Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 6.240
February 25, 1997

1) Ende oysiyes (Rick Turkel)
2) Ende oysiyes (Ruth Fisher Goodman)
3) Ende oysiyes (Ellen Prince)
4) Ende oysiyes (Meinhard E. Mayer)
5) Place names (Harold L. Orbach)
6) Place names (Mikhl Herzog)
7) Yiddish songs in translation (Sema Chaimovitz Menora)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 11:04:55 -0500
From: rturkel@cas.org
Subject: Ende oysiyes

David Herskovic fregt in Mendele 6.238:

   Was there ever a movement to remove the end letters from the
   Yiddish orthography? And if so, why?

This was common usage in Soviet times.  I believe it was part of the
attempt to eliminate any connection between the Yiddish language and
the religious background associated with the Hebrew alphabet.  The
strangest part of this, of course, was spelling words and names of
Hebrew origin (e.g., khometz, odom, ruvn, etc.) using the orthographic
rules used for the Germanic and Slavic component of Yiddish (e.g.,
khaf-alef-mem-ayin-tzadi, alef-dalet-alef-mem, resh- vov-veis-nun,
respectively) and without ende-oysiyes.

I have a small Russian-language paperback book entitled "Alphabets of
the Languages of the Peoples of the USSR, published in Moscow in
1965,that does show the ende oysiyes, but I never saw anything written
there in Yiddish since WWII that used them.  The first time I ever
encountered this was at the memorial in Minsk to those who were killed
by the Nazis, the inscription on which was written in Russian and
Yiddish.

Rick Turkel

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 15:46:25 -0500 (EST)
From: ruthfg@aol.com
Subject: Yiddish alphabet end letters

With regard to yiddish final consonants such as nun, tsadi, mem,
fay--a Russian immigrant now 77 years of age whose Yiddish school was
closed when he was ten was not taught the final consonants mentioned
above.  He is originally from Berditchev.  I can only assume that this
is the way they wrote, or they put off teaching the young children the
end final consonants until they were older.  There is no one older
that he in my community who emigrated recently to give me that
information.

Ruth Fisher Goodman
Wilmington, DE

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 11:15:15 EST
From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: Ende oysiyes

a. joseph ross [6.239] explains the soviet orthography changes as
being due to hebrew's being 'considered the language of religion and
zionism, both of which were anathema to soviet ideology.'

let's keep our time frame straight -- the orthographic modifications
were a long time ago; the ussr was, i believe, the second country to
recognize israel in 1948. besides, there is no reason for them to have
believed that the state of israel would endow the alphabet with sacred
status. so i see no evidence that the orthography issue had anything
to do with zionism. if there is any, i'd love to hear about it.

ellen prince

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 21:41:53 PST
From: hardy@lynx.ps.uci.edu
To: mendele@shakti.cc.trincoll.edu
Subject: Lange oysies

In Mendele Vol 6.239 hobn etlekhe fraynd bamerkt vegn Sovietish-
yidisher ortografie (ode orfografie vi me zogt in Rusland).
Ikh hob zikh gelernt in yidishe shuln in Ratnfarband in 1940/41 un
1944/45 ven dos iz geven di ofitsiele ortografie. Ikh ken mikh nokh
haynt nisht geveynen mit di lange oysies, etlekhe ekstra oysies (sin
vos me hot farbayt of samekh, nor eyn os farn kh u. a. v.).  Ikh gefin
az di fonetishe transkriptsie fun dem ashkenazishn variant fun
hebreish iz bazunders bakvem (shabes is nisht shabat un git-shabbes
nist shabat shalom). Leynen Tevye's "hebreizmen" fonetish iz asakh
bakvemer vi aroystsuzukhn dem hebreishn verterbukh.

Di reforme iz gekumen fun di yidishe shrayber gufe, nisht funen
"tsentral-komitet" un hot reflektirt di modernizatsie fun dem
Russishn alfabet nok 1917: vu me hot eliminirt "yery, tvyordyi znak,
etc" kedey tsu "fonetizirn" di shprakh.

