Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.006 May 24, 1994 1) Introduction (Larry Rosenwald) 2) Verb-Adj vs. Adj-Verb word order (Dovid Braun) 3) The stem construction (Dovid Braun) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 23 11:35:20 1994 From: lrosenwald@wellesley.edu Subject: Introduction My name is Larry Rosenwald, and I teach English at Wellesley College. I've probably corresponded with some of you, during the time when I was co-editor of a prospective Schocken anthology of American Yiddish prose. (The anthology is on hold, by the way; I don't know what plans Schocken has for it.) I learned my Yiddish from Pearl Kahan, at the University of Chicago; I've done a little translating (a story by I. J. Singer) and some teaching of Yiddish material. Two questions, one general and one specific. 1) I'm working on a big project I call Multilingual America, on scenes of language and dialect contact in American writing. I'd like there to be a chapter on Yiddish as an example, neither typical nor unrepresentative, of what happens to immigrant languages in America. I have some sense of what English texts are central for me; but I'd appreciate any suggestions of Yiddish texts that reflect on, or portray, the relations between Yiddish and English in America. 2) I had a student this last semester working on Yiddish who did a translation of a Peretz story called "A Khanike-Lempl." In that story there's a phrase about someone eagerly seizing something "vi tsu/oyf [I can't remember and have no access to the book at the moment] a heysn poplinik." I can't find poplinik, either in my dictionaries or through consultation with Slavicist colleagues. Anyone know the word or the phrase? A sheynem dank, Larry Rosenwald 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 16 20:57:41 1994 From: dovid@MIT.EDU Subject: Verb-Adj vs. Adj-Verb word order A slightly belated answer to Holger Nath: This is how I (at least currently) see the situation (in very general and crude terms): adjectival phrases, like noun phrases and adverbial phrases, can be scrambled in Yiddish if their content is not focused. By scrambling I mean movement of a constituent to a non-base-generated position following the tensed verb. In your (a)-sentence (slightly modified): a. s'iz gegangen a shpreyregn. azoy vi er hot nit gehat ken shirem iz er nas gevorn since the rain was going on for a while (as per the first sentence), the fact that the guy is getting wet is not new information -- speaker may imply and hearer may infer that, standing in a drizzle without an umbrella, one will get wet. In (b): b. beshas er iz gegangen af der gas hot zikh plutsem ongehoybn a shturem, iz er gevorn nas the fact that the guy got wet IS new information: from the context we don't have reason to believe necessarily that he got wet, because the strom had just begun and the guy might have taken out an umbrella, might've run for shelter, etc. Compare: c. s'iz geven a sheyner tog. di zun hot geshaynt. bin ikh mir aroysgegangen fun shtub un mit a mol bin ikh gevorn nas. imetser hot af mir oysgegosn an emer mit vaser! vs. d. ...aroysgegangen fun shtub un mit a mol bin ikh nas gevorn. ... Methinks (c) is awkward, infelicitous. Do native speakers with very, very fine judgments concur? As for nekome nemen vs. nemen nekome, I think the difference is that the first is a "periphrastic" verb and the second isn't. Periphrastics have fixed word order, e.g. ikh vel morgn khasene hobn *ikh vel morgn hobn khasene So there would be two dictionary entries: 1. [nekome nemen] -- periphrastic verb ex.: ikh vel in im nekome nemen 2. [nemen] + [nekome] -- verb + complement (idiomatic expression) ex.: ikh vel in im nemen nekome If nekome in #2 is scrambled for discourse-pragmatic reasons, it looks like #1. If the compilers of the Russian-Yiddish dcitionary meant something by the apparent distinction that you cite: blednet' BLAS VERN poblednet' VERN BLAS this is quite insightful. But isn't the order inconsistent? You gave another example: krepnut' VERN SHTARKER okrepnut' SHTARKER VERN In the case of blas vern, the order Adj. + Verb is associated with the Russian imperfective form, but in the case of shtarker vern, that same Yiddish order is glossed with the Russian perfective form (if I'm right that okrepnut' and poblednet' are perfective -- my knowledge of Russian is minimal). Incidentally, the last living editor of the Russian-Yiddish Dictionary died just recently, Moyni Shulman. See obituary on last page of Forverts of three (?) weeks ago. David Braun [This post and the one that follows were delayed in transmission. nm] 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 16 21:18:52 1994 From: dovid@MIT.EDU Subject: The stem construction A belated answer to Beatrice Santorini: A _makh_ is a physical gesture, a gesticulation. The use is quite general, as opposed to the English counterparts -- a wave [of the hand] (a makh mit der hant), a wag [of the tail] (a makh mitn ek/veydl). All derived from makhn mitn ek, makhn mit der hant, makhn mit di zaytn (one of the humorous an- swers to "vos makhstu?"). So the sentence from _Grine felder_, me tor nisht a makh ton mitn hant af a dorfmentshn means: 'One shouldn't dismiss a villager' (as in the idiomatic expression: avekmakhn X mit der hant -- 'wave away, dismiss somebody'). In instances of the so-called stem construction, there is indeed variation possible wrt whether the stem preceds or follows ton/gebn. I think, however, that there is NO variation wrt possible orders for invariants which are composed of stem+particle; i.e. (a) and (b) are possible, but only (c) and not (d) is possible: (a) er hot a zog/shprung/... gegebn/geton (b) er hot gegebn/geton a zog/shprung/... (c) er hot gegebn/geton a shray oys/shtey uf/... (d) *er hot a shray oys/shtey uf gegebn/geton So there's a lot of explaining to be done. Incidentally, I changed your _gebn a geshrey oys_ to _...a shray oys_, which is also fine, just to be consistent with the other stems given. _geshrey_ is an interesting case of a non-stem which can have the stem construction apply to it. Somebody who is more versed in Yiddish historical linguistics than I: what's the story behind the vowel shift in _shray_ --> _geshrey_? Dovid Braun ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.006 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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