מענדעלע

Ever since last Dec.29,1995 when Dan Leeson asked:"Is Yiddish dying?", I have been keeping track of the responses which have been posted in response to that question. To date there have been about 19. My idea was to see if, from all these, I could get some feel for the state of the language. However, the post of Ellen Prince in 5.214 has given me a new way to look at the question, and to come up with an answer. Her answer to Hershl Hartman's post in 5.212 states, in part: "the fact remains that a language is considered 'dead' or 'alive' according to whether children are learning it in the normal way that children aquire languages, and the presence or absence of a written literary tradition and corpus is irrelevant. children acquiring a native language do not know (or care) about its literature."

First of all, there are degrees of "aliveness" which a language can exhibit. The very fact that we use the term "dying" implies that there are stages in which the transition is from "fully alive" to "dead". Yiddish is not dead yet because there still are Khasidic and other children who are learning it in the normal way. And there are still adults around who learned Yiddish in the normal way, and who still use it in everyday discourse.

Second, I would like to make a comparison with the history of the Hebrew language. Before the time of Eliezer ben Yehudah, Hebrew was a dead language. He, almost single-handedly, brought about a rebirth of the language, and made it the language of the land. A key element in his success was his dictionary for which he created the words needed in order to have a modern, living language. By comparison, Yiddish today is much more alive than when ben Yehudah started out on his monumental task. Not only are there modern Yiddish dictionaries, but there are lexicographers, such as Mordkhe Schaechter, who are creating new Yiddish terms such as those required to talk about computers, etc.

It has been said that Hebrew is the only language in the world which has been brought back to full life. If it could happen to Hebrew, why not to Yiddish which already has a good head-start? According to my friend Leybl Botwinik, even in Israel today there are some 3,000 pupils in 50 schools who are learning Yiddish - and over half the cost is subsidized by the Israeli government. Why not think that Yiddish might become the fourth official language of Israel?

With respect to the revival of Yiddish, we should adopt the motto of Herzl: "If you will it, it is no dream!".

Morrie Feller Phoenix

For several weeks now many posts in Mendele run under the same subject title "Is Yiddish Dying?"

May I in this connection cite from an obituary in the _New York Times_ (January 14, 1996, p. 33) about Red Thunder Cloud, 76, "a singer, a dancer, a story teller, and the last link to a language."

Mr. Red Thunder Cloud was a member of the Catawba nation, steeped in the history of the American Indians. He was the only one -- and the last living person -- who knew and spoke Catawba, a tongue related to the Sioux family of languages, and so took to his grave the last human link to the ancient language of his people.

In the 1940's he made a complete recording of all he knew of the Catawba language for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About that time he also recorded some ancient Catawba songs for the Smithsonian Institute.

"It is always sad when the last living speaker of a language dies," said Carl Teeter, emeritus professor of linguistics at Harvard University. He added that there were once about 500 languages in North America. A hundred are still spoken, half of them by older people.

Mr. Foxx Ayres, 71, also a member of the Catawba nation, recalled on Mr. Cloud's death that, as a youngster, he (Ayres) resisted his grandmother's efforts to teach him the language because he feared he would be ridiculed. "I wish now that I'd learned," Mr. Ayers added.

See some parallels to Yiddish? Only up to one cardinal and fundamentally singular difference: Catawba was an oral language only, with _no_ written form!

Compare this to Yiddish: A history of hundreds of years, spoken by millions, a multitude of newspapers and journals in all fields of human endeavor, a literature that reached dimensions of grandeur in prose and poetry, a true "goldene keyt" [golden chain] of continuity from generation to generation in all continents of the globe, from the dozens upon dozens of editions of the pious _tsenerene_ books for women to the universality of Isaac Bashevis Singer's master stories, all originally written in Yiddish, that earned him the Nobel Prize for literaturex from Mendele, the "zeyde," the grandfather of the modern Yiddish literature to our Mendele List for Literature and the Yiddish Language -- his great-, great-, great-, great-, great-, great-grandchild...

Is Yiddish dying? We won't let it! And it will never, never happen!

Zellig Bach

Anna Shternshis inquired about Yiddish songs with Soviet content. My grandmother once recalled the song that was as popular in Bessarabia in the late 1930s as it sounds ironic now:

lomir trinken a lekhaim, let's drink ai-ai-ai, ai-ai-ai, far dem leibn ayer naye, for your new life ai-ai-...

far oktiabr revolutsie, for October revolution ai-ai-... un far stalin konstitutsie, and for Stalin's constitution ai-ai-...

Does anybody know the author(s) and the rest of the song?

Iosif Vaisman

Mendelyaner Bernard Greenberg [5.217] asked about the etymology of "potschken". This verb surely comes from the Russian verb "patschkat" (the usual transliteration is pachkat' ) which means to dirty, soil, stain, sully, daub. As usual, Yiddish takes the Russian root "patschk", drops the Russian infinitive ending and ads the Germanic- Yiddish ending "en", then further adds the Germanic-Yiddish prefixes "on" or "far". The form "farpatschket" has both the prefix and past participle form from Germanic-Yiddish with the Russian root "patsch" sandwiched in the middle.

Carl Goldberg

Last night on the eleven o'clock news:

Disscussing a formation on his weather map, the meteorologist, Mr. G. announced that over the next 12 hours one should expect "tsures" to cover New York City. "Ooops!" he corrected himself, "Not 'tsures' - 'cirrus'. 'Tsures' is trouble, 'cirrus' are clouds!"

Zol der veter-novi undz brengen tsures???

***

Nekhtn, af di televizye-yedies fun 11 a zeyger:

Beshas a derklerung fun zayn veter-mape hot mister "G.," der veter-novi anonsirt az in di kumendike 12 shoen ken men zikh rikhtn af "tsures" vos voltn badekt di stodt, New York. "Hoo-ha!!," hot er gekhapt zayn toes, "nisht 'tsures' nor 'cirrus'!" Un tsugegebn, "'Tsures' zenen shverikaytn 'cirrus' zenen khmares."

Should a meteorologist bring us trouble???

Ruvn Millman