Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 6.081
October 16, 1996

1) L. L. Zamenhof and Yiddish (Howard I. Aronson)
2) L. L. Zamenhof and Yiddish (Bob Rothstein)
3) L. L. Zamenhof and Yiddish (Irving D. Goldfein)
4) Yiddish vegetarian writers (Pawel Brunon Dorman)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 15:54:27 -0600
From: hia5@midway.uchicago.edu
Subject: L. L. Zamenhof and Yiddish

Ellen Prince (Mendele Vol 6.080) asked about whether L. L. Zamenhof, the
inventor of Esperanto, knew Yiddish. Although he apparently regarded
Russian as his first (and favorite) non-invented language, he clearly
was a speaker of Yiddish and, in fact, wrote a fascinating grammar of
Yiddish in Russian. The grammar was not published until 1982 with the
original Russian and a complete Esperanto translation. In it Zamenhof
argued for Latinization of the Yiddish writing system. He proposes a
literary pronunciation that is almost exactly the same as the YIVO norm.
A propos of another thread he states that one should spell 'auf' as
'af.' His proposed spelling norms totally reject the daytshmerish
orthography in favor of one reflecting actual Yiddish pronunciation. He
calls for a purging of daytshmerisms from the language. All in all, a
very "modern" approach for 1879-1882, the approximate time of
composition.

I don't know about the 'the,' but it is widely accepted that only one
purely Yiddish morpheme made it into Esperanto. This is the suffix (now,
basically, substantive) -edz-o 'husband,' which is viewed as a back
formation of -edz-in-o 'wife,' and which appears to derive from the
suffix -etsn in the word rebetsn.

By the way, Zamenhof's writings on Yiddish are collected in: Adolf
Holzhaus. "L. Zamenhof, Provo de gramatiko de novjuda lingvo- kaj
-Alvoko al la juda intelektularo. Helsinki, 1982.

Howard I. Aronson

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 22:49:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: rar@slavic.umass.edu
Subject: Zamenhof

Re Ellen Prince's question about Ludwig Zamenhof's native language:

According to Reyzen's _Leksikon_, Zamenhof's father, Marcus, and his
grandfather, Fabian, were both teachers of French and German in
Bialystok, then part of the Russian empire, where four
languages--Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish--were common. Reyzen says
nothing about his first language, but points out that Zamenhof once
thought that Yiddish, because of its widespread character, might serve
as a basis for an international language. Zamenhof spent three years
working on a Yiddish grammar, only fragments of which were ever
published (in a Yiddish periodical). In his publications on Yiddish he
suggested adopting the Latin alphabet for Yiddish.

In 1958 the editor of _Yidishe shprakh_, Yudel Mark, gently corrected a
reader who had asserted that Zamenhof's mother tongue was Russian.  He
argued that Zamenhof grew up in a bilingual milieu even if he learned
Russian as a child and heard Russian at home--and from his mother at
that (YS 18:80).

In a subsequent issue of the journal (YS 19 [1959]:30) another reader
expressed his surprise that Zamenhof had written for a Yiddish
periodical and worked on the language.  He related his own experience of
being visited daily by Dr. Zamenhof (who was an ophthalmologist) during
the four weeks in 1902 when he was a patient in a Jewish hospital in
Warsaw.  He reported that the doctor normally used Polish while making
his rounds, but since he (the patient) spoke little Polish, Zamenhof
spoke "a 'daytshn' yidish" with him.  He added that the doctor "[hot]
ober keyn mol nit oysgeredt keyn ekht yidish vort."  The editor (Mark)
conceded that this may have been true, but suggested that the strongly
anti-Yiddish attitude of the time would have made it difficult for a
doctor to deal officially with his patients in ordinary Yiddish, "nit
fardaytshndik a bisl zayn shprakh."  Mark added that it is conceivable
that a person could perfectly well write about linguistic matters in
Yiddish without being a fluent _speaker_ of the language.

Bob Rothstein

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:26:34 -0700
From: goldfein@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Zamenhof

A second-hand but reliable personal reference: my father has often told
me of his friendship with Zamenhof's daughter, in Warsaw. She told him
that her father had done quite a lot of writing in Yiddish, and had in
fact worked on a Yiddish grammar which was never published. His dream,
however, could have been in Russian, German, Hebrew or English -
languages with which he also had great facility.

Irving D. Goldfein

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 96 09:01:19 CET
From: dorman@plearn.edu.pl
Subject: Yiddish vegetarian writers

Is there someone who knows which Yiddish writer was vegetarian? or who
was writing about it? References would be enough.

It would be great help - because I will publish booklet about famous
vegetarian people.

Pawel Brunon Dorman

______________________________________________________
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