[gothic-l] Dialects of German (Was EE Jews etc.)

[jdm314 at AOL.COM]

As I am enjoying this conversation, I am hoping that Matthaius and the 
other list-members will indulge us just a little longer...



> >Of course it is true. It still is normally written with hebrew letters.
> 
> Thanks. The examples I have seen were however in Latin letters.

Linguistic books almost always Latinize it... not everyone can read 
Hebrew afterall ;)


> >Possibly, but I don't think so. At least not as far as umlauts go.
> >Apparently in earlier stages of the written language there were umlaut
> >vowels, though I have not seen this myself.
> 
> Do you know if it was written with Hebrew characters already from the beg=
inning?
> 

>From the first ridiculously old texts that we have... as I said I don't 
know how different from German the first texts were, and somewhat 
wonder if maybe the only perceivible difference was the alphabet.

> >Yes, both are represented by <f>, and why not? German <v> and <f> are bo=
th
> >pronounced [f] anyway. German <w> ends up being represented by the hebre=
w
> >letter vov written twice, <ww>, rather like how w is itself shaped like =
a
> >pair of v's.
> 
> I was thinking of Dutch, where there is a big difference:
>   « In het Nederlands is de "v" een labiodentale stemhebbende fricatief.
>     De "f" is een stemloze labiodentale spirant of fricatief. »
> I suppose the point is that although German v and f are the same now,
> they used to be different when one began to write German with
> Latin letters ca. a thousand years ago. But I don't know if the Dutch
> differentiation between e.g. faan & van, spills over the border to some
> degree. Anyhow, I pronounce e.g. Hannover with a Dutch v; but that may
> be wrong. Also, I don't know if German "Vers" and "Ferze" is
> pronounced similarly or not; I have never worried about it before.
> But in these soundless internet days, phonetics seems to have become
> a topic that is regularly taken up.

Interesting. I had forgotten about the dutch distinction (note though 
that many Dutch words are spelled with a v that etymologically have an 
f, especially at the beginning of words. Alas the only example that 
springs to mind is Vlaams.)

	Anyway, I don't know if the loss of that distinction was the 
result of spelling-pronunciation or not. Spelling rarely has serious 
effects on pronunciation (such as eliminating an entire phoneme) except 
in extremely litterate (Which I suppose manY jews were) societies, or 
when there is a huge influx of non-native speakers (again, I suppose 
you could argue that for the Jews, but in Europe Yiddish was the native 
language of choice for centuries)


> Maybe I picked the wrong example. But you will no doubt agree that a one-=
to-one
> mapping is difficult between two sets that do not contain the same number=

> of elements, and that the reason why some languages add graphemes is to
> have one for
> each phoneme.

Yes. Yiddish has much fewer sounds than either Standard German or 
(Ancient) Hebrew. Quite frankly I think they did an admirable job 
mapping the phonemes to the letters though... certainly better than any 
other non-Semitic language I've seen written in Hebrew characters.

> 
> 
> >    As I explained earlier, in reference to the YIVO orthography, pretty=

> >much any method you see for writing Yiddish words will be based on the
> >phonemic principle, rather than on German spelling. Don't get distracted=

> >by the orthography when it's the sounds you should be paying attention t=
o
> >(as you say below)
> 
> What is YIVO?

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research ( http://www.yivoinstitute.org/ 
... I forget what YIVO itself stands for!) which is the closest thing 
to the Academie Francaise when it comes to Yiddish ;) Theirs is the 
translitteration I prefer.

> >
> >This is correct. See my post at
> >http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gothic-l/message/3753 for a more complete
> >analysis.
> 
> I posted before I'd read your translation.
> My goal was however not to translate, but to recognize the German words.

	Yeah, sorry but due to propagation problems either with my message 
or with other peoples', this was like the third almost-correct-but-not-
quite attempt I had seen since my posting went up, so I was getting 
somewhat unfairly frustrated ;)


> ><< Spei nicht in (den) Brunnen - vielleicht wirst du [dürfen](?) von ihm=

> >[trinken] Wasser. >>
> >
> >nope, nischt was correct. The Yiddish word for "not" is pronounced eithe=
r
> >NISHT or NIT, never *NIKHT. In all other cases (or perhaps there was one=

> >other exception) the ich-laut always comes out as KH.
> 
> Here I don't understand you. I claim that "nischt" is the same word as "n=
icht".
> It is only a dialectal variance. (maybe because the Hebrew used "shin" to=

> represent
> the "ch" sound)

Well, at this point you were only fixing the SPELLING to resemble 
German, not the forms of the words themselves. Yiddish has no "Ich-
Laut", which is the sound of <ch> in words like ich. That sound always 
comes out as something like the sound in "Akh!" 
	The one exception is the word for not, and words derived from it. 
Instead of coming out as NIKHT (nicht), as one would expet, it comes 
out as NISHT (nischt). Obviously this is in someway related to how 
Germans pronounce the same word, but as I said, nowhere else int he 
language is the german <ch> represented by a Yiddish SH. Get it?


> >    On the other hand... um... shouldn't we be discussing Gothic? We're
> >probably about this close from being admonished by Matthaius!
> 
> I agree! Here the point was to show that Yiddish is NOT Gothic.
> And that too seems like a valid topic.

Oops... still haven't stopped yet! (Sheepish grin)
Maybe you (and anyone else who want to continue this) want to reply to 
me privately, as the group must be getting tired of this by now.


> 
> >A gezunt inem heym!
> >
> >
> >(AHAH! There IS a Gothic word in this post!)
> I know too little Gothic to be able to set up comparisons like you do.
> Sorry!


The one Gothic word in my post was my name, IUSTEINUS, which somehow 
got deleted from your reply ;) There was nothing particularly Gothic 
about the Yiddish quote in closing.

> 
> Keth


MOSES DAWEID / Dzhastin



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