The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #45455   Message #677259
Posted By: Wilfried Schaum
27-Mar-02 - 07:00 AM
Thread Name: Help: Meaning of 'Donna donna' in Yiddish
Subject: RE: Help: Meaning of 'Donna donna' in Yiddish
Liland, I'm not able to give the IPA symbols here - no idea where to get them and how to insert them.
The references I got from older publications in my home town. I try to give approximate sounds in English:
o as in door, but a little bit shorter
au as in house
ou as in so
oy as in coin
When going through my list I found that hebr. b:rogez (enraged) was pronounced here brauches, while in a Yiddish song from Poland it is given as broyges. Yiddish pronounciation in my hometown and its surroundings is also influenced by the local peasants' dialect: o is pronounce as long u (as in moose) ending in a furtive murmuring sound not unlike the Shwa mobile in Hebrew, u is pronounced as a long o (as in door) ending in a furtive u. Lots of interesting observations of no further use.
For all those problems let me refer to Voltaire: "Etymology is a science where the consonants don't count much, and the vowels even less."

Wilfried