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Moyshe Lezer

Member since:
Nov 2014
Posts: 5

This is my first posting on Taytsh, so sholem aleykhem yeder eyner un yede eyne.

 I'm trying to decipher and translate a message on a postcard, dated 1934, sent by one sister in the Soviet Union to another in France. 

I wonder if anyone can advise me on the following phrase taken from the message (with spellings unchanged):

 …אז ער וויל גיטען מיר ניט אָפּ דעם בריף

I'd have expected the grammatical object of opgetn to be a person, viz. a wife, and in this case the writer herself.  Here the object is 'the letter'.  Would anyone be able to tell me whether this form of words is an accepted idiom that native Yiddish speakers use or used - one that perhaps emphasises the power the ritual letter gives to the husband?   Or is there some altogether different meaning here that I haven't grasped? 

Thanks in advance.

Edited by: Moyshe Lezer on 04 Dec 2014, 02:12 pm

Mundart Press

Member since:
Sep 2013
Posts: 11

Aleykhem sholem Moyshe,

Here is what a friend of mine had to say:

"That's an interesting one. I forgot to look at that; thanks for reminding me. I'm almost positive this is not "opgetn," divorce, for two reasons. The first is, as the query writer notes, the fact that the object is "brif"; it doesn't make sense to divorce a letter. But also making it unlikely is the yud in it; that would be an odd misspelling of getn, since it's not phonetic. The way I would expect getn to be misspelled is with an ayin.

Also odd is the separated prefix with an infinitive after veln. To me this suggests that the writer was not a native Yiddish speaker. If so, I think the verb in question might be "opgebn." A nonnative speaker might take the third-person-singular form git op and extrapolate from that an infinitive gitn op. I bet that's it."

Hope that helps,

Yosele

 

Moyshe Lezer

Member since:
Nov 2014
Posts: 5

Here is what a friend of mine had to say:

 

"That's an interesting one. I forgot to look at that; thanks for reminding me. I'm almost positive this is not "opgetn," divorce, for two reasons. The first is, as the query writer notes, the fact that the object is "brif"; it doesn't make sense to divorce a letter. But also making it unlikely is the yud in it; that would be an odd misspelling of getn, since it's not phonetic. The way I would expect getn to be misspelled is with an ayin. Also odd is the separated prefix with an infinitive after veln. To me this suggests that the writer was not a native Yiddish speaker. If so, I think the verb in question might be "opgebn." A nonnative speaker might take the third-person-singular form /git op/ and extrapolate from that an infinitive /gitn op/. I bet that's it."

 

Hope that helps,

 

Yosele

 

 

Dear Yosele

 Thanks very much for your posting, which has certainly given me food for thought.  Interesting that you should have spotted the way the prefix op is separate even though it's part of an infinitive.  All the same, I'm pretty sure the writer was a native speaker — for a whole variety of reasons that I won't go into here.  I imagine you're speculating that her first language was English, since this separation of the prefix is exactly what we do in English.  But no, I doubt very much that she spoke English, and her 'local' language would have been Russian.  Also, although the construction is not formally correct, it flows nicely in Yiddish, at least to my ear.  Perhaps that's why I didn't spot it myself.

 As to the possibility that what I'm reading as a yud could be an ayin, well, it's definitely a short vertical mark that seems to look just like others, elsewhere in the text, which are clearly yudn.  And, looking again, I see there are at least a couple of other places where she inserts a yud when, strictly speaking, there should have been nothing at all.  E.g,, she writes העלפֿין for העלפֿן and סיקין for שיקן.       

 So, basically, I'm still puzzled.  After the 'yontoyvim', I'm going to try to find some native speakers to run it past.  I take it, you aren't one of those yourself.

 Thanks again for you interest and suggestions.

משה-לעזער

 

 

 

Mundart Press

Member since:
Sep 2013
Posts: 11

Nishto far vos!

No, I'm not a native speaker nor is my friend, but I frequently find him quite helpful and something of a wonder. That whole quote is his. I'm not sure why part of that quote came out in small text and the rest looks normal, but none of it stemmed from my own observations. I didn't know what to think of it myself.

Yeah, it wouldn't seem odd to me if it was just a dialectical variant.

Quite a number of languages and dialects are at play in Yiddish and my Slavic is poor at best.

I'm here to help if I can and I have some words in the Words section of the Words and Phrases heading that I'm looking for help on. Real tough buggers like zdibits(i)e too.

Best,

Yosele

 

 

Moyshe Lezer

Member since:
Nov 2014
Posts: 5

Lieber Yosele

 

This is a rather belated message to tell you that I did finally manage to crack the puzzle and to thank you for your help, which turned out invaluable.  You rightly noted that the way I proposed to decipher the handwritten words produced something that was syntactically pretty dubious.  Your native-speaker friend, meanwhile, insisted — you told me — that the key, seemingly indecipherable, word I was having trouble with must relate toגעבן  and couldn’t have anything to do with a גט.  I got, in fact, exactly the same message from another native speaker I subsequently talked to.

 

All this feedback led me to carry on puzzling over the manuscript until, suddenly, I realised (1) that there was rather a large space between the ט and the ע in my postulated word גיטען and (2) that what I was taking as a ן at the end of the ‘word’ was formed very like the ר as the writer had written this letter at the end of several other words in the text.  Then the penny dropped: what I was looking at was not one esoteric word גיטען but the two bog-standard words גיט ער and (with some punctuation inserted for clarity) what I had in front of me was the following emotional and beautifully idiomatic Yiddish assertion:

דאך ער איז דער באלעבאס. וויל ער, גיט ער מיר אָפּ דעם בריף. און אז ער וויל, גיט ער מיר ניט אָפּ דעם בריף.

 

I’m still none the wiser about the nature of the letter over which ‘he’ exercised such baleful control.  But that’s not the translator’s problem!

 

Thanks again for all your help.

 

Moyshe Lezer

Moyshe Lezer

Member since:
Nov 2014
Posts: 5

Lieber Yosele

 

This is a rather belated message to tell you that I did finally manage to crack the puzzle and to thank you for your help, which turned out invaluable.  You rightly noted that the way I proposed to decipher the handwritten words produced something that was syntactically pretty dubious.  Your native-speaker friend, meanwhile, insisted — you told me — that the key, seemingly indecipherable, word I was having trouble with must relate toגעבן  and couldn’t have anything to do with a גט.  I got, in fact, exactly the same message from another native speaker I subsequently talked to.

 

All this feedback led me to carry on puzzling over the manuscript until, suddenly, I realised (1) that there was rather a large space between the ט and the ע in my postulated word גיטען and (2) that what I was taking as a ן at the end of the ‘word’ was formed very like the ר as the writer had written this letter at the end of several other words in the text.  Then the penny dropped: what I was looking at was not one esoteric word גיטען but the two bog-standard words גיט ער and (with some punctuation inserted for clarity) what I had in front of me was the following emotional and beautifully idiomatic Yiddish assertion:

דאך ער איז דער באלעבאס. וויל ער, גיט ער מיר אָפּ דעם בריף. און אז ער וויל, גיט ער מיר ניט אָפּ דעם בריף.

 

I’m still none the wiser about the nature of the letter over which ‘he’ exercised such baleful control.  But that’s not the translator’s problem!

 

Thanks again for all your help.

 

Moyshe Lezer

Mundart Press

Member since:
Sep 2013
Posts: 11

Keyn zorg, s'var a fargenign!

Glad to hear that you were able to get it all figured out finally.

I'll pass it along to my friend too. I'm sure he'll be in terested in seeing the outcome. 

Biz tsum nekhsten mol,

Yosele