I didn't know any serious linguist ever questioned that Yiddish is a variant of German. One might ask if Germanic and other IE languages carry some old Afroasiatic Neolithic stratum from before the spread out of Anatolia / Southern Caucasus but that's a much deeper question.
The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
81–90 of 109 posts
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#82Earlier 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).
Most Yiddish speakers (or even their ancestors for many generations) didn’t live in Germany, though.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#83Earlier 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.
Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the…
> 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.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I‘m a run-of-the-mill West German dude with no particular talent for languages, and second this. It’s somewhere between “normal” German and Dutch in terms of understandibility for me.
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!
>and perfect spelling
>>understandibility for me
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd think bones from a couple hundred or thousand or ten-thousand years ago would provide a okay trail.
I don’t think the ancestry tests compare the DNA with archeological finds. If they did I wouldn’t trust it given the relatively small sample size of archeological finds with intact DNA.
The usual tests certainly don’t. But some scientific studies do:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#86Earlier 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).
Most Yiddish speakers (or even their ancestors for many generations) didn’t live in Germany, though.
Many Germans didn't live in Germany at that time either, Hungary, Romania, contemporary Poland etc had very big German population.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 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.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic. Ah, we had one Yiddish speaker in r/germany who ragequit after it was pointed out to him that Yiddish basically just sounds like an Eastern-European dialect of German to native speakers, with a number of Hebrew words thrown in, and German native speakers usually can understand it after being exposed to it for some time…
It’s mostly about diminution: Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, but describing one as a dialect of the other is likely to cause offense. This is particularly salient in the case of Yiddish, where relabeling as a dialect distorts the historical relationship between European Jewry and Europe.
(I don’t know anything about the commenter you’re referring to, but I suspect I would be mildly annoyed by a forum of Germans insisting that my family’s mostly dead language was “just a dialect“ of their language. Which is distinct from the unobjectionable claim that Yiddish is a Germanic language.)
The Weinstein witticism has already been posted once in this thread: a sprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot :-)
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#89>> 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 the fact that neither of his parents looked stereotypically Jewish, enabled them to pass as Catholic Poles.
A Shibboleth!
⁴Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” ⁵The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” ⁶they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’ ” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
Judges 12 4-6:
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#90The 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.
As another comment mentioned, both of those claims come from one theory that is considered as fringe in this field. That is explained in the article, although how those specific claims are being linked is not detailed.
Iranian languages and peoples that are referred here are not from Iran though. During ancient and middle ages there were various Iranian peoples in Eastern Europe, speaking Iranian languages and distantly related to modern people in Iran. These were very prominent, with two of these peoples, Scythians and Sarmatians, being used as names for the whole East Europe during the times of ancient Greek and Rome. In early middle ages, the Iranian tribe Alans also spread to western Europe, and there are still Iranian peoples such as Ossetians living in north of the Caucasus. For the first century CE, it would be these Iranian populations in eastern Europe which interacted with Slavs and are a source of many loanwords.
I guess the theory goes so that a significant Iranian population in central or east Europe would have converted to Judaism and thus they would make up a large portion of European Jews' ancestry. It's probably not so, because while there certainly were many individuals or small groups converting and thus being part of Jewish ancestry, we don't really have evidence of large-scale conversions.
Of course there has been the whole political debate based on these theories, which goes to claim that "Jews are not Jews" because according to their views, almost all Ashkenazi Jews would be descended from European converts and have little to none Middle Eastern ancestry. This often goes to antisemitic direction if it's used as basis to deny some part of Jewish culture, for example. But if such conversions ever happened in a large scale, that was 1000 years ago, and surely the Jewish people whose ancestry is from one of those groups who converted, are as Jewish as are those with Middle Eastern ancestry.