I was playing Scrabble last week and I had a seven letter
word sitting on my rack: hauling. But
there was nowhere to play it…unless it could be pluralized. Is haulings a word? It’s tempting. Hauling
is a noun…it’s an activity, and that’s a thing. To be sure, it’s also a verb,
as in “I am hauling gravel”. But it’s also a noun: “Hauling gravel is hard
work”. What else is the subject of that sentence if not hauling? I think that kind of noun is called a gerund.
But of course, not every noun can be pluralized by adding s. And the fact that it ends in ing is not necessarily the problem. You
can have a number of undertakings
going on at the same time, and that’s a perfectly good Scrabble word (except it
might be too long to fit on the board). You can attend three different poetry readings in the same evening. And so on.
But can you have multiple haulings?
To understand what’s going on here, we have to start by
noting that there at least two different kind of ing words here. Undertaking
and reading are not gerunds in the
same sense as hauling. Well…reading is, if you say “Reading is
fun”…that’s a gerund. But the “reading” in poetry
readings is not the plural of the “reading” in reading is fun. If you see what I mean.
Because haulings
actually looks like it might be a word, as in the following conversation: Tom
says, “I was hauling garbage all day”…to which Dick replies: “What did you do
with the haulings?” It’s a bit
contrived, but it’s arguable. Was my Scrabble partner convinced? Well…
The thing is, this is a whole new kind of ing noun, different from the other two
we’ve seen do far. It’s clearly different because it only takes the plural (or collective) form…no one takes away a
single hauling of garbage. Or
droppings. No one picks up a single dog dropping. They pick up droppings with an s. Yes, you can play dropping
in Scrabble, if you’re dropping a ball. But it’s really a whole different word
from dog droppings.
What about serving?
Would you like one serving of Jello with your meal or two? I guess I’m not sure
if servings is more like undertakings or droppings.
Maybe it’s somewhere inbetween…but that’s not my point. I want to talk about
how these things work in Yiddish. Because in Yiddish, we have three different
endings instead of one.
The first one is easy, because it is close to the English
ending. Undertaking in Yiddish is unter-nehmung. In fact, in the
Galitzianer pronunciation, the ung
ending is actually just like the English ing.
You can pluralize it with –en, so you
have several unternehmungen. Another
nice word that takes this type of ending is vorhandlen
– to negotiate. “Peace negotiations” in Yiddish are sholem-vorhandlungen.
What about “reading and writing”? In Yiddish, we would have schreiben un lesen (or leyenen if you’re reading from the
Torah…no one quite knows why!). The point is it’s a different ending…it’s just
the infinitive form of the verb, without the ung. These are basically identical to the German constructions.
The third form is where it gets interesting. Have you ever
heard of drippings? I had an English
co-worker once from a very working-class background, and he once told me how
his mother always used to save the “drippins” for his father, because animal
protein in any form was at a premium. He was talking about the drippings from
frying bacon…but of course, my readers wouldn’t know anything about that.
It’s funny that in the old country, we also had a culture of
poverty, and there was a food item which arguably took the role of bacon for
us: it was called grieven, and I
don’t know what that word means, but it is sometimes translated as cracklings, and it was a special treat
for the children when a goose was slaughtered…I think it was something about
the way the skin got fried up in its own fat. So the English had their drippins, and we had our cracklings. But I digress…
I want to tell you about the third kind of ending…the one we
use in Yiddish for words like drippings.
It only shows up in a handful of words, but it’s very expressive: echts, and it lends a distinctly
unsavory flavor to the word it attaches to. For example, the shell of a seed is
a schâll; to remove the shell is schâllen; but if you have a big pile of
sunflower seeds that you’ve been spitting in bowl (or on the floor), it’s
called schâllechts – shellings, if
you like.
Another one: saliva. To spit is speien, as in speien in die
kasha (pissing in the soup, as we might say). But “saliva” in Yiddish
is…yes, speiechts!..literally,
“spittings”. Grease is schmierechts…you
can see where that comes from. And there’s one I never figured out the story
on, except that it’s a substance, presumably sticky and smelly, used in the
process of bootmaking: dzhegechts.
Maybe it’s a Slavic word. My favorite is ân-tuechts
– from ân-tuen sich, to get dressed;
and you use it to describe an embarrassing or inappropriate get-up that you
find yourself forced to wear. Those are all the examples I can think of now.
Where does this suffix come from? You don’t see it in
German…well, not normally. I sometimes visit a German Language discussion group
online, and I posted the question: does the form exist in German? I got an
interesting answer from one Takkat, a regular contributor, who offered the
seldom-used term kehricht…meaning
“sweepings”, from kehren, “to sweep”.
It was the only example of this form in German that anyone could come up with,
and it definitely jibes with the Yiddish pattern in terms of unsavoriness
(except it’s missing the final s).
I wonder if any of our readers can think of any more echts words?
No comments:
Post a Comment