101–109 of 109 posts
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I also would say Viennese sounds especially close to Yiddish.
I'm guessing the reason why is that the Jews migrated northwards from the Levantine / Africa / Spain upwards through Italy, Austria and then Germany, Poland, the Baltics. Are there any Italian or Piedmontese / Venetian traces in Yiddish? Relevant? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Italian_languages
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Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
How do estimates of genetic origin relate to ethnic affiliation? Ethnicity is about culture, customs, and language, not genetics. As far as genetics go, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of question begging involved in identifying specific genetics with regional cultural groups in the first place.
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Jews were in Czech Republic since at least 9th century. I don’t think they were German Jews.
As I said, geography was a bit different back then. These are the same people I’m talking about. They came from Italy.
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>and perfect spelling >> understandibility for me https://www.google.com/search?q=understandibility
I made that one up intentionally, but didn’t want to put it in quotes because I already had one word in quotes.
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Not really. They're close, but definitely not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu (Edit: pasted wikipedia link)
In theory sure. I think in practice it is very common that a Hindi or Urdu speaker will talk to someone else speaking "the other language" and not even realize it.
I have no revisionist intentions here :)
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> Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity Prussia, let alone Prussian “identity” is not something that existed well into the mid to late modern era.
Yes, it's a relatively late concept, but one could rationally argue it's objectively more correct than 'German' in default modern interpretation, both spatially in that it additionally encompasses what is now western Poland, and temporally in that it is closer to the timeframe in question. As for identity, this can be argued until the cows come home, but many Jews served in the Prussian army (google suggests 100,000-…
Calling someone from Cologne Prussian was about as silly as claiming that Belgian Walloons were Dutch prior to 1830. Most people who lived in the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1900s weren’t really Prussian in most senses.
There was a large population of Jews in Berlin but most of the remaining ones lived in the Rhineland, Westphalia etc.
> don't put your life on the line
Or you’re conscripted and not given a choice.
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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 wer…
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 , "... a hypothesis that has been widely rejected by other Yiddish and Germanic linguists and geneticists", says his WP bio.
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Run of the mill, he says, he says, in his second tongue, using correct grammar, idiomatic phrases, and perfect spelling. This n=1 sample shows even run of the mill can be good at languages. Oy veh!
Pretty sure it has to “oy vey”. It’s also a good example: it’s easy to understand for me because in German, “oh weh!” is a very common phrase.
(The “official” YIVO transliterations are not widely used, in practice.)
>> His mother survived the war partially due to the fact that she was a native speaker of Polish and didn’t have the distinctive Yiddish accent, which is precisely what sent many Jews to their graves as the surest means of identifying them as Jews. (Her horrific experiences during the Holocaust are chronicled in a 1983 video from the Holocaust Memorial Center oral history project.) The lack of accent, coupled with th…