Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 3.050
June 25, 1993

1) Epis/ippis (Ellen Prince)
2) Mauscheln (Leonard Prager)
3) Various (Ellen Prince)
4) Self-review (Khaim Bochner)
5) Ben Zakkai? (H. Davidson)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Jun 25 13:36:49 1993
From: "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: epis/ippis

hi, gregg. welcome to mendele! your question about your grandparents'
use of _ippis_ for _etwas_ in german is interesting. do you know
where in germany they were from? swiss german has something like
_ippis_ for instead of _etwas_, so, if they were from somewhere
near switzerland, that may explain it. also, i would imagine that
some non-swiss dialects of german have or had it, since presumably
yiddish didn't get it from swiss german. (yiddish has many features
in common with bavarian german, but to my knowledge _epis_ isn't
one of them.)

ellen prince

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Jun 25 13:47:07 1993
From: LEONARD PRAGER <RHLE302@HAIFAUVM.BITNET>
Subject: RE Noyekh Zide's query re mauscheln

I know of no better discussion than that by Sander L. Gilman in his
brilliant book -Jewish Self Hatred- (Johns Hopkins 1986).  See the
index for the many references.  Note: I can now be reached at the
simpler address Leonard.Prager@Haifauvm.

Leonard Prager (my Yiddish name, which I occasionally use in Mendele
= Yude-Leyb Proger).  It is not a pseudonym.

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Jun 25 13:51:22 1993
From: "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Various

on 'stringing up' editors:

bob werman writes that wexler only did what we all fantasize and
that it's the editors that allow this that should be 'strung up'. i
would like to note that the editor in question, sally thomason, most
definitely did not 'allow' it and should have been punished for only
one thing: believing wexler when he claimed repeatedly that the
piece was authored by one 'slobodjanski' and that he had only
translated it. and she spent two very painful years of her life
paying for her 'crime'.

--------------------------------------------- on hall and

dialect/language:

norman zide writes that it was robert hall that described language
as a 'dialect with an army and a navy'. very very interesting! i
just skimmed his _leave your language alone_ and couldn't find it
(it doesn't have an index). could you possibly find a reference? it
would be very very funny if hall's quote had gotten re-attributed to
max weinreich, given hall's politics! (as you know but probably many
other mendelniks don't, hall has spent the last 40 years as a
'revisionist', claiming the holocaust never took place. but he did
write a wonderful vulgarization of linguistics way back when, the
book in fact that inspired me to switch from french to linguistics.
go figure.)

ellen prince

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Jun 25 13:53:34 1993
From: bochner@das.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: Self-review

Bob Werman writes (wrt Wexler):
> Come now, this is fantasy stuff that we all would love to be able to
> do, to review our own material the way it was meant to be reviewed.
...
> It is the editors who allow this who should be strung up it seems to
> me.
> One hopes for
> better in the academic world but should not be too surprised when
> the academic world approaches the real world in its corruption.

Sorry, but I don't buy it.

This is _not_ an everyday occurence. I don't know of another case
like it, in _Language_ or the other major linguistic journals, in
the 15+ years I've been in the field. As soon as the editor's
apology appeared, it struck me as a major embarassment to the field
of Yiddish studies (and I knew nothing about Wexler's theories at
the time).

-- Khaim

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Jun 25 15:26:14 1993
From: "H. Davidson" <IBIDHAD@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: Ben Zakkai?

Did someone confuse Ben Zakkai with Simon ben Yohai?

H. Davidson

[Yep, the shammes did.  Proof that some people should never even try
to show off their shallow pedantry without a reference book or two.
So the examples don't quite come off.  As Mephistopheles says to
Faust, die Ecke ist nicht zu.  (This too from memory, so one expects
to get it from Michael Shimshoni and others.)  nm]

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.050