Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 3.110
September 28, 1993

1) The Yiddish Dictionary (Paul Ritterband)
2) Hobn/zayn in past tense with Hebrew verbs (Shleyme Axelrod)
3) Yontiv and manse (Harold L. Orbach)
4) Plural of talis (Bob Goldberg)
5) Yarmlke (Dan Slobin)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun Sep 26 20:45:54 1993
From: uap@cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu
Subject: The Yiddish Dictionary

There are three or four volumes out, through beys, but the project
has been abandonedd to the best of my knowledge.

Paul Ritterband

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon Sep 27 13:48:27 1993
From: Seymour Axelrod <PTYAXEL@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>
Subject: hobn/zayn in past tense with Hebrew verbs

Some Yiddish verbs are made up of a Hebrew verb + the appropriate
tense of "zayn".  But the past-tense auxiliary is sometimes "hobn"
and sometimes "zayn".  For example, Maurice Samuel, on a single page
(139) in _In Praise of Yiddish_ cites the following:

he exaggerates = er iz megazem
he exaggerated = er *hot* megazem geven

but

he decrees = er iz goyzer
he decreed = er *iz* goyzer geven

he influences = er iz mashpie
he influenced = er *iz* mashpie geven.

Is there a rule governing the choice of the past-tense auxiliary in
these situations, or does one have to learn which to use verb by
verb?

A dank.

--Shleyme Axelrod

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon Sep 27 19:06:19 1993
From: Harold L. Orbach <HLORBACH@KSUVM>
Subject: Yontiv and manse

Yontiv:

If "Good Yontif to the Pontif" was used in NY c.1979, that was
redoing the old "joke" which was told to me c.1960 and undoubtedly
had been in circulation long before.  Can anyone date it?  It sounds
like music hall and vaudeville stuff.  My Chicago friend had legions
of yiddish-american jokes (many quite Catskillian in character and
unprintable).  When I was in HS in NYC, I vividly recall a trip to a
Broadway movie house [the Capitol the Paramount] for a movie, Artie
Shaw's band and some comics. One had a routine that used Yiddish
extensively, e.g., teaching French starting with "gay avec," "gay
viter und viter avec..."  [c.1944]  One uncle had a large collection
of 78 rpm yiddish records of comics with lots of joke routines which
as a child I was not supposed to listen to. Have any studies been
done of this material?  This was entirely in Yiddish, though with
"American-yiddish" words tossed in.

Manse:

Adding to others who report the use of 'manses' in their families,
mine came from Lodz and Tomashef in Poland and my recollection is
that all my relatives said what I always have said myself: "manses"
-- though perhaps they were saying something like "maynses"
[meinses]? Certainly there was an 'n' sound there.

Harold L. Orbach

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon Sep 27 19:27:25 1993
From: xidak!poseidon!bob@uunet.UU.NET (Robert N. Goldberg)
Subject: Plural of "talis"

My high holiday makhsor indicates in its introduction that the
plural of "talis" is different in Hebrew than in Yiddish.  In
Yiddish it is "taleysim" while in modern Hebrew it is "talitot".

How did this difference arise?   I know there are germanic plurals
on some Hebrew words in Yiddish, but isn't "im" strictly a
Hebrew-based plural ending?  Could it be that modern Hebrew changed
the plural for some reason?

Bob "Nissen" Goldberg

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue Sep 28 10:18:52 1993
From: Dan Slobin <slobin@mpi.kun.NL>
Subject: yarmlke

If "yarmlke" does come from Turkish, as Mikhl Herzog and others
suggest, it does not come from the non-existent "yagmurlak."  The
Turkish noun "yagmur" means `rain' (the g has a micron--the
so-called "soft g," which is not pronounced, but is reflected in
lenghtening of the preceding vowel, something like "yaamur").  The
only "yarmlke"-like word in modern Turkish is "yagmurluk"-- `rain'
plus a nominal suffix, meaning `raincoat' or `eave' (of a house, to
divert the rain)--that is, more generally, `rain-thing'.  It is not
inconceivable that in some Turkic language spoken in
Yiddish-speaking territory (southern Ukraine) there was a word like
"yagmurluk" that referred to a head-covering intended to protect one
from the rain--hence our Yiddish meaning. Is there any evidence of
the regional origins of "yarmlke"?

(In my mother's southern Ukrainian Yiddish, stuffed cabbage leaves
are called "prakes"--clearly derived from the Turkish "yaprak"
`leaf'.  The food is called "yaprak dolmasi" `leaf stuffed-thing' in
Turkish--curiously entering Greek through the second half of the
compound, familiar to Americans now as "dolmas".  Are there studies
of the geographical regions of Yiddish that have Turkish lexical
items?)

Dan Slobin (slobin@cogsci.berkeley.edu)

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.110