Re: THEORY: CP-V2 vs. IP-V2

On Wed, 19 May 1999 17:47:41 -0400 John Cowan <cowan@...>
writes:
>Steg Belsky wrote:
>> Shouldn't the Yiddish be _es iz shver..._?
>Yeah, German interference.  Sorry about that.  So what are *your*
>intuitions about "Es iz shver a Yid tsu zayn"?  Sound like
>good Mamaloshn to you?
>
>--
>John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
Well, unfortunately i'm not a native speaker, and i've only learned
Yiddish for one year, but it sounds good to me.  It seems to have more of
a lyrical quality than _Es iz shver tsu zain a yid_, although that could
just be my English intuition assuming it's a _mishpat yihhud_ (i don't
know the English term, it's when you take a sentence and move the parts
out of their correct/normal order for poetic effect, like "Him I ate"
instead of "I ate him").
The sentence just seems to be begging for a pause after _shver_ that the
other sentence doesn't:

Es iz shver tzu zain a yid.
Es iz shver, a yid tzu zain.

Although that could just be to distinguish that _shver_ is talking about
the whole phrase, and not _a yid_.

But like i said before, i'm desafortunadamente not a native speaker.


-Stephen (Steg)
 _ , bre'davidh ktish-a tze-a, ozii-elyeb, ozii: i ozii-dagair amsh ,. _

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