Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 15.012
June 20, 2005
1) tate (Dina Levias)
2) tate (Hugh Denman)
3) tate (Larry Friedman)
4) orkheporkhe (Dovid Braun)
5) orkheporkhe (Amitai Halevi)
6) Hebrew in Yiddish (Mark Steiner)
1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: June 20, 2005
Subject: Re: tate
In answer to Hirsh Perloff, the word 'tata' is father in Romanian.
Where the word comes from I don't know, but I suspect it's Indo-eureopan
"baby-babble", like the word 'mama' for mother. The final 'a' in tata is
accented if one's father is meant; if it's used as a form of address, i.e.
in the vocative case, or if it's indefinite, i.e. 'a father', then the
last 'a' is not accented and the word sounds more or less like 'tate'.
Dina L‚vias
Geneva, Switzerland
2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: June 20, 2005
Subject: Re: tate
In response to Hirsh Perloff's interesting query [15.001:6] concerning
'tate', it should perhaps be said that parallel with the more formal pater/
pitar/ father/ Vater/ foter Indo-European designations for the male parent
there exist the equally (if not more) ancient hypocoristic forms of the
'daddy' type. Not only the Slav 'tata'/ tatus, but the Alemannic tete/
ette, Yiddish 'tate' and, of course, our own 'daddy' etc., so I don't think
it necessary to have recourse to Turkish. On the other hand, it is
precisely in the areas of such primordial and basic vocabulary that
evidence for the validity of the Nostratic hypothesis is most likely to be
found, so the Turkish parallel is perhaps not so far-fetched, after all.
The simple answer may well be that Yiddish has it from the Upper German
dialects among which the language had its origins and that this was later
reinforced by the coterritorial Slav forms in a manner akin to what Ghil'ad
Zuckerman would probably call multi-sourced lexical enrichment. Of course,
if Paul Wexler is right, the Germanic/ Slav sequence may need to be
reversed.
Hugh Denman
Oxford
3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: June 19, 2005
Subject: Re: tate
Czech has the word "t?ta", which is often translated as "dad(dy)". Along
with that word are other words for "daddy": tatinek, tat?cek, tatka, etc.
They all appear to be cognates of the Russian-Ukrainian "dyadya", which can
mean "uncle", "dad" or "grandpa", depending on where it is used.
Larry Friedman
4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: June 20, 2005
Subject: Re: orkheporkhe
For etymology of the Yiddish _orkheporkhe_, a Hebrew or Hebrew-Aramaic
etymological dictionary is to be consulted. The first root is the
Hebrew/Aramaic alef-reysh-khes ('guest, visitor; homeless individual being
hosted') and the second root is pey-reysh-khes ('to flower/blossom, to be
florid'). No relation to _parkh_.
Dovid Braun
dbraun@fas.harvard.edu
5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: June 20, 2005
Subject: Re: orkheporkhe
The expression "orkhei u-porkhei" appears in the Talmud (Ketubot 61a).
Jastrow translates it as: "guests and transient visitors" (orhka3Dguest,
traveler; prakh3Dfly, run).
In the common Hebrew expression, "ore'akh pore'akh", the "u" (3Dand)
was dropped, and the expression has come to mean "transient visitor"
or simply "transient".
How did it get to be an expression in Yiddish?
I imagine that it was adopted directly from the Talmud, which Orthodox
Ashkenazi Jews used to study in Yiddish and - as far as I know - still
do.
Amitai Halevi
[Posts also received from Herbert Davidson and Martin Jacobs.]
6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: June 20, 2005
Subject: Yiddish in Hebrew
1. Though the formal commemoration of the yortsayt began in the Middle Ages, there are at least nine
references in Hazal (Bavli, Yerushalmi, Midrashim) to "yom shemet bo
aviv" as a fast day. This is quite a mouthful, and a Hebrew word could
easily have been coined, but it seems that it was Yiddish that coined
it. By the way, I believe that the word "yortsayt" is in use among
Moroccan Jews.
2. On pareve: though it may be true (I have not checked this) that the
Israel Academy of the Hebrew Language offers "stami" as a Hebrew
substitute for pareve, the only time I have seen this unsucessful word
anywhere in Israel in 28 years here is on certain pots in kibbutzim of
the Poel Hamizrahi. Certainly not on the labels of supervised foods...
Probably it would be much better to admit: pareve has become a Hebrew
word derived from Yiddish, just as there are very many words in Yiddish
derived from Hebrew. In MH, when the Rabbis wanted to say pareve, the
used a paradigmatic case: fish, as in the famous: dagim she`alu
beqa`arah...
