Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 2 no. 147 January 24, 1993 1) Gender of borrowed words (Khaim Bochner) 2) Gender of nouns; word meanings (Mikhl Herzog) 3) Gender of borrowed words (Ellen Prince) 4) Daniel/Doniel/Doniyel (David Sherman) 5) Here's the problem (Zev Kesselman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 16:11:48 -0500 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: RE: keeping gender of borrowed words David Sherman writes: > When words are borrowed into Yiddish from another language > where the word has a gender, is the gender preserved? > Borrowings from Hebrew are, but is that a special case? Alas, even this isn't right. "emes" is feminine in Hebrew, masculine in Yiddish. "rege" is masculine in Hebrew, feminine in Y. And the abstract nouns that end in -ut in H. tend to be neuter in Y. (but maybe that depends on dialect?) > Does the answer depend on whether the endings indicating > gender in the source language have any correspondence to > those in Yiddish? One factor is this: there's a strong tendency for nouns ending in -e to be feminine in Y. This accounts for a lot of the cases where Y & H agree (H has -ah, Y has -e): menoyre, mishpokhe, etc. But the -e doesn't have to be an ending: "rege" ends in -e just because the final ayin has become silent, but still the -e is probably the reason that the word is feminine in Yiddish. Shver tsu zayn a yidish-redner! -- Khaim 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 16:40 EST From: ZOGUR@CUVMB.Columbia.edu Subject: Gender of nouns; word meanings David Sherman: The donor language DOES NOT determine the gender of borrowed nouns in Yiddish; NOT even Hebrew! To wit:: Yiddish "der shabes", "dos ponim!". Actually, many Hebrew nouns were originally classified as neuters: dos mes, dos seyfer. The determining factors are, probably often, Formal and/or semantic". There is a bibliography on the subject. Dvosye: In working with early Yiddish texts, a good German dictionary is useful (in the absence of a historical Yiddish one). So, go directly to a good German dictionary, do not pass "Go" or collect $200 and look up "ko(umlaut)stlich". And, zay gezunt. Mikhl. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 18:03:25 EST From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Gender of borrowed words dave sherman asks whether yiddish words borrowed from other languages keep their original gender and vice versa-- i don't know of any systematic study but i'd guess that the answer is: sometimes. given that even native yiddish words sometimes have different genders in different dialects of yiddish and that northeastern yiddish has no neuter, it would be extraordinary if all borrowed words always kept their original gender. one example that i know of that clearly doesn't keep its gender is shap 'workshop', masculine in yiddish but neuter in its original language, english. perhaps there are phonological and/or semantic reasons for the genders they wind up with, when it differs from the original one. as for yiddish words borrowed into other languages, clearly it depends on the other language's gender system. english, for example, has natural gender, while yiddish has grammatical gender. therefore a word like meydl will be feminine in english (neuter in non-NEY yiddish), yingl will be masculine (neuter in non-NEY yiddish), shmate will be neuter (feminine in yiddish), and pupik will be neuter (masculine in yiddish). this sort of gender variation is not at all unusual, by the way. (english opera is neuter singular, french opera is feminine singular, latin opera is neuter plural--the plural of opus, which went its own way in languages that borrowed it, for example.) ellen prince 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 19:19:33 EST From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.CA Subject: Daniel/Doniel/Doniyel > From: Michael Shimshoni > "David (Daniel Moishe) Sherman" > This makes me wonder, if, as I know, it is customary for > Yiddishist to write Moishe and not the Sefaradi way, > Moshe, why Daniel and not Doniel, or even Doniyel? Oh, please don't attribute anything to the way I spell my name. I don't have a Yiddish name, you see, since my parents never spoke Yiddish. I have the Hebrew name I was given at my bris, which I always spelled Daniel Moshe. I guess I'm slowly yiddishizing the spelling. To his credit, Melekh Viswanath immediately switched to meylekh when someone pointed out the inconsistency in his orthography. Maybe I'll do the same someday, but somehow doniyel looks awfully weird. Names are such subjective things, after all. D (D M) S 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 24 Jan 93 11:46 JST From: ZEV%HADASSAH@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL Subject: Here's the problem "Po kavur hakelev" is a Hebrew phrase which translates to "the dog is buried here," but means "this is the source of the problem". The phrase was made popular in Israel by a Hebrew song about twenty years ago, but the Even-Shoshan Hebrew dictionary lists the source as a folk-'mashal', in Yiddish. Does anyone in Mendel-velt know of this? Is there a story involved? Or a known zaftig translation? Zev Kesselman ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 2.147