[Mesorah] Chad Gadya

[Toby Katz]

 In Avodah Digest, Vol 37, Issue 27 dated 4/10/2019 R'  Aryeh Frimer <Aryeh.Frimer at biu.ac.il> writes:
>> In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba Imahot becauseAvot is male and Imahot is female. Yet the text reads Asara Dibraya andshlosha Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and Mida/Midot are female.Has any one seen a discussion related to this Dikduk Problem? Are therules in Aramaic different? <<
 >>>>>>>>>>>>
This thread migrated to Mesorah, without changing the subject line.  In all the learned back-and-forth I did not see anyone note the simple fact that the Avos, the Imahos, the Dibraya and the Midaya do not appear in Chad Gadya at all!  The subject line should have been "Echad Mi Yodeia."
Echad Mi Yodeia is written in a mash-up of Hebrew and Aramaic, and there is an excellent reason for that.  It rhymes beautifully and is very enjoyable to sing!  Beginning with the number five, everything rhymes:5 chumshei Torah6 sidrei Mishna7 yemei Shabata8 yemei milah9 yarchei leidah10 dibraya11 kochvaya12 shivtaya13 midaya
All the numbers (chamisha, shisha, etc) are Hebrew. Almost all the words in the poem are Hebrew (including sidrei, yemei, yarchei).  The only words in Aramaic are words at the end of a line, where the Hebrew would not make a rhyme.Hebrew:  Torah, Mishna, milah, leidahAramaic: Shabata, dibraya, kochvaya, shivtaya, midaya
I doubt the poet gave any thought to correct Aramaic dikduk.  It's a song, and it rolls sweetly and smoothly off the tongue.
 BTW it is not surprising that this poem/song was confused with Chad Gadya, which likewise has a multiplicity of smoothly rhyming Aramaic "--ah" words.  Gadya, shunra, chalba,chutra, nura, maya, sora.  And let us not forget Abba!
R' Seth Mandel says Chad Gadya was composed at a time when Aramaic was no longer a spoken tongue.  He may be right, or it may be that people were still mixing a lot of Aramaic into their daily language, as many of us continue to use some Yiddish mixed in with our English.  Over time people would have simplified their folk-Aramaic and forgotten some of the grammar.  To give an analogy, most Yiddish speakers today don't pay attention to which words are masculine and which are feminine, and don't know when you're supposed to say der, dos, dem or di.
RMS also says that Chad Gadya is taken from an older popular German song, and he may well be right about that, too.  I have a book of Mother Goose rhymes, some centuries old, and one of them is a rhyme that is very similar to Chad Gadya.  It has a stick hitting a dog, a fire burning the stick, water putting out the fire, even an ox lapping up the water.  But instead of a father it has an old woman, and somewhere in the sequence of events is a pig jumping over a stile.  Needless to say, HKBH makes no appearance in the Mother Goose version.

--Toby Katzt613k at aol.com
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