The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language
A
Companion to MENDELE
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 09.013
[Sequential No. 165]
Date:
1) This issue (ed.)
2) The Israeli Language (Ghil'ad Zuckermann)
3) More on kvetsh (ed.)
4) Yehoyesh's
khumesh with Ulrich Greve's
Jewish Calendar: Instructions
Click here to
enter: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr09/tmr09013.htm
1)-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: This issue of
TMR
Ghil'ad Zuckermann's new book, Hebrew As Myth [Am Oved] will be
published shortly and he here gives a refined restatement of the
argument he presented polemically in his reply to the Forward's Philologus in TMR 8.013 (December 2004). [See http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmr/tmr08013.htm].
Zuckermann commands a position midway between
the traditionalists -- semiticists largely who cling
to the view of continuous development of a Hebrew language from
biblical times to today -- and the "revisionists" for whom
Hebrew is relexified Indo-European. Zuckermann states squarely: "Israeli is a hybrid
language based on both Hebrew and Yiddish" as well as on many other
languages. Since his copious review of the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary
(in the International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1999):
325-346) -- and probably before -- Zuckermann has
wrangled with the glottonomy issue and it has
unnecessarily won him sharp critics. Zuckermann by
no means denies the productive powers and expressive capacity of the language
of the State of Israel commonly called Hebrew. He insists on both its
Indo-European and Semitic origins, its immense debt to Yiddish, its essential
newness -- and his name for it: "Israeli." He concludes: "Whatever we choose to call
it, we should acknowledge, and celebrate, its complexity." The appearance of Zuckermann's
new book will doubtless stimulate much discussion.
In the last issue of TMR
I boldly asserted that the verb kvetshn in
Yiddish does not mean 'to complain', though to kvetch has clearly come
to mean that in English. What bothered me was the notion that Yiddish itself in
toto was being assigned the quality of griping.
Now that the lexical question has been raised we are constrained to pursue it
further.
Instructions for
downloading a marvelous Jewish Calendar with integrated weekly Khumesh portion in Yehoyesh's
classic Yiddish translation.
2)-----------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Ghil'ad Zuckermann
<gz208@cam.ac.uk>
Subject: The Israeli Language
THE ISRAELI LANGUAGE
Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
http://www.zuckermann.org Fascinating and
multifaceted, Israeli (Zuckermann 1999, a.k.a.
‘Modern Hebrew’) is a ‘non-genetic’ language from the point of view of Hebrew;
there was no continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli.
Hebrew was spoken by the Jewish people after the so-called conquest of
Unlike Maskilic Hebrew (i.e. the Hebrew of the Haskalah,
the 1770-1880 Enlightenment Movement led by Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Herz Wessely),
a literary language, Israeli is a living mother tongue. Its formation was
facilitated in Eretz Yisrael
(‘
Itamar Ben-Avi (1882-1943, born as
Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda), Eliezer
Ben-Yehuda’s son, is symbolically considered to have
been the first native Israeli-speaker. He was born one year after Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a native
Yiddish-speaker, conversant in Russian and French, arrived in Eretz Yisrael. Eliezer and his wife, Dvora,
spoke to Itamar only in Hebrew despite their not
being native speakers. Itamar, who only started to
speak at the age of four, confessed that he uttered his first word after his
father, who was obsessive about Hebrew, found Dvora
singing a Russian lullaby to Itamar. Eliezer became furious and smashed a wooden table to
pieces. ‘Seeing my father furious and my mother […] crying, I started to
speak’, Itamar wrote in his autobiography (Ben-Avi 1961: 18).
But it was not until the
beginning of the twentieth century that Israeli was first spoken by a
community, which makes it approximately 100 years old. The first children born
to two Israeli-speaking parents were those of couples who were graduates of the
first Israeli schools in Eretz Yisrael,
and who had married in the first decade of the twentieth century (see Rabin
1981: 54).
