Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.188 December 10, 1995 1) Der Tunkeler (Moises Kijak) 2) Der Tunkeler (Hershl Hartman) 3) Judeo-languages: The case of Alsace (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 16:44:57 -0300 From: administ@kijak.recom.edu.ar Subject: Der Tunkeler undzer liber fraint Peter Kluehs fregt zikh oifn rikhtikn nomen funem groisn humorist der tunkeler. zain nomen iz geven iosef tunkel. mer protim ken men gefinen inem leksicon oder in der Encyclopaedia Judaica. vegn der frage vos er shtelt undz, tzi er zol vaiter ibershraibn zaine humoreskn, halt ikh fun sholem alekhems zog : "lakhn iz gezunt, doktoirim heisn lakhn". ikh alein bin a shtikl roife, un bin zikher az es iz azoi. ikh hof az a sakh mendelianer zenen maskim mit mir. zait ale gezunt. aier argentiner fraint moishe. Moises Kijak 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 22:00:52 -0500 From: hershl@aol.com Subject: Der Tunkeler ikh hob shtark hanoe gehat fun der satire. kh'hob es opgeshport un upgedrukt un kh'klayb zikh es iberzetsn oyf english kidey misameyakh zayn gevise freynd un kolegn vos zenen zeyer bahavnt in filozofye ober zenen, nebekh, geshtroft mit nit-kenen yidish. andere azelkhe antikn? adrabe. makheteyse. Hershl Hartman 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 9 Dec 95 12:59 EST From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu Subject: Judeo-languages: The case of Alsace The following is inspired by Dan Leeson's intriguing description of his language experience in Alsace. I beg Dan's forgiveness if some of my comments seem a bit acerbic (khutspedik?). No offense is intended. I don't know how else to deal with the problems he raises. I should say that he's been good enough to let me read some of his fiction. If only I could write like that! One of the most surprising features of Dan's mesage is his assertion that what he calls Judeo-Alsatian "is a variant on Romansch and has little to do with either German or Yiddish." Romansch?! Why surprising? Well, I needn't tell you who Uriel Weinreich was, right? His relationship to Yiddish and Yiddish scholarship are well known. Less well known is the fact that his own dissertation research was not on Yiddish but on--you guessed it, or did you?-- Romansch. He did his work among its speakers in Switzerland. He was also in Alsace, and knew the language spoken by the Jews there. It was after his return to New York (in 1959-60?) that he began to design the dialectological investigation that has yielded the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (now approaching Volume III) in which Yiddish in Alsace plays a prominent part. What are we now to infer from the fact that nowhere in all his writings does Weinreich find any similarity between Romansch and whatever it is that Dan Leeson refers to as Judeo-Alsatian. I say "whatever it is" because, having been in the game for some decades, intrigued by Yiddish in Alsace, on which more below, I've never heard a reference to "Judeo-Alsatian". Dan asserts that "there is not the slightest relationship between Yiddish and Judeo-Alsatian". Perhaps he can give us a better description of the two entities he refers to here so that we can judge his conclusions. "A rose by any other name" (in Yiddish, _di zelbe yente andersh geshleyert_). What's in a language name? How different are Serbian and Croatian? Dutch, Flemish, and Low German? Belorussian and Ukrainian? They "sound" very different! If they are very different, the differences are _not_ very significant _linguistically_; they do not reside in the features of the languages themselves. Linguistically, the variation within each of the above groups is probably less significant than say between Bavarian (High) German and Frisian (Low) German. Yet we say that the differences between Serbian and Croatian are between "languages", but those between High and Low German are "only" differences between "dialects". There's something funny going on here, no? The names, in fact, reflect a socio-political reality that obscures the linguistic similarities in one case, and the linguistic differences in the other. We might say that that's what's in a name! Normally, I would speak of Alsatian German. Dan Leeson speaks of Alsatian. Are the two different? Not that I know of. What about Judeo-German and Yiddish? Is "Judeo-German" different from Western Yiddish? I would urge a reading of Max Weinreich's chapters on "Jewish