Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 10.035 October 8, 2000 1) Yiddish TV (Ari Davidow) 2) Yiddish radio (Alex Dafner) 3) Mendele (Chana Schachner) 4) LCAAJ on Eydes (Charles Nydorf) 5) Matisoff Book (Bill Weigel) 6) Naming a Yiddish tango orchestra? (Larry Rosenwald) 7) Yiddish grammar question (David Gil) 8) Another Yiddish story for Onkelos (Noyekh Miller, Leonard Prager) 9) Disney and Yiddish (Sheine Mankovsky) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 19:39:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Ari Davidow Subject: yiddish tv From: "yonathan khayat" my name is yonathan khayat, and i am the technical production manager of new vision production, based in tel aviv, israel, and specialised in streaming video and web tv. in a few weeks we are about to put on the internet the first ever created yiddish television. in order to develop our channel who is already plenty of very interesting contents in yiddish, we are looking for more contents and contacts in order to help us in our objective and to relive the yiddish culture. we are interested in all kind of contents, especially yiddish music such klezmer and that is the reason why i am writting to you thank you for your help best regards yonathan khayat 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 04:03:00 -0400 (EDT) From: "Alex Dafner" Subject: Yiddish radio Tayere Abonentn fun Mendele Oyf der web zaytl fun di Yiddishe Radio programen in Melbourne, http://www.sbs.com.au/radio/radio_set.html kent ir shoyn, hern durkh MP3 shpiler, geshprekhn mit Raphoyl Finkel, Eugene Orenstein, Dovid Ringelblum, Jan Karski (RIP), Aaron Zable, Emil Hecht, vi oykh barikhtn fun Avrom Zeleznikow, Shmuel Bennett un di vekhntlekhe parshe fun Rav Rutzki. Ir kent zikh oykh abisl bakenen mit der hoshever Yiddisher kultur institutzie un natzional bibliotek "Kadimah" oyf der zaytl http://home.iprimus.com.au/kadimah/ Mit grusn un vuntshn far a gezunt un gliklekh nay yor. Alex Dafner Melbourne 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 23:05:33 -0400 (EDT) From: CSJFERN@aol.com Subject: Mendele I'm DELIGHTED to have Mendele functioning again. It was sorely missed the weeks that it was not available. A hartsikn dank aykh alemen! It was especially good to see Gershon Winer's report on the E. European Yiddish activities. I remember Dr. Winer from his administration of the Yiddisher Lerer Seminar in NYC, as well as from having the pleasure of having one of his daughters as a student in the Sholem Aleykhem Shul of the North Shore (of Long Island) when I was the Director. As always, his contributions & activities are a nakhess. I wish Mendele were written in YIDDISH rather than in transliteration. I am also interested in a Yiddish word processing program that would enable such activity. Anybody have information in this regard? It would be most appreciated. Hartsike vuntshn alemen af a zis, gezunt un gliklekh yor! Aldos guts... Chana Schachner 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 09:21:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Cnydorf@aol.com Subject: LCAAJ on Eydes I would like to thank Kalman Weiser for calling attention to the Eydes website. I have visited it and have found that it comes nowhere near the goal of making the database of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry available to everybody. At the least, a website dedicated to the Atlas should allow people to start with any question in the Atlas questionnaire and look up the written answers to it, for all or a substantial proportion of the locations. The original design of the project has meant that this has been technically feasible for a long time. The bad news is that, at present, the Eydes website does not reach this minimum standard. The good news is that this could be achieved very easily. I urge Eydes to provide us with the all the answers to all the questions as quickly as possible. Charles Nydorf 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 21:02:29 -0400 (EDT) From: weigelw@socrates.Berkeley.EDU Subject: Matisoff Book Dear all- Many of you will no doubt be as pleased as I was to discover that there is a new edition of James Matisoff's long out-of-print classic **Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish.** The new version is published by Stanford University Press (www.sup.org) in both hardbound and paperback. -Bill Weigel 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 11:38:58 -0400 (EDT) From: "Lawrence A. Rosenwald" Subject: Naming a Yiddish tango orchestra? Tayere khaveyrim, I got the following request from a woman named Jenny Levison, have no ingenious suggestions for her, and therefore am submitting the request to Mendele. I hope someone can be of help! If you have suggestions, they should probably be addressed to me (lrosenwald@wellesley.edu). A sheynem dank, and a gut un zis yor to all - best, Larry Rosenwald I would like to invite you to do some creative thinking to help me come up with a name for the orchestra who will play in my new show: Shtil, Mayn Corazon, a Yiddish Tango Cabaret. I am looking for a name