[Mendele] Mendele Vol. 23.016

[Victor Bers]

Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
____________________________________________________

Contents of Vol. 23.016
March 2, 2014

1) Yiddish Romanization Tool (Refoyl Finkl)
2) Yiddish Romanization Tool (Peter Gutmann)
3) shabash (Elvira Groezinger)
4) shabash (Murray Woldman)
5) shabash (Meylekh Viswanath)
6) shabash (Itsik Goldenberg)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: February 3
Subject:  Yiddish Romanization Tool

In response to Paula Grossman, who asks about Romanizing Yiddish texts:

My automated tool at

http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html has an option
that allows you to enter text in Yiddish letters (either directly in an
input box or in a file)
and get the equivalent in Romanized transcription.  In the first option
column, choose
"Unicode"; in the second, choose "YIVO transcription."  If you use a file,
it should be
plain text in utf-8 encoding; my program does not understand Word
formatting.

If your text is not in a computer file but rather on paper, you need an
optical character
recognition program.  I have built one, but it isn't easy enough to use for
me to publish it.
But I have succeeded in converting some texts from the Book Center into
computer files.

Refoyl Finkl


For that very purpose: Refoyl Finkel's Yiddish Typewriter:
http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html


2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: February 2
Subject: Yiddish Romanization too

Dear Paula,

If your material is in a format Refoyl Finkl's Yidishe Shraybmashinke
understands, that
would be a great tool because it works both ways and can transform oysyes
into letters.
You can check it out here:
http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html

If your material is too much to upload and convert on Refoyl's page, you
might want to
consider downloading his superb "yidishtex" package for LaTeX and run the
scripts on
your own machine.

Best,
Peter Gutmann

[Moderator's note: Barry Goldstein and Lucas Fiszman also wrote in to
recommend the
Yidishe Shraybmashinke.]

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: February 3
Subject: shabash

I wonder if this is not a derivate from the Hebrew word "shibesh" to make a
mistake, so
something by fault. It depends of course on the context.

Best,
Elvira Groezinger

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: February 3
Subject: shabash

Tayre mentshn: Shabash is a Persian/Farsi/Indian Hindi/Urdu verbal applause
heard
during a poetry competition, a musical performance, a sports event,
anything you
spontaneously appreciate in a public or semi-public setting. I have been at
musical
performances of Sufi music or qawwali concerts and at Classical Indian
musical
performances both there and in the USA where many "Shabashes" were heard
when the
performance of a classical Indian raga was performed and as it reached its
climax of
excitement, again Shabash!

Murray Woldman

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: February 2
Subject: shabash

Vegn shabash: ikh meyn az s'iz fun perzish (efsher terkish).  Mir nitsn es
in indiye in
farshidene sprakhn mitn batayt fun shkoyekh!

Meylekh Viswanath

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: February 4
Subject: shabash

In Mendele 23:12, Alexis Manaster Ramer asks about the Yiddish word
shabash. In the
YIVO journal YIDISHE SHPRAKH XXV (1), June 1965, pp. 26-28, A. Ben Ezra's
article "Shabas, Shabat, Shabash" discusses this in some detail. Shabash is
used in
klezmer-loshn, referring to a custom in Galitsye (Kroke mentioned in
particular), of
money contributed to the klezmorim during the mitsve-tentsl. It is proposed
that the word
derives from Persian, since the custom prevailed there and in Kurdistan.
Dov Sadan
proposed that the word came from Ukrainian. The article includes a
reference to a paper
on klezmer-loshn by Noyekh Prilutski.

Itsik Goldenberg
______________________________________________________
End of Mendele Vol. 23.016

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