Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.163 November, 1994 1) Yiddish grammar (Zev bar-Lev) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 1 Nov 94 15:52:15 PST From: zbarlev@zeus.sdsu.edu Subject: Yiddish grammar it is interesting to see the issue of grammar debated, if not hotly, then at least with some persistence, with someone bringing up the issue periodically. of the various bulletin-boards i am on for different languages, nowhere else do i see this issue discussed in this way. hhas vehhalila that i should observe that it is a siman of the unique status of yiddish that such a question should be debated. (please don't anyone correct my spellings: i was using hebrew, not yiddish. it is unlikely that i would ever dare use yiddish here, even without the grammar discussions.) i admit that i have heard discussions and angry observations about rampant ungrammaticality. when i once gave a paper at an arabic conference, i could take comfort in the fact that, however many errors in my samples, the egyptian press had just been thoroughly condemned for the low level of their arabic! indeed, speakers of arabic typically hold foreigners to a "higher" standard: we should speak (real) arabic, even though they can't, due to the unfortunate accident of their having been born many centuries after Mohammad! even the best informant of modern arabic that i ever found, could do no better than to say "yes, that's how we say it, although it's not arabic". i once offended an arab terribly by misspelling a word in a quote from the qur'an -- i tried to assure him that i am liable (sp?) to misspell in any language, no matter how "holily" (stet) i regard the text. i once had a serbian teacher who said, about some construction: "now make sure you don't say this, because serbians do all the time." i had thought i was there to learn how to talk like serbians, but i quickly found out the truth! i heard one counter-person at Jack-in-the-Box correct another for putting a preposition at the end of a sentence. (it was probably a particle, however, not a preposition.) is that a rise in cultural level? in all my many e-mail conversations, only one has ever commented on my avoidance of capitals -- and i believe that was on an Learning-Disability bulletin-board. LD people sometimes have terrible trouble spelling -- but perhaps i was not exhibiting the "acceptable" kind of misspellings by not capitalizing. i still mention to my linguistics classes my grandmother's comment that yiddish wasn't a language, but "just something we speak". (i judge the quality of the class by how many laugh.) she was curious that, when i did a sort of junior field-method research, at some young age, on her yiddish, that i could write yiddish without using the alphabet! (i don't remember whether i used real IPA or some makeshift substitute.) i enjoy teaching people about dialects with the example that yiddish is no more a dialect of german than german is a dialect of yiddish. the most interesting discussions of grammaticality, perhaps, take place about esperanto, where people sometimes feel they have a right to invent their own dialect during the first months of study. after all, there are so few native speakers, it's easy to be an authority. but, to return (at last) to yiddish, this is the only language where norms of transcription are discussed -- with one exception: i'm now having such arguments on chinese e-mail. the mainland chinese, it happens, have invented a romanization, and now teachers are more and more thinking that any other system should be verboten. (in case this sounds like a yiddish word: i mean the Gm one.) one scholar has proposed that the chinese romanization should be a proper system just like english spelling, so that any homonymous words should have a different spelling, like "dam" and "damn" (his examples). other chinese teachers i know resist the idea that any other transcription should ever be used with students, whatever the difficulties, e.g. qi is pronounce chee, cong is pron. tsong. i can't help feeling that the issue goes, for many, beyond classroom convenience, and that indeed they want chinese to have a proper spelling system, where you have trouble looking words up in a dictionary (as if character dictionaries weren't bad enough), and -- best of all -- you can mark students down on their compositions for spelling! apart from spelling, i notice on this bulletin board, instead of a discussion about what are the norms, or even about how few people observe the norms nowadays, we have a discussion about whether the norms should be followed, or whether "we" should be tolerant. the many people who know the language informally and partially (i don't even include myself in this number), it seems, are going to be urged to use YIVO grammar and lexicon -- even if they have to take courses. and even speakers of "non-standard dialects" should be -- what, ostracized? made to feel guilty? old standards are silly enough -- people who insist on a pseudo-biblical pronunciation in preference to daily speech in hebrew, or the example of arabic mentioned earlier. languages other than yiddish with new standards have the decency to get confused about what these standards are, if not to argue about them. for example, the serbo-croats publish (or used to publish) a whole periodical or so on correct serbo-croat. only in yiddish, it appears, can we expect people to take the initiative on their own. in case a conclusion is desired, let me opine that a thorough "prescriptivism" (standarization, etc.), while it may get mixed reactions from native speakers of a language (some will think it nitpicky, others will think it's the height of morality), can have a disastrous effect on learners, non-native speakers, and even exiled native speakers of a language: they quickly see that their efforts aren't good enough, and they quickly stop speaking. zev bar-Lev ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.163 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. 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