Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.209 December 2, 1994 1) Error-free Yiddish (Mimi Halkin) 2) Hebraicization (Rick Gildemeister) 3) Tshepn (Yude Rozof) 4) Tshepn (Arnie Kuzmack) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 21:14:38 +0200 (EET) From: mhalkin@lib.haifa.ac.il Subject: Error-free yidish I'd like to clarify something about my request for correct Yidish in Mendele. It's not standard Yidish I'm looking for - I can cope with dialectic variations in usage and orthography, and I imagine we all enjoy them and learn from them. It's just gross errors of grammar and syntax that I'd like eliminated, if possible, and I think that's what Zellig Bach's proposal aimed to do, no more. Miriam Halkin 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 01 Dec 94 15:50:42 EST From: eeglc%cunyvm.bitnet@yalevm.cis.yale.edu Subject: Hebraicization Dovid Braun and Arre Komar have discussed Hebraicization in Yiddish and discuss its presence in religious or academic discourse. I'm not a formal scholar, but I've done a lot of reading about the presence of the loshn-koydesh component in Yiddish. I can't overlook what I read once about Glikl Haml's Zikhroynes, that the vocabulary used was about 30% words from loshn-koydesh. I've found in reading Western Yiddish, older and more current alike, that the language does indeed seem to use much more loshn-koydesh vocabulary. I would guess that this can be explained by the fact that cryptonyms needed to be used in order not to be understood by gentiles. Die Reste des Juedisch-Deutschen contains scads of loshn-koydesh words that never went East. This raises the question of whether cryptonymic jargon phrases can be called "Yiddish". If we see that these forms start carrying over into everyday speech, I'd see a case for it, which would explain Glikl's usage. I remember words like "ferkhileft" and countless other words now not used by speakers from Central and Eastern Yiddish, which she used routinely. "Ferkhileft" is perhaps not a good example, since the whole method of money-lending related to this word no longer exists, but, trust me, you see words like "shoufel", which Mendelyanern Marion Aptroot pointed out to me could have gone into Dutch through thieves' argot, which contained a lot of this crypto-language that existed up till World War II. An interesting trade-jargon made up of crypto-Hebrew words was used by the cattle-traders of Alsace/SW Germany/Switzerland. To bring this long message back to a focus, I'm trying to say that "low" context words of Hebrew/Aramaic origin are very plentiful and not at all literary or religious, and probably came into the Yiddish language to prevent Germanic Gentiles from understanding Yiddish conversations. Resorting to Hebrew/Aramaic cryptonyms was simply not necessary further East, where the H.-A. component is smaller. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Poles couldn't necessarily understand German any more easily than Hebrew. Nu, zoln di talmude-khakhamim epes zogn derfun. Ikh bin avade nisht zikher vos ikh hob rikhtik genutst dos vort "cryptonym" ober mayne bamerkungen zenen do, kedey ale zoln leyenen mayn brivele un zogn tsi ikh bin gerekht, oder zey kenen oykh derklern zeyere taynes; punkt azoy lernt yeder eyner a bisl mer. Rick Gildemeister 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 17:33:22 -0500 (EST) From: jrosof@sas.upenn.edu Subject: tshepn [Mottel Lakin wrote in vol. 4.208:] >I find no such word in Weinreich. Tshepen (no sch!) is certainly in Weinreich: "bother, touch, handle, tamper with" tshepen zikh (tsu): "badger, bother pick on, annoy, bully." I'm sure the various other words which Mottel listed are also in Weinreich. I doubt the origin suggested: tzepeetsa does not sound enough like tshepn, first of all. Second of all Yiddish has absorbed relatively few words from Russian at all thanks to the restrictions on residence imposed by the pale of settlement. The principal Slavic languages which influenced the development of Yiddish were as I recall from reading Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, and Bellorussian. I've listed them in chronological order reflecting the pattern of Jewish migration east. From what I understand, although I do not speak Slavic languages, Polish has been by far the dominant Slavic language in its contributions to Yiddish; Jewish migration east was accomplished under the political auspices of the Polish-Lithuanian empire, thus the preeminence of Polish. It is noteworthy that modern Yiddish preserves original stress patterns of old Polish pronunciation. Again though I am not a speaker of Slavic languages, my friends who speak Russian have impressed on me the remarkable closeness of this language group. That is, Polish is much closer to Russian than Yiddish is to Icelandic or German is to English. Thus it seems possible that the Russian source suggested for the Yiddish tshepen is _related_ to the actual source word in another Slavic language from which the Yiddish word may be derived. I turn further discussion over to the Slavicists. Yude Rozof 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 23:23:36 -0500 (EST) From: Linda Kuzmack Subject: Re: Tshepen I found it hard to believe that Weinreich did not have this common and tamevdik word. Lo and behold, on page 202, second column, a little more than half way down: tshepen: touch, handle; bother; badger. t' zikh (tsu): tamper with, bother, pick on, annoy, bully. A freylekhn khanuke aykh alemen! Arnie Kuzmack ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.209 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Archives available via gopher on: gopher.cic.net Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Send change-of-status messages to: listserv@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu a. 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