Re: belz

[Sandra Layman <sandralayman...>]

The Romanian spelling of Belz (the one in Bessarabia/Basarabia, now Moldova)
is Balti [Ba~lt,i], pronounced something like "buhlts". Unfortunately, I
can't show the two diacriticals, but the "a" has a breve accent over it (a
breve looks like a small bowl), and the "t" has a cedilla-like comma under
it and is pronounced "ts".

The Romanian is the plural of the word "balta~," which means "puddle, pond,
swamp, marsh."

BTW, while I was in Bucharest in the late 1980s, I asked a Romanian
(non-Jewish) native of Balti if he knew the Yiddish song. He'd never heard
of it.

Shabbat Shalom,
Sandra


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert A. Rothstein" <rar (at) slavic(dot)umass(dot)edu>
To: "World music from a Jewish slant" <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Sent: Friday, May 09, 2003 2:11 PM
Subject: Re: belz

[snip]

> suggests
> >Bessarabia over Galicia.  The Bessarabian Belz is really Belts (and
> that's the
> >official Yiddish form as well as the Moldavian/Romanian form), but
> there's a
> >tradition of using _Belz_ in Yiddish for both places.
>
[snip]

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