Mendele Personal Notices and Announcements:Introduction to Old and Middle Yiddish 20 July - 15 August 2014 at the Summer Program of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute
________________________________ To minimize wear and tear on the untershames, three requests: 1. Send time-sensitive notices well in advance. 2. Send material as plain text to [email protected] as plain text (no HTML, other coding, or attachments and write MENDELE PERSONALS in the subject line. 3. Correspond directly with the person who or organization which has posted the notice, *not* with your ever-beleaguered untershames (in *this* case, one and the same person). * __________________________________________________________________* Introduction to Old and Middle Yiddish 20 July - 15 August 2014 at the Summer Program of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute Instructor: Jerold C. Frakes http://www.judaicvilnius.com/en/main/in_news?ID=136 This course is intended as a supplementary course for Intermediate II and Advanced students in the program. It is based on the new textbook of Old and Middle Yiddish written by the instructor, which presents a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the grammar and vocabulary of earlyYiddish through the guided reading of three entertaining and culturally important literary texts of the period (_Yoysef ha-tsadik_ from the Cairo geniza, the adventure tale _Briyo ve-Zimro_, and one canto from the Renaissance romance epic _Paris un Viene_). Along the way there are very brief and fun supplementary readings added to individual lessons, such as the Worms mahzor couplet from 1272, excerpts from letters, riddles, potion recipes, the final paragraph of the “Khad gadye,” etc., which provides a bit more variety and a broader sense of the range of extant texts. The whole is divided into individual lessons with portions of the focal texts small enough to be dealt with in a class period. Only authentic Old Yiddish texts are used (no newly invented pseudo-Old Yiddish practice sentences). All words from all the texts are fully glossed in the textbook. The emphasis will be on guiding students who know modern Yiddish into making use of that knowledge to learn to read Old Yiddish. Facsimile pages from the medieval and early modern original texts will be introduced in the class. Thus by the end of the course, students will be able to read medieval and early modern Yiddish in both modern text editions and from original manuscript and early printed books. Old and Middle Yiddish are the earlier stages of modern Yiddish, much as Old English (_Beowulf_) and Middle English (Chaucer) are the earlier stages of modern English. With Yiddish, fortunately, these earlier stages are much, much closer in form to the modern language, so that those who know modern Yiddish can learn to read texts from the earlier periods rather quickly and without too much pain. The scope and importance of Old and Middle Yiddish literature (fourteen-eighteenth centuries) is unfortunately still not widely known even among students and scholars of Jewish Studies. This body of literature encompasses essentially the same range of genres found in French, English, Italian, and German literature of the period, i.e. love poetry, epic poetry, historical poetry, an early newspaper, medical and legal texts, debate poems, midrashic texts, fables, a guide to tax preparation, letters, liturgical poems, magical incantations, satirical poems, adventure tales, and travel guides. Old Yiddish literature is an essential complement to Hebrew literature of the period — a knowledge of one without the other offers only an incomplete portrait of Ashkenazic intellectual life of that time. For further information, contact Jerold C. Frakes: [email protected] __________________________________ Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead, direct your mail as follows: Responses to Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements should be sent directly to the person whom or organization which posted the item. Material for posting in Mendele Personal Notices and announcements, typically announcements of events, commercial publications, and questions not of general interest to the membership, should be sent to: victor.bers at yale.edu (IMPORTANT! in the subject line write "Mendele Personal") Material for postings to Mendele Yiddish literature and language i.e, inquiries and comments of a non-commercial or publicity nature and likely to interest the membership in general, should be sent to mendele at mailman.yale.edu IMPORTANT: Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in your posting. No posting will appear without its author's name. Submissions to regular Mendele should not include personal email addresses, as responses will be posted for all to read. They must also include the author's name as you would like it to appear. In order to spare the shamosim time and effort, we request that contributors adhere, when applicable, as closely as possible to standard English punctuation, grammar, etc. and to the YIVO rules of transliteration into Latin letters. A guide to Romanization can be found at this site: http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=275 All other messages should be sent to the shamosim at this address: mendele at mailman.yale.edu We are hoping to update this website to restore its full functionality. For interim access to Mendele’s archives and PDF library, please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/mendeledervaylik/ __________________________________ Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead, direct your mail as follows: Responses to Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements should be sent directly to the person whom or organization which posted the item. Material for posting in Mendele Personal Notices and announcements, typically announcements of events, commercial publications, and questions not of general interest to the membership, should be sent to: victor.bers at yale.edu (IMPORTANT! in the subject line write "Mendele Personal") Material for postings to Mendele Yiddish literature and language i.e, inquiries and comments of a non-commercial or publicity nature and likely to interest the membership in general, should be sent to mendele at mailman.yale.edu IMPORTANT: Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in your posting. No posting will appear without its author's name. Submissions to regular Mendele should not include personal email addresses, as responses will be posted for all to read. They must also include the author's name as you would like it to appear. In order to spare the shamosim time and effort, we request that contributors adhere, when applicable, as closely as possible to standard English punctuation, grammar, etc. and to the YIVO rules of transliteration into Latin letters. A guide to Romanization can be found at this site: http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=275 All other messages should be sent to the shamosim at this address: mendele at mailman.yale.edu We are hoping to update this website to restore its full functionality. 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