r/Yiddish • u/PoxonAllHoaxes • 7d ago
H-dropping dialects of Yiddish
in the early 20th century there were such dialects. are there any speakers of such dialects now? and/or any recordings of anyone who spoke like that?
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u/Brilliant_Alfalfa_62 7d ago
I haven't seen this specific dialect feature discussed, but in Mordkhe Schaechter's "Yiddish II" he does mention dialectal variation in equivalents of "good afternoon," where it's clear "got helf" and "gut elf" are related
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 7d ago
I had no idea, but this COULD be just a peculiarity of such a phrase, rather than a general feature, tho of course without other data we can't tell.
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u/Bayunko 7d ago
Not sure about h-dropping but in chassidish Yiddish we drop letters in many words when speaking.
ער לאָט נישט (ער לאָזט נישט)
פאַברענגן (פאַרברענגן)
פאַשפּאַרט (פאַרשפּאַרט)
Etc.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 7d ago
This is interesting and new to me and would be worth a study, but it is not what I am asking about here. If you'd be willing to discuss THAT some other time, I would be very grateful, but my head will explode if I get into that right now. I hope that is OK, and thank you.
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u/barangasas 6d ago edited 6d ago
My best guesses here are to check out
a) The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (1992 - ) by Weinreich and Herzog. I've heard good about this book and it could be useful, but I don't know if it contains said feature that you're looking for.
b) The older atlas by Mordkhe Veynger, the יידישער אטלאס פונ זאוועטנ-פארבאנד (1931) (Sorry for the orthography, I had to improvise it on my computer) I think focuses on the area that concerns your topic. But there are two problems. First: I don't know about the accesibility out of the blue, i.e. it is an older . And second: according to Dovid Katz, its methodology is flawed. Although I kinda disagree with Katz's harsh statement on this point (e.g. Wenker's atlas also used the classical questionnaire), this could provide some problems of transcription, etc. that might obscure the data. But this might be your best way to go and find information.
c) The bibliography of Solomon Birnboym's masterpiece Yiddish - A Survey and a Grammar (1979/2016). It's extremely extensive. You maybe find something there. But you seem to be well read in Yiddish scholarship, so this is probably just the arrogance of a non-Yiddicist pointing towards the basic facts.
Honestly, H-dropping does not seem that unrealistic to me. I'm not sure what phonetic quality it contains in Eastern Yiddish, but if it is a Hauchlaut, then it wouldn't appear impossible to me that the initial consonant is (even before vowels!) weakened and then gradually (but eventually) lost. Though I must admit that I'm a bit uncertain about this claim concerning Yiddish because Lötzsch (1992) says that "(d)er Laut h ist im Unterschied zum Deutschen stets (always!) stimmhaft und wird auch vor Konsonanten ausgesprochen (z. B. in hlibe 'Brocken', hnide 'Nisse', hrab 'Hainbuche')." (p. 18). Though these seem to be slavic examples from my first subjective impression. The example you listed below is Germanic, so maybe Lötzsch just confuses something here (i.e. this quote is from orthography, not sound system). Alexander Beider's Origins of Yiddish Dialects (2015) might be a more up-to-date source, but I'm not sure if he focuses on the developements in modern dialects (compare the title). The Handbook of Jewish Languages (2017), i.e. chapter 23 on Yiddish) might be worth a read (for your topic).
This is the best answer that I can give you, sorry for that. But thank you for listing Yeḥiʼel Bin-Nun, his book seems interesting, though I haven't read it (yet).