3. The influence of Yiddish on Israeli Hebrew--on every phase of syntax
and semantics--is extremely profound. There are thousands of examples,
but I'll list two: The word for "chicken" (meaning the dish served on
shabbat or at weddings, most usually roasted chicken) in Israeli Hebrew
is `of, though this word in Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew is a general
word for all fowl, kosher or not. It is in Yiddish that the word oyf,
oyfes--though derived from Hebrew--has the narrower extension. The word
"kevar" in Israeli Hebrew has become equivalent to Yiddish "shoyn", so
that whereas in MH kevar refers to something done in the past, in
Israeli Hebrew it can refer to something not yet done, as in "ani kevar
ba." (When an Israeli tells you that, you can expect to wait a half
hour.) Something similar has happened in "Brooklyn English" to the word
'already' which has been identified with the Yiddish word shoyn, but in
the U.S. this use of "already" has been labeled by the OED as a
"non-standard idiomatic use" in "Yiddish influenced speech" to denote
"emphasis, exasperation...; frequently 'now' as "Enough, already."
Another example given is "Give me the watermelon already," from D.
Greenburg's How to Be a Jewish Mother.
4. The dual derivation of Yiddish words from Hebrew/Aramaic on the one
hand, and Medieval German on the other (also the Slavic Languages, and,
in Jerusalem, Arabic), allows distinctions pertaining to Jewish/halakhic
concepts:
(a) seform/bikhlakh--both mean books, but only the first means
sacred books. The second is a disparaging diminutive meaning nonkosher
books. I'm not aware of such a distinction in Hebrew, where you have to
say "sifrei kodesh" to make this distinction. The Mishnah speaks of
"gilyonot", probably referring to the Gospels, but I am not sure that
this, like the abovementioned "dagim," is a paradigmatic example.
(b) niftr/geshtorbn--the first refers to righteous Jews
specifically. This distinction probably exists at least incipiently in
MH. Another kind of distinction that doesn't exist in Hebrew is:
(c) gut shabes/a gutn shabes The first is said as a greeting
and the second as a good-bye wish that the interlocutor should _have_ a
good shabes. The first, therefore, can be said only on shabes; the
latter can be said on Thursday as a farewell to someone whom we won't
see on shabes. This distinction may even have halakhic significance
since R. Akiba Eger (to O.H. 271) is said to hold that "gut shabes"
counts as fulfillment of the Biblical commandment of "lekadsho",
i.e. kiddush hayom. I doubt that "a gutn shabes" would so count,
since it could be said before shabes as well. In Israeli Hebrew
"shabat shalom" translates both "gut shabes" and "a gutn shabes."
5. On the Yiddish word loshn (=MH "lashon"), my brother pointed out to
me that MH lashon hara` need not be semikhut, since the word lashon in
MH suffered a gender shift and is masculine. I had thought that the
verse "netzor leshonekha mera`" indicates that the word ra` in lashon
hara` is a noun. In any case this also shows that Yiddish reflects
MH--but I can also change the example to "loshn koydesh" which is a
perfectlly grammatical expression in MH, where lashon can also be the
semikhut form of lashon.
6. Weinreich pointed out in an old article on Hebrew words in Yiddish
that even after German Jews stopped speaking (Western) Yiddish, they
preserved the Hebrew element in Yiddish in their daily speech, updating
only the German derived part of their speech to Modern German. In some
cases they did this to create a Jewish code which Gentiles could not
understand. In any case, "Yekes" in referring to "counting the `omer"
say "aumern" a Yiddish word derived from Hebrew, while we Galitzyaners
say "tseyln sfire." (The connection between aumern and cheesecake on
shavuot among the German Jews is that if you don't do the first, you
don't get the second. keyn khokmes nisht. khokhmes is, by the way,
part of the German Jewish vocabulary.)
7. In thinking further about the Israeli neologism "stami," to replace the
Yiddish word "pareve," I suddenly realized that there is a great irony
here. The Israeli word "stam" itself is actually a Yiddish word. And
though of course the word derives from MH and Aramaic, the relevant
meaning (there are others, esp. "closed") there is "unspecified", where
as in Yiddish it means "ordinary, undistinguished". Roughly speaking we
have a shift from the gavra to the heftza (ad hominem to ad rem). The
term stami utilizes the Yiddish meaning of the term, so why not just say
"pareve"?
Mark Steiner
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