Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.160 November 1, 1995 1) Standards, written yiddish, and resources (Khayem Bochner) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 01 Nov 95 11:06:53 -0500 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: Standards, written yiddish, and resources I'm going to try to tie together several different things here, so please be patient. I'll start with a story, about myself. I became fascinated by languages as a teenager. I taught myself Esperanto, a substantial amount of Latin, a little Greek, etc, all from library books. If I had started learning Yiddish then, while I still had daily access to fluent, dialectal Yiddish, my Yiddish would be much better than it is. But I didn't. Wasn't I interested? On the contrary, I learned to read Yiddish from the introduction to Harkavy (1898) (the one Yiddish book we had in the house), and I remember looking at a Yiddish translation of Shakespeare in the Jewish Center library. But I didn't get very far, given my limited knowldge. And it _never occurred_ to me that such a thing as a textbook of Yiddish might exist. Why not? I'll come back to this. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about written Yiddish. Real written Yiddish, that is, oyf yidishe oysyes. Many of you probably know that bitter battles have been found over Yiddish spelling, and I don't mean to minimize their importance. But for my current purposes it's more interesting to look at something that all the major spelling systems all have in common. My point is this: conventional written Yiddish doesn't reflect the spoken dialects. And I'm not referring to Yivo publications here. I'm talking about the hasidic press as well as secular. (Unless there's been a dramatic change in the last year or two, and I doubt it.) What do I mean? Well, most dialects pronounce the word for 'good' as "git". But the newspapers consistently write it as giml, vov, tes, i.e. "gut". Or take 'and'. In most dialects it's "in", pronounced just like the preposition "in". But in writing there's a difference: alef vov nun versus alef yud nun. And writing doesn't just enforce artificial distinctions, it also ignores real distinctions. Most dialects distinguish the preposition "nukh" ("nuuekh" in my dialect) 'after' from the adverb "nokh" 'still'. But they're both written nun, komets alef, khof. Now, those details happen to match litvish Yiddish. But of course the newspapers write "groys" (vov yud), not "greys" (yud yud), so they aren't writing Litvish either. In fact, returning to an earlier topic, they write things that don't reflect any widespread dialect: "oyf" in particular. Now notice that all these details match 'standard' Yiddish. Have the nasty academics infiltrated the hasidic press? Khas vekholile! The fact is this: Yiddish spelling wasn't invented yesterday. And not in 1930, or in 1800, either. It has evolved gradually, under a variety of influences, over hundreds of years. And spelling is very conservative. There is tremendous resistance to change. As a matter of fact, the spelling reforms adopted by Yivo and Tsisho in the twenties and thirties were primarily directed toward making writing reflect the spoken language better. (No one pronounces a 'hey' in "geht".) And there's _still_ bitter resistance to those reforms. But my main point in talking about writing is this: many people think that standard Yiddish is an arbitrary creation that academics cooked up to confuse the public. That just isn't true. The standard is just an attempt to codify the commonly accepted practice of the _written_ language. Sure, there are areas of disagreement, but in broad outline, and in particular with respect to the compromises between dialects, the standard does that pretty well. So what we have is, in this respect, like English: dialects differ a great deal in pronunciation, much less so in writing. The standard is a standard for writing; it's not an attempt to get people to change the way they speak. And the pronunciation that upsets Eliyahu Yuni (and others) so much is just what results when people speak Yiddish the way it's written. Even the way dialect speakers (usually) write it. The tendency for people to try to pronounce things the way they see them written is inevitable. (Why do you think so many people say "oyf"?) And for people learning the language, this tendency is even stronger. (My students are always asking me why I say "of" and not "oyf".) I don't think this in itself should be very upsetting. On the other hand, when some one claims that that's the _only_ way to speak, that is worth getting upset about. I agree completely, and if I'm in any way responsible for these people's behavior, I apologize. It shows a deplorable lack of linguistic sophistication (not to mention manners). Maybe if we really did have an elite cadre of well-trained yiddishists we could eliminate this kind of thing. But we don't, and, human nature being what it is, I'm afraid the problem is going to continue. But let me turn now to the question: who needs a standard anyway? Let me try to explain why this discussion gets me upset enough to waste time writing long harrangues. Writing a dictionary inevitably involves making choices. You can't include every form from every dialect, if only because no one knows every last variation. The same thing goes for textbooks. And when you make choices, you always end up offending someone. It can't be helped. So when you say there shouldn't be a standard, you're saying that there shouldn't be any dictionaries or textbooks. And that means you're saying no one should be able to learn Yiddish without living in a Yiddish- speaking community. In effect, you're saying that Yiddish is your own private club; non-members aren't welcome. That's the point of the little personal story I began with: I grew up surrounded by this attitude, to the extent that it didn't occur to me that someone might have taken the great egalitarian step of writing a textbook, so that I could study Yiddish, the way I could study any other language. Only as an adult did I learn that Yiddish is a language like any other language, not a private plaything that I was permanently excluded from. And thanks to textbooks, and dictionaries, _and_ the standards that make those possible, I've learned to talk to my parents in their own language. I don't talk exactly the way they do, and they tease me about it, but they seem to think it's better than nothing. I certainly do. So, those of you who speak some real dialect fluently: I envy the opportunity that I was deprived of. And I sympathise with your frustration with people who think that the only way to speak is "mit gedrukte oysyes". But I'm sick and tired of the implication that people like me should be deprived of the opportunity to learn the language. It's not your private plaything; it belongs to the rest of us too. Khayem Bochner ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.160