Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 07.089 October 29, 1997 1) sneezing (Shimen Kass) 2) sneezing (David Sherman) 3) shlak/durkhshlak (Ruvn Millman) 4) Dav(e)nen (Alexis Manaster Ramer) 5) A story of Chelm (Michael Shimshoni) 6) Yiddish anarchist group in England (Hugh Denman) 7) davenen (Bob Werman) 8) davenen (Bob Hoberman) 9) Cecilia Bartoli's Yiddish Pronunciation (Berel Leiser) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 09:13:21 EST From: kass@umbsky.cc.umb.edu Subject: sneezing As a child, and even when older, whenever I would sneeze my father would say: "Gib a tsee an eur", by which he meant for me to pull an ear lobe. He explained it this way: that if a person sneezes while another is thinking of a departed person (my father's mother in this case) an ear lobe should be pulled. I sneezed often and my father often was thinking of his departed mother. I wonder if this is in anyone else's experience. Shimen Kass 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 13:00:11 -0400 From: "David M. Sherman" Subject: sneezing The expression bay uns in hoyz is (for a single sneeze): "Tsin gezint, tsum lebn, an alte bube [zayde] zoltsi vern". It's what Simone (my wife) grew up with, it's still what her in-laws use (they're from Staszow, Poland originally), and it's what our kids have learned to use from us. We don't have a tradition of varying the brocha (or whatever one would call it) for a second or subsequent sneeze. And no, I haven't really thought about how I'd vary it it I were to hear my mother-in-law or father-in-law sneeze (which I haven't recently), given they they are already (zoln gezunt zayn, biz hindert un tsvantsik, keneynehore, etc.:-)) an alte bube and alte zayde respectively. David Sherman Toronto 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 12:15:01 -0500 (EST) From: Ruvn@aol.com Subject: shlak/durkhshlak Leon Rosenberg writes (7.087) that, in his dialect, a "shlak" denoted "a foolish person", "a person who could not be persuaded by reason." I find that interesting. In producing a cooking video tape in Yiddish (coming out in two weeks for the khanike gift season) I learned the word for colander, "durkhshlak." Could it be that Rosenberg's "shlak" was simply a reference to the fact that whatever one tried to impart to the "foolish/stubborn" person, the effort would pass through like water through a colander? Ruvn Millman 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 20:31:44 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Dav(e)nen Re sylvia schildt's posting, I understand you are joking about the Old French etymology in an attempt to highlight the rejection by some contemporary Yiddishists of the idea, held by Weinreich, Fischer/Bin-Nun, and Birnbaum (the three greatest Yiddish historical linguistics of the century) of a Judeo-Romance connection for Yiddish. The reality is that much of the recent work (Katz, King, Wexler) is quite clearly aimed at showing how much smarter we are supposedly than in particular Weinreich and in general everybody of the older generations was. But not everybody takes this tack, and on the other hand tehre are some real issues which Weinreich & co. left unsolved, for example, the relationship between the indubitably French-derived forms (tsholent etc.) and the indubitably Italian-derived ones (oorn, antshpoyzn, etc.) There is even more doubt about the correctness of the idea they had that bentshn must come from a Latin-based language, since in particular MHGerman had the form bendiz 'benediction'. So, I would say do not despair, but also do not presuppose that everyhting Weinerich may have said has to be right. Dovid Braun asks that I explain why I think the Hebrew d-b-b etymology is the only one that works. I can't go into full details here, but my basic point is that mere similarity is not enough got an etymology. You need to be able to account for the exact forms we find. Hence, Hebrew d-f-f is not a good etymology because then we would expect *daf(e)nen, and there is no good way to explain the /v/. Kosover's etymology involving MHGerman doenen is much worse, that would have to give *deynen or something like that (as Birnbaum points out). Various other etymologies, incl. the supposed Turkic, Arabic, and Persian ones fail for many reasons listedby Birnbaum but also because they all seem to derive this word from some form like dave, which would probably have given a Yiddish form like *dov(e)nen. A form like tabu, which is recently proposed as the Turkic eymology in an article that just came out recently, would of course yield *tab(e)nen or again *tob(e)nen. But from the Hebrew da:vav (from the root D-B-B) you would get *davv- whence dav- just as from pa:saq you get pask-. The only remaining trouble is why the variaition between davenen and davnen. Even that is probably easier to explain from the Hebrew than from any other source. This is becuse almost all Hebrew-origin verbstems in Yiddish come from Hebrew roots with three distinct consonants. In Standard Yd, in fact, it may be the only one which does not. The missing -e- in davnen may perhaps be the expedted outcome after a single consonant, in contrast to paskenen and others with a cluster of two consonants, but I am not yet quite sure if this is right. However, here again, I think that the authors and supporters of the other etymologies have not tried to explain this fact at all, which would once again militate against taking their proposals as valid. An irregulairity like this is usually a sign of something historically important. Alexis Manaster Ramer 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 97 11:27:59 +0200 From: Michael Shimshoni Subject: A story of Chelm In Mendele 07.077 Louis Fridhandler brings the story of the Chelmer shames knocking on the shutters to wake up the people to go to prayer. Louis adds that "This story ... is one I've heard, but never read among the well-known tales of this town". As this story was known to me I reached for my Bible on such matters, A. Doryanov's(sp?) collection with 3170 stories, which I had been given for my prehistoric bar mitzva. Sure enough the story is there as number 1039, essentially as had been told here, the only difference was that this