Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 5.227
January 21, 1996

1) Is Yiddish dying? (Ellen Prince)
2) Pluperfect (Dovid Braun)
3) Pluperfect (Meyer-Leyb Wolf)
4) Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library (Zachary Baker)
5) Transliterated spelling (Sheldon I. Clare)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 14:59:06 EST
From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: is yiddish dying?

to arnie herschorn: you enumerate [5.224] a number of points and, for many,
you cite references. i was wondering if you have references for some of the
others. in particular, i am puzzled by #7, the smaller the number of persons
who are fluent in the language, the more the language tends to be considered a
dead language. my puzzlement stems from the fact that there are many languages
(probably more than half of the extant languages of the world in fact) with a
few hundred or fewer speakers and i know of no one who considers them dead or
dying for that reason. (the speakers of many are of course currently in the
process of language shift and so they may be considered moribund for that
reason, but that's independent of the size of the speech community. and there
are many languages with fewer than 200 speakers that are alive and well.)

i'm also puzzled by #10, that the reason that latin is considered a dead
language is that the number of churchmen speaking it today is smaller than the
number of romans who used to speak it. do you have a reference for that?

might i point out that the fact that millions of diasporan jews being able to
communicate in hebrew, both orally and in writing, for nearly two millenia did
not make hebrew a living language, whereas a far smaller number of babies in
palestine did?

ellen prince

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 19:53:50 EST
From: dovid@mit.edu
Subject: pluperfect

Aaaaah!  Thanks for the clarification, Ellen. And yes, I confused the condi-
tional with the pluperfect:  indeed, Olsvanger uses _gevezt_ only for the past
conditional.

Dovid Braun
Cambridge, MA

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 03:39:09 -0500
From: wolfim@chelsea.ios.com
Subject: gevest

Collectors of instances of 'gevest' should check out Yehoash's bible
translation. The pluperfect is commonly formed with gevest in the neviim and
ksuvim sections, e.g yeshaye 38:10a. Yehoash was also a Litvak.

Meyer-Leyb Wolf

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 96 19:09:43 PST
From: bm.yib@rlg.stanford.edu
Subject: Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library

I have just received a fascinating bibliographical article by Leonard Prager
and Brad Sabin Hill, "Yiddish Manuscripts in the British Library" (in The
British Library Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 81-108).  The
offprint was sent to me by Brad Hill, who is the curator of Hebrew books at
the British Library.

The article "gives a brief and only preliminary account of some fifty Yiddish
manuscript texts in the collections of the British Library" (p. 94).  The
manuscripts run the gamut from a beautifully illuminated Yiddish Mahzor (Add.
MS. 27071), circa 1560, to the script of a play by the London Yiddish author
Nathan Horowitz, "Shol hameylekh:  a biblishe drame in 7 akten," which is
dated 1933.  The article treats liturgical works, illuminated and decorated
manuscripts, ethics, letters, public records, medicine, drama, the Lord
Chamberlain's Plays (all plays performed on British stages were, until 1968,
legally required to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain; Yiddish troupes
largely observed this law only in the breach, with perhaps a quarter of all
Yiddish plays being performed *with* licenses), and manuscript notes in
printed books).

Notwithstanding the authors' claim that their article offers only a
"preliminary account" of the Yiddish manuscripts under discussion, they cover
a range of subjects relating to Yiddish philology and bibliography, in
considerable detail -- especially in the footnotes. Though bibliographical
essays tend to be rather dry, this one contains a fair amount of subtle yet
pointed commentary.  Let two examples suffice:

      Esdaile [noted British bibliographer] in his The British Museum Library:
      a Short History and Survey (London, 1946), p. 299, wrote: 'With Hebrew
      is often classed Yiddish.  But this, though written and printed in
      Hebrew characters, is not Semitic, but European, being the dialect
      (Juedisch) of the Jews in Germany...'  The flawed definition given here
      of Yiddish, 'the dialect of the Jews in Germany', is surprising.  At the
      very moment Esdaile wrote and only a few miles from where he wrote a
      vibrant Yiddish culture flourished in the East End of London.  In his
      day a significant world-class literature existed in Yiddish, which was
      the language of the majority of Eastern European Jews and of hardly a
      remnant in Germany proper.  (p. 97)

      From a footnote on the Bove-bukh, by Elia Levita (Elye Bokhur):
      Ironically, it has been universally forgotten by Yiddish scholarship
      in England that this classic work of Yiddish literature is based
      ultimately on an Anglo-Norman epic inspired by a figure from (South)
      Hampton; a student of Yiddish literature cannot but smile when
      encountering a pub named 'Sir Bevis of Hampton' in this Hampshire port
      town.  (p. 104)

Zachary Baker

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 11:20:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: clare@vms.cis.pitt.edu
Subject: Transliterated spelling

I am still confused as to how to transliterate words such as _tree_, beym or
baym versus _near_, baym or beym. I've seen both methods used in Mendele.

A shaynem (sheynem?) dank un a gutn shabbes.

Sheldon I. Clare

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End of Mendele Vol. 5.227