Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 4.232
December 13, 1994

1) Russian/Yiddish `r' (Rick Turkel)
2) Russian/Yiddish `r' (Jay Lee)
3) Russian/Yiddish `r' (Reuven Rachlin)
4) Russian/Yiddish `r' (Bob Poe)
5) Jewish accent in Russian (Zev bar-Lev)
6) Pronouncing "geooghit" (Dan Leeson)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 22:20:03 EST
From: rturkel@cas.org
Subject: Russian/Yiddish `r'

In mendele 4.230, Ben Alpers asks about the origin of the Russian
euphemism "one who mispronounces 'r'" for a Jew.  This is a genuine
linguistic phenomenon which I have personally observed.  This is a long
one, so please bear with me.

I used to work with a man who was born in Harbin, China, of Russian
parents who had left Odessa after the 1905 revolution.  His native tongue
was Russian, but most of his education was in Hebrew (he left China for
Israel in 1949, at the age of 11).  His Russian was always respected by
recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union despite his occasional
antiquated usage, although I noticed a distinct Yiddish accent to it
(which he always denied, naive informant that he was), primarily from the
uvular 'r' about which Ben wrote.

My personal theory was that his family (and many others in the expatriate
community in Harbin), being native Yiddish speakers, retained the uvular
'r' in their Russian.  In his case, I'm certain that it was reinforced by
his subsequent acquisition of Hebrew.

On the other hand, most of the recent immigrants from the former Soviet
Union are two or three generations away from native Yiddish speakers, so
the dominant "Russian" 'r' comes through loud and clear.  (As we all
know, Yiddish culture was suppressed in much of the Soviet Union, and few
recent immigrants from there, except for those who came from the Baltics
and certain parts of Belarus and the Ukraine, are native Yiddish
speakers.)

It would be interesting to research this question in present-day Latvia
and Lithuania, which were independent between the World Wars and where
there was a thriving Yiddish educational establishment through the
1930's.

Zayt mir ale gezunt un shtark.

Rick Turkel

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 15:47:00 EST
From: jmlee@ucs.indiana.edu
Subject: Russian/Yiddish `r'

What first came to my mind was that Lenin dropped his r's, thus
Revoliutsiia became Evoliutsiia.  This is the only case I can think of
where the letter r is "mispronounced."  If this is the origin of the
slur, then it could be an insinuation that Lenin and his Bolsheviks were
some sort of Zionist plot, using Lenin's characteristics to denigrate
Jews.

Jay Lee

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 17:31:41 -0500 (EST)
From: rachlin@panix.com
Subject: Russian/Yiddish `r'

I cannot answer Mr. Alpers' inquiry about the prevalence of a guttural
"r" among Russian Yiddish speakers.  However, I do recall learning long
ago from an unrecalled source, that a frequent "humorous" (yeah! sure!)
method of determining whether a Russian was Jewish was to ask him to
recite in Russian "na gor'ye ararat'ye" (On Mount Ararat).  The repeated
voiced gutturalized "r"s would presumably be a shibboleth that would
identify the Jew and would sound bizarre enough to assure the speaker's
status as the butt of those making the inquiry.

Reuven Rachlin

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 17:45:57 EST
From: poe@keps.com
Subject: Russian/Yiddish `r'

My mother, who was from [the] Ukraine, pronounced her `r's in Yiddish in
the usual way--i.e., with the back of the tongue raised.  (Is this called
`retroflex'?  We need help from a phonetician!)  In fact, when she said
`dortn', the `r' became unvoiced and came out much as if the word were
spelled `dokhtn'.

She was sent to Russian school for a while as a child and achieved some
fluency in that language, probably with a relatively correct Russian
accent, but she had forgotten most of this by the time I was adult enough
to talk to her about it.  She remembered very vividly, however, that,
during pogroms, people were asked to pronounce words with `r's in them,
and that this test was used to distinguish the Jews from the others.
(The others, in this case, were usually Ukrainians, rather than Russians,
but that probably didn't matter to the validity of the test.)  It seems
to me that my mother pronounced her `r's very differently in the few
words of Russian that she remembered than she did in Yiddish.  I wonder,
actually, whether the *real* test was the pronunciation of the soft, or
palatalised, `r'; I think this would be hard even for an Italian or Pole
to get right, whereas they would probably have little problem with the
hard Russian `r'.

Bob Poe

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 15:26:35 -0800
From: zbarlev@mail.sdsu.edu
Subject: Jewish accent in russian

while awaiting replies of others on the subject of russian vs. yiddish
/r/, i thought i might mention that the usual "Jewish accent" in russian
is mostly a matter of intonation, a more musical intonation, not of a
typical Yiddish variety, but actually morte of a lilt, perhaps "more
russian than russian".

zev bar-Lev

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 14:42:55 EST
From: leeson@aspen.fhda.edu
Subject: Pronouncing "geooghit"

David Brown asks me how to pronounce geooghit.  I am not sure that I can
do that, but I'll give it a try anyhow.

The first sound "ge" has no equivalent sound in English but I think of
the French name "Gigi" with a soft "G."  Another is as in the French word
"rouge" or "mirage" or as in the English word "vision." In my dictionary,
the phonetic  symbol is zh with a curved line underneath.

Combine that with "oogh" to get "geoogh."  The beginning "ge" sound that
I have described above is how "geoogh" ends.  The final letters "....it"
are as written with no mystery.

Thus "geooghit" is the word describing a pain in the ear.

I never realized how difficult it is to describe a sound only with words.

Dan Leeson

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