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The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

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Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#41

Post by woodruffw »

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...

> I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic.

I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic. This is a recurring theme in Ashkenazi literature: Yiddish is understood to be the מאַמע־לשין -- the mother tongue, essentially grounded and practical, in contrast with Hebrew.

(Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however. Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones.)

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#42

Post by kimixa »

arresin wrote: post #37
searealist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.

It looks like there's a mixed consensus on ancestry, but a fair bit of evidence they at least intermixed with European locals since prehistoric times [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/

No idea where the other guy got their %age numbers from, unless you only count specific parts of the family tree.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#43

Post by Amezarak »

darby_nine wrote: post #40
searealist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.

My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#44

Post by woodruffw »

arresin wrote: post #28
gizmo686 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having grown up as an American Jew, it has been a recurring revelation of how much of what I think if as "Jewish" culture is actually German.

Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).

It would be ahistorical, at least: many of the Jews in 1920s Germany had fled pogroms in Ukraine and Russia just 20 or 30 years prior. Many were not particularly integrated, and only spoke Eastern Yiddish dialects.

(The Jews who were already in Germany prior were much more assimilated and less religious than their Eastern counterparts, which is why they often have more Germanic names. This appears in other forms across European Jewry, e.g. Litvaks, being more Western, typically being less religious and more assimilated than the Galitzianers.)

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#45

Post by gizmo686 »

Amezarak wrote: post #43
darby_nine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.

My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?

It is not that genetic simmilarity is inherently meaninglessness. Just that it is not a good proxy for the social concepts people are generally using it to talk about.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#46

Post by [deleted] »

gizmo686 wrote: post #45
Amezarak wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?

It is not that genetic simmilarity is inherently meaninglessness. Just that it is not a good proxy for the social concepts people are generally using it to talk about.

[deleted]

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#47

Post by rvense »

malermeister wrote: post #16
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.

I saw the film A Serious Man[0] at a cinema in Amsterdam when it came out. There's an opening scene with Yiddisch dialogue and it had no subtitles but judging from the laughs everyone understood it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serious_Man

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#48

Post by Amezarak »

kimixa wrote: post #42
arresin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.

It looks like there's a mixed consensus on ancestry, but a fair bit of evidence they at least intermixed with European locals since prehistoric times [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/ No idea where the other guy got their %age numbers from, unless you only count specific parts of the family tree.

To be clear, that paper is not arguing Jewish ethnic groups were intermixing with European locals since prehistoric times, it is arguing that the Ashkenazi Jews (or perhaps it would be better to say: the proto-Asheknazi Jews) assimilated lots of European converts with ancestry in Europe dating back to prehistoric times.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#49

Post by BehindTheMath »

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…

Nearly all Israeli Haredi Jews speak Hebrew. For most, it's their primary language. Most do not speak Yiddish.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#50

Post by adastra22 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #20
adastra22 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yiddish wasn’t a created language.

You know what I mean.

No, I don't. Early jewish communities in Central Europe spoke the local language, then carried this language with them as they moved into Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Over centuries it diverged from its ancestral origin, as all languages do. At no point did anyone look at another jewish language and go “oh that's interesting; let's do something like that.”
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