Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 5.061
July 19, 1995

1) Musical notation for Internet (Dvorah Halperin Biasca)
2) Papirene kinder (Stanley Werbow)
3) Komets alef beys (Dovid Braun)
4) Komets-alef O again (Larry Rosenwald)
5) Nursery rhymes & Hebrew-Yiddish pairs (Miriam Isaacs)
6) Nursery rhyme (David Sherman)
7) Khotch (Fishel Hoppe)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 15:56:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: biasca@horton.colorado.edu
Subject: Musical notation for Internet

For [Sholom Pearlman, 5.051] who was wondering about a potential
Internet-worthy musical notation: check Mendele,Vol3.127 (Indexed under
the title "Shloflidele") for another possibility.

Dvorah Halperin Biasca

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 09:30:13 -0500
From: s.werbow@mail.utexas.edu
Subject: Papirene kinder

The song "papirene kinder" may well have been sung in the concentration
camps, but it is much older than WWII. My mother sang it to us in the
20's or 30's, and I have always assumed that it was an immigration song
about the parents left behind in the old country. It is not in Ruth
Rubin's Voices of a People. Nor in the Mloteks' Pearls of Yiddish Song or
in Mir Trogn a Gezang.

Stanley Werbow

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 00:24:42 EDT
From: dovid@mit.edu
Subject: Komets alef beys

To Eliyahu Juni:

Maybe I misexpressed myself.  The kids who sang the song were native
speakers of Yiddish who hadn't yet been exposed to the meaning of "komets
alef [o]", as you say was your own case. *Because* they were native and
because they were of the age that they knew the alef-beys (but not
_niked_ 'vocalization' yet), they used two words that they *knew* instead
of the two words which wouldn't have made sense to them at this stage of
their language and concept acquisition (viz., _koyekh *shepn*_ and
_komets alef *o*_).  Point is that a native, reliable informant for an
adult term or concept must be able to speak adult Yiddish.  That's what I
meant, in case it didn't get across.

Dovid Braun

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 08:13:04 -0500 (EST)
From: lrosenwald@wellesley.edu
Subject: Komets-alef O again

I read Eliyahu Juni's posting with fascination.  What still puzzles me,
though, is this - in so far as I can see, in some sense it doesn't really
matter whether you're used to komet-alef beys or komets-alef O in
general, since in the context of the song the phrase has to rhyme with
vos ir lernt do, doesn't it?  Best,

Larry Rosenwald

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 22:02:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: miriamis@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Yiddish Nursery rhymes & Hebrew-Yiddish pairs

In response to Itzik Shpitzik, my parents version of that was a little
cruder, but we are Galitsianer.

Itzik, shpitzik nudl freser
Gayt tsim galekh, ganvet a meser
Gayt aran, p-t zekh oys
Kimt aroys, zugt nisht oys

Nu?

Ikh hab anander frage. Se zaynen do vertlekh vos kinder zogn vos zenen a
por Hebraish un Yidish, ikh denk fin a tzayt ven men iz nisht zikher
gevezn ver farshtayt vos, zol zayn klor- code mixing- by the linguists as
I do now, but systematically in pairs? I know of two Hamor-ayzl
tson-retekh- a friend from israel told me her parent generation said
that.

Miriam Isaacs

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 95 13:45:32 EDT
From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca
Subject: Nursery rhyme

The nursery rhyme Max ben-Aaron asks about appears in "Kinder-Lider",
poems for children, by Beryl Sigal (Workmen's Circle, 1970), p. 10:

[transliterating]

Itzik, shpitzik,
nodl, teshl
loyf un koyf mir
kvas a fleshl.

a bisl mir
a bisl dir
eyns un tsvey
un dray un fir!

This book has lots of similar ones.

David Sherman
Toronto

7)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 11:29:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: hoppe@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca
Subject: Khotch

Yankel Gerger asks for the "where used" of khotch.  I seem to recall this
word used at the start of the second line of a haunting song from the
time of the Second World War.  My grandmother used to sing it and I have
a copy somewhere in an old songbook.

Zog nisht kayn mol az ir geyt dem letstn veyg.
Khotch himlen bleyene ...
AZ komen vil nokh undzer osgebengte sho.

I'm new to this list and its a pleasure to realize that so many others
still care about this language.

Fishel Hoppe

______________________________________________________
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