languages" and the "Names of Yiddish" in his _History of the Yiddish Language_ for a better understanding of the naming problem. The Judeo-prefix is fine from an "external" point of view. The Germanist may be interested in all forms of German, including the "Judeo" variety, the Slavist in all varieties of "Judeo-Slavic". Jewish languages-scholarship, however, is only productive when it adopts an "internal" perspective that speaks of "Yiddish", "Judezmo", Knaanic". It can then incorporate a variety of linguistic entities, differently named at different times for a variety of non-linguistic reasons, under a single heading; _yidish_, yidish-daytsh_ (not _taytsh_, that's something else), mame-loshn, even zhargon, are subsumed today under the heading Yiddish. Another puzzling thing is Dan Leeson's reference to Hebrew words in marriage contracts that "did not even sound as if they were Hebrew". Sound? Who sounded them? Or "all of a sudden I would read a word whose pronunciation made me suspect that it could just as well have been Icelandic or Serbo-Croatian". Pronunciation? Whose pronunciation? Texts and sounds? That's a no-no! Icelandic, you say. Careful with those analogies. They can have unintended consequences. I quote from a section entitled "Icelandic and Yiddish" on p. 138 of a recently published study by a Mendele subscriber, Sten Vikner (Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages; Oxford 1995): "Let us now turn to Icelandic and Yiddish, which apparently behave completely alike." Now let's turn to Dan's final comment in referring to Alsatian (German): Although he knows some French and German, he says "I could not understand a single word . . ." He then adds "No wonder I had such problems with Judeo-Alsatian! It is as if some Bantu language were written in Hebrew characters!!" What can we infer from this? i) Presumably he _heard_ Alsatian (German), and found that he couldn't understand a single word. Dan, its hardly credible. How long were you there? Did you give time to become familiar with the distinctive intonation patterns? ii) The implication is that his encounter with Judeo-Alsatian was in _written_ documents. Dan, didn't you _hear_ Alsatian Yiddish spoken? Alsace may be the last bastion of living Western Yiddish. To say that it is "alive and well" would be stretching a point, but we have numerous, some quite contemporary recordings of fluent speakers of the language. Aside from our Atlas interviews from 7 or 8 from different locations, conducted by Richard Zuckerman in Alsace in the mid 60's, there are recordings made by the late Florence Guggenheim-Gruenberg in the Swiss Phonogrammarchiv (some on a record release), an interview that Max Weinreich and I recorded in New York in 1969, a recent recording by Claude Vigee sent to me by Bob Werman from Jerusalem, and another by the late Marcel Sulzer which I recently received from Mulhouse. The latter was published by CREDYO--Centre de Recherche, d'Etude et de Documentation Du Yiddisch Occidental, (President Professor Astrid Starck of the Universite de Haute Alsace, in Mulhouse). To be sure, the average speaker of Eastern Yiddish is going to have to do some listening to attune his senses to the distinctive intonation contours, to Western Yiddish phonology, to a variant syntax, to vocabulary differences (_shule_ is 'school', _eygol_ is 'Jewish school' (i.e. _heder_), and _kheyder_ is 'barn'. But then, even in Eastern Yiddish, the speaker from Vilna is going to have to make adjustments in order to comprehend the speaker from Lodzh. I can't fathom what it means to know German, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and not be able "to understand a word". Surely an exaggeration. Some patience, a little careful listening, a review of published descriptions and word-lists, and the beauties of that very distinctive dialect begin to emerge, shall we say, loud and clear. Alsatian is the Southwesternmost outpost of the historical Yiddish language area--an outpost of a geographic and linguistic continuum that stretched eastward through Germany to the borders of Muscovy. The language can still be retrieved, in situ, the historical continuum reconstructed (as in the maps of the Yiddish Atlas. During your next visit to Alsace, Dan, look up Astrid Starck (CREDYO) in Mulhouse, or Richard Zuckerman who became a "native speaker" and took up residence there. Mikhl Herzog ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.188