Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 6.246
March 2, 1997

1) Ende oysiyes (Rick Turkel)
2) Ende oysiyes (A. Joseph Ross)
3) Ende oysiyes (Sholem Yafe)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 11:42:11 -0500
From: rturkel@cas.org
Subject: Ende oysiyes

I know I should probably stop beating a dead horse, but
ellen prince's question in Vol. 6.243:

     does anyone really think that there were non-jews in the kremlin
     who (a) could read the hebrew alphabet and (b) gave a damn how
     yiddish words were spelled?

demands an answer.

It was ellen who cautioned earlier (6.240) about "keeping our time
frame straight."  Of course there were no "non-Jews in the Kremlin
...," but there were plenty of _Jews_ there at the time who had been
raised in more or less frum, Yiddish-speaking households and who were
literate in Yiddish, from Trotsky on down.  Especially for them as
Communists, with all their anti-nationalist rhetoric, the idea that
Jews would maintain _any_ connection to their "antiquated" ways was
anathema. Many of the most strident anti-smoking advocates are
ex-smokers themselves.

     or is it so upsetting that the reform came from jews, and from
     jews who were among the most highly literate in yiddish nokh?

It's not upsetting, it's just a little hard to believe that, out of
the blue, the literati would favor excising an important cultural
element from the language as it had been written for hundreds of
years.

     on the contrary, it's the convention that the *right wing*
     adopted (and that survives today, at least outside the ex-ussr)
     that needs explaining -- how religious fanaticism intruding on a
     purely secular issue results in the failure to achieve the
     desired logical spelling reform.

As I understand it, there was little in the way of a right or left
wing within Yiddish much before the turn of the 20th century in
Eastern Europe.  Jewish society of that time and place was fairly
closed; most of those who gave up any semblance of religious
observance left the shtetl for the big city, and left Yiddish behind
as well.  Those who continued to use Yiddish (at least the men,
anyway) had at least some familiarity with Hebrew; that was the
setting in which the Hebrew component of Yiddish became incorporated
in to the language and in which the orthography as we know it in the
West crystallized.  It seems to me that you've got it backwards - it
was the secularists of a later time that came along and attempted to
alter a system that had been accepted universally and had always
served its purpose reasonably well. Even fairly uneducated women could
read the tzena ur'ena and other such literature in the traditional
orthography.

Rick Turkel

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 23:37:06 -0500 (EST)
From: lawyer@world.std.com
Subject: Soviet spelling "reform"

Ellen Prince wonders [6.243] how the spelling reform in the early USSR
could have been ordered from above, and thinks that this would have
had to be done by "non-jews in the kremlin who (a) could read the
hebrew alphabet and (b) gave a damn how yiddish words were spelled".

Non-Jews?  At that time, there were Jews highly-placed in the
Communist Party (Trotsky, for example) who could have been quite
knowledgeable about Yiddish and had ideological reasons for ordering a
spelling reform.  The early Communist Party, after the revolution,
tended to think of anti-semitism as one of those Bourgeoise and
Czarist notions that they were going to do away with. Anti-semitism
returned later, especially under Stalin.

A. Joseph Ross
Boston

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 03:18:41 -0500 (EST)
From: lakejaffe@aol.com
Subject: Sovetish Heymland spelling

This is with reference to the Soviet style of writing Yiddish, as
discussed by several people in Vol. 6.240.

I happen to have a copy of Sovetish Heymland No. 11 dated 1965.  Words
ending in kh use the long form, as we do. The same is true of words
ending in m, n, f, or ts.

The silent aleph is used as we do, before a vov or a yud when either
of these would otherwise be the first letter of the word.  What's
missing are veyz, khes, kof, sin, tof, and sof.

And guess what.  It's a pleasure to read!  Many English words are
derived from Greek, and we do quite well writing them with English
letters.  Would anybody vote to start writing them in Greek letters?!

So why can't Yiddish spell Yiddish words of Hebraic or Aramaic origin
in Yiddish style?  It can, and Sovetish Heymland did, and -- for a
guy like me -- it's a real pleasure! I don't have to search for the
unfamiliar-looking words in Steven Jacobson's valuable little book!

Sholem Yafe

______________________________________________________
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