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The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

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Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#61

Post by Jun8 »

asveikau wrote: post #38

From my understanding, the Jewish European languages, including Yiddish and Ladino (judeo-spanish) have a short of frozen in time quality. I know more about Ladino because I know Spanish and am always interested in romance languages. Many (though by no means all) of the differences between that and modern Castilian are that Ladino has not kept current with Spanish phonetic changes from the 1500s onwards. I believe I'…

Speaking of Ladino, here’s the Sephardic Jewish French singer Francoise Atlan singing a famous song in that language: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLr9d_db0g. If you speak Spanish you can check how much of it you can understand. Here are the lyrics with English translation: https://sephardicsongs.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/dos-amantes-...

There’s a large group of Ladino speakers in Turkey.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#62

Post by saagarjha »

mangamadaiyan wrote: post #60
Koshkin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they essentially the same language (unlike Yiddish vs. German)?

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.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#63

Post by swaginator »

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...

Is there a regional aspect to it? I have been listening to a lot of Yiddish/Russian music lately and people say that there are a lot of Russian loan words and it is hard to understand for non-Russian Yiddish speakers.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#64

Post by jhbadger »

woodruffw wrote: post #41
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 Yid…

Many linguists even call it Judeo-German (and Ladino, the Sephardic language, Judeo-Spanish)

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#65

Post by moshegramovsky »

searealist wrote: post #36
arresin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

A lot of people think I am Mexican.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#66

Post by moshegramovsky »

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).

The amount of assimilation was not homogeneous anywhere in Europe. In urban environments, some Jewish families were highly assimilated, and there was a great deal of interaction between Jewish people and Gentiles. If these dynamics are interesting to you, you might want to read about the haskalah:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah?useskin=vector

Out in the stetls (in rural towns), there was far less assimilation (although a lot of interaction). For example, in Poland prior to WW2, Jewish society was almost a parallel world. Polish Jews had their own religious institutions, shops, and, at various times, a parallel government. For centuries, Poland was like two separate worlds that inhabited the same physical space.

It's really too bad that it ended. I grieve for something I never even knew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland?...

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#67

Post by emmelaich »

tosh wrote: post #24
malermeister wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#68

Post by woodruffw »

swaginator wrote: post #63
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...

Is there a regional aspect to it? I have been listening to a lot of Yiddish/Russian music lately and people say that there are a lot of Russian loan words and it is hard to understand for non-Russian Yiddish speakers.

Yep -- Eastern and Western Yiddish are mutually intelligible, but have substantially different accents and word choices. Most people speaking Yiddish today speak an Eastern dialect.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#69

Post by cafard »

asveikau wrote: post #38

From my understanding, the Jewish European languages, including Yiddish and Ladino (judeo-spanish) have a short of frozen in time quality. I know more about Ladino because I know Spanish and am always interested in romance languages. Many (though by no means all) of the differences between that and modern Castilian are that Ladino has not kept current with Spanish phonetic changes from the 1500s onwards. I believe I'…

Luther was a major force on the standardization of (school) German, wasn't he? It makes sense to me that his influence would have bypassed Yiddish. I take it to be mostly a variant of old regional German. I base this on transcriptions to the Latin alphabet that I have seen, for I have never learned the Hebrew alphabet.

Archaic language features: I have heard that Quebecois French was some centuries behind what is spoken in France.

Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

#70

Post by thrownv7032g »

runarberg wrote: post #55
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.

I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on…

I'd think bones from a couple hundred or thousand or ten-thousand years ago would provide a okay trail.
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