Matrushka; Hryvna

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:32 AM -0400 7/19/02, Alice Faber wrote:
>Laurence Horn said:
>>I thought it [pronunciation of Lodz] was /wUdzh/, with the wowel,
>>er, vowel of "look" and a
>>voiced final affricate.  But then they [my grandparents]'d have
>>spoken Yiddish and
>>pronounced it god knows how.
>>
>
>Well, most varieties of Yiddish lost final devoicing lo these many
>years. And therein hangs a tale, actually, many tales. (It was
>subsequently reacquired in some varieties of Polish Yiddish.)
>
>Alice
>
Well, yes, but my point was that virtually none of the Polish city
names sounded anything like that in Yiddish.  The Yiddish names
tended to be much closer to the German names for the relevant cities,
and perhaps (does anyone here know?) the German/Yiddish take on Lwów
bears as much relation to either [wUdzh] or [wutsh] as Lwów [lvuf]
does to Lemberg.  Or maybe not--it could have just been something
like [lOdz], the way "Lodz" would come out in German minus final
devoicink, with O = open o.  These are, however, stabs in the dark.

larry