that tells the world that this is a Yiddish Tango Orchestra -- (could include those words.) I am looking for a name that is inviting to people who do and do not speak Yiddish or Spanish ... or English for that matter. However, most of the music comes from Poland and Argentina, so if the name had Yiddish and Spanish in it, that would be appropriate. The name of my production company is Tango Meydl Productions. The orchestra is made up of piano, accordion, bass, and 2 violins. It is under the direction of Pablo Aslan, and fronted by me, singing tangos in Yiddish, with a few Spanish and English lyrics thrown in there. The songs are mostly from the early 1900's through the 1950's. There is a big emotional range in the material; they are love songs, lullabies, comedic parodies, folk songs, theater songs, and ghetto songs. I would very much appreciate your input -- Thanks a lot, and gut yontef. Jenny Levison 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 09:38:06 -0400 (EDT) From: David Gil Subject: Yiddish grammar question Shana tova and a happy new year to everybody. I am a professional linguist with no knowledge of Yiddish. I am looking for a fluent speaker of Yiddish who would be willing to answer a short (but perhaps tricky) question about Yiddish grammar. If you think you may be able to help me, I would be extremely grateful. My question follows below. YIDDISH GRAMMAR QUESTION Please translate the following sentence into Yiddish: "My two daughters each got three presents for the holidays" My particular interest is in the "mathematics" of the sentence: how does the translated sentence make sure that EACH daughter got three presents, that is to say, for a total of six presents; or in other words, how does the sentence rule out the possibility that the two daughters shared a total of three presents between them. In English, it's the word "each" that does the job. In written German they say "je drei", but in most regional varieties of German the word "je" is not used; in some places they say "jede drei", while in other places they put the "jeder" at the beginning of the sentence. In Hebrew the sentence would be as follows: "Shtey habanot sheli kiblu kol akhat shalosh matanot lakhagim" Here, it's the phrase "kol akhat" which corresponds to English "each" and German "je". When responding to this query, please indicate which dialect of Yiddish you speak, as I am also interested in tracing out this construction as it occurs in different regional varieties. Thanks, David Gil Leipzig, Germany 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 16:17:27 -0400 From: N Miller Subject: Another Yiddish story for Onkelos A modern Yiddish version of Dovid Bergelson's "yoysef shur" is now available at http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/onkelos.htm. An English translation of this story, as with the others in Onkelos, is to be found in Howe and Greenberg's _A Treasury of Yiddish Stories_, Penguin. Noyekh Miller Leonard Prager 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 00:21:09 -0400 (EDT) From: "Mankovsky, Sheine" Subject: Disney and Yiddish In late July I visited Disney.com, an interesting and informative site. I would encourage you to explore it. Via Family.com, I clicked on a baby name finder because I was curious to see what names were included, etc. There I located my name, although it was spelled differently than I spell it. The origin of Shaina was noted as Hebrew, meaning beautiful. I was more than a little disturbed. Of course I didn't take issue with the meaning ( a nar zol ich zein), but with the origin-not Hebrew as all of us know! I wrote to the editor in chief, as visitors are invited to "write us", explaining that the origin of Shaina is Yiddish, and providing the correct YIVO spelling which I had requested from YIVO. (For any of you who may be interested and don't know, the correct transliteration is Sheyne). Just change the origin of Shaina to Yiddish, add Yiddish to the list of languages, right after Swahili, I said, and I will be a happy camper. I wrote again at the end of July and at the end of August asking for the correction. Still nothing. The other day I received an e-mail from Reyzl aka YiddishNet containing two Associated Press articles about Joseph Lieberman and Yiddish. The second article, by Brigitte Greenberg, dated September 18 stated in the body as follows: Although Yiddish and Hebrew are often associated with one another by Americans, they are different tongues..... The internet is proving to be a wonderful tool for Yiddish and Yiddish culture. The folks who invented it deserve a Mazel Tov. Smart bunch they are, whoever they are. However, chaverim, I am perplexed. How does one go about getting the folks at Disney to make one such small change on their website? Vos tut men mit uzeleche menschen? I am open to suggestions. In the meantime, a healthy, happy, and productive New Year to all of you. Sheine (Sheinele) Mankovsky Toronto, Canada ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 10.035 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://ibiblio.org/yiddish/mendele.html