Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 3.086
August 19, 1993

1) Fishl Kutner and Der Bay (Stephen Dowling)
2) Places with unusual names (Meylekh Viswanath)
3) Yiddish orthography (Khaim Bochner)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed Aug 18 11:09:18 1993
From: stephen dowling <71072.2134@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Fishl Kutner and Der Bay

To all Mendelniks,

     My dear friend Fishl Kutner was kind enough to offer his list
of Yiddish clubs. I would like to briefly tell you about the amount
of effort that went into creating his list.

     Fishl started about three years ago. He was interested in
finding out how many Yiddish clubs and courses were being offered in
the United States. He assumed that the major Yiddish organization
such as Yivo, Yiddish League/Yugntruf, National Yiddish Book Center
and the Workmen's Circle would be able to help him. What he
discovered was that their lists were old and incomplete. He decided
that he would search for the Yiddish teachers and ignore trying to
compile a list schools that offer Yiddish. This was based on the
assumption that while courses change, a Yiddish teacher is always a
Yiddish teacher. Clubs and Klezmer bands came later.

     His primary tool (weapon?) has been the telephone. The best way
to get the sort of information he needed and make a personal
connection was by calling. Letters are frequently ignored. He
updates his list constantly and with the help of the Peninsula JCC
publishes "Der Bay". He is always on the lookout for new names and
within the last two years has added Foreign contacts. On request, he
is usually willing to provide parts (except for people that have
told him that they don't want their names given out) of his list.

     I'm not sure I can convey to you the importance of what he has
done. Until now, the major Yiddish have not had a detailed picture
of what was going on in Yiddish land. I am the manager of the Jewish
Book Center of the Workmen's Circle. I am in an excellent position
to hear what is going on in the World of Yiddish. He has found
Yiddish teachers and clubs in places we would never have thought of
looking. He has also served as a means of bringing together these
disparate elements. The recent conference of Yiddish clubs in
Washington would not have been the success that it was without his
years of work. If I wasn't late for work I would tell you more about
what he has done.

     All of the above costs a great deal of money. Much of it Fishl
has put out of his own pocket. He also invests a lot of time. The
best way to help him is to provide any of the following:

     1.Names of Yiddish Teachers
     2.Names of Yiddish Clubs
     3.Names of Klezmer Bands
     4.A small contribution
     5.When requesting labels, send a few dollars to cover the cost
       of the labels.

     Ask for a copy (and send some stamps to cover the postage)of
Der Bay. He maintains a calendar of Yiddish events in San Francisco
and the world. It frequently includes articles and stories.

Stephen Dowling

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed Aug 18 12:13:42 1993
From:  meylekh viswanath (viswanath@draco.rutgers.edu)
Subject: places with unusual names

Another place that I was sure had a made-up name, when I first
encountered it, is Promishlan.  It sounded so much like the Promised
Land!

(until I found out otherwise).

Meylekh

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed Aug 18 18:19:21 1993
From: bochner@das.harvard.edu
Subject: Yiddish Orthography

Ellen Prince writes:

> i wouldn't exactly say (except sarcastically) that yivo 'arbitrarily
> chose basically a litvak norm'--the choosers were basically litvaks!
> if they'd been basically galitsianer, standard orthography might look
> very different

While there's truth to this, of course, I think there may have been
a less self-centered reason as well. If anyone really knows the
history, I'd like to hear how realistic the following is.

It seems to me that the main priority of spelling reform had to be
to get rid of the worst atrocities of the German-based spelling that
was predominant then. People were still writing "ertsehlen" for
"dertseyln", "arobgehen" (or even "herabgehen") for "aropgeyn", etc.
Reforming this was a big battle, and it still hasn't been won
completely: daytshmerish silent heys still appear in words like
"yohr" in modern khsidishe kinder-bikher.

Beyond throwing out the worst of the nonsense, the "new" yiddish
spelling was pretty conservative. Certainly they _didn't_ adopt
litvish features that were not already well-established in the
orthography. They didn't adopt "ey" in words like "broyt" & "groys",
they didn't confuse the two prefixes "tse" and "tsu". They even
stuck with the artificial form "oyf", instead of adopting litvish
"af/uf".

So it wasn't necessarily litvish chauvinism that resulted in the
spelling "gut". That spelling had been accepted for a _long_ time:
in the daytshmerish spelling of the 1800's, because that's the
German spelling, and before that, probably because of the Western
Yiddish origins of Yiddish literature? I don't know much about
things that early. But anyway, reforming the orthography to match
the majority pronunciation "git" was just beyond anything YIVO was
ready to tackle, I suspect. Of course, the fact that it matched the
way they spoke didn't hurt any, either ;-)

Khaim

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.086