Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.109 September 26, 1993 1) A confession of my own (Victor Bers) 2) Introduction (Bob Poe) 3) Mayse (Rick Turkel) 4) Shas (Reuven Rachlin) 5) Yontif (Susan Jones) 6) Shmues sho (Vera Szabo) 7) Introduction (Bob King) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Sep 22 18:45:21 1993 From: VBERS@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: A confession of my own That l'shone tayveh in ASCII-crude-graphic form that our honest and noble shames has attributed to me is something I myself was sent by a certain Valodya Lumelsky, robotics engineer at Wisconsin. But maybe he was *also* a gonif? Victor Bers 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Sep 22 19:00:15 1993 From: poe@keps.com (Bob Poe) Subject: Introduction I'm a new subscriber, but I've been reading someone else's copy of Mendele for a while now. (Thanks, Harold!) My mother was a native Yiddish speaker, but she taught us only a few isolated (but colorful) phrases. After I took a year of German in college and perceived the obvious relationships, I tried to learn some Yiddish in various ways: from my mother, from friends, from folk songs, etc., eventually from Weinreich's _College_Yiddish_. That was about 30-35 years ago, and I was not terribly successful in the effort. How I wish that Mendele existed at that time . . . or, rather, that I was 30 years younger today! My mother's uncle, Pinkhus Rudoy, was a Yiddish scholar. I believed he participated in a YIVO project to assemble an etymological Yiddish dictionary (analogous to the Oxford English Dictionary). Does this exist? Is it what I have seen referred to here as the Weinreich dictionary? He also wrote novels, that were serialized in the Forvert, I believe, under the name Pinye Bal-loshn; at least one of them, _Oyf_Amerikaner_Erd_, was published in book form. In response to Martin Davis's comment in Vol. 3.108, my mother and her family also said manse for mayse, but they mostly spoke a typical SEY dialect. (They lived in Olaskov--which has disappeared--, Golta, and Odessa.) Where does the `n' come from, and was it prevalent in CY and SEY both? Bob Poe 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Sep 22 23:03:47 1993 From: rmt51@cas.org Subject: Re: Mayse Martin Davis (mendele 3.108) states that his family (from Lodz) said 'manse' for 'mayse.' My family, from Bendin (Bedzin), south of Lodz, said something intermediate between the two - 'may~se.' (I'm using '~' to represent nasalization of the previous vowel.) I always thought this nasalization was restricted to a Hebrew `ayin. However, an acquaintance of mine, from somewhere near Bialystok in eastern Poland, also nasalizes those alefs that are punctuated with a khataf-patakh - when he davens, he says 'a~sher' for 'asher'. Rick Turkel 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Sep 22 23:53:03 1993 From: "Robert D. Rachlin" Subject: "Shas" Re E. Portnoy's question about the acronym "sh's" pronounced "shas": it is "shisha sedarim" - the six orders of the Talmud. A gut yohr ... Reuven 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Sep 24 10:02:57 1993 From: sbjones@MIT.EDU (Susan B. Jones) Subject: Regarding yontif Actually, the phrase "Gut yontif to the Pontif" was used when the Pope arrived in New York on Yom Kippur sometime in the late seventies/early eighties. ... probably 1979. Susan Jones 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Sep 24 11:53:34 1993 From: veszabo@theo.jtsa.edu Subject: shmues sho Libe mendele leyeners, Ikh vel aykh ale farbetn tsu a shmues sho. A por studentn fun Columbia/JTS/ YIVO trefn zikh eyn mol a hoydesh tsu redn yidish. Dos kumendike mol veln mir zikh trefn dem 3 oktober, zuntig 4 azeyger, in a sukke bay Brukhe Langn, vos voynt in Columbia bayit: 535 West 112st, NY NY 10027 Phone: 212-280-1166 All of you are welcome - vi zogt men dos af gut geshmak yidish? Vera Szabo 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun Sep 26 11:06:41 1993 From: Subject: Introduction My name is Robert D. King, and I teach at the University of Texas at Austin. I work on Yiddish linguistics and, especially recently, on the ways that linguistics tells us something about Jewish history. Right now I'm a bit more into research on India than anything else--my work on India being mainly historical and having nothing to do with Jewish matters. Regards, Bob King ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.109