Oykh di popularitet fun shrayb-mashines hot mistame geshpilt a rol.
Der Ratnfarband hot oykh arayngefirt lataynishe oysies in etlekhe
mitl-azyatishe shprakhn.

S'iz vert zikh oykh tsu dermanen in di experimentn in di 30-er yorn
tsu banutsn lataynishe transkriptsies -- oykh fonetish (azoy vi mir
zaynen getsvungen dorkhn kompyuter).  A sheyn moshl fun dem iz di
kleyne poetishe antologie:

"Naje Jidi`se dichtung"  Oisgeklibn un tsunojfge`stelt: Chaim
Ginninger, Note Helfer, Hersch Segal, Itzik Schwarz, Seminar far jid.
Literatur un `sprachkentni`s, 'Cernovits 1934 96 zaytlekh.

Note Helfer = Izik Manger.

---
English summary: I was in a yiddish high-schhol in Soviet Czernowitz
in 1940/41 and 1944/45, and was exposed to the phonetic rendering of
Yiddish with a reduced hebrew alphabet.  I enjoyed being able to read
Tevye's hebraisms without recourse to a Hebrew dictionary (or a
melamed).  In my opinion this rationalization was not so much
"anti-hebrew" but in line with the simplification of the Russian
alphabet, and the introduction of Latin letters for several
Central-Asian languages (on the other hand, Moldavian -- which is a
Romanian dialect was converted to  cyrillic letters, obviously for
political reasons).

I am also calling attention to Latin renering of Yiddish and a nice
antology of poetry published in Czernowitz by Ginninger, Mangr, Segal,
and Schwarz (see the transcription above).

Meinhard E. Mayer

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 11:01:43 -0600 (CST)
From: hlorbach@ksu.edu
Subject: Place names as history

With all due respect to Noyekh's concern over the stretching of
discussion on the topic, my remark about Lodz and Lodzers was meant to
emphasize that in a too short time there will be no more people who
call themselves Lodzers and pronounce the name of a certain now Polish
city 'Lodz' because they or their parents or grandparents lived as
Lodzers. I imagine the same is true of most of the examples others
have given. Memories will no longer speak.

The way different languages, i.e., peoples, speak or spell given place
names is a matter of history for the curious of later times when those
people or languages are no longer living or present in those places --
and mendelayners have given fine examples of this phenomenon.  But it
is the living usage by the "native" speakers that I meant to address.
And those who were Lodzers did not speak or write Lodz as anything but
'Lhodz'(in Yiddish script, of course) to each other.

Paris was (is ?) 'Paname' to the French-speaking inhabitants of its
quartiers populaires, but you won't find it on any maps.  Geneva can
be found on Swiss train time-tables as 'Geneva/Geneve/Genf', but in
Muenchen it appears only as 'Genf'.  And only on diplomas or medals or
other places where its official seal appears will you find my alma
mater's name written as Collegii Urbus Nov Eborac but I never heard
anyone speak thus of the College of the City of New York.  But perhaps
they did when a good number of the members of its community knew and
used Latin because it was a required part of their education.

Harold L. Orbach
Manhattan, Kansas

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 97 12:58 EST
From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu
Subject: Place names

Concerning place names like _shvarts-time_ and _tseylem_ which "play
on the sound, form, or (especially) the meaning of the official name,
and involve folk etymologies often laced with irony" see _Language and
Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry_ Volume II, page 88.

Mikhl Herzog

7)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 22:58:39 -0500 (EST)
From: lights4607@aol.com
Subject: Yiddish songs in translation

Re Lisa Tomlinson's concern about mixed language versions of Yiddish
songs such as Reyzele (Vol 6.238), I feel that if the Yiddish world is
to be kept alive among non-100 percent Yiddishists, translations
interspersed with the original Yiddish should be perfectly acceptable
and even encouraged. "Reyzele" happens to be the song which I have
been singing one of my granddaughters to sleep with for several years
now.  I have had to interject my own English here and there, and it
would certainly have been nice to have some official English
translation that flowed with the Yiddish.

Sema Chaimovitz Menora

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End of Mendele Vol. 6.240