Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Contraversions) - Hardcover

Matisoff, James Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804733937 ISBN 13: 9780804733939

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish "psycho-ostensives"-ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! ("Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose!"). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezúnt dir in yeder éyverl! ("A health to all your little body-parts!"). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off-or even to deceive the listener.

Comments [1999]

"I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff's outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields."

-William Labov,

University of Pennsylvania

"Matisoff's book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty." -Deborah Tannen,

Georgetown University

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In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish “psycho-ostensives”—ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! (“Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose!”). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezúnt dir in yeder éyverl! (“A health to all your little body-parts!”). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off—or even to deceive the listener.
Comments [1999]
“I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff’s outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields.”
—William Labov,
University of Pennsylvania
“Matisoff’s book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty.” —Deborah Tannen,
Georgetown University

Aus dem Klappentext

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish psycho-ostensives ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! ( Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose! ). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezúnt dir in yeder éyverl! ( A health to all your little body-parts! ). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off or even to deceive the listener.
Comments [1999]
I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff s outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields.
William Labov,
University of Pennsylvania
Matisoff s book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty. Deborah Tannen,
Georgetown University

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BLESSINGS, CURSES, HOPES, AND FEARS

PSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS IN YIDDISH

By JAMES A. MATISOFF

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-3393-9

Contents

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION..............................................
xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
xxi
FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION..............................................
xxiii
ABBREVIATIONS..............................................................
xxix
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION OF YIDDISH WORDS.....................................
xxxi
1 INTRODUCTION.............................................................
1
2 SEMANTIC SUBTYPES OF PSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS........................
9
3 BONO-RECOGNITION: THANKS AND CONGRATULATIONS.............................
11
4 MALO-RECOGNITION: LAMENTATION AND SYMPATHY...............................
17
5 PETITIVE ATTITUDES.......................................................
23
6 BONO-PETITION............................................................
29
7 MALO-FUGITION: DELIVER US FROM EVIL!.....................................
43
8 PSYCHO-OSTENSIVES RELATING TO THE DEAD...................................
65
9 ALLO-MALO-PETITION: CURSES!..............................................
71
10 SWEARING OATHS..........................................................
89
11 CONCLUSION AND COMMENCEMENT.............................................
97
12 'EPES AN ÉPILOG': THE RELEVANCE OF YIDDISH PSYCHO-OSTENSIVES TO RECENT 
AND FUTURE WORK IN LINGUISTICS AND OTHER FIELDS............................
107
NOTES......................................................................
117
BIBLIOGRAPHY TO THE FIRST EDITION..........................................
149
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY (SECOND EDITION)...................................
155

<br><h2>CHAPTER 1</h2><p><b>INTRODUCTION</b></p><br><p>To say that a language is "an infinite set of well-formed sentences" is alittle like saying that a human being consists of water, carbon, salt, andtrace elements. That is, there are certain restricted contexts in whichsuch statements make sense, even though there are many other intellectualpoints of view from which they are irrelevant and misleading. Whenwe are engrossed in our formalistic charts and diagrams, writing ourrules and playing with our arrows and brackets, it is easy to forget thatwe are approaching that magnificent infinite object, Language, in muchthe same way as the blind men in the fable approached the elephant.</p><p>In particular, most linguists have been operating on the heuristic assumptionthat the speakers of a language are some kind of beautifullyprogrammed automata, sentence-generating machines capable of producinga limitless number of grammatical utterances that conform in allrespects to a fixed set of rules—the grammar of one's native language—thathas been internalized in early childhood. This point of view, aseveryone knows, has opened up some brilliantly successful lines of investigation.But now it is time to move on from the elephant's cerebralcortex to his primitive brain stem, his heart, his gonads, or wherever elsethe seat of his emotions may be located.</p><p>The work of William Labov and his students has undercut the overlyrigid Chomskyan dichotomy between "competence" and "performance"to the point where it is no longer clear in what sense we can speak ofa "rule of grammar" at all. Variability is now understood by many tobe as basic to linguistic structure as the countertendency toward orderand organization. We can easily construct "an infinite set of sentences"in any language as to the grammaticality of which native speakers willviolently disagree, each citing his own sacred intuitions as evidence oneway or the other. It is precisely this variability that lies at the heart oflinguistic creativity.</p><p>Language is the frail bridge that we fling across the chasm of the inexpressibleand the incommunicable.</p><p>Anyone who has ever tried to get any thoughts down on paper knowshow hard it is to "say what you mean." How much more difficult this isunder the time pressure of ordinary rapid conversation! When we write,we have the leisure to go back and cross things out, add a word hereor permute some words there, recast a sentence completely if we havegotten ourselves into a desperate syntactic bind. When we speak, ourinterlocutors will lose patience with us if we say, "Just a minute—I usedthe perfect tense in that last sentence, but the action referred to reallydidn't have enough present relevance for that, so I retract it and willuse the simple past instead. Also, I'd like to put that adverb at the endof the sentence instead of at the beginning—I don't know why, it justsounds better." At this point our listener would be likely to say, "Go tothe devil with your adverbs and your present relevance!" or,if he is a Yiddishspeaker, <i>Gey tsum tayvl mit dayne adverbn un ítstike sháyekhdikkayttsuzamen!</i></p><p>Under the pressure to communicate rapidly, the edges of the grammarare constantly being bent and deformed, expanded and retracted.My daughter's report card this morning carried the teacher's scrawledcomment, <i>She shuns away from the math area.</i> How can we be so arrogantas to stigmatize this as a "performance error"? We might succeedin demonstrating that <i>shuns away from</i> derives analogically from <i>shiesaway from</i> in some historical sense. But it is not a "mistake," for God'ssake. It's a rather nice new creation, in fact, and had doubtless alreadyoccurred independently in the speech of millions of people of all socialclasses and degrees of linguistic virtuosity. It already sounds grammaticalto me, better and better each time I say it over to myself. The newgrammar is constantly being created on top of the willing and yieldingruins of the old. To worry about where "one" grammar ends and the"next" grammar begins is a totally meaningless and futile pursuit. Innovationsin language are welcomed at least as much as they are resisted.</p><p>Everybody knows (but linguists have usually forgotten) that the realcommunication that goes on during interpersonal exchanges often hasvery little to do with the actual words that are spoken. We can be talkingabout the damn cat when all we want to do is go to bed with each other.We can be trading polite commiserations about the weather even as weare thinking how we hate each other, and how gladly we would bathein the other's blood. From early childhood on, we learn to look for "the<i>real</i&ggt; meaning behind the words." That is, we look for paralinguistic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804733937
• ISBN 13: 9780804733939
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande