are there other instances of the same phenomenon? Paul Ritterband 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Apr 30 14:06:55 1994 From: PTYAXEL@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: "fritshunes"? I have been asked to translate a handwritten letter dated January 26, 1958 from a woman in the Soviet Union (perhaps near Minsk) to her sister in the US. After noting that she hasn't written in 10 years, she writes "Nor ikh gleyb az du vest mistame farshteyn az s'iz given alerley FRITShUNES velkhe hobn nisht gigebn di meglekhkayt shraybn. Nor yetst iz gekumen di tsayt vider zikh farbinden tsvishn zikh als fraynt." Can someone help with "fritshunes"? I can't find it in either Harkavy or Weinreich. (Either of the first two vowels could be yud or vov, and I suppose the first letter could be pey rather than fey.) A dank. --Shleyme Axelrod 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 12:41:47 1994 From: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu Subject: Kortn Many thanks to Odem Vaytman for his query about card names. His reference to 'pik' (spade) led me to the dictionaries because we used 'shippe' at home. Not found in Weinreich but Harkavy gives it as 'shiffe' (a typo?) and Stutchkoff says 'shippe' (cf. ModG Schippe). Ober dos iz in gantsn nisht oysn. Odem's question got me to open Stutchkoff zikhroynoy l'brokhe. To open S. is to open a world. There's no better way of disabusing those whose notion of east European Jews is limited to shuls and shul-going than to read even a portion of the Yiddish words and terms for cards and card-playing. I was trained to believe that Richard Lee Whorf was right, though I learn that the current wisdom is that he was wrong. Maybe if he had concentrated on Yiddish instead of Eskimo languages things would have worked out differently. He couldn't have of course because the library he used, now at Trinity, didn't then and doesn't now have a Yiddish collection. Anyway, given the lively discussion about Hebrew and Yiddish in recent numbers of Mendele here are some that ought not be overlooked in any reshime. My guesses, not definitions, are in parentheses. Please correct as necessary. hilchos-kortn kortn-shas godel tseve (trump) shney zeysim shrage (full house) zogn tikn (play late into the night) provn khatzes (ditto) mbulbul zayn (shuffle) magbie zayn (cut the deck) makke zayn aroysgen b'kharboy ub'kashtoy tseyln sfire (count sevens) vayhi erev vayhi poyker eyn khokhme v'eyn tvune kneged shlekhte kortn Finally one that isn't Hebrew but which I couldn't resist: Ludmer (Ludmirer) moyd (queen of diamonds) Noyekh Miller ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.339 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Archives available via gopher on: gopher.cic.net Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. 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