[gothic-l] Re: EE Jews descend from Goths

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hi Dirk,
you wrote :

>Hello Keth,
>
>I basically agree to all you said above, but your example of
>Yiddish caught me out. As a German native speaker I am at a loss to
>determine what the above sentence means. Something about a well
>(Brunnen - brunem) and drinking (trinken) of water (wasser), but
>for the words: Schpaj, efscher, wessto, darfn, fun, I cannot find a
>German equivalent and cannot get the meaning of that sentence. Can you
>solve the riddle for me?
>
>cheers
>Dirk

Ah, so you *are* German! For a while I thought you were British, although
*Dirk* definitely suggests a continental connection.

I will try to explain the example.
Here it might be helpful to use the idea someone proposed, that Yiddish
has been through a phase of being written with Hebrew letters. (Is this true?)
Anyway, it isn't a very important hypothesis, but, if true, it might
help to explain some of the oddities in spelling. Hebrew, having only
22 letters, and not very many wovels, and especially not umlauts,
would then imply a kind of "collapse" of the phonetic system; i.e.
that it is sometimes necessary to map different phonemes onto the
same graphic sign or letter. Take for example the tree German letters
v, w and f. How do you represent them by Hebrew letters? My guess
is that both v and f gets to be represented by the same Hebrew letter.

That would explain why a German word like "von" comes back
to the Latin system of writing as "fun", after having been through
the mill of a phonetic system that has too few letters to faithfully
represent all sound on a one-to-one basis.


>> Here another example:
>>
>>   Schpaj nischt in brunem - efscher wesstu darfn fun im trinken
>wasser.

The basic meaning is that you should not spit into the well (brunnen),
because it might happen that you yourself might some time return to
drink from the well. Also, Astrid Stedje hints us that "efscher" should
be read as "vielleicht" (=maybe). Well.. my own understanding was
basically intuitive. I must therefore ask you to bear over with me
if my explanation seems clumsy or elaborate. But this is how I would
do it for myself with pencil and paper :

First adjust the spelling :

Spei nicht in (den) Brunnen - vielleicht wirst du [dürfen](?) von ihm
[trinken] Wasser.

The two verbs [dürfen] and [trinken] are still in the wrong place,
because that seems to be one of the things that differentiates Yiddish
from German. Putting the verbs in the right place we then obtain:

Spei nicht in den Brunnen - vielleicht wirst du von ihm Wasser [trinken]
[dürfen].

Finally, one should replace dürfen by müssen :

Spei nicht in den Brunnen - vielleicht wirst du von ihm Wasser trinken müssen.

I hope people don't mind if I now add a specimen of "Bairisch"
(also from Stedje's book):

Onerkennung

In da Schul om erstn Tog
Is no net gor gross de Plog
DLehrerin dazöhlt a Gsicht.
Und in Kinern zrinnt is Gsicht.
Wia de Schul is nocha aus
Und si führt de Kloan vors Haus,
Blaibt a Bua stehn bai da Tür.
Er sogt voller Liab zu ihr:
"Du, dai Gschicht wor gor net z'wida.
Mir hot s gfolln, i kimm morgn wida."

The way I read such dialects, which is something
I hardly ever do - though you sometimes do run into it
on the internet - is to try to disentangle from the
spelling, and try to *hear* it as sounds spoken to
me by someone from that area. It works because I used
to spend a lot of time in Tyrol, where I got
used to conversing with people from those areas.

Grüss Gott!
Keth



You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>.
Homepage: http://www.stormloader.com/carver/gothicl/index.html 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/