Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.002 May 15, 1997 1) Kemp Hemshekh (Perl Teitelbaum) 2) English transcription of Yiddish words (Sholem Berger) 3) Lipography (Estelle Souche) 4) Kezayes (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 14 May 97 21:40:04 EDT From: 74031.775@compuserve.com Subject: Kemp Hemshekh Elye Palevsky shraybt [6.302]: interestant volt geven tsu visn vifl mendelyaner es hobn gehat epes a shtikl shaykhes mit "hemshekh" Ikh bin zikher, az er gedenkt mikh. Ikh bin geven an oyfpaser in "hemshekh" fun 1971 biz 1973, un teyl fun di mentshn mit velkhe ikh hob zikh dortn bakent zaynen mir nokh haynt noente fraynd. Ikh bin demolt geven a "grine" in Amerike, nor fir yor. "Hemshekh" iz far mir geven eyn ort in Amerike, vu ikh hob zikh gefilt in der heym, khotsh in der heym - in Poyln - hob ikh zikh keynmol nisht gefunen in a svive fun yugntlekhe, vos hobn gehat aza pozitive batsiyung tsu yidish vi in kemp "hemshekh". Perl Teitelbaum Queens, New York 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 01:52:16 +0000 From: bergez01@mchip00.med.nyu.edu Subject: English transcription of Yiddish words Sheker hasus litshue: If everyone's beating a dead horse I might as well. I hesitate to take issue with Zellig Bach, but it's incorrect to find fault with the Forward's transcription of Yiddishisms that have entered English. Foreign words get Anglicized when they get devoured by English; that's the way it has been, is, and will always be, from "desperado" to "chaise-longue" (pronounced "chaise-lounge" by most English speakers), from "kangaroo" (however that might have been pronounced in the first place) to "borscht." Languages that get it the worst are those which are written in non-Roman character systems, including Yiddish and Hebrew. (And, of course, not just those: one can still get into fights in certain academic circles for advocating the "wrong" system of Chinese romanization.) If every writer who "mistransliterated" a Hebrew or Yiddish word were laid open to the charge of insensitivity with regard to the source language, who would be left standing? "Chanukah," "Hanukkah," or "Hanuka"? "Pesach," "Pesakh," or "Peysekh"? It's hard enough writing a good sentence without worrying about the provenance of every other word. So it's no surprise that (to take one example) the American Heritage Dictionary, third edition, my current favorite among dictionaries for its faithful representation of current usage, gives non-Yivo, indeed, positively anti-Yivo spellings for Yinglish words: "schmooze," "mensch," etc. This is not indicative of any lack of rigor on their part--the included etymologies, when they bother to list the Yiddish source words, transliterate them "correctly," i.e. according to Yivo. Rather, it's merely a reflection of the way a word's spelling gets refracted on its trajectory through many different languages. And this is perfectly okay: no one should be expected to translate Yinglishisms a la Yivo for the simple reason that they're no longer Yiddish words. (Leonard Prager made this abundantly clear in the case of "mentsh"-->"mensch.") So, no--if we're conducting a Grand Inquisition of (or laying a kherem on) the English Forward there are much better reasons, to which transliteration is merely ancillary: the flippant and often ignorant treatment of the language _in general_ in such rump columns as "Yiddish VInkl" and "Philologos," and indeed in the whole newspaper, and a lack of respect for the facts with regard to such small historical matters as pre-World War II Eastern Europe. Transliteration of Yinglishisms has really nothing to do with one's respect for the language one way or the other. It's an intelligibility issue to the non-Yiddish speaker: If I spelled "schmooze" "shmues," would anyone really know what I meant? "I shmuessed with her" looks almost obscene... Sholem Berger New York 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 11:40:00 +0200 (MET DST) From: esouche@ens.ens-lyon.fr Subject: Lipography Vegn Andrey Bredsteins entfer (6.302-4): Actually I was asking about lipograms which are made on purpose, for literary reasons, and not about abbreviations or alternative spellings. For example, Perec's "La disparition" (translated into English as "A void", with no "e" too) is a long novel which includes no "e"s, and all the novel deals with "disappearances", so that the stylistic constraint is a kind of reflection of the book's subject. Sometimes lipograms just are amusing games (cf. "Dying or not dying" in "A void", which is a "lipogrammatic translation" of a famous text by William S. ...), sometimes they are more interesting. I remember of reading a text of Perec about the history of lipograms, including examples in several languages, but I don't think it included any example with non-Latin alphabets. Estelle Souche 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 May 97 17:48:23 IST From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il Subject: Kezayes In my recent dissertation on the logistics of khreyn distribution in Spain [6.296] I inadvertently spelled _kezayes_ as _kezis_, i. e. I wrote "I" for "aye". Hugh Denman's sharp eye caught this. I wish also to thank Mikhl Herzog [6.303] for catching _HaRov_, which of course should be _HoRav_. Ha rov (the majority) are indeed always making transcription errors and we need to keep learning Yiddish so that mistakes will be as few as possible. We owe this especially to newcomers to _Mendele_ and _The Mendele Review_ and, hopefully, to posterity. PS Happy Birthday to _Mendele_!! Leonard Prager Haifa ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.002