Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.076 August 8, 1995 1) Goylem (David Herskovic) 2) More on Nitl (Mikhl Herzog) 3) Looking for a poem (Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan) 4) Indexing Mendele (Morrie Feller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 06 Aug 95 11:10:45 EDT From: 100114.750@compuserve.com Subject: Goylem The word _golem_ (pronounced goylem or geylem) appears in Tehilim (Psalms) 139,16. golmi rou eynekho, Your eyes saw my form. The word appears a lot in the Gemoro meaning planks of wood. Although the word is used in yiddish for a moron or an idiot the yiddish translation of the word is klotz. While you won't hear goylem used for wood these days klotz is used for wood and for humans. The plural is not goylems but goylomim. David Herskovic 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 6 Aug 95 13:10 EDT From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu Subject: More on Nitl It's hard to know, at this distance, just what Reuven Frankenstein means when he says that my reference to the absurd suggestion that German _Heirat_ is related to Hebrew _harey at_ "goes back to him [i.e. me] as a boomerang". Assuming that it's not meant to be an unfriendly comment, let me return to the matter of _nitl_. Perhaps I should add, at the outset, that I have no ideological committment to one or another of the proposed etymologies. My committment is to preserving a degree of rigour when engaging in etymological speculations. Reuven Frankenstein cites a number of authorities who should be held to the same standard of rigour--Siegmund Wolf and Moses Iserles. Let's add Max Weinreich who also suggests the possible connection between Yiddish _nitl_ 'Christmas' and Latin _(dies) natalis_ (or Italian _Natale_). As Wexler points out, Weinreich also notes a possible connection to the Hebrew root _nun, tes, lamed_ 'to lift up' (note the Hebrew form _nital_ 'to be taken, lifted up', 'to be removed'.) As for the problem that Reuven Frankenstein sees in the spelling of Yiddish _nitl_ with _tes_, as against Hebrew _nitla_ with _tof_, are we, therefore, to assume that Yiddish _shekhtn_, spelled with _khof_ can't be derived from the Hebrew root _ShKhT_ with _khes_, or that Yiddish _mekn_ can't be derived from Hebrew MKhH? In any event, note that Wexler cites "early 14th century Judeo-French, [where] the _t_ in _nitl_ IS spelled with _tav_ rather than the expected _tet_". As for other features of the spelling, the _e_ in Siegmund Wolf's _nitel_ signifies little. Are we to credit Yiddish spellings like _leben_, _hoben_, etc. with any significance? Furthermore, there are early spellings that _do not_ have a vowel letter before the _l_ of _nitl_. There has been _no_ suggestion that the form _nitl_ might be derived from _hataluyi_, however much they may both be derived from the same Hebrew root; Yiddish _tole_ yes, _nitl_ no. That's an instance of _fardreyen/farbaytn di yoytsres_. Nor have I attempted to derive Yiddish _nitl_ from the "Hebrew root TLH. Hebrew _nitla_ is derived from that root. Yiddish _nitl_ MAY, in turn, be derived from Hebrew _nitla_. Although this would be a subject for an entire different chapter, it may also be worth mentioning that the specific grammatical form of the word, _in Hebrew_, is often irrelevant to its function in Yiddish. For me the central question remains how to account for the _i_ in Yiddish _nitl_. Possibly in support of the Latin etymon: There IS an area in the Northern Ukraine, where a group of words with _i_ derive from an early low front vowel, perhaps a "Proto-Yiddish *[ae], the front morphophonemic alternant of modern Yiddish back mid [o/u] in _shtot/shtu(i)t_, plural _shtet/shteyt/shtit_. They are generally cognate with German words like _leben, Regen_, Pferd_, and a group of Hebrew segolates that include _khesed_ and _makhateneste (but not __emes_ or _pesakh_). In MHG dictionaries, the German cognates are usually spelled with the _e_ with two dots over it. In Western Yiddish, traces of this _i_ can still be picked up in a Hebrew word like [bal-sign] 'the person who stands next to the reader in the synagogue', primarily at a cluster of locations just to the Northwest and Southwest of Nuernberg, and at one or two locations far to the West of them. I've also run across an entry for the German-origin Yiddish word, _mel_ 'flour' spelled _mem, yud, lamed_, in a 17th(??) century dictionary. If this phenomenon can really be invoked to account for the correspondence _natalis_/_nitl_, we would still have to account for the universalization of the _i_ variant in Yiddish. Perhaps, we can all have our cake and eat it, too, by thinking of Hebrew _nitla_ as having become implicated, as folk- etymological support for a Latin etymon, _after_ the change of some kind of [a]([ae]??) to [i] in Yiddish. Is there any other evidence for such a sound change affecting words of Latin origin? Having come this far, I still fail to understand the "boomerang" analogy. Mikhl Herzog 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 09:49:55 -0400 From: shirshan@aol.com Subject: Looking for a poem There is a poem I recall and cannot find written after the holocaust where the poet tells that after seven years she has bought a new dress but it is too short for her grief, cannot fit her sorrow.... Help, anyone? Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan North Conway, New Hampshire 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 18:08:37 -0700 (MST) From: feller@indirect.com Subject: Indexing Mendele My thanks to the shames for his comments in response to my inquiry about the possibility of creating an index for Mendele. At present I do not have the personal expertise to carry out the accessing methods he has described. I think David Sherman's posting (5.074) does does an excellent job of pointing out why an index would be the most useful tool to accomplish what I had originally posed. 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