Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.282 March 13, 1996 1) Zin/zun (Jonathan Bellman) 2) Prezhnitse (David Sherman) 3) Prezhnitse (Dovid Braun) 4) Tel-Aviv street named after Mortkhe Gebirtig (Leonard Prager) 5) International Yiddish Conference (Miki Safadi) 6) "Az me git..." (Bernard Katz) 7) "A libe iz an umglik af der velt" (Marti Krow-Lucal) 8) CLusters and voicing (Neil Jacobs) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 14:11:37 -0700 (MST) From: jdbellm@bentley.univnorthco.edu Subject: Zin/Zun A personal and wholly unscholarly contribution on this issue: My maternal grandmother would, in bursts of affection, squeeze me and call out "mei' sheyne _zin_!" Not in the plural, and filially slightly incorrect, as I was her grandson. I remember this very clearly; it happened many times. Grandma was born and raised in Proskurov; she spent one year as a 17-year-old working as an au pair for a well-off family in Poland. Are we sure that the zun-zin homonym is only limited to one small district of the Polish-Lithuanian border? Jonathan Bellman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 96 10:05:28 EST From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca Subject: Prezhnitse Stuart Noah asks [5.280] about "Prezj'nyet'seh" for fried matzo. While fried matzo to me is matse bray (pronounced "braa"), I've heard prezhnitse used by Shmuel Rudzhinski in a taped skit of Sholem Aleykhem's "Kasrilivke restoranen": "Makht mir a prezhnitse fun a por eyer". I looked it up at the time (no Weinreich handy at the moment) and found it was an omelet, or scrambled eggs. The skit is a riot to listen to, by the way. David Sherman 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 00:37:00 EST From: dovid@mit.edu Subject: Prezhnitse pre'zhnitse (this is the way I know it; U. Weinreich's _Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary_ lists the form pre'zhenitse) is 'scrambled eggs'. I've never heard of it being restricted to fried eggs with matse (i.e. what most of the rest of us call matse-bray) -- that's curious. Btw, cf. Mendele archives for interesting discussion (perhaps some recipes too) of matse-bray. I recall some interesting discussion of it a few years ago. Dovid Braun Cambridge, MA 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 96 11:46:26 IST From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il Subject: Tel-Aviv street named after Mortkhe Gebirtig Today, the 13th of March 1996, at 11:30 A.M. at 4219 St. in Kfar Shalem, on the fifty-third anniversary of the destruction of the Cracow ghetto, in the presence of Mayor Ronnie Milo, a street in Tel-Aviv - Jaffa will be named after Mortkhe Gebirtig, the Yiddish poet and composer (as advertised by the Municipality of Tel-Aviv -Jaffa) on p. 13 of _Ha-Arets_ of 13.3.96). Leonard Prager 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 07:23:42 -0800 From: msafadi@ucla.edu Subject: International Yiddish Conference A dank tsu Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan far ihr iberblik fun dem yidishn conference in Miami. Vi kenen mir zayn in kontakt mit di reders? S'iz doh a meglekhkayt tsu bakumen kopies fun die redes? Miki Safadi 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 12:29:06 -0500 (EST) From: bkatz@uoguelph.ca Subject: "Az me git..." Pinyeh Weichsel (5.277) asks about the addition of "men" to the end of this saying. I too found the lack of this word jarring and at odds with the Yiddish I learned from both my central Polish and Galizyaner meshpokhe. Lo'mir zogen azoy: Az me git, nemt men! Bernard Katz Guelph, Ontario 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 15:52:20 -0500 From: kromobile@aol.com Subject: "A libe iz an umglik af der velt" Is anyone acquainted with the song _a libe iz an umglik af der velt_? I have all the words and half the music, but I am missing the second half, and I would like my Yiddish chorus to be able to sing it. In the truncated copy I have, it is listed as a folk song. If anyone could tell me of a songbook in which it appears, I would be very grateful. A sheynem dank aykh. Marti Krow-Lucal Sunnyvale 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 16:06:33 -0500 (EST) From: njacobs@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu Subject: CLusters and voicing I have a follow-up question to my posting on syllable onsets and voicing. Again, my concern here is NOT about varieties such as Northeastern Yiddish which have anticipatory voicing assimilation when obstruents collide (e.g., NEY *ikh shik dir* > shi[g] [d]ir ). In these non-NEY-like varieties, what happens to, say, the /g/ in *der kligster* ? In some material I'm working on, I am so far assuming that it gets devoiced, based on the phonological cycle in which there is no inflectional ending after the superlative marker, that is, /klig/ + /st/ --> [klikst]. (Again, this is a cyclic approach, and ignores, at least here, whether or not a "base superlative" occurs by itself.) In such non-NEY varieties of Yiddish, we normally wouldn't expect anticipatory voicing assimilation in, say, *tog-seminar* to to[k s]eminar. So, my question is mostly about what linguists out there might have heard from native informants in inflected superlatives, where the adjective base ends in an underlying voiced obstruent, i.e., klig - ster or klik-ster ? (Of course, a further complication concerns the fact that some varieties are going to have a voiceless [k] here due to a final-devoicing rule, anyway. But there are some varieties which, presumably, lack both anticipatory voicing and final devoicing [SEY-types]). Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this. Neil Jacobs ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.282