מענדעלע

When Reb Menachem-Mendl left his native Kasrilevke and went to Yekhupets and other big cities, he had to write his dearly loved wife Sheine-Sheindl long letters on paper because there was no e-mail. Of course, now there is e-mail, but there is no Kasrilevke, and even Yekhupets, I must tell you, has changed significantly.

As a remedy against historical injustice, I am announcing a Virtual Shtetl: Yiddish Language and Culture Home Page on World Wide Web (URL: http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/shtetl.html). Shtetl is under construction, the first phase contains Mendele and Mail-Yiddish archives (completely searchable soon), first chapter from Sheva Zucker's new textbook with the special introduction for Shtetl, links to on-line catalogs of libraries with large Yiddish collections, Yiddish songs (sheet music and recordings), paintings and drawings, recipes and other goodies.

Plans for the nearest future: Yiddish bibliographies, list of shtetlakh and towns, photographs of important places, buildings, memorials. I invite everybody to participate in construction of the shtetl. Materials, ideas, suggestions, and critique are welcome.

Iosif Vaisman

[Yasher koyekh! Zol zayn mit glik!]

The recent discussion of vaybertaytsh has me fascinated, and baffled because I can't relate the terms "square letters" or "Rashi script" to anything I know (which ain't much, obviously) about Yiddish or Hebrew character typefonts. At the same time, I heartily concur with Harvey Spiro's yearning for something like a CD-ROM reference work. My question: has anyone explored the idea of a Mendele page on the World Wide Web, which might both allow graphic presentation of Yiddish in the original characters, and create a standing, accessible database that we could all use?

Andrew Cassel Elkins Park, PA

I enjoyed reading Dovid Braun's recent posting about "fossil" words and phrases like af der gikh. There's one we all know, "in gantsn". But there's one particular one that has interested me for a long time, and that has to do with the presence in Yiddish of the word "heyt" as an independent word, as in "di heyt" and not just as a noun-forming suffix. I've searched various modern German dictionaries and not found it. But if we look further in Yiddish, we find it used in an adverbial suffix, which also does not occur in modern German, in words ending in -erheyt (shtilerheyt, gezunterheyt). It seems plausible that the "er" portion is a "fossil" of a German dative which was inherently adverbial and required no preposition ( e.g. (in) a shtiler heyt ).

Another interesting one is "bay laytn glaykh," where we have an old dative plural suffix.

Rick Gildemeister

I enjoyed reading Howard Gershen's recent posting, suggesting ways to place people geographically by their pronunciation. I've tried it and been wrong many times because dialect features each have their own geography. If someone says "tug" instead of "tog" but says "mayn", you would guess that it was Southeastern Yiddish. But in Moldavian Yiddish you get occasional "Polish" characteristics: "Man tote ot gezugt", and "fin ant uen" for "fun haynt on". You have to really know a *lot* to do it, and you have to deal with dialect shift, as dialects widen and narrow certain features. As Ellen Prince explained years ago on WEVD, a nonstandard dialect will often be eroded by the host dialect.

An interesting example that I read somewhere was that yeshives performed normative functions, that yeshive bakhurim would bring back styles of speech and inform the locals that a particular local feature was "hickish" (doubtless they got genudzhet a lot in school). The particular context was of surviving preterites, which a 19th century German would praise as pure and showing culture, while the local Jews would come to think of them as silly and not au courant.

Rick Gildemeister

One of my students is taking a linguistics course and is working on a presentation on Yiddish. She is interested in Yiddish words that have entered into English, the language of origin of these words, how they have migrated etc. Can someone please suggest books, articles and other resources?

Henny Lewin