Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 07.115 December 7, 1997 1) Vi azoy men darf nitzn Mendele... (Mendy Fliegler) 2) Dutch Yiddish "davenen" and [ou] (Marion Aptroot) 3) davenen one last?? time (A. Manaster Ramer) 4) I.B. Singer's "Blood" (Roberta Saltzman) 5) davenen and no end!davenen and no end! (Ruben Frankenstein) 6) WEVD (Heynekh Sapoznik) 7) vanity plate (elye palevsky) 8) Chanukah stories (Rosalyn "Reyzl" Kirkel) 9) fonyelekh un ivonim (Nadia Paladini) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 22:05:44 -0200 From: emenems@juno.com (Mendy Fliegler) Subject: Vi azoy men darf nitzn Mendele... Ikh denk az men darf, efsher muz men, freygn unzere mitglider tsi es past beser far Mendele tsu zayn a shtikl tsaytung vu men redt Yidish, shtelt poemes, un lider, un efsher a sakh_naye_ zakhn bashaft fun Yidishe shraybers fun _di_ teyg.... Oder iz es beser tsu hern nokh amul un take _nokh amul_ vegn "etimologies" un vayter "etimologies"..... Mir Mendlyaners zaynen dokh fun der gantzer velt, nisht nor fun filozofishe khevre fun universitetn oyf a barg... Lomir take freygn, vi azoy ken Yidish _VAKSN_??? Vi fil _kinder_ veln zikh avekzetzn ot a du o, un vi fil viln visn fun vanen men ken tsukayen dus vort: "davenen", ba(g)laytn, un a.z.v, un a.z.v.... Un ver, fun unzere mitglider, ken epes araynshteln du a nay lidl, a maynsele, a vits a nays, a shpilekhl, un a.z.v.....afile a nay maykhl... Mendy Fliegler Vashington 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 14:33:08 +0100 From: aptroot@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de (Marion Aptroot) Subject: Dutch Yiddish "davenen" and [ou] Alexis Manaster Ramer (Mendele Vol 07.112) cites Hartog Beem as proof that _davenen_ is attested in Dutch Yiddish and adds that that leaves us with the question if the verb was indigenous to Dutch Yiddish or whether it was borrowed from recent immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe. My guess is that it entered Dutch Yiddish relatively recently. I can't remember having come across it in early written sources (unless it is related to _doenen_ which may be more frequent in ivre-taytsh than in other styles). Of course I can be mistaken, I haven't paid special attention to this word. Maybe Ariane Zwiers and Shlomo Berger who also work on Dutch Yiddish have helpful observations in this matter. As a Dutch speaker, however, I have the impression that until recently, those with a Dutch Jewish background used _oren_ and others use _davenen_ when speaking Dutch with Yiddish expressions. At present, one finds more and more Modern Hebrew or Eastern Yiddish influences and the remnants of Dutch Yiddish are disappearing. I found the most striking example of this in the works of a Dutch author who purportedly writes autobiographical prose. In his memoirs of a Dutch Jewish childhood one can find a number of Yiddish expressions, but none of them is recognizably Dutch Yiddish. If anything, I believe they can all be retraced to Philip Roth's _Portnoy's Complaint_... As for the _ou_ pronunciation, there is no doubt about its authenticity and the criticism by Claus Buryn/Lucas Bruyn on Beem's transcriptions (Mendele Vol 07.113) is misplaced. _vov+yud_ usually represents [ou] (V42/54) or [a:] (long a, V44) in Dutch Yiddish texts. Representations of Dutch Yiddish in roman characters can be found in different sources, but the [ou] pronounciation is most convincingly described in an early 18th century Yiddish primer from Amsterdam: "vov-yud is pronounced as _a_ followed by _u_." This pronunciation survives to this day. Marion Aptroot 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 11:15:04 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: davenen one last?? time Mr. Buryn's latest contribution gets everything precisely backwards when he says: "I don't possess the linguist's bag of trics to relate Old Yiddish 'doynen' to Modern Yiddish dav(e)nen but I can imagine that at some point in time Hebraists tried to come up with a Hebrew form for an originally non Hebrew word, because this word was related to religeous practice and therefore ought to be of Hebrew origin." I dont know how many times it needs to repeated that it is precisely linguists (e.g., me) who reject the possibility of davenen coming from doynen. Linguists do not have tricks, we have methods, and these methods rule out almost all the possibilities which have been proposed simply because the precise form of davenen cannot derive from doynen or do"nen or dawn or divinare etc. etc. Period end of THOSE stories. The rest of teh passage I quote reveal a complete lack of understanding (for which we linguists perhaps are to blame, since we apparently do a louse job of teaching our subject to teh world at large) about how languages change. Only in rare cases do we find conscious innovations such as Mr. Buryn suggests. Most linguistic innovation is not done by committee. There was no group of Hebraists that got together to make up a new verb for saying prayers in Eastern Yiddish. On the other hand, Mr. Weigel poses some good questions, which I dont think I can do full justice here since a full-scale article is required. But briefly, it is an old and controversial question where Yiddish verbs of Hebrew origin like pasken(en) come from. One possibility which I cautiously support is that SOME of them do come from 3d person masc. perfects of the "qal" conjugation. Hence pasken could in fact come from pa:saq. I cannot here go into all the details of how the Hebrew kamats /a:/ would get to become Yiddish /a/ and how the second Hebrew vowel would syncopate. These are all valid research problems