LINGUIST List 2.604

Tue 01 Oct 1991

Misc: Yiddish, Kreplach and Washing

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Sheldon Harrison, Yiddish -ax
2. Ellen Prince, Re: 2.583 Semantics and Chinese Kreplach
3. Robert D Hoberman, Kreplach
4. Jim Scobbie, Re: 2.566 Washing
5. mark l louden, Re: 2.566 Washing

I'd always thought it was a Slavic plural, in one of the more high frequency
oblique cases, I can't recall which one[s].
shelly harrison
univerisity of western australia

Message 2: Re: 2.583 Semantics and Chinese Kreplach

>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 14:26:35 EDT
>From: Geoffrey Russom <EL403015brownvm.brown.edu>
>Subject: Re: 2.570 Queries
>
>Local Canadian French influence on culinary terms is also evident: even
>Italian-Americans call chicken cacciatore "chicken chaser (<chasseur)".
>It would be "chicken catcher" if you went directly from Italian.
i think a more cooperative rendition of the italian would be 'hunter's
chicken'.

 State University of New York at Stony Brook
 Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355
 Robert Hoberman
 Comparative Studies Dept.
 516 632-7462, -7460
 29-Sep-1991 03:32pm EDT
TO: Remote Addressee ( _linguisttamvm1.tamu.edu)
	Somewhere I heard it suggested that the Yiddish diminutive plural
/-lax/ or /-lex/ was from a concatenation of two separate diminutive suffixes,
an *l one as in modern standard German -lein and a *k>x one as in MSG -chen.
They do occur concatenated, though not as a plural, in some dialectal German,
as my wife's parents' Jewish Hessisch, where the diminutive of /na:s/ 'nose' is
/ne:zel$e/ (/z/ is voiceless but lax, /$/ is like English SH, German SCH -- in
this dialect Fisch /fi$/ and Ich /i$/ rhyme perfectly). (The plural of
/ne:zel$e/ is, of course, /ne:zel$en/.) Etymologically doubled diminutives
like this are mentioned by Max Weinreich in his History of the Yiddish
Language, p. 522, but unfortunately he doesn't discuss the Yiddish diminutive
plural.
	By the way, Max Weinreich is OBVIOUSLY the source of "a language is a
dialect with an army and a navy", by an elementary principle of historical
linguistics. Here's the proof: If we have in modern English both BROTHERS and
BRETHREN, the latter is obviously original because we know of "the regularizing
trend of analogic change" (Bloomfield 1933:410). Well, the other candidates
proposed for the army-navy criterion, Sapir and Jakobson, are much more widely
known (distributed, not to say productive) than Weinreich; if it was really
Weinreich, we understand how people might have come to think it was either of
the others, but if it was really Sapir or Jakobson, would anyone have forgotten
and called it Weinreich? Q.E.D.
-Bob Hoberman

Message 4: Re: 2.566 Washing

Not to be forgotten is "it's needing washed". This may be
a Highland influence (ie Gaelic originally) on this
Glaswegian.
--
oo
--
James M. Scobbie: Dept of Linguistics, Stanford University, CA 94305-2150

Message 5: Re: 2.566 Washing

In reference to nonstd. constructions of the 'needs washed' type:
It has been stated in the past that such constructions in SE Pennsylvania
are due to substratal Penn German influence. This is highly unlikely, since
there is no such construction in the dialect. This is another instance
of the largely mythical 'Dutchified English', e.g. 'Come the house in',
'Throw my wife out the window a kiss', etc.
There are a few lona translation idioms which have passed into colloquial
usage in PA from the dialect, notably 'what for + N' as in 'What for a book
is that?'
Mark Louden
UT Austin