Er hod gegeybm ales far de yi:dn ‘He gave the Jews everything’: On the emergence of prepositional dative marking with far in Transcarpathian Yiddish
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Steffen Krogh
Abstract
Uriel Weinreich’s seminal study “Western Traits in Transcarpathian Yiddish” (in For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish languages, literature, and society, 245–264. The Hague: Mouton) brought a feature into focus that is characteristic not only of Transcarpathian Yiddish, but also of the Haredi idioms descending from it. In the eyes of many representatives of secular Yiddish, it has become a hallmark of so-called Hungarian Yiddish, i.e. Haredi Yiddish derived from Central Yiddish subdialects spoken in Hungary with its 1914 borders. The feature in question is the consistent replacement of nominal dative objects by a prepositional phrase introduced by far ‘for, to’. It is tempting to ascribe the rise of the construction to contact-induced influence from Hungarian, which, for historical reasons, occupies an extraordinarily firm position among Jews living in the Transcarpathian area. A major obstacle to such an assumption is, however, that Hungarian itself does not employ prepositions at all. Being an agglutinative language, it expresses grammatical categories of the noun phrase by means of suffixation.
In my paper, I will argue that a constructional borrowing from Hungarian can nevertheless be the source of the feature under scrutiny. To substantiate this assumption, another (more straightforward) example of the Hungarian impact on the prepositional system of Transcarpathian Yiddish – the employment of the preposition of (St Yid. oyf ‘on/onto’) to indicate movement in the direction of geographical locations – will be discussed as well.
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Dalit Assouline, Katalin Deme, Paul Glasser, Yitskhok Niborski, Chaya Nove, Kathrine Thisted Petersen, Joost Robbe, and two anonymous Linguistics reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions. Lazar (Moyshe-Leyzer) Freund, Mihai (Avrom-Khayim) Freundlich, Eugen (Menakhem-Yehude) Grünfeld, Eugen (Yankev) Krausz, Margareta (Malke) Mezei, Golda (Goldi) Salamon, and Gerson (Gershn) Schvarcz deserve special thanks for generously sharing their native Unterland Yiddish with me.
Appendix: Yiddish Data Sources
Texts in Oyberland Yiddish
Taglikht, Yisroel-Khayim. 1929. Lider fun Ungern un de Slovakay [Yiddish songs in Hungary and Slovakia]. Shriftn fun yidishn visnshaftlekhn institut. Filologishe shriftn [Publications of the Yiddish Scientific Institute. Studies in Philology] 3. 297–312.
Texts in Unterland Yiddish
Malik, Khayim Yitskhok. 1935. Seyfer nakhles Yankev [The book of Jacob’s heritage]. Satumare: Meyer Lib Hirsh.
Ring, Yekhezkl. 1940. Oyfn himl a yarid. Dertseylung [Tumult in Heaven. Short story]. Siget: Centrala.
Tambur, Volf. 1975. Maramoreshaner. Dertseylungen [Maramureș Jews. Short stories]. Bukaresht: Kriteryon.
Oral interviews in Unterland Yiddish conducted by this author
Lazar (Moyshe-Leyzer) Freund, interview conducted on May 11, 2011 in Oradea.
Mihai (Avrom-Khayim) Freundlich, interview conducted on May 13, 2011 in Oradea.
Eugen (Menakhem-Yehude) Grünfeld, interview conducted on May 15, 2011 in Cluj-Napoca.
Eugen (Yankev) Krausz, interview conducted on May 15, 2011 in Cluj-Napoca.
Margareta (Malke) Mezei, interview conducted on May 11, 2011 in Oradea.
Golda (Goldi) Salamon, interviews (quoted as I-III) conducted on July 20, 2009 and on 23 and May 24, 2012 in Sighetu Marmației.
Gerson (Gershn) Schvarcz, interview conducted on May 12, 2011 in Oradea.
Texts in Haredi Satmar Yiddish
Newspapers
Die vokh [The week]. July 30, 1998.
Der blat. Tsaytshrift fun alveltlikhn ortodoksishn idntum [The paper. Magazine for orthodox Jewry worldwide]. June 15, 2001.
Der id. Organ fun umophengigen ortodoksishen identum in Amerike [The Jew. Organ of independent orthodox Jewry in America]. March 21, 2008. Sections A–B. Supplement ‘Der shiker’er id’ [The drunk Jew].
Journal
Der idisher gedank [The Jewish thought] 2. October 18, 1999.
Fiction
Hirshsohn, Yankev Menakhem. 1999. Der ring in gerangl. A shpanende dertseylung mit file shturmishe momentn un dramatishe shilderungen mit lebedige filmen fun der ofene ‘siate deshmaye’ in di nisht vayte fargangehayt [sic] … [The ring in conflict. An exciting story with many tempestuous moments and dramatic accounts with lively films of the open ‘help from Heaven’ in the recent past …], vols 1–2. Brooklyn, NY: Or yisroel pablishing.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Er hod gegeybm ales far de yi:dn ‘He gave the Jews everything’: On the emergence of prepositional dative marking with far in Transcarpathian Yiddish
- Regular and copular fragments in Basaá
- Sentence-final aspect particles as finite markers in Mandarin Chinese
- Clustering and stranding in Dutch
- The Hebrew dative: Usage patterns as discourse profile constructions
- (Inter)subjective uses of the Dutch progressive constructions
- If everything is syntax, why are words so important? An a-morphous but non-lexicalist approach
- Japanese subject markers in linguistic change: A quantitative analysis of data spanning 90 years and its theoretical implications
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Er hod gegeybm ales far de yi:dn ‘He gave the Jews everything’: On the emergence of prepositional dative marking with far in Transcarpathian Yiddish
- Regular and copular fragments in Basaá
- Sentence-final aspect particles as finite markers in Mandarin Chinese
- Clustering and stranding in Dutch
- The Hebrew dative: Usage patterns as discourse profile constructions
- (Inter)subjective uses of the Dutch progressive constructions
- If everything is syntax, why are words so important? An a-morphous but non-lexicalist approach
- Japanese subject markers in linguistic change: A quantitative analysis of data spanning 90 years and its theoretical implications