at present, actually, and my own solutions may not turn out to be right. At any rate, IF pa:saq can yield pasken(en), then da:vav could in theory have yielded a hytpothetical from like *davven(en), from which daven(en) would beeasy to get. However, tehre are problems as I keep pointing out, such as the fact that we do not have any attestations of *daven, as this theory would suggest we should. Also, we haveyet to offer a satisfactory response to Meyer Wolf's semantic problem, which may kill the whole thing. I cannot overemphasize the fact that a satisfactory solution to this kind of problem requires a large number of things to fall into place, and once published, will probably be subejcted to years of scholarly debate before becoming accepted. I cannot possibly go into all this here. All I can say is that a body would have to get up might early to come with a problem that has not already been noticed. Of course, Meyer Wolf did precisely that, but there are not, I am pretty sure, many Meyer Wolfs in this field. As it is, his objection is giving me nightmares, so I HOPE there are no more(:-). In any case, please do not assume that just because many of the details were not mentioned in my earlier postings, that this means that those of us working on such problems are unaware of them. In conclusion, when I first posted something on this, it was merely to try to set the record straight, but the whole thing has been blown totally out of proportion. I do not regert it because it did eleicit Meyer's crucial contribution to the problem and alsp perhaps because it gives us an opportunity to clarify some basic issues of Yiddish linguistics. Since these, it is now cleare, are quite foreign to many participants in these discussions, it mightbe good to discuss them. But I do not think that going on about davenen is a good way to do this, since (a) this problem is still tricky and (b) the basic issue regarding linguistics vs. amateur tinkering with the language is much more basic. The ONE thing that the case of davenen does show I think (and I hope this is not lost in all teh hubbub) is that linguists do not claim to know everything and know enough to find the real problems. It strikes as quite significant in this discussion that a number of amateurs seem to think thay they do know everything and are immune to the kind of doubts and problems that we linguists deal with daily. This alone would be sufficient to show that the amateur proposals are not to be taken seriously. A. Manaster Ramer 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 13:42:43 -0500 From: rsaltzman@nypl.org Subject: I.B. Singer's "Blood" In answer to Jason M. Payne's question (Vol. 07.113), I.B. Singer's "Blood" was originally published in Yiddish as "Treyf blut". It appeared in the "Forverts" (New York) on December 23, 24, 30 and 31, 1966. Roberta Saltzman New York NY 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 13:32:57 +0100 (MEZ) From: Ruben Frankenstein Subject: davenen and no end! Maybe this question will never be solved and stay a riddle. Still I would like to stress the 3 possibilities, that seem to me most convincing: a) Siegmund A. Wolf cites Gottfried Seligs Lehrbuch der juedischdeut- schen Sprache, Leipzig 1792, whre the word is written DAFNEN. This would support the etymology from the hebrew DAF (= page), which is also a yiddish synonym for "blat" (of Talmud or Siddur). b) In his shortly before Nazi occupation in Paris 1939-40 published "Milon Idi-ivri male" A B K (Imprimerie L. Beresniak) gives besides the english "dawn" for shakhris also the rather possible French "service divin" = tefila le-Elohim ve-asu bekitsur mehamila hashniya "divin" poal "davenen". c) Still I plead for the Hebrew verb DVV - davov, perhaps in coincidence with one of the above etymologies. Reuven Frankenstein Ruben Frankenstein 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 08:20:16 -0500 (EST) From: Sapoznik@aol.com Subject: WEVD Just to clear up a point about the programming on WEVD. It was founded as a Socialist station, not a Yiddish one. For it's first 5 years (1927-1932) there is no evidence that it ran any Yiddish programming outside of several "Jewish" content shows. It was under the ownership of the Forverts that it started running many Yiddish programs--most of them on Sundays--but never in it's entire broadcast life was it ever solely a "Yiddish" station. Heynekh Sapoznik 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 11:05:12 EST From: EPalevsky1 Subject: vanity plate efsher gor a "koyne shem shildl" mit a b'kivindiker tsveydaytikayt, me darf dokh tsutsoln k'dey zikh tsu bazorgn mit a -vanity plate-. elye palevsky 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 14:57:39 -0600 From: Rosalyn Kirkel Subject: Chanukah stories I'm a native Yiddish speaker and professional Yiddish/English storyteller, looking for Chanukah stories (memorable) by Yiddish writers in English (transl.)-classic or contemporary writers. Also Chanukah Chelm stories. Would appreciate references/info. Rosalyn "Reyzl" Kirkel 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 23:16:25 +0100 From: nadia.paladini@rsadvnet.it (Paladini Nadia) Subject: fonyelekh un ivonim What does "fonye" exactly mean? I found it in a preface to "Mirele Efros": "ihr vet a yosele'n zehn un a donye,/(...)/yenem alz shvekhlikher fun fonye" I know "fonyelekh" are russian soldiers: is that correct? Who can help me understand what's the link between a Russian soldier and a Daniel, a yiddisher bokher? a gute vokh! Nadia Paladini ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 07.115 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