Volume 48 Number 65
Produced: Sun Jun 26 16:42:14 EDT 2005
Subjects Discussed In This Issue:
Kavod Habriyos (2)
[Mark Steiner, Mark Steiner]
Kiddush Levanah
[Martin Stern]
Mishnaic Hebrew (was "Re: Kavod Habriyos ") (4)
[Mark Steiner, Ira L. Jacobson, Mark Steiner, Ira L. Jacobson]
Origin of "daven"
[Martin Stern]
Origination of the Word Daven
[Robert Schoenfeld]
Stress-shift in Modern Hebrew (2)
[Mark Steiner, Lipman Phillip Minden]
Yiddish Etymology
[Shimon Lebowitz]
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From: Mark Steiner <marksa@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 13:57:48 +0300
Subject: RE: Re: Kavod Habriyos
From: Ira L. Jacobson <laser@...>
> My dictionaries do indeed recognize a word birya, but it comes from the root
> bet-resh-yod and means food. They DO recognize that beri'a can also be
> written beriya (that is, yod instead of alef), but the vocalization remains
> sheva, hiriq, qamatz, and not "birya".
Why look at dictionaries, when we can look right at the thing
itself: e.g., Mishnah Kelim 24:17 in the vocalized Kaufmann Codex, for
example, has biryah as the singular, as the word kiryah in BH. The
vocalization in this manuscript is highly respected by linguists. The shift
from biryah to berye as in Yiddish I think is also ancient, as in midrash to
medrash, also attested in the mss. (See my article on yasherkoax) The
plural of biryah in MH is briyoth as in Mishnah Shekalim etc.
As for kavod in semikhut--I can't find any cases of this in the
Mishnah so far, so it appears that I am in error; thanks to Ira for pointing
this out. I'll look at some other mss when I have time, bli neder.
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From: Mark Steiner <marksa@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 14:46:46 +0300
Subject: Re: Kavod Habriyos
From: Ira L. Jacobson <laser@...>
> I always thought that pirya verivya was just an erroneous way of saying
> peri'a urevi'a. Is that not right?
Ira is getting the idea--pirya verivya is bad BH, good MH and
excellent Yiddish (cf. end of Mishnah Yevamot chapter 6 (= 5 in the
Kaufmann Codex).
By the way, the Kaufmann Codex is on line, as I have pointed out many
times, at http://jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/talmud/ the website of our National
Library. Don't look at dictionaries--find the place using a search
program, then look it up in the Kaufmann, keeping in mind that the
chapter numberings might be shifted +- 1. (And of course the Mishnah
numbers don't mean much.) There is another ancient vocalized ms I have
at home--that of the Torat Kohanim in the Vatican Library. It is a true
gold mine of information. For example, we find there that the common
expression hakadosh barukh hu is "wrong"--the actual expression in MH is
"haKODESH barukh hu," identical to the kaddish "kudsha brikh hu", not
"kadisha brikh hu." This appears to be a euphemism for Hashem using the
Bais Hamikdosh (kodesh means "kodesh hakodoshim"). Hakodesh b"h is
written in that ms. probably hundreds of times. The Vatican is supposed
to be the most ancient complete rabbinic document.
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From: Martin Stern <md.stern@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:40:15 +0100
Subject: Re: Kiddush Levanah
on 24/6/05 11:03 am, Mark Steiner <marksa@...> wrote:
> Martin Stern attests to the following proverb, in the mouths of German
> Jews: "In Kislev, Teves und Shevat, man bencht die Levonoh wenn man sie
> hat"
>
> For the Yiddish afficionados:
>
> This vort is a perfect example of the survival of elements of Western
> Yiddish (benshn, levone) in the speech of German Jews after what is
> called the "emancipation."
Western Yiddish disappeared mainly because it was not sufficiently
differentiated from High German and was therefore perceived as a 'low'
dialect, referred to derogatorily as 'mauschelen' from the typical
Jewish name Mosheh pronounced Mowshe by many German Jews, not used by
'refined' people, much like the dialects current among non-Jews are
viewed to this day.
