Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 6.177
January 1, 1997

1) How many colleges teach Yiddish? (David Goldberg)
2) Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax (Joachim Neugroschel)
3) Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax (Ellen Prince)
4) GrineR gal (Joachim Neugroschel)
5) Grine verem (Hugh Denman)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 96 12:32:52 EST
From: david.goldberg@smtpgwy.mla.org
Subject: How many colleges teach Yiddish?

I write in response to Stanley Werbow's inquiry about colleges offering
courses in Yiddish in Mendele 6.163.

The MLA periodically (every 4 or 5 years since 1968) asks postsecondary
institutions' registrars about how many students are enrolled in
credit-bearing courses in languages other than English. How responsibly
registrars separate language classes from classes about language (e.g.,
reading literature in translation) we cannot say, but the numbers for
Yiddish in the Fall semester of 1995 are as follows: 19 institutions in
the US report having students enrolled in credit-bearing undergraduate
Yiddish classes, 5 of those 19 report enrollments in graduate courses as
well.  The total number of enrollments is 656.

This number (as I wrote in a previous posting) is double that of the
number recorded for 1990. The increase appears to be the result of data
supplied by two rabbinical academies that reported registrations of 200
and 180 students, so these students' classes may not fit the image of
college Yiddish classes that Stanley Werbow had in mind. (They do fit
the MLA's description of classes in languages other than English, even
if they aren't studying Weinreich's College Yiddish or reading Moyshe
Leyb Halpern.) How many colleges offer noncredit bearing courses through
evening or extension programs, Hillels, and so on, would be interesting
to know.

David Goldberg

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 14:59:11 -0500 (EST)
From: achim1@cris.com
Subject: Tenses in German and Yiddish

[see also: Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax]

I'm not quite sure what Hugh Denman is referring to when he writes [Vol.
6.176] that German applies the sequence of tenses...like Latin and the
Romance languages.  German has very strict rules of sequences, but they
differ widely from Romance usage--as do the Yiddish sequences.

Yid:  "Oyb ikh volt gekent, volt ikh gegangen.
Ger:  "Wenn ich koennte, ginge ich" (or else use the composed
	conditional in both clauses).
Eng:  "If I could" [simple past tense, except for "were"), I would
	go" (composed conditional).
French:  "Si je pouvais" [past tense], j'y irais (simple
      conditional).

In Yiddish and in German the same tense is used in both the if-clause
and the then-clause, but the tenses are not identical in English or
French (or any of the other Romance languages).  And as I wrote in
another posting, I don't think the "war" in the Remarque passage is good
usage.  In German and Yiddish, the tense of indirect discourse is always
the same as the tense of direct discourse. "Er hot gezogt, 'Ikh ken
nisht.' "Er hot gezogt az er ken nisht."

"Er hat gesagt, "Ich kann nicht."
"Er hat gesagt, er koenne nicht" or , dass er nicht kann" (or a few
variants thereof)

English: "He said he couldn't. French:  "Il a dit qu'il ne pouvait pas"
(or possibly "pourrait pas" with a slightly different nuance.

I may have misunderstood Hugh, but the German (and Yiddish) tense
sequences are very different from those in the Romance languages and in
English.

Joachim Neugroschel

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 15:12:00 EST
From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: Slavic influence on Yiddish syntax

re german being an sov (subj-obj-verb) language, hugh denman points out
[6.176] that old high german has 'very fluid word order', which persists
into middle high german. i am not a germanist (as must be apparent from
my shameful ignorance even of modern german!) but i must point out that
'very fluid word order' can (and, to my knowledge, always is by modern
syntacticians) be taken to be a surface phenomenon and is therefore not
inconsistent with an underlying sov (or any other) word order. for
example, russian permits all possible word orders on the surface but is
taken to be underlyingly svo. in any event, i'd be interested in hearing
more about ohg and mhg word order and in particular about the word order
in luther's bible that hugh notes is quite similar to yiddish.

re 'sequence of tenses': could hugh or joachim or any other german
speaker tell me if joachim's sentence can have the second interpretation
as well as the first:

