Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 145 January 22, 1993 1) Our busy readers (Khaim Bochner) 2) Hek/gdesh (Mikhl Herzog) 3) Pedantry (David Sherman) 4) Mess (David Sherman) 5) Pedantry revisited (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 20 Jan 93 17:47:54 -0500 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: RE: Our busy readers Dave Sherman's example has reminded me that publications need not be related to Yiddish ... Bochner, Harry (1992), "Simplicity in Generative Morphology", Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. -- Khaim 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 08:17 EST From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.Columbia.edu Subject: Hek/gdesh Concerning "hek/gdesh": the term was applied to a communal facility for the old and sick poor. Bedlam? Mikhl Herzog. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 10:20:11 -0500 From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.CA Subject: Pedantry, and yeshiva English I fully agree with Dovid Braun's comments about Yiddish being used in more "sophisticated" environments than we sometimes give it credit for. I'm watching my own Yiddish develop as Ariela (our oldest) gets older and discussions with her need to move up a level. (She'll be 9 in a few months.) I may have to develop a whole vocabulary for income tax! > From: jfinger@mv.us.adobe.COM > At the very least, frumme yidn would understand > the term "kapdan". I haven't run into kapdan in everyday conversation, but in modern Judaeo-English it's quite normal to describe someone as "being makpid on" some issue. (Same Hebrew root, of course.) One can be makpid both on religious matters and on non-religious issues (e.g., how carefully a picture is hung on a wall). Is there any current research or scholarship on today's Judaeo-English in North America, as found in the yeshiva world and in Orthodox communities? A normal English speaker would probably have quite some difficulty understanding ordinary conversation in certain circles, due to the number of borrowings from Hebrew and Yiddish. My (anecdotal) sense is that this trend is growing, possibly in tandem with the steady progression of the Orthodox world to the right. Perhaps it's a psychological substitute for the large portion of the modern frum community who can't/don't speak Yiddish, but want the same "withdrawal" from secular society that Yiddish provides to the Chassidic world. Comments? David (Daniel Moishe) Sherman 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 10:39:45 EST From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.CA Subject: Mess > This, of course, is a Fundamental Vocabulary Word for those > of us who speak Yiddish to young kids on a daily basis. On rereading my own posting in Mendele, I'm reminded of the days I spent as a guest of Rabbi Alpern and his family (a Lubavitcher family) in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1971. We'd lived in Brazil from 1968-70 and I returned to visit friends. At the time I spoke no Yiddish. The Alperns spoke Yiddish with their young children. I vividly remember the Rebbetzin coming into the living room, where the kids had strewn toys around, and saying "Vos hostu gemakht aza bagunc,a!" (The "c," is c-cedilla; bagunc,a is the standard word for mess in Sao Paulo Portuguese.) Evidently the lack of a good word for "mess" in Yiddish is widespread. I don't recall the Alperns' Yiddish including a large number of borrowed words from Portuguese. David (Daniel Moishe) Sherman 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thur, 21 Jan 93 14:25:19 EST From: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Subject: Pedantry revisited (der shames farentfert zikh) Thanks to those who've corrected me in the matter of a Yiddish word for pedant. My question was badly put. I was much less interested in the existence of a _word_ for pedant than in the _idea_. Here's my last sentence: Or--and I guess this is my point--the concept. In other words, even if Mikhl is right that my (imaginary) feter and tante would have known about medakdek and maybe even Jeff Finger's kapdan, the question really was: is there a Yiddish word for "one who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.."(AHD)? Is there a Yiddish word for the kind of dry sterile scholar that the English word conveys? I can't think of one. I base my remarks not on what I hear because what I hear (among the elderly members of the Yiddish group I run at the local Home) is pretty elementary at best. Yiddish literature, however, is full of references to learned men and there are dozens of expressions to sort through (this is particularly true of Chaim Grade). But they are all, without exception, terms of praise and respect. A Jew who knows his way around di kleyne oyseyes is someone to be reckoned with, not scorned or laughed at. Is there anywhere in Yiddish fiction the counterpart of George Eliot's Mr. Casaubon or Goethe's Wagner? I've never run across one. Is it fair to infer the lineaments of a culture (and social structure) from what's missing? That's what I was trying to do. And still want to do. So I repeat my request for words (better: ideas) that aren't. Noyekh ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.145