Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 1 no. 105
November 20, 1991
 
1) The /i/ ending (Fayvel Miller)
2) Reply to Melekh Viswanath (Ellen Prince)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 91 12:57:53 PST
From: "Philip Miller, Dr." <BM.H2H%RLG@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: The /i/ ending

With regard to the recent communications concerning the weak
final vowel *a or *o > i, as in khali (bread)...

My grandmother from Boston (geborn gevorn in Suvalk) - not
to be confused with my other-grandmother-from-Providence-of
sissel-bread-fame (per last week's communications) - my
grand- mother from Boston said such things as /matsi/ at
Passover, /khaneki/, as in /khaneki gelt/, and /mitsvi/.
Not only that, she referred to my 13 year rite-de-passage
as a /bal mitsvi/, not /bar mitsvi/. Any comments anyone?
Might this be derived from the Hebrew /baaal mitsvah/?

Fayvel Miller (BM.H2H@RLG)

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 91 19:49:40 EST
From: Ellen Prince <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.104

>From: VISWANATH@DRACO.BITNET

>I observe that almost none of the words that undergo the
>schwa > /i/ transformation have a xxxccv (c=consonant,
>v=vowel) structure, whereas shikse and tshatshke do.
>According to this rule, pulke shouldn't become pulki, but
>don't l and r have quasi-vowel status? Also, shmate should
>become shmati, by this rule.  So maybe a modified rule: If
>the word is cvcschwa, it becomes cvci. Now that I read my
>hypothesis, it occurs to me that I may have no degrees of
>freedom left to test it!  (on the other hand, bobe, chmare,
>late, kale, etc.) In any case, I don't understand why ellen
>has an asterisk before moyshi and tati: I constantly hear
>them pronounced thus.

nice try, melekh, but it ain't going to work. for one
thing, there are exceptions, as you note. if you want to
discount pulki, what about tsatski? and shmate? also (never
with i): khupe (khipe), kale, shande, shayle (sha:le),
bima, moyre, shive, brokhe (brukhe), kashe, vate, khane,
sore (sure), etc etc.

in addition, as your last line shows, there is clearly
variation on this. on MY block it was never moyshi or tati,
believe me. in fact, it occurred in very few words, leading
me to infer that a phonological explanation of the sort you
suggest can't work, at least not in this 'dialect'. it
looks more like some crazy historical thing that maybe once
was regular (= rule-governed) , somewhere, but no longer
was by the time it got to brooklyn.

that said, one regularity i think i can find is that it
occurred (on my block) only in nouns. that is, no i in:
grine (or any other adjective), meyle, take, beyde, nudzhe
(verb: as in 'don't nudzhe me when i'm on the phone'), ...
of course, one would have to do a statistical analysis to
know if this is possibly due simply to how few words were
affected altogether. also, for those who said tshepi (no
one i knew), this would be false. but i think i can safely
say no non-nouns were affected in my variety of yinglish.
(i'm counting beyde here as a quantifier as well as a
noun.)

a gute (*guti) nakht.

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End of Mendele Vol 1.105