Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no.21 June 12, 1991 1) Introduction (William Adelman) 2) Dutsn and irtsn (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 Jun 91 03:22:42 EDT From: William Adelman <72230.1066@CompuServe.COM> Subject: Introduction I'm William Adelman; I've never had the benefit of a Yiddish diminutive. I am senior majoring in English Literature, with an emphasis in Creative Writing. My only exposure to the language at hand has been while in Israel, and by picking up as much as has filtered into English. Once, in a fit, I decided to write the copy for a picture book called The Joy of Yiddish Sign Language, but my partner, the artist, dropped out, and it never got to page one. I won't have much to contribute at first, but as I learn the language(s), I hope to add something of value. Meanwhile, listening with open ears. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 Jun 91 From: Noyekh Miller (nmiller@trincc.bitnet) Subject: Dutsn and irtsn: a reply to Mikhl Herzog Thanks, Mikhl, for the distinction between Canadian and U.S. Yiddish in the matter of forms of address [Mendele Vol 1.17]. A naive observer might have predicted the exact opposite, Canada being supposed to be more formal than its south-ern neighbor. So how come it's the other way? I have an idea, but first let me describe the facts as I see them. Like you, I'm a native Yiddish-speaker (indeed Yiddish was first by about 5 years). I learned to use the intimate form when speaking to my parents and my grandparents. Period. My parents, in speaking to any adults other than their siblings, used 'ir' with their close friends and the third person 'zey' for everyone else. Even more remote like when my grandmother took me to our teler-lefel rov to pasken a shayle: 'vus zugt der rov, s'iz kusher?' And nothing strange about it: Yiddish like other European languages follows the rules. And is at least as age- and rank-conscious as the others. Two examples: my mother spoke one way or the other to her closest friend at least twice a day for 45 years. But it was Mrs. M. and Mrs. C. and 'ir' till the end. My grandparents and their oldest son used 'du' with my father, but it was 'ir' the other way. I once asked my father (when he was about 65 give or take) how come my uncle, his brother-in-law, got such special treatment. The answer: 'er iz elter'. Now I'll bet, Mikhl, that this situation obtained in Toronto as well. So how come we differ? I offer something along the lines of the Portuguese-Romanian hypothesis. (I forget the name it goes by among lin- guists, and it's anyway been discredited I have no doubt, but being a kind soul I trust you to let me down gently.) Canadian Jews were, for a whole variety of reasons which I wish someone would explore, under less pressure to assimilate, encouraged to develop their own educa- tional institutions, etc. As a result, Yiddish was far more likely to be a) studied in schools (you yourself went through the Yiddish school system) and b) perhaps Canadianized by the Canadian-born generation who assim- ilated the informal forms of English to Yiddish so that 'du' was used with comparative strangers as well. But Yiddish clearly had a different fate in the United States. The U.S. was more open, had more of an estab- lished community of German Jews to set the tone and veto anything that smacked of Jewish separatism of any kind, etc. Few of us went to Yiddish schools and those who did seem to have learned as little as the rest of us seem to have learned in heder. Item: never in my life have I _spoken_ Yiddish (other than words and phrases) to any of my cousins or friends or contempo- raries, many of whom speak Yiddish at least well as I do. Usual exceptions. Essentially 50 years of silence except for the Yiddish I speak with myself, but that's maybe more interesting to alienists than to members of this list. At any rate, one result for me and for others who left home as adolescents is a kind of froz- en, fossilized Yiddish. Assuming that my case is not atypical, I assume that this has something to do with the fixed belief on the part of many American Yiddish-speakers that the lan- guage has no rules; and more serious, the virtual disappearance of the idioms that make Yiddish such a colorful and witty language because such expressions (in an age-ranked culture) were off-limits to the young. The same rule applied I think to anything that in the young would have been seen as affected: many Hebrew expressions (e.g. al akhes kamo v'kamo) or flowery constructions (e.g. s'iz shoyn a zeyger akht) or ironic comments (afn boydem iz a yarid). Chilren in all cultures (see Miller's Fourth Law) are forbidden to touch irony, and a good thing too. The untershte shura would seem to be that the language spoken by one's cohort is ultimately more important than that of parents in determining the extent to which a language will be spoken at an adult and fully-devel- oped level. The foregoing is as you can see not the result of scholarship but of untrained speculation. Not being a linguist, the only remark that might hurt my feelings would be that it's a boring topic. Otherwise, fire away. I hope that others will want to join the dis- cussion. [A note on the European character of Yiddish. I wonder to what extent the Hebrew spoken and written in eastern Europe was influenced by Yiddish at least with respect to address. During the hakofes at simkhas toyra, for instance, it's customary for bystanders to say 'Ir zolt derleybn biz iber a yor un nokh a mol..' To which the proper response is 'gam atem'. I think I remember a letter to the Besht from his brother-in-law Reb Avrom Gershon Kitever with the same 'atem'. I don't know how widespread this and similar usages was, and I hope that someone on this list does know. Was the Hebrew of the early maskilim, for instance, free of European con- structions?] ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.21