shutter knocking was not performed every day but only on the slikhes days, when one gets up especially early. The book I have is in Hebrew and AFAIK is still in print its name being sefer habedi`ha we-ha`hidud (book of the joke and the witticism). Michael Shimshoni 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 12:54:02 +0000 From: Hugh Denman Subject: Yiddish anarchist group in England Estelle Souche enquires [07.087:7] about a Yiddish anarchist group and a bilingual anarchist journal "V'panotch" in Jubilee Street, London, in 1991, as cited in a French novel by Jean-Baptiste Evette. Is this a misprint or is the novellist creating some sort of time-warp? Of course, there were Yiddish anarchists aplenty in this vicinity in the early years of this century and the illustrious Rudolf Ro(c)ker did indeed edit a bilingual anarchist periodical entitled _Der hilfruf/ V Pomoshtsh'_ during the years 1911-12. At the time he was living at 33 Dunstan Houses, just off Stepney Green, about 2 minutes walk from Jubilee Street. But by 1991 there was precious little left in London's East End to remind one of the the area's Jewish past (whether anarchist or not). In 1991 the garment trade still flourished in dark overcrowded sweatshops, but the voices one heard were Bengali not Yiddish. Incidentally, with particular reference to 07.087:4, could I possibly put in a plea for a code of good practice in accordance with which, inter alia, Mendelyaner refrain from misquoting each other? Hugh Denman 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 11:26:16 +0200 From: Robert Werman Subject: davenen Sylvia Shildt raises the possibility that davenen might be derived from Old French. As Rashi, and to a lesser extent, Rashbam, are good sources of Old French equivalents, I thought of their uses and could find none resembling the Yiddish word we know for prayer. To check myself out, I looked at the Bar Ilan Responsa CDROM collection which covers them fully and could find no word or close relative in use by them. Of course negative evidence of this kind is intrinsically limited - one new positive example and this evidence is worthless. While using the CDROM, I checked all the parshanim as well as all the responsa literature from 10th Century onward to today and did not find any use of the word. Ah, well. Bob Werman, Jerusalem 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 16:14:32 -0500 (EST) From: "R. Hoberman" Subject: davenen I was disturbed at Sylvia Schildt's comments, suggesting that "theoretical" linguists for some incomprehensible reason turn to obscure languages as the sources for Yiddish words and reject the possibility of an origin in Old French. This accusation is just unfair and saddening. No one discounts an Old French component in Yiddish; everyone agrees that bentshn and tsholnt and a number of other words are from medieval Jewish Romance languages. And the idea that some Yiddish words are from Turkish is not new. I have no commitment to any particular suggested etymology for davenen, but I know how such proposals have to be evaluated, and the methods are far from new: they were discovered by the great philologist/linguists of the mid-nineteenth century, they are the methods that made possible almost all we know about the history of Yiddish, they were the daily tools of Max Weinreich among others. They are not hard to summarize, either: The basic idea is that sound change is regular, and if in some individual case it seems to be irregular then there must be some reason based on the structure of the language or the specific historical and social circumstances. The idea that sound change is regular simply means that if a given sound or sequence of sounds changes to another sound in a particular language at a particular time, then every word in which it occurs changes in the same way. If the vowel u changes to i in certain Yiddish dialects, then it doesn't change only in the word bukh but in all the words in which it occurs. If the Hebrew sound of the letter "sof" (which was like th in English thin) is pronounced as an s when those words appear in Yiddish, then it is s in all the words in which sof appears. Exceptions need explanation. This is not esoteric dogma hoarded by the privileged few or a radical fringe, not a matter of authority, not experimental, not even very theoretical. Bob Hoberman 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 97 22:22:38 EST From: "Burton M. (Berel) Leiser" Subject: Cecilia Bartoli's Yiddish Pronunciation A few weeks ago, a Mendelist (Mendelenik?)--I forget who--inquired about Cecilia Bartoli's Yiddish (and, I might add, Hebrew) pronunciation in her new disk, "Chant D'amour." On this disk, in addition to a number of songs in French, Italian, and Greek, this magnificent young mezzo sings a "Chanson hebraique" by Maurice Ravel, which turns out to be "Mayerke main zon," in Yiddish. There are two others, Kaddish (in Hebrew, or to be more precise, Hebrew and Aramaic), and "Die alte kashe," in Yiddish. Cecilia obviously had a splendid coach on Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation. The first thing that strikes me is her absolutely perfect pronunciation of the letters khes and khaf. My zeyde could have done no better. Ms. Bartoli generally seems to avoid German--I have yet to hear her sing anything in that language--and one might have thought that it had something to do with reluctance to try its guttural sounds. But her gutturals sound perfectly natural in mame loshn and in Hebrew. The only fault that I found in her pronunciation was her use of a hard "s" instead of a soft "s" in "zon" (= son) in "Mayerke mayn zon." But this is a very minor quibble. In every other respect, her pronunciation is perfect, at least to my ear, and her musicianship, the feeling she transmits through her magnificent voice--what can I say? Oy, iz dos a khazn! You should all hear her "Kaddish." It will make you weep. For these tracks alone, this disk is worth the price. My only criticism concerns the transliterations, which are pretty weird, but quite understandable with a little effort. Enjoy! Berel Leiser ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 07.089 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html