There were many 'relics' of words, mainly of a specifically Jewish
nature, but these differ from their Eastern Yiddish equivalents. For
example the EY 'davennen', under current discussion in m-j, was replaced
by 'oren' in WY, probably derived from the Latin 'orare - to pray', a
'siddur' was called a 'tefilloh', and 'challah' was called 'baerches' or
'tatche', derived from words in the pasuk 'birkhas HaShem ta'ashir'.
Other WY words not specifically referring to 'Jewish' concepts were
absorbed into the general German vocabulary such as 'shlemihl' which
appears in the title of the early nineteenth century novel 'The Tale of
Peter Shlemihl' by Adalbert von Chamisso, a French aristocrat refugee
who settled in Berlin and was certainly not Jewish though he frequented
the fashionable 'enlightened' salons run by ladies of Jewish extraction
which promoted assimilation of 'cultured' Jews into German society,
usually through conversion to the dominant religion.
Martin Stern
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From: Mark Steiner <marksa@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:47:26 +0300
Subject: RE: Mishnaic Hebrew (was "Re: Kavod Habriyos ")
I forgot to remark on the other points that Ira makes:
The word biryah in MH is the SAME WORD as bri'ah in BH. (This doesn't
exclude the possibility that the meaning of the word shifted over time
as very often.) What happened in MH is that the roots eding in aleph in
BH tend to be conjugated in MH as though they ended in heh:
example (Israeli pronunciation for convenience):
BH kri'ah = MH kiryah (the "correct" pronunciation in Ashkenazic
pronunciation is "kiryas shema`", Mishnah Berakhot 2:6 in Kaufmann, not
BH kri'as shema`
BH karati = MH kariti
BH karu' (aleph at end) = MH karuy
This is why Israelis don't know whether to say "kruv memula" or "kruv
memuleh"; the first is BH, the second MH. They also made up a phony
distinction between karu' "invited" and karuy "called."
On kavod--I think I was in error, since all the mss I have consulted
shift from kavod to kevod in smekhut, including my Vatican ms. (with by
the way Babylonian vowel signs OVER the words and matching the Yemenite
pronunciation). Thanks to Ira for pointing out the error. I am
researching the matter further (this means calling linguists).
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From: Ira L. Jacobson <laser@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:02:42 +0300
Subject: RE: Mishnaic Hebrew (was "Re: Kavod Habriyos ")
At 17:47 24-06-05 +0300, Mark Steiner stated the following:
This is why Israelis don't know whether to say "kruv memula"
or "kruv memuleh"; the first is BH, the second MH. They also
made up a phony distinction between karu' "invited" and karuy
"called."
There is nothing "phony" here. Language develops.
IRA L. JACOBSON
mailto:<laser@...>
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From: Mark Steiner <marksa@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:20:18 +0300
Subject: RE: Mishnaic Hebrew (was "Re: Kavod Habriyos ")
The problem is that Israeli Hebrew has a dual structure: MH and BH, and
the speakers don't realize th is. In historical time, BH evolved in MH,
but then you had MH. For example, in BH you say hafetz and in MH
rotzeh. Israeli Hebrew simply dumped both "layers" onto the speakers,
who don't realize that they are speaking two dialects of the same
language. (I would not call this a "development.") This motivates them
to search for an imaginary distinction between equivalents. Once they
are made up, however, they can be useful--as in karu' and karuy.
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From: Ira L. Jacobson <laser@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:47:52 +0400
Subject: Mishnaic Hebrew (was "Re: Kavod Habriyos ")
I had stated:
I always thought that pirya verivya was just an erroneous way
of saying peri'a urevi'a. Is that not right?
To which Mark Steiner replied:
Ira is getting the idea--pirya verivya is bad BH, good MH and
excellent Yiddish (cf. end of Mishnah Yevamot chapter 6 (= 5
in the Kaufmann Codex).