In April 2000, the
oldest native Israeli-speaker was Dola Wittmann (in her late 90s), Eliezer
Ben-Yehuda’s daughter, who also happens to be one of
the first native Israeli-speakers. When Orthodox Jews desecrated her father’s
grave with obscene graffiti (because, in their view, vernacularizing
the ‘holy language’ was a sin), Dola simply asked,
‘What language did they write in?’ When the answer came back, ‘Hebrew’, she
took it as an admission of defeat by his critics.
Israeli is one of the
official languages – with Arabic and English – of the State of Israel, spoken
to varying degrees of fluency by its 6.8 million
citizens – as a mother tongue by most Israeli Jews (whose total number is
5,235,000), and as a second language by Israeli Muslims (Arabic-speakers),
Israeli Christians (e.g. Russian- and Arabic-speakers), Israeli Druze (Arabic-speakers)
and others. It is also spoken by some non-Israeli Palestinians, as well as by a
small number of Diaspora Jews.
During the past century,
Israeli has become the primary mode of communication in all domains of public
and private life. With the growing diversification of Israeli society, it has
come also to highlight the absence of a unitary civic culture among citizens
who seem increasingly to share only their language.
Issues of language are
so sensitive in
One could see in these rebukes the common nostalgia of a conservative older
generation unhappy with ‘reckless’ changes to the language – cf. Aitchison
(2001), Hill (1998), Milroy and Milroy
(1999) and Cameron (1995). But normativism in Israeli contradicts the usual ‘do not
split your infinitives’ model, where there is an attempt to enforce the grammar
and pronunciation of an elite social group. Using a ‘do as I say, don’t do as I
do’ approach, Ashkenazic Jews (most of them originally native
Yiddish-speakers), who have usually controlled key positions in Israeli
society, urged Israelis to adopt the pronunciation of Sephardic Jews
(many of them originally native Arabic-speakers), who happen to have been
socio-economically disadvantaged. In fact, politicians, educators and many laymen
are attempting to impose Hebrew grammar on Israeli speech, ignoring the fact
that Israeli has its own grammar, which is very different from that of Hebrew.
The late linguist Haim Blanc once took his young daughter to see an Israeli
production of My Fair Lady. In this version, Professor Henry Higgins teaches
Eliza Doolittle how to pronounce /r/ ‘properly’, i.e. as the Hebrew alveolar
trill, characteristic of Sephardim (cf. Judaeo-Spanish,
Italian, Spanish), rather than as the Israeli lax uvular approximant (cf. many
Yiddish and German dialects). The line ‘The rain in
A language is an
abstract ensemble of idiolects – as well as sociolects,
dialects etc. – rather than an entity per se. It is more like a species
than an organism (cf. Mufwene 2001: 11). Still,
linguists attempt to generalize about communal languages, and, in fact, the
genetic classification of Israeli Hebrew has preoccupied scholars since the
beginning of the twentieth century. The traditional view suggests that it is
Semitic: (Biblical/Mishnaic) Hebrew revived (e.g.
Rabin 1974). Educators, scholars and politicians have propagated this view. The
revisionist position defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified, i.e. Yiddish, most revivalists’ máme lóshn
(mother tongue), is the ‘substratum’, whilst Hebrew is only a ‘superstratum’ providing lexicon and frozen morphology (cf.
Horvath and Wexler 1997).
From time to time it is
alleged that Hebrew never died (e.g. Haramati 1992,
2000, Chomsky 1957: 218). It is true that throughout its literary history
Hebrew was used as an occasional lingua franca. However, between the second and
nineteenth centuries it was no one’s mother tongue. The development of a
literary language is very different from that of a native language. But there
are many linguists who, though rejecting the ‘eternal spoken Hebrew mythology’,
still explain every linguistic feature in Israeli as if Hebrew never died. For
example, Goldenberg (1996: 151-8) suggests that Israeli pronunciation
originates from internal convergence and divergence within Hebrew.