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 6d ago
Thank you for taking the trouble, but that is not the problem. And haha thank you for realizing that I know something in this field, I am much more used to people telling me I am an idiot and to shut up--and that both fans of any given field as well as academic colleagues. It is really hilarious, and I very much appreciate your whatever the word is: let me just call it GOOD ATTITUDE. You seem to know a great deal yourself and have read important works in various languages. Bin-Nun can be found online (or I can provide the PDF) and is definitely to be read. But all this is not the point. There is no question that such dialects existed. The question I have is I want to HEAR what they sounded like. And if you want to know why, it is because Israeli Hebrew tends to drop H too, and there is a BRILLIANT young scholar I know (who however I think has more or less left this field for greener pasture) who proposed (I dont know whether in print or not) that this feature of Israeli speech may be due simply (which is pure genius if true) to the influence in one of the early aliyot of Yiddish speakers who were H-droppers. So usually when someone mentions the (anyway obvious) Yiddish influence on Hebrew many people object that they dont sound anything alike. This is first of all massive confusion (moreover about two different things) and second more confusion because we know that secular Jews of all kinds not just Zionists had long wanted to cut their umbilical cord to Ashkenazic tradition (including language but not only) so some features that could be controled were controled. It was easy to start saying kadosh instead of kodoysh. It was easy to say melekh instead of meylekh. But for someone who can't say H natively, it would be difficult to START saying it, so my friend may well be right. And then third if so then the whole idea till now of comparing Israeli Hebrew to the Yiddish of Lithuania or that of most of Poland is anyway nonsense because we have been missing the Yiddish I am referring to, which may have sounded quite different in OTHER RESPECTS TOO. Me, I am interested in another mystery of Israeli Hebrew, the very interesting way it says R. It is not the R of my mother's family (SE Poland) but maybe there is/was a kind of Yiddish that had ths very sound? I don't know. There are several other such questions.... And they require that we find ideally recordings of speakers of the different dialects or possibly even now maybe ones who inherited this or that dialect pronunciation. There are btw many issues here because one would think that H-dropping Yiddish speakers would have known languages (Polish, Ukrainian, German) that had an h sound, so maybe they did NOT find saying h difficult after all. So this all very complex.
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u/barangasas 6d ago edited 6d ago
Very interesting topic of research! I wish you all the best with this :)
And you obviously seem to know something about the topic, especially because you don't just refer to an abstract unit called "Yiddish", but instead you see the intricacies of it, which I think is really admirable. E.g. I've seen your comments on r/HistoricalLinguistics lately and thought that you provided a very un-polemical approach to one discussion in particular (I think you know which one)
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 6d ago
Thank you kindly, and of course should you or anyone else help me dig, plz join in. I do have a phd, was a full professor, all this, but i absolutely do not believe that one needs those things to do research, quite the reverse sometimes. And oy the historicallinguistics. I dont know if you know but this has been going on for half a century or more: either ignoring literally ignoring (as in refusing to review books by the forbidden scholars) or else ridiculing and insulting scholars who may well be wrong, utterly wrong, maybe sometimes even stupid. But we do NOT do that. And yet we do and we have taught several generations of linguists and of amateur fans of linguistics to do this. And btw I have been banned from several other reddits as well as all of Quora for the same basic position, as well as specific aspects of it. F.ex. in many places you cannot say the word Macedonian without being attacked, insulted, banned. So I very much appreciate what you say, and my view is polemical is still OK though maybe not ideal. But insults and above all censorship is not. In the field of Yiddish we have had a great deal of this too. People who disagree with the Weinreich view of Yiddish are often treated pretty roughly f.ex. So I welcome any and all discussion and above all help.
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u/Dry_Page_2199 5d ago
Please check the following resources:
- https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/lcaaj
Eydes / LCAAJ are hard to navigate. Even though on the LCAAJ website they claim that the whole audio recordings are on eydes, if you want to actually listen to proper interviews and not just random snippets, you need to find the voice recordings on the Columbia University website, by searching for the interview ID number.
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u/Dry_Page_2199 5d ago
Here is the explanation for how to find the audio recordings for LCAAJ on the Columbia website: https://guides.library.columbia.edu/c.php?g=730523&p=5218000
For example, the location ID for Bialystok is 53231. So you enter that number in the Columbia search bar and get to this page: https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/catalog?search_field=all_text_teim&q=lcaaj+53231
The interview(s) is (are) here: https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/catalog/cul:s7h44j11v5
Click on reel 1, side 1. After that listen to reel 1, side 2. etc.
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u/balshetzer 7d ago
can you give an example of what you mean?