Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 1 no. 15
June 6, 1991
 
1) Introduction (Ellen Prince)
2) Introduction (Eva-Maria Jansson)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 91 14:35:55 -0400
From: Ellen Prince <ellen@central.cis.upenn.EDU>
Subject: RE: Vol 1.14 Introductions

first, let me join mina graur in congratulating you on
your initiative and thanking you for your hard work.

my name is ellen prince, and i'm a professor of lin-
guistics at the university of pennsylvania. my main
interest is the discourse functions of syntax--how we
know in what contexts to use the many syntactic forms
that we can generate. i work on english and, for the
past 8 years or so, on yiddish, and have also been
involved in research on a bunch of other european,
asian, and african languages. a secondary interest of
mine is in language contact phenomena--what happens
when languages interact in the heads/mouths of
bilinguals--and have  worked or directed work on yid-
dish-english, yiddish-spanish, arabic-english, fula-
mande-french (senegal), catalan-spanish, tagalog-span-
ish-english (philippines), and japanese-english lan-
guage-mixing. and i'm always happy to hear comments and
anecdotes from all you bilinguals! a dank aykh.

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 91 09:21:47 +0100
From: Eva-Maria.Jansson@teol.lu.se
Subject: introduction

Here is an introduction from one of the junior members
of this distinguished society.  My name is Eva-Maria
Jansson, so far my only achived title is a BA (Humani-
ties).  My corner of the world is at Lund University,
Sweden, at the Dept. of History of Religions, where we
have a new Section for Jewish Studies (with the first
chair of Jewish Studies in Scandinavia, apart from ]bo,
Finland, where Jewish Studies is part of the Bible
Dept.s) and where I am engaged as assistant lecturer. 
I hope to be doing a thesis on aspects of Jewish magic,
preferably amulets.  So what about my interest in
Yiddish?  Well, I B Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize
in literature and was widely published in Sweden when I
was even younger than I am now; reading him brought me
to where I am now, doing research in Jewish Studies. 
This interest also brought me to the Yiddish summer
course of Hebrew U. in '88, but alas I have forgotten
most of learnt. You don't get that many opportunities
of keeping the language alive in Sweden (even though
the interest is growing). Hope you were not too bored
with this little expose of Scandinavia and what we are
doing up here.
 
Eva-Maria Jansson
 
Eva-Maria.Jansson@teol.lu.se
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End of Mendele Vol 1.015