Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 17 June 6, 1991 1) Comments on mekhutn (Leonard Prager) 2) Sociolinguistics and geolinguistics (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 09 Jun 91 10:19:25 IST From: leonard Subject: Comments on mekhutn Mikhl Herzog's comments [Vol 1.16] are first-rate, but i think "Vos bistu mir far a mekhutn" is better trans- lated 'Who are you to me?' The idea of pretense is, of course, present, yet 'pretender' doesn't seem to be the best gloss of _mekhutan_ in the isolated phrase -- in certain contexts it might fit fine. The phrase ex- presses rejection of familiarity, closeness or intimacy which is in some way seen as not being bona fide, i.e. pretended, unearned, unjustified, etc. yours, lp 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 5 Jun 91 19:26 EDT From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.BITNET Subject: du, ir, and regional differences [From a letter to Noyekh Miller] Now to the exclamation marks (!). They're motivat- ed by i) Leonard Prager's correction of your transcrip- tion and, ii) Your expression of thanks to me the other day. You wrote "a shaynem dank aykh". This provides me with an excuse for both a "sociolinguistic" and a "geolinguistic" diversion. Re i) "aykh": I guess that I am as "native" a speaker of Yiddish as one born in Canada can be, apparently quite bilin- gual from the start. I had Yiddish-speaking peers, many of us who went through the Yiddish school system to- gether, but we spoke only English to one another. Hence, everyone I spoke Yiddish to addressed me with "du" and, except for parents and their siblings, I addressed everyone as "ir". (The associated verbs are "dutsn" and "irtsn".) The first time I ever remember having been ad- dressed as "ir" --and by people of my own age and older--is when I came to NY as a graduate student. I always felt like looking around for the person being addressed. I'd somehow failed to anticipate the problem and, frankly, it disconcerted me. The problem was further complicated when first-name relationships developed and I found people saying "Mikhl, efsher vilt ir . . . .". The next complication was the result of speaking Yiddish to my students to whom I was inclinbed to say "du" but who were entitled to "ir" if only as a lesson in sociolinguistic correctness. Finally, I discovered that liberation could be achieved through the simple mechanism of one of the two parties concerned saying to the other "efsher iz shoyn tsayt mir zoln zikh ufhern irtsn". There must be rules about who should say it to whom, but I have taken the bull by the horns, as you can see from the exclamation marks above. Re ii): "a shaynem dank aykh" Notice that you've written the same vowel in the 2nd and the 4th words. That cooccurrence is SO UNLIKELY (not impossible) that if it were truly characteristic of your speech, I'd catch the earliest flight to Hart- ford (?) to record you for posterity. The "ay" sequence is used to render the sound of the vowel in English "bite". Standard Yiddish (as well as Northeastern Yiddish and Volhynian Yiddish) is "a sheynem (to rhyme with English "plain") dank aykh"; In the Southern Ukraine: "a sheynem dank akh" (short "a" to rhyme with "dakh"); Central Yiddish (Poland, etc.): "a shaynem (to ryhme, more or less, with English "bite") dank a:kh (long a:; i.e. as in ma:n 'my' vs short "a" in "man" 'husband'). There is one town in Northeastern Poland, Wyszkow, if I recall correctly, (Yiddish Vishkeve), on record (de- cades ago) for the cooccurence of the same vowel, "ay", in the words represented by "sheyn" and "aykh". The cooccurence, which would lead to such anomalous se- quences as "a shayn vayb" ('a beautiful wife') would have interesting implications for the relative chronol- ogy of sound change. Do you know anyone from that town? It's one of the dialectologist's "missing links". Mikhl ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.017