Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 5.163
November 6, 1995

1) Dialects, standards, and khsidim (Eliyahu Juni)

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Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 20:31:45 -0500
From: ao107@freenet.carleton.ca
Subject: Dialects, standards, and khsidim--bove m'tsie

Although I oppose replacing dialects with "standard" Yiddish, my issue
with standard Yiddish is about more than just differences among dialects.
Yiddish was, and is, the language of a very religiously aware society.
Not just religious:  a society where everything, even secularism and
secular things, is defined in terms of, and discussed in the language of,
religious life and religious learning.  Yiddish doesn't just borrow
vocabulary from loshnkoydesh and the sforimakdoyshim.  It borrows a
universe of discourse from Judaism, from haymishe, farfrimte, farkhnyokte
Judaism, from lernen (not learning).  A Judaism which is more a way of
life than an ideology.  (To call it 'Orthodox' doesn't begin to do it
justice--it's a small subset of today's ultra-Orthodox community, mostly
Yiddish-speaking.)  This is at least as true for the secular Yiddish
speaker, for whom Yidish and its religion are always two parts of the
same picture, as it is for the religious one, for whom they are easily
divisible (if not always separable) into religion and Yiddish.

[David Herskovic said something similar about the beauty and humour of
Yiddish (vol. 5.140), but I think the religion is in more than the art
and the jokes and innuendo--it's in the language itself.]


For quite a few months now, I've been involved in Mendele, and have begun
to test the water of the wider world of Yiddishistn with one toe.  I've
noticed more and more that although we're all talking Yiddish and about
Yiddish, we're really talking about two different languages.  In almost
every issue of Mendele, someone uses a Yiddish word or phrase with heavy
religious content, or even purely religious content, and doesn't realize
that that content is there.  Often these words are misused, even by
native speakers. And there are loads of words and expressions which are
common in religious Yiddish, but which have all but disappeared from the
vocabulary of secular Yiddish-speakers, because they lack the religious
framework which makes them meaningful.

I guess the most ironic example I can cite is the word "Yiddishkayt."  It
means 'Judaism', as in the religion;  it does not refer to Yiddish, the
language, or anything connected to the language.  (I share my Yiddishkayt
with a religious Jew from Baghdad who never heard of Yiddish, but not
really with the secularist who speaks nothing but Yiddish.)  Hearing
Mendelyaner, and other yidishistn, use "Yiddishkayt" to refer to their
connection to Yiddish was funny the first time--it sounded like an
intended pun--and maybe the second;  after that, I realized that they
weren't joking, and soon it began to sting.  (Maybe it was when I heard
that there is actually a Yiddish festival somewhere called
"Yiddishkayt".)  And, as an unwitting reminder that many secular
Yiddish-speakers aren't well acquainted with Yiddishkayt, it also reminds
me that we aren't talking quite the same language.

Occasionally, some Mendelyaner, including me, try to fill in the
background which Mendele seems to lack.  I have spent lots of time
darshening on yoytsres (and how to fardrey them), khavruses, yontoyvim,
and other areas where the religiously challenged are also Yiddish-ly
challenged.  (I probably took each of those, just like this, past the
point where most listeners in a more conventional forum would be snoozing
in boredom, yet I don't feel I quite did them justice.)  Others have
explained what y'kumpurkon is, when to use which new year greeting, and
many other words and phrases which are esoteric in the world of Mendele,
but are commonplaces for religious Jews.  For me, it has felt like
swimming upstream.  Not that I mind swimming upstream, but I'm coming to
the realization that no matter how much I or others explain about
religious culture, the Yiddish-speaker who doesn't have a very strong
background in that culture isn't really understanding or speaking the
same Yiddish as those who do have the background.


This isn't just relevant to the spoken language;  it's in the literature
too.  I'm not very familiar with Yiddish lit., but what little I have
read has given me the impression that many, if not most, of its writers
either grew up in a very haymishe setting, or expected their readers to
be very familiar with such a setting.  In the little bit that I have
read, it often seemed obvious to me that those without that background
would not be able to fully understand what they were reading.  The
authors were not religious, but their language, their images, their
characters, their metaphors, presuppose the religious world, at least as
much as the world outside it.  This has been very noticeable in
translation--and even more so in mistranslation--when it sometimes only
dawns upon me what the author was trying to say once I have figured out
what Yiddish word was behind an English word, and the (religious) baggage
which the Yiddish word carries.  A rebbe is not a rabbi, a shtender is
not a lectern, and a mikve is not a ritual bath.

