Re: CHAT: Left-handed Lithuanians (was: My coming out as a conlanger)

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002 20:22:01 +0100
=?iso-8859-1?q?Jan=20van=20Steenbergen?= <ijzeren_jan@...>
writes:
>  --- Steg Belsky wrote:
> > Well, as i mentioned in reference to my brother (who's
> Left-Handed), if
> > you count "of the Lithuanian (a.k.a. North-Eastern Ashkenazic)
> Jewish
> > Culture-Zone" as within the category "Lithuanian", then i guess
> i'd be a
> > somewhat 'real' Lithuanian on the List.
> Counting that as Lithuanian shouldn't be a problem, I think. Where
> exactly is
> your brother from? Probably the same place as you, I may assume...
> Didn't you mention recently that he is an ex-conlanger as well? What
> language did he create?
> Jan
-

We're both from the NYC area.  The reason we're "Litvaks" is because our
patrilineal great-grandfather immigrated to the USA from supposedly the
city of Slonim, which is now in Belarus but then was part of the
Lithuanian culture-zone as far as Jewish subcultures are concerned.  My
father's mother's side of the family was probably from the same general
region; sometimes it's hard to tell in my family which side different
customs come from.
The way i know that we're from there is (besides the geography) there's a
ritual at the end of the holiday of Sukkot where you take willow branches
and hit them against a chair, the ground, or some other object.  When
doing the ritual, you say /qo:l m@bas':e:r m@bas':e:r v@?o:me:r/ (/s'/ =
sin, pronounced the same as /s/).  When my father taught me and my
brother to do it, he pronounced it [ke@l m@vasr= m@vasr= viejmr=], and
the pronounciation of /o:/ as [ej] or [e@] is a distinguishing
characteristic of a North-Eastern Ashkenazic accent.  He also pronounces
/o:/ as [ej] in the last word of the "Threefold Blessing": [SOlejm] for
/SO:lo:m/.  The rest of the time he has more-or-less an American
Ashkenazic accent, with [ow] for /o:/.

My brother and I collaborated on the short-lived conlang
"ool-Nuziiferoi".  We never got very far in it... what i remember of it
was:

All verbal roots are a CVCVC pattern, where certain diphthongs can count
as V and certain affricates can count as C.  For instance, _bobuht_
/bowbVt/ "to pour", or _tezar_ /tEzar/ "to be".
"yes" was |ten| and "no" was |nyet| (because my brother liked the way the
Russian word sounds), and you suffixed them:
_tezar, uh tezar-nyet?_ = "to be, or not to be?"

It had the same pronoun set as Rokbeigalmki (since, like many of its
remnants, the pronouns were part of what i salvaged from ool-Nuziiferoi
when i started Rokbeigalmki), except that the epicene vowel was /&/
instead of /V/.  And the plural ones were formed differently.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "tezar, uh tezar-nyet?"
 "wa'tezat, au nyeng wa'tezat?"