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The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

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Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#11

Post by Koshkin »

nicole_express wrote: post #3

The article is quite interesting, but I have to say I don't understand why Yiddish being a Slavic language would suddenly mean that all European Jews are Iranian; the Slavic languages aren't descended from anything spoken in Iran in the first century CE. That really feels like it came out of nowhere.

> Yiddish being a Slavic language

I wonder why anyone would think that. The words predominantly come from German, and the grammar is more of a thing of its own, far from resembling anything Slavic...

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#13

Post by adamnemecek »

samatman wrote: post #4
adamnemecek wrote: post #2

These discussions generally do not cover Knaanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language . Based on Old Czech, it is the first language like Yiddish or Ladino and predates all of them by like 500 years.

And they wouldn't, because the only person who suggests that Knaanic was ancestral to Yiddish, rather than having been displaced by it, is Wexler. Who is an unpleasant and academically dishonest crank, who, in addition to his discredited linguistic views, makes claims about the ethnic origins of the Ashkenazim which were always on shaky ground, and which have been conclusively disproven by modern genetic analysis. No…

I didn’t say it was ancestral, more like German Jews saw Knaanic and were inspired to create their own language.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#14

Post by Animats »

The Jerusalem Post on Yiddish.[1]

Yiddish speakers today are mostly ultra-orthodox Jews. The language binds them together across country boundaries, and cuts them off from the surrounding society. Even in Israel, which runs on Hebrew.

This is recently relevant as the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox must end.[2] Many will speak only Yiddish. The IDF has a crash one month course in Hebrew for foreign Jews who want to join and some other ethnic groups, so they will cope. Israel nominally has compulsory military service, but the ultra-orthodox have been exempted so they can supposedly study Torah. When that started in the 1940s, only 4,000 were in that status. Now it's 1.4 million. There's currently political unrest in Israel over this.

[1] https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/A-bisl-Yiddis...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-court-ruling-ag-t...

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#15

Post by adastra22 »

Animats wrote: post #14

The Jerusalem Post on Yiddish.[1] Yiddish speakers today are mostly ultra-orthodox Jews. The language binds them together across country boundaries, and cuts them off from the surrounding society. Even in Israel, which runs on Hebrew. This is recently relevant as the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox must end.[2] Many will speak only Yiddish. The IDF has a crash one…

The Haredi know Hebrew. They spend all day every day reading and debating texts written in Hebrew…

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#16

Post by malermeister »

blueyes wrote: post #7

I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...

As a speaker of Viennese German and English, I have no problem understanding spoken Yiddish.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#17

Post by adastra22 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #13
samatman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they wouldn't, because the only person who suggests that Knaanic was ancestral to Yiddish, rather than having been displaced by it, is Wexler. Who is an unpleasant and academically dishonest crank, who, in addition to his discredited linguistic views, makes claims about the ethnic origins of the Ashkenazim which were always on shaky ground, and which have been conclusively disproven by modern genetic analysis. No…

I didn’t say it was ancestral, more like German Jews saw Knaanic and were inspired to create their own language.

Yiddish wasn’t a created language.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#18

Post by cwzwarich »

Koshkin wrote: post #11
nicole_express wrote: post #3

The article is quite interesting, but I have to say I don't understand why Yiddish being a Slavic language would suddenly mean that all European Jews are Iranian; the Slavic languages aren't descended from anything spoken in Iran in the first century CE. That really feels like it came out of nowhere.

> Yiddish being a Slavic language I wonder why anyone would think that. The words predominantly come from German, and the grammar is more of a thing of its own, far from resembling anything Slavic...

Most people who encounter Yiddish outside of the religious Jewish community encounter Western Yiddish. Most people who learn Yiddish as a first language today would be speaking Eastern Yiddish (think Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia), which has more obviously Slavic elements.

The standard historical explanation for this is that Yiddish began as a Germanic language, and the Eastern dialects developed after Jews were expelled from Germany in the 14th century and migrated East. There were already Jews living there, but the population grew tremendously with the migration.

Paul Wexler's thesis is that the Eastern dialects of Yiddish actually independently descend from early Jewish Slavic languages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language), and the Western dialects are derived from the Eastern ones.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#19

Post by bojan »

082349872349872 wrote: post #6
nicole_express wrote: post #3

The article is quite interesting, but I have to say I don't understand why Yiddish being a Slavic language would suddenly mean that all European Jews are Iranian; the Slavic languages aren't descended from anything spoken in Iran in the first century CE. That really feels like it came out of nowhere.

It didn't exactly come out of nowhere, it was prefaced by "a fringe tends to develop; in Yiddish linguistics, that would be Paul Wexler". As an L2 german (standard & dialect) speaker who's learning a slavic language I think "fringe" may be the charitable way to put it. (I've experimented with alemannic dialect speakers and upon first exposure they tend to think of yiddish as a different german dialect with some bizar…

As a native Slavic speaker that can also speak an almost fluent Dutch, and knowing what the quoted Hobbit line says, I can't even see how this having anything to do with Slavic languages is even a discussion.
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