This summer, I took a few Yiddish lessons from an elderly native speaker
who grew up in a secular home.  During one of them, she read a passage
from Perets, in which the word "asheryotsar" appeared.  Every religious
child knows that the brokhe one makes after using the bathroom begins
with the words "asher yotsar";  it was crucial to the point of the
paragraph, if not the passage.  Although this woman's Yiddish is much
much better than mine, she had no idea what it meant--in fact, she read
it "asher yeytser" and stopped, clearly puzzled.  ("yeytser" isn't
correct, in any dialect; it's a komets, not a kheylem.)

A while ago (in vol. 5.055), David Herskovic asked, rhetorically, if
English people aren't expected to use Jane Austen's English, why should a
kheyder boy be required to use Perets's Yiddish?  He then said that the
next Perets or Sholom Aleykhem was likely to be kheyder/yeshive educated,
and not high school/university educated.  The kheyder yingl's Yiddish may
be grammatically different from Perets's Yiddish (and modern chareidi
society is unlikely to produce the sort of productive rebellion that
turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe did).  But if there is anyone who is
speaking Perets's Yiddish, it is the kheyder yingl for whom Perets's work
is trayfe, not the secularist who reads it. 4 David was advocating
allowing for change, and not demanding that Yiddish-speakers conform to
some canonized version of the language.  And if truth be told, the
"standard" does allow for growth and change.  There is a regular coining
of new words, and adaptation of old ones to new meanings, in the Yiddish
academic community.  But it is not the same sort of change that takes
place in a natural speaking community.

As Marjorie Hirshan so eloquently put it, if we do not allow for change,
"our perfect, every-hair-in-place Mame Yidish may end up a static
hand-maiden to Latin which is jailed within its grammar and sentence
structure in specific tomes today."  And the change that does take place
in standard Yiddish is of the same sort that takes place in Latin among
modern Latin scholars;  it keeps every hair in place.  Standard Yiddish
has the same hairstyle today as it had 50 years ago;  its change has been
mostly a matter of finding Yiddish words when there was no suitable one
to translate an English (or Hebrew) word.

But those 50 years' worth of changes in the chareidi community have been
real, natural, language change;  not only filling in the gaps in the
dictionary, but changing words, replacing them, changing meanings,
changing connotations.  I'm pretty sure that most of the new coinages in
the standard are specialized words, academic words;  there's nothing
wrong with that, but they're words that the average baleboste doesn't use
every day, or even every decade.  The new coinages and borrowings in
chareidi dialects of Yiddish are everyday words, because most of the
Yiddish usage in the chareidi community is not academic.  It takes
place--much as European Yiddish took place--in kitchens, playgrounds,
stores, shuls, and streets;  when chareidim want academic precision, we
switch from Yiddish to English (or some other dominant language).

The typical "standard" coinage is probably something like the list of
Chemistry terms recently posted on Mendele.  The typical chareidi coinage
is probably something like "vinde", meaning window, or "diner", meaning a
dinner (as in a fundraising event, not supper), or "servis", meaning taxi
(a.k.a. as a "car service" in NY).  There are perfectly good traditional
Yiddish words which they are replacing, and which their users are often
aware of.  I'm betting these coinages would not be very well-received in
Columbia (I can't stand them myself--I'm a bit of a purist by
temperament).  Another example, mentioned by Khayem Bokhner (in vol.
5.073), is the trend among the younger generation to no longer use the
construction "halb akht" to mean half past seven.  (I haven't noticed
this, but my exposure has been mostly to an older generation, which still
uses it;  I do know that it's a Europeanism--only the Brits use it in
English.)  Along with dictionary changes, there have been changes is
sound patterns, changes in grammatical structure.

The academic community seems mostly oblivious to the changes in charedi
Yiddish.  And the coinages and other changes in "standard" Yiddish are
almost entirely unknown in the native speaking community;  academic
prescriptivism, to the extent that it is noticed, goes entirely unheeded.
As the chareidi Yiddish moves away from the (already limited) ground
which it shares with the "standard", the gap between the two Yiddishes is
growing.

(to be continued)

Eliyahu Juni

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End of Mendele Vol. 5.163