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The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
- adamnemecek 2y agoThese discussions generally do not cover Knaanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language 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.
- samatman 2y agoAnd 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. Not that this fact has motivated Wexler to retract his bullshit arguments.
- adamnemecek 2y agoI didn’t say it was ancestral, more like German Jews saw Knaanic and were inspired to create their own language.
- adastra22 2y agoYiddish wasn’t a created language.
- adamnemecek 2y agoYou know what I mean.
- schoen 2y agoI think that's a genuine dispute, because people consciously deciding to make a new language is a relatively rare phenomenon. Most language change is informal and unplanned.
- adastra22 2y agoNo, 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.”
- adamnemecek 2y agoI have a hunch that Jews came from Eastern Europe (I mean Israel before that). No, I don't think they are Khazars. But Ashkenaz was in Scythia, i.e. Eastern Europe.
- adastra22 2y agoTheir history is very well documented. The Ashkenazi came from Italy into Germany, then moved into Poland (a bit different geographically from modern day Poland) after crusader pogroms in the 11th century.
- adamnemecek 2y agoJews were in Czech Republic since at least 9th century. I don’t think they were German Jews.
- adastra22 2y agoAs I said, geography was a bit different back then. These are the same people I’m talking about. They came from Italy.
- samatman 2y agoI'm saying that discussions of the origins of Yiddish do not cover Knaanic because it isn't a part of the origin of Yiddish. No different from Judeo-Arabic in that sense: an interesting topic in its own right, just not relevant. > German Jews saw Knaanic and were inspired to create their own language This is... not how it works. I know of only one case of "inspired to create their own language" in all of history, and it's Modern Hebrew. Which is a revival, not de novo.
- nicole_express 2y agoThe 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.
- 082349872349872 2y agoIt 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 bizarre vocabulary) > In a lokh in der erd hot gevoynt a hobit. Nit keyn bridke, koytike, nase lokh, ongefilt mit di ekn fun verem un a dripendikn reyekh, oykh nit keyn trukene, hoyle, zamdike lokh mit gornisht vu zikh avektsuzetsn tsi vos tsu esn: zi iz geven a hobit-lokh, un dos heyst bakvemlekhkeyt. —JRRT Lagniappe: https://www.petitnicolas.com/livre/le-petit-nicolas/le-petit-nicolas-en-yiddish/37 https://www.petitnicolas.com/livre/le-petit-nicolas/le-petit... (honorable mention to https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט )
- bojan 2y agoAs 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.
- yorwba 2y agoThere is one word of Slavic origin in that paragraph: bridke (English ugly, Polish brzydki, German hässlich). (And I can't find a cognate for "dripendikn" in any other language.)
- 082349872349872 2y ago
- josefritzishere 2y agoIf you are into this I reccomend the book Outwitting History; great read. https://shop.yiddishbookcenter.org/products/outwitting-history-by-aaron-lansky https://shop.yiddishbookcenter.org/products/outwitting-histo...
- blueyes 2y agoI 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...
- 082349872349872 2y agoCompare hindi/urdu... Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504
- Koshkin 2y agoAren't they essentially the same language (unlike Yiddish vs. German)?
- sneed_chucker 2y agoYiddish is pretty much a high German dialect.
- ignoramous 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- mangamadaiyan 2y agoNot really. They're close, but definitely not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu (Edit: pasted wikipedia link)
- saagarjha 2y agoIn 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.
- croisillon 2y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830501
- Animats 2y agoThe 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-Yiddish-Yiddish-and-the-Haredim https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/A-bisl-Yiddis... [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-court-ruling-ag-tells-idf-to-immediately-start-drafting-3000-haredi-students/ar-BB1oSEyt https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-court-ruling-ag-t...
- adastra22 2y agoThe Haredi know Hebrew. They spend all day every day reading and debating texts written in Hebrew…
- math_dandy 2y agoSome speak perfect conversational Hebrew in a standard Israeli accent but switch to an Ashenazi/Yiddish accent in biblical or liturgical contexts. Pretty cool actually.
- ViktorRay 2y agoWhy is the word “supposedly” in your comment? Is there some implication that these people are doing something else? If there is no implication then there’s no need to include this word.
- booleandilemma 2y agoI guess the parent is implying that there are some people who use their supposed desire to study Torah to hide from IDF conscription.
- KoftaBob 2y ago"Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter) extending over parts of Germany and France.[29] There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish#Origins
- asveikau 2y agoFrom 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've also read Yiddish has a similar quality of seeming, from a distance, like it has some characteristics that might have been seen among German speaking gentiles in prior times. I think that when you see separations of populations, you sometimes see the preservation of "archaic" language features.
- Jun8 2y agoSpeaking 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 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-tengo/ https://sephardicsongs.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/dos-amantes-... There’s a large group of Ladino speakers in Turkey.
- cafard 2y agoLuther 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.
- singularity2001 2y agoI 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago>> 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: https://biblehub.com/niv/judges/12.htm https://biblehub.com/niv/judges/12.htm
- 082349872349872 2y agorelated: if you really wish to know someone's L1 and suspect that the language they count in isn't it, hit them with a $5 wrench and see what language they say "ow!" in. (my L1 is english but I can make two kinds of 'ch' sound, neither of which is the english "tsh" one, so I suspect the wrench test, while far from perfect, may still be better than sibboleths)