Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.058 July 18, 1995 1) Komets-alef beys and teaching (Eliyahu Juni) 2) Origins of Yiddish (Ellen Prince) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 04:27:38 -0400 From: ao107@freenet.carleton.ca Subject: Komets-alef beys and teaching In vol. 5.055, Dovid Braun mentioned that at an event which he attended, some children sang the song "oyfn pripetshik" with the following mistake: zogt zhe kinderlekh, gedenkt zhe tayere vos ir lernt do zogt zhe nokh a mol un take nokh a mol komets alef beys (This last line should have been "komets alef oh".) Reb Dovid attributed the mistake to a lack of Yiddish fluency, and such a lack might produce such a mistake. But I think it is very likely that it could come about as a result of different learning experiences. The phrase "komets-alef oh" meant nothing to me until I sat in shul one shabes morning and overheard a small child, with his nose in the first page of a sidur (the one which has all the permutations of letters and vowels), slowly reading "komets-alef oh, komets beyz boh, komets-giml goh. . ." When I was taught to read loshn-koydesh as a child, I was expected to put my finger on a letter or a string of letters and read it, or read something to which someone pointed. I never recited the names of the letters and vowels--I just pronounced them. And I never read aloud together with other children--it was always an individual or silent task. When I moved on to learn khumesh, mishne and g'more, I never chanted a text and translation in a group--I listened to a rebbe translate and explain, and was often called upon to translate and explain myself, but there was rarely a prescribed text which I had to repeat verbatim. In summer learning programs and in brief stints in more traditional khadorim, I was exposed to a different sort of pedagogy: the rebbe would recite a text and its translation a few times (sometimes word by word, sometimes phrase by phrase), and then the entire class (as many as 40 boys) would recite the entire passage and its translation in unison, interspersing the translation with the text in exactly the same pattern as the rebbe had done. (The recitation was done in a particular tune, and my grandmother used a similar pattern and tune in describing to me her experience in kheyder in Minkatch in the 'teens and '20s.) The child whom I overheard in shul reciting the alef-beys was using the same rhythm and sing-song which traditional khadorim used for translating khumesh. When I went to yeshive in New York, there was a kindergarten down the hall, and I often overheard young voices chanting "komets-alef oh, komets-beyz boh. . ." [I've heard the same style and similar tunes used for translation into Yiddish and English, depending on the language of the particular class. I've also been in a class where the children spoke no Yiddish, but mimed the rebbe's translation into Yiddish by following the tune and memorizing the strings of sounds, without understanding what they were saying. Many a yeshive bokher has picked up Yiddish (and a lousy knowledge of khumesh) this way. And in classes where the rebbe translated into English, a word considered inappropriate for tender ears would sometimes be translated into Yiddish, so the children would "know" the taytsh without understanding it.] Before I was exposed to this style of teaching, I assumed that all the instances of the word "alef" in the song "Oyfn pripetshik" (which I had heard but didn't understand, not speaking Yiddish,) were followed by the word "beyz" (as indeed the first one is). When I again heard the song after I had learned of this style of teaching, it struck me that the words to the song were really "komets-alef oh", the beginning of the long recitation of every letter combined with the vowel komets, followed by each letter combined with each of the other vowels. (In the traditional arrangement of that first page of the sidur, each letter appears alone in large print; then, in small print, each letter combined with komets, each letter combined with patakh, then tseyre, segeyl, khirik khoser, khirik moley, khoylem khoser, khoylem moley, kubuts, and m'lupum. My impression is that in most pre-WWII khadorim (and in some contemporary ones), children learned to read out of the sidur, beginning with this first page and going through until they knew the whole davenen. They then moved on to learn khumesh.) I imagine that a Yiddish speaker, even a native speaker, who learned the way I did and was never exposed to the traditional teaching style, could easily make the same mistake, and, assuming the "oh" in "komets-alef oh" to be gibberish, change it to "komets alef beyz". Knowing what this particular phrase means seems to depend more on familiarity with the recitative teaching style (which is used to teach loshn-koydesh) than on fluency in Yiddish. Eliyahu Juni 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 13:00:29 EDT From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Origins of Yiddish i think the immediate origins of yiddish, i.e. where the yiddish speakers came to german-speaking lands from, is one of the most puzzling issues about yiddish today. like alice, i just don't see the evidence for a romance (french or italian) provenance. alice charitably mentions that there is little evidence 'aside from vocabulary (e.g. tsholent, bentshn)'. i would add that there is absurdly little evidence from vocabulary! the lexicon of yiddish speakers in particular and jewish language speakers in general (see wexler's paper on jewish languages) is remarkably hospitable to borrowing; furthermore, yiddish speakers have demonstrated remarkable language loyalty, shlepping not only lexical items but whole languages around the world. so where are the massive romance borrowings we'd expect if in fact their first language was french (or italian) when they arrived in german-speaking lands? tsholent, bentshn, yenta, and a handful of others just ain't gonna cut it... food for thought: there are more yiddish borrowings in webster's third internatl dictionary of the english language than there are romance borrowings in yiddish! that is, yiddish-speaking immigrants to america and their offspring, altho a tiny percentage of american english speakers, retained/borrowed so many yiddish lexical items in(to) their english that they managed to get a fair number into the language as a whole, while those early yiddish speakers, allegedly arriving with french or spanish as their dominant language, couldn't even manage to keep more than a precious few in their OWN speech! how is this possible? i think it's time to do serious work on other levels of the language--syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. i believe one of the key features of yiddish that distinguishes it from (middle high) german is an early tendency toward svo word order (i.e. infl-medial) (see beatrice santorini's dissertation)--this could be a romance influence, since romance has always been svo--could it be aramaic as well? what do we know about the aramaic that they could have been speaking? the np-np form of adjectival modification (a bokher a fayner) may have been inspired (not borrowed, just inspired) by semitic since it looks like hebrew; its discourse function and therefore distribution look a lot more like romance--but what did adjectival modification look like in aramaic and how did it function? clitic-climbing (zey hobn dos afile nit gevolt gloybn, where the _dos_ has moved up to the finite verb; zey hobn zikh nit vos tsu freyen, where the _zikh_ has moved up out of the vos-infinitive to the finite verb) is attested in romance--but just how similar is it? what about aramaic? i think it's time to really grapple with these questions and not just accept what has been claimed. one thought. let's assume, as bob king has proposed, that the first yiddish speakers came to bavaria/austria from italy. (certainly bavaria gets my vote as the area they were initially concentrated in, wherever they came from.) well, what do we know about where in italy they'd been living and for how long and from where they'd come? ok, here's the point: what is today northern italy and what is directly south of bavaria/austria (around trento and points north) is _still_, in 1995, somewhat german-speaking. is it possible that they'd lived there for centuries and spoke _german_ there the whole time? and that they'd originally come _there_ speaking a semitic language? i throw this out as a wild speculation, since i have no idea of the demographic facts of jews in italy at the time, but it would be a way of having our cake and eating it too, since they could then be coming from italy but in fact had already become germanic-speakers a long time before, with perhaps just a smattering of italian, and it would give us a scenario where the language switch was indeed from semitic to germanic, just pushed back a few (or many) centuries. just a thought. ellen prince ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.058