Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.233 January 25, 1996 1) Mayn shtetele Belz (Zachary Baker) 2) Pluperfect (Ellen Prince) 3) Soviet Yiddish songs (Michael Shimshoni) 4) Life and death of language (Ellen Prince) 5) Life and death of language (Daniel Bugel) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 96 13:43:04 PST From: bm.yib@rlg.stanford.edu Subject: Mayn shtetele Belz While, like Bob Rothstein, I am under the impression that the Belz that is the subject of Alexander Olashanetzky's song is the Bessarabian Beltsy, rather than the Galician Belz, the landslayt of both localities have staked a claim to the song. The "Belz yisker-bukh" (Tel Aviv, 1974), for the Galician shtetl, and "Sefer Beltsi Basarabiah" (Jerusalem, 1993) both include it, though the version in the Belz (Galicia) book is the more complete one -- for what that's worth. Zachary Baker 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 16:52:13 EST From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: pluperfect to meyer-leyb wolf: i hope you don't think that i think that all litvaks have merged the two auxiliaries! as i mentioned to dovid braun, for olsvanger (among others) the distinction is alive and well. that's very curious that yehoash uses _gevest_ only as the pluperfect particle (while olsvanger uses it only in the past conditional) but it's even more curious that he uses it only in one part of the book. do you have any ideas why that might be? i'm also very interested in why you refer to it as the 'pluperfect PARTICLE'. in fact, that's what my very speculative little story says it is, a particle rather than a real verbal item, so i'd very much like to know if that's what you meant and if this has been discussed anywhere in the literature. a dank! ellen prince 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 96 15:24:15 +0200 From: mash@weizmann.weizmann.ac.il Subject: Soviet Yiddish songs In Vol. 5.219 Iosif Vaisman gives the words of a Soviet Yiddish song: lomir trinken a lekhaim, let's drink ai-ai-ai, ai-ai-ai, far dem leibn ayer naye, for your new life ai-ai-... far oktiabr revolutsie, for October revolution ai-ai-... un far stalin konstitutsie, and for Stalin's constitution ai-ai-... Vaisman asks for possible more of it and its author. I have no knowledge about the author. To my surprise, I the yekke know one more doublet which surely is later than the late 1930's Reb Vaisman gave as the date of the song (leaving out the ai-ai..): Romenien hot gekhapt a shvartsen sof for dos sol leben khaver molotov. Otherwise the version I know is the similar with just minor changes. Michael Shimshoni 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 17:33:47 EST From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: dead/dying languages to arnie herschorn: as for whether the passing of the last speaker of some language brings a tear to my eye, it depends on a number of things. 1. as a linguist: it brings a tear to my eye if the language has not been adequately documented, which, given today's technology, would include compiling a vast database of the spoken language in a variety of registers and social contexts, uttered by the full range of speakers (with respect to age, class, geographic origin, etc etc etc). 2. as a person: it brings a tear to my eye if the reason that this is the last speaker is that all the other speakers have been killed. if, on the other hand, all the other would-be speakers are alive and well but have chosen (or their parents/grandparents/... have chosen) to speak another language, then i see nothing to cry over. i value the freedom to speak whatever language you like and to raise your children in that language over the survival of a language. don't you? >Adjust now to the fact that Yiddish no longer lives and avoid the bitter >disappointment later. up till now, i have carefully avoided discussing yiddish per se in this discussion. but let me now say what i think, for what it's worth. of course none of us can see into the future, but, if the present trends continue, i would predict that yiddish is _not_ dying but will remain alive in certain ultra-orthodox speech communities in various parts of the world. now of course, all living languages are in a constant state of change, and therefore yiddish will change too. i would predict that it will change at an above-average rate from the yiddish of pre-war eastern europe or the maurice schwartz era, since the new speech community will be very different demographically, socially, and linguistically from the old ones. (demographically and socially, the new one will be a proper subset of the old ones; linguistically, the 'coterritorial language' will be different -- modern hebrew, new york/london/melbourne english, what have you.) interestingly, if this comes to pass, the new yiddish will have one thing very much in common with the old yiddish: it will be an in-group language of a community living in the midst of a larger and different community but interacting with that larger community in only restricted ways. one other thought. it is very easy to think of the holocaust as the reason for the uncertain status of yiddish today, and surely the annihilation of millions of speakers _is_ an inescapably important point. at the same time, there are millions of jews in the world today who do not speak yiddish and whose ancestors did and their story has nothing to do with the holocaust but rather with assimilation (or 'self-deghettoization' -- choosing to stop living apart from the larger community around them), migration (both from the villages to the cities of eastern europe and from eastern europe to the rest of the world), and the concomitant language-shift. i happen to be such a person and i suspect that most mendelniks who are not fluent yiddish speakers are also such people. it is even quite possible that the same discussion would be taking place today if the holocaust had never occurred, tho with a few million more people, may they rest in peace. ellen prince 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 01:06:50 +0000 From: bugel@innet.be Subject: Life and death of language Reading the recent contributions about the living and dying of languages, I merely wish to point that life or death of a language has nothing to do whatsoever with the number of persons who speak it. A language is dead only when it becomes monolytic, preserved, no longer alive in the very meaning of that word, no longer reacting to outside stimuli, no longer changing, no longer acquiring or shaping new words, no longer developing dialects, etc. Living is a proces, and as soon as language isn't in proces anymore, it's dead. This can happen despite the fact that a language is being used for ritual purposes, prayers etc. A language can be dead years, even centuries, before people stop using it to those ends. Continued usage, on the other hand, may make a later revival more probable, easier perhaps, but that's another story. A language can even be dead in a time when books are published in it, should those books be out of touch with time. Sitting here at my computer and reading Mendele, I did not get the impression that Yiddish is in acute danger, that is, as long one doesn't try to hard to preserve it as it is, or was. Daniel Bugel ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.233