Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.168 December 27 1) Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax (Joachim Neugroschel) 2) Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax (Meyer-leyb Wolf) 3) Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax (Joachim Neugroschel) 4) From Yiddish to other languages (Bob Werman) 5) Yiddish in colleges (Miki Safadi) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 12:25:11 -0500 (EST) From: achim1@cris.com Subject: Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax Re: Ellen Prince's suggestion (6.165) that Slavic usage may have affected the tenses in indirect Yiddish speech, i.e. "Er hot mir gezogt az er iz krank": Actually, that usage must have originated in German, which still practices it today (like Yiddish and the Slavic tongues). The sole difference is that in German you have two choices: the more bookish subjunctive: "Er hat mir gezagt, dass er krank _sei_" or: "Er hat mir gesagt, er sei krank. the more colloquial: "Er hat mir gesagt, dass er krank ist." The rule in German is the same as in Yiddish, most Slavic languages, and some medieval English: the tense of indirect discourse is the same as that of direct discourse (except that, as I've said, literary German puts the tensed verb in the subjunctive. The modern English practice is the same as that of the Romance languages, and I suspect that it may have been taken over from French: "He said he _was_ sick" = "Il a dit qu'il _etait_ (past imperfect) malade". Yiddish has far, far fewer tenses than German and certainly than English or Romance, so it has to husband them very carefully. Joachim Neugroschel 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 13:22:08 -0500 (EST) From: wolfim@chelsea.ios.com Subject: Slavic influences on Yiddish syntax The use of zikh for first and second persons as well as third is not universal in Eastern Yiddish -- many native Yiddish speakers use the accusative and dative forms of the personal pronouns, e.g. "Ikh vash mikh". So if Slavic influence is at work here, how come it affects some speakers but not others? Moreover, while the universal zikh users are quite happy with 'er hot zikh gekoyft a hoyz', Polish has 'kupil sobie dom' = er hot im gekoyft a hoyz -- so even in the third person "Slavic" doesnt always provide a model for undifferentiated zikh. It strikes me that the appeal to Slavic influence in the case of zikh raises more questions than it answers. Meyer-leyb Wolf 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 18:32:02 -0500 (EST) From: achim1@cris.com Subject: Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax In regard to the issue of Slavic influence on Yiddish, there's one area in which Slavic affected Yiddish by _reenforcing_ the latter's syntax rather than altering it--specifically, the second position of the verb. Both Yiddish and German tend to put the verb in second place within a main clause. But when asking a question without an interrogative word, the two languages go their separate ways: German: "Sprichst Du russich?" (= "Do you speak Russian?") The tensed verb is in_first_ place. Yiddish: "Tsi redtste rusish?" The tensed verb is in _second_ place because Yiddish requires the word "tsi" at the start of such a a yes-or-no question. Tsi, however, is part of the Slavic component, cognate with "czy" in Polish and parallel with "li" in Russian: "Li govorish po-rusky? (In German you can ease the abruptness of the question by adding an non-translatable adverb like "etwa" or "denn" or even "eigentlich" after the pronoun: "Sprichst Du denn russisch/Sprichst Du eigentlich russisch?" But the verb remains in first place. I find it mesmerizingly bizarre that a Slavic borrowing actually helped Yiddish _maintain_ its syntactic character. A connected issue is the inflection of a question: In an English question, the voice always goes up: "Where are you going?" but in German the voice rises only if there is no interrogative word: "Wohin gehst Du?" The voice goes down on the last word, but "Sprichst Du denn russisch?" The voice does up. In Yiddish, the voice seems to go up at the end of every question, but I wonder if there are regional differences. Can any natural speaker tell me if any question in any Yiddish dialect has a downward inflection? Joachim Neugroschel 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Dec 96 12:08 +0200 From: rwerman@vms.huji.ac.il Subject: From Yiddish to other languages Not only do the missionaries work by translating their texts into Yiddish, but they have also bothered, in times past, to translate Yiddish texts, mostly into Latin, in order to better understand the beliefs of the poor benighted Jews. Golda Werman, my wife these many years, writes about this phenomenon in two chapters of her book _Milton and Midrash_, 1995 [I dare not give more details. Otherwise this posting will be rightly placed in one of the Notices issues]. She deals with the 17th century translation of the _Tsena Rena_ into Latin at length and other works more briefly. Bob Werman 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 12:56:51 -0700 From: msafadi@ucla.edu Subject: Yiddish in colleges Stanley Werbow (Mendele Vol 6.163) bet a reshime fun kolejn un universitetn vos lernen Yiddish. Mir vos entfern him muzn zayn forzikhtik mit der informatsie. L'moshl, me zogt az in UCLA s'iz doh a program in Yiddish (durkh dem opteyl fun germanishe shprakhn un literatur). Ober merstns, me leynt ibergezetzte literatur un diskutirt es af english. Far a yor iz dokh geven a kors in Yiddish loshn, ober nor far unheybers, un ikh hob gehert, az es vet nit zayn keyn kontinuitet. Ba mir, heyst dos nisht keyn program in Yiddish. Fun der ander zayt, in University of Judaism (Los Angeles) iz dokh an emeser program in Yiddish loshn vos iz mamshikh yor nokh yor. Miki Safadi ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.168