I wonder, however, how a
literary language can be subject to the same phonetic and phonological
processes as a mother tongue. I argue, rather, that the Israeli sound system
continues the (strikingly similar) phonetics and phonology of Yiddish, the
native language of almost all the revivalists. These revivalists very much
wished to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, like Arabs.
However, they could not avoid the Ashkenazic mindset
– and consonants – arising from their European background.
Unlike the
traditionalist and revisionist, my own hybridizational
theory acknowledges the historical and linguistic continuity of both Semitic
and Indo-European languages within Israeli. ‘Genetically modified’,
semi-engineered Israeli is based simultaneously on Hebrew and Yiddish (both
being primary contributors – rather than ‘substrata’), accompanied by a
plethora of other contributors such as Russian, Polish, German, Judaeo-Spanish (‘Ladino’) Arabic and English. Therefore,
the term Israeli is far more appropriate than Israeli Hebrew, let
alone Modern Hebrew or Hebrew (tout court).
What makes the
‘genetics’ of Israeli grammar so complex is the fact that the combination of
Semitic and Indo-European influences is a phenomenon occurring already within
the primary (and secondary) contributors to Israeli. Yiddish, a Germanic
language with a Romance substratum (and with most dialects having undergone Slavonicization), was shaped by Hebrew and Aramaic. On the
other hand, Indo-European languages, such as Greek, played a role in (Semitic)
Hebrew. Moreover, before the emergence of Israeli, Yiddish and other European
languages influenced Medieval and Maskilic variants
of Hebrew (see Glinert 1991), which, in turn,
influenced Israeli (in tandem with the European contribution). This adds to the
importance of the Congruence Principle (Zuckermann
2003):
If a linguistic feature
exists in more than one contributor, it is more likely to persist in the Target
Language.
The distinction between
forms and patterns (Zuckermann 2006) is crucial too.
In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá,
‘the language defendants regiment’ (see Shur 2000),
whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít
‘Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew!’, used to tear down signs written in
‘foreign’ languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, the
members of this group did not look for Yiddish and ‘Standard Average European’
patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak ‘Hebrew’. [The
term ‘Standard Average European’ was first introduced by Whorf (1941: 25) and
recently received more attention by Haspelmath (1998,
2001) and Bernini and Ramat
(1996) – cf. ‘European Sprachbund’ in Kuteva (1998).]
This is, obviously, not
to say that the revivalists, had they paid attention to patterns, would have
managed to neutralize the impact of their mother tongues, which was often
subconscious (hence the term ‘semi-engineered’). As Mufwene
observes, ‘linguistic change is inadvertent, a consequence of “imperfect
replication” in the interactions of individual speakers as they adapt their
communicative strategies to one another or to new needs’ (2001: 11). Although
they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the language the
revivalists ‘created’ often mirrors the very cultural differences they sought
to erase (cf. mutatis mutandis Frankenstein’s monster, or the golem).
The alleged victory of Hebrew over Yiddish was, in fact, a Pyrrhic one.
Victorious ‘asthmatic’ Hebrew is, after all, partly European at heart. Yiddish
and Standard Average European survive beneath ‘osmotic’ Israeli grammar.
Had the revivalists been
Arabic-speaking Jews (e.g. from
Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance to the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been [...] in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants generations later.
Harrison et al. (1988)
discuss the ‘Founder Effect’ in biology and human evolution, and Mufwene (2001) applies it as a creolistic
tool to explain why the structural features of so-called creoles (which he
regards as ‘normal languages’ just like English) are largely predetermined by
the characteristics of the languages spoken by the founder population, i.e. by
the first colonists. I propose the following Founder Principle in the context
of Israeli:
Yiddish is a primary
contributor to Israeli because it was the mother tongue of the vast majority of
revivalists and first pioneers in Eretz Yisrael at the crucial period of the beginning of
Israeli.