	Er sagte mir, dass er krank ist.
	1. he told me that he was (and still is) sick.
	2. he told me that he was (but no longer is) sick.

modern (american?) english is losing some of its sequence of tense
properties and 'he told me that he is sick' is perfectly acceptable --
but only in the context where he's _still_ sick. similarly, 'he told me
that he will leave' is also fine -- but only where his leaving is future
with respect to _my_ saying, i.e. where he hasn't left yet. as i
understand it, yiddish 'er hot mir gezogt, az er iz krank' is the way to
say it even if he's now well, just so long as he was sick when he told
me about it, and 'er hot mir gezogt az er vet avekforn' is ok even when
he has already left. and i understand that slavic is like yiddish in
this respect. so, the question for you german speakers -- is german like
modern (american?) english or like slavic in this? (or none of the
above. ;) ) a dank.

re 'zikh' and polish and my reply to meyer-leyb last week, it turns out
that i totally misunderstood his point! we've cleared this up in email
but, so long as hugh brings it up, i wish to say publicly 'mea culpa,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.' :-)

finally, in response to hugh's saying that 'the slavic impact on yiddish
syntax is more far-reaching than ellen believes', i must say that i
believe the impact was _enormous_ my beef with some of the claims is
simply in HOW this impact came to be -- i don't think it was a matter of
just borrowing a particular _form_, since i don't see the evidence for it
and don't know of any currently credible theory of grammar that could
handle it, and i think a lot of what has been claimed to be syntactic
borrowing is in fact semantic or pragmatic borrowing -- but i do believe
there was a huge and largely unexplored impact all the same, which came
about in other ways. just wanted to get that on the record (for which
opportunity i thank hugh!).

happy new year, everyone!

ellen prince

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 15:24:49 -0500 (EST)
From: achim1@cris.com
Subject: GrineR gal

the Yiddish idiom about green bile has been mentioned in several
postings recently, but I wonder about the adjectival ending.  since
"gal" is feminine and since every Yiddish preposition (but one) takes
the dative, I believe the phrase should read "mit griner gal" and not
"mit grine gal". a number of postings seem indifferent to case and
gender endings/ when in doubt check Weinreich's College Yiddish. der
yidisher idiom vegn griner gal hot men tsitirt etlekhe mol bay Mendele.
ober ikh meyn az "mit grine (sic!) gal" is falsh.  "gal" is
loshen-nekeyve, un ale yidishe prepozitsies (akhuts einer) nemen dem
dativ--to darf men zogn "mit grineR gal"....

Joachim Neugroschel

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 1997 16:26:00 +0100 (MET)
From: h_denman@maier.vol.at
Subject: Grine verem

This colourful topic seems to have caught the imagination of the khevre,
so I venture to augment Meyer-Leyb Wolf's recent list of parallel
phrases [6,176 .2] with the following (not included by Stutshkoff, but
culled from the Groyser Verterbukh):

onkumen mit maternish, mit gebrente tsores, mit biterkayt, mit khreyn, and
also: mit kries-yam-sof.

The latter example leads me to speculate whether all this bitter
suffering might not be (subliminally?) associated in people's minds with
the afflictions endured in the Land of Egypt, the morer of the seyder
(often represented by khreyn in Eastern Europe) and the travails of the
ensuing exodus, one of whose more distasteful vicissitudes included the
worms (tola'im; Yehoyesh: "un es iz gevorn verimdik") of Exodus 16:20
(i.e only a couple of pages after the crossing of the Red Sea). But
where does the "grin" (= "kupern"?) come from? This detail is as curious
in the case of the worms as it is the case of the gall. I don't recall
ever having seen any gall, but isn't it supposed to be yellow? After
all, "gal" is ultimately cognate with "gel" and why otherwise would it
be called "zolc" (talk about noyekh mit zibn grayzn, that's four
diacritics missing in four letters! - role on unicode!) in Polish?
Perhaps some (entomologically-minded?) mendelyaner can take this
further.

Hugh Denman
London

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End of Mendele Vol. 6.177