I note also that the Kehati edition has the same vocalization, so it does
indeed appear that Mishnaic Hebrew has this form. It seems to be a hapax
legomenon in the Mishna, although I haven't looked for it elsewhere.
> That a critter is beriya and not birya:
Bikkurim 4:5 and Keilim 24:17 seem to be the only instances of the word
in the Mishna, and they vocalize beriya sheva-hiriq-qamatz.
> And that kavod in semikhut is kevod:
Now I also checked the vocalized Mishna and found every case that I
checked (Pirqei Avot and Ta`anit are good starting points) that kevod is
indeed written with a sheva in the possessive case.
IRA L. JACOBSON
mailto:<laser@...>
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From: Martin Stern <md.stern@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:54:20 +0100
Subject: Re: Origin of "daven"
on 24/6/05 11:03 am, David Curwin <tobyndave@...> wrote:
> Mark Steiner <marksa@...> wrote:
>> Thus, the license to daven (a Yiddish word for which I have not seen a
>> satisfactory etymology)
> I always assumed that it came from "divine". But I see from this page:
> http://www.tifereth-israel.org/DvarTfila/Praying-in-Another-Language.html
> that there are many more possible theories.
Most of those suggested on this site seem extremely farfetched. I tend
to agree with David's original suggestion which might perhaps be better
phrased as that the word is derived from the mediaeval Latin term 'ordo
divinus' meaning the set liturgy as recited by priests and
monks. Davenen would then mean 'saying the set prayers'.
Martin Stern
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From: Robert Schoenfeld <frank_james@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:36:03 -0400
Subject: Origination of the Word Daven
There is a forth source for Yiddish words in addition to Hebrew, German,
and Slavic and that is Northern Rustic Latin Daven is one of those that
came from Latin. This is according to a book I read many years ago about
the origin of Yiddish
Bob
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From: Mark Steiner <marksa@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:40:39 +0300
Subject: RE: Stress-shift in Modern Hebrew
On the stress shift, I'll try to get the answers to the questions on
this subject.
(a) I'm not in this field so I don't know what of the literature is
online, but I can probably get the answers. I doubt if it would be a
good idea to identify the linguist who told me first about the shift (by
the way, he said it predates the Babylonian Talmud, and may have
occurred in Eretz Yisrael in Tannaitic times! I wanted to be
conservative about it so said "Talmudic."
(b) I'll see what I can do about the "Sepharadim" at their stress
changes. (But see also (a)). Note, however, that "Sepharadim" is not a
very good term for this context. For example, Yemenite Jews are not
"Sepharadim" and they preserve the Babylonian vocalization of Hebrew.
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From: Lipman Phillip Minden <phminden@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:59:16 +0200
Subject: Stress-shift in Modern Hebrew
Ben Katz asked:
> If the shift occurred in the Talmudic period, why wasn't it
> accepted by Sephardi Jews by and large, since they are more closely
> descended to the Babylonians in any case?
Simple: It was, though to different degrees in different areas, and with
possible trends backwards. Davke in Babylonia, aka Iraq, the native
pronunciation is shOmrim etc.
Lipman Phillip Minden
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From: Shimon Lebowitz <shimonl@...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:20:31 +0200
Subject: Re: Yiddish Etymology
> The instructive example of "makhn khoyzek", meaning to mock or
> ridicule, may have escaped Mr. Miller at the time of his posting.
Since I am reading this on Erev Shabbos Parashat Shelach, I can't resist
telling you how it ties into the parsha.
The Torah tells us "vayapilu la`alot el rosh hahar" (Bam. 14:44). Now,
any one who knows any Hebrew understands that this is strange - vayapilu
means they fell, la`alot means to go up! How can anyone fall... up???
Of course the answer is simple, you just have to look at Rashi! Rashi
on that posuk states simply: vayapilu: loshon choyzek!
Shabbat shalom to all!
Shimon Lebowitz mailto:<shimonl@...>
Jerusalem, Israel PGP: http://www.poboxes.com/shimonpgp
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End of Volume 48 Issue 65