The Founder Principle
works because by the time later immigrations came to
At the same time – and
unlike anti-revivalist revisionists – I suggest that lethargic liturgical
Hebrew too fulfills the criteria of a primary contributor for the following
reasons: (i) Despite millennia without native
speakers, it persisted as a most important cultural, literary and liturgical
language throughout the generations; (ii) Revivalists made a huge effort to
revive it and were, in fact, partly successful.
The impact of Yiddish
and Standard Average European is apparent in all the components of the
language but usually in patterns rather than in forms. That said,
Israeli demonstrates a unique spectacular split between morphology and
phonology. Whereas most Israeli Hebrew morphological forms, e.g.
discontinuously conjugated verbs, are Hebrew, the phonetics and phonology of
Israeli — including of these very forms — are European. One of the reasons for
overlooking this split is the axiom that morphology — rather than phonology —
is the most important component in genetic classification. In fact, such a morpho-phonological split is not apparent in most languages
of the world and is definitely rare in ‘genetic’ languages.
The revivalists’ attempt
to belie their European roots, negate diasporism and
avoid hybridity (as, in fact, reflected in Yiddish
itself) failed. Thus, the study of Israeli offers a unique insight into the
dynamics between language and culture in general and in particular into the
role of language as a source of collective self-perception. Linguists and
community leaders seeking to apply the lessons of Israeli in the hope of
reviving no-longer spoken languages (e.g. Amery 1994, 1995, 2000; cf. Clyne 2001; Fishman 1991, 2001; Thieberger
1988) should take warning. When one revives a language, even at best one should
expect to end up with a hybrid. I maintain that Israeli is a ‘non-genetic’,
layered, Semito-European language, only partially
engineered. Whatever we choose to call it, we should acknowledge, and
celebrate, its complexity.
* Stop Revive Survive is
a sign intended to urge drivers to nap.
Zuckermann playfully reanalyses it to
declare that the revival of Hebrew also includes the survival of Yiddish --
even though the revivalists did not intend this!
3)------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: More on
kvetsh
Dr. Meyer Wolf, a
keen-eyed Yiddish linguist, has pointed to a Yiddish noun kvetsh
meaning 'hypochondriac'. See Nokhem Stutshkov, Der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh.
Under the semantic category krankeyt,
'sickness' [#420], the nouns khekhlyak, khorkhlyak, zdekhlyak, khvetshke, KVETSH and kholyere
are grouped together on p. 411. Of all these words the only one that is phonotactically a candidate for English borrowing is kvetsh (spelled kvetch). This Yiddish
substantive could very well be the seed from which a Jewish-English verb
meaning 'to complain' arose.
4)--------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Yehoyesh's khumesh
with Ulrich Greve's Jewish Calendar: Instructions
Download the latest
version of the Jewish Calendar Program for Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP: http://www.tichnut.de/jewish/index2.htm
(by clicking on here on left-hand side) and the files for the Khumesh in Yiddish. After downloading the
calendar, close all running applications (since the computer is restarted after
installation) and execute the downloaded file. Then go to the manual page where
details of installation of the Khumesh
in Yiddish are described and install the self-extracting archive. By clicking
on a Shabbat or holiday in the calendar and then clicking on "View torah
reading in Yiddish!", the torah sections are displayed in Yiddish. The Khumesh in Yiddish must be downloaded
and installed separately. On the download page of the Jewish Calendar
for Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP, the short manual at http://www.tichnut.de/jewish/jewcalreadme2.htm
contains these instructions. Download the self-extracting archive tpr.exe
from http://www.tichnut.de/jewish/tpr/tpr.exe.
Run the downloaded tpr.exe file in order to extract the .tpr files with the Khumesh
in Yiddish. Copy the extracted .tpr files (bamidbar.tpr, breyshis.tpr,
dvorim.tpr, shmoys.tpr and vayikro.tpr)
into the same directory where the Jewish Calendar Program is installed (by
default, C:\CAL80).
---------------------------------------------------------------
End of The Mendele Review Vol. 09.013
Editor,
Leonard Prager
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