Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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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

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End of Mendele Vol. 5.058