מענדעלע

A colleage of mine who works in Native American laguages has two questions: (a) the first time that the speakers of Yiddish described themselves as speaking a language called Yiddish--I notice that "ivri-deytch" is used in Peretz, and paused before I answered with any assurance and (b) the influence of Khazar on Yiddish (I take it he is referring to the Slavic language of the tribe which allegedly converted to Judaism). I apologize for questions which have been raised before--please direct me to the archives under the appropriate subject if this is where I should look.

Baruch Rosenstock

Re David Herskovic's post "chiribiom" [5.260]:

There is a song titled "Tshiribim" that might be the chorus to the one you mentioned. The Yiddish Song Book, Stein and Day, Publishers, says the chorus is a wordless Chassidic nigun (melody) to be sung and danced to with great joy. Tshiribim,tschribom, Tshiribim-bam-bim-bam-bom etc.

Zelma Teicher

In vol. 5.263, Ellen Prince and David Lidsky suggested reasons for the preponderance of daytshmerisms and the use of German-influenced spelling in Khsidishe Yiddish.

Ellen suggested that it was a matter of dialect differences: Poland had more contact with and immigration from Germany than Lithuania and Russia, and so Polish Yiddish acquired more German borrowings and German influence than did Lithuanian Yiddish; when the standardizers did their thing, they did it within a dialect with relatively few German borrowings, and labeled the ones that weren't theirs as daytshmerisms.

As no great fan of standard Yiddish, I liked Ellen's explanation, but I have some reservations about it.

My impression is that there was quite a lot of emigration from Poland to Germany and Austria in the last century before the war, but not much the other way--Poland was poorer than a church mouse's shrayim. Maybe we can blame it on the mail that came back from the emigrants.

As for other forms of contact, I imagine that in most matters Poland had much more contact with Germany than Lite or Russia. And don't forget that Galitsye, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were under an Austro-Hungarian government until World War I, and part of Poylin was under Prussia. But in the haymishe community, my impression is that there was much more contact between the Lite and Germany than between Poland and Germany. The Lite had famous yeshives, to which many German Orthodox Jews sent their sons to learn. And Germany had famous universities, to which many Orthodox Litvaks of a slightly modern bent went to study, including some of the best and brightest from the yeshives. Poland had little to do with either phenomenon: university was absolutely out of the question for the Polish Orthodox Jew, and Poland had no yeshives to speak of until R. Mayer Shapire opened Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin (in the early 1930s?). German Jews were an odd sight in Poland, and a short jacket is called a "daytshl" because it was the strange garb of German visitors. So if there was more contact between Poland and Germany than between Lite and Germany, I would say it must have been outside frime circles; in frime circles, there was probably more contact between Germany and the Lite than between Germany and Poland.

Still, we have to ask, how did this contact affect dialects? It is possible that increased contact (particularly within the close confines of a yeshive) would make for a heightened awareness of dialect differences, and that heightened awarenss would make for _less_ borrowing than in areas where the contrast wasn't as noticeable. Or, it may be that the pattern of contact was different in the secular community, and Poylishe-yiidish speakers as a whole had more contact with Germany than did litvishe-yiidish speakers, and the Polish dialect changed as a whole, without any major differences between the religious and secular communities. [See the recent Mendele polemics on the history, extent and character of a distinction between religious and secular yiidish, where I argued that until recently, even the yiidish of secular Jews was permeated with frimkayt (in frime yiidish, I would have said Yiddishkayt ;-), and that such is no longer the case.]

This brings me to David's suggestion. He quoted the following explanation for the preponderance of Germanized spelling: "In the late nineteenth century (such) germanized spelling became standard in Yiddish and despite its having originated with their ideological enemies traditional Orthodox Jews adopted it as did other people. When in the early twentieth century modern orthographies were developed by people who were not as traditionally religiously inclined as they, traditional religious Jews rejected modern spelling (because it was the product of people seen by them as secularizers) and just stuck to the old system, as they still do." He then suggested that a similar explanation could account for the preponderance of daytshmersms in religious yiidish. I like his suggestion, but there's one piece missing: why did religious Jews reject the second standardization, but not the first? I can think of a few different reasons.

One could explain it through the character of the political struggle over Yiddish. At the time of the first change, Yiddish was already something of a political issue, but there was no need for the religious camp to fight it in the trenches--Yiddish was the language of daily use for the religious community, and there was no need to take a stand on particular details of vocabulary. Or maybe they did see a need to fight it, but they failed; fighting a new word which is in circulation is, burikhashem, one of the most futile enterprises known to man (just ask the official academies of French and Hebrew). By the time the second wave of reforms began to reach the religious community, Yiddish was declining, and was much more of a fighting issue--it was definitely more so in America than in Europe, where the language of instruction in khadorim and yeshives was never in question--so a religious "maintain-everything-exactly-as-it-was"-movement, the only one which has preserved a living yiidish to this day, insisted on keeping the germanized spellings. And orthography is much more easily controlled than vocabulary.

But a more likely explanation lies in the connection between the religious and secular communities and their respective yiidishes. The degree of contact between them at the time of the second wave of reforms was much slighter than at the time of the first. I don't think the second standardization has really been noticed in the religious Yiddish-speaking community; it's not something which we've been fighting. YIVO is virtually unknown, even as an organization, and definitely not as an authority over the language. The YIVO standardization was not so much rejected as unnoticed. Chareidi rhetoric about Yiddish usually revolves around getting peple to use it more (or less)--not on how to spell it, or which words are "correct" Yiddish.

I should add, before I keel over and fall asleep, that some aspects of this topic came up in private discussion with Reb Noyekh a while back, and some of what I wrote above includes ideas which I got from him. Once again, yash'koyakh.

Eliyahu Juni

Leonard Prager noticed [5.271] that "Az me git, nem!" sounds better in Yiddish than in Hebrew (English with its "If you are given something, take it" [F.Kogos, 1001 Yiddish Proverbs] is clearly out of contest). If the phonetic 'quality' is an indicator here, Russian succint "Daiut - beri" wins by a wide margin. Russian equivalent for "Az men git nem, az men nemt -- shray gevald!" is also very laconic: "Daiut - beri, b'iut - begi" (If you are given something, take it; if you are being beaten, run away). Interestingly, the meaning of a related proverb "Az Got vil nit geben, ken men zich alein nit nemen" is opposite from its Russian counterpart "Na Boga nadeisia, a sam ne ploshai" (Count on God, but don't miss your opportunities). Red oif 'secular Yiddish'!

Iosif Vaisman