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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

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...

082349872349872 2y ago
Compare hindi/urdu... Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504
- Koshkin 2y ago
  Aren't they essentially the same language (unlike Yiddish vs. German)?
  - sneed_chucker 2y ago
    Yiddish is pretty much a high German dialect.
  - ignoramous 2y ago
    https://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 ago
    Not 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 ago
      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.
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        We spent several years in a francophone ski station that attracted a fair number of Haredi tourists. My wife and I had several brief convos with them, and I'm sure from their side they were in yiddish, while from ours they were in german. My favourite anecdote from this period was when my wife crossed a family on the trail at the lake, and one of the kids asked a question of the father about "the lady", as if she couldn't understand, and they were all surprised when she answered "sure, sure". ("doch, doch", written left-to-right, from her point of view; "dokh, dokh", written right-to-left in a different script, from theirs)
      - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
        I wasn't trying to be pedantic :) The OP's claim was that they are essentially the same language. My point was that while they are mutually intelligible to a large extent, Hindi and Urdu are distinct languages. That was pretty much it. I have no revisionist intentions here :)
delichon 2y ago
My dad learned Yiddish in his family home, both parents were immigrants and native speakers, though he never spoke it. But he loved to watch WWII movies, and would translate the German dialog for us and sometimes correct the subtitles.
malermeister 2y ago
As a speaker of Viennese German and English, I have no problem understanding spoken Yiddish.
- tosh 2y ago
  I also would say Viennese sounds especially close to Yiddish.
  - woodson 2y ago
    A lot of words and expressions in the old Viennese dialect are Yiddish, though that dialect has all but disappeared from day to day interactions (you can find it in old movies and recordings).
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Italian_languages
    - snowpid 2y ago
      I know Jews used some Latins phrases in their languages. But it's too late for look up some sources...
  - malermeister 2y ago
    I would agree, which is why I specified :)
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  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.
gizmo686 2y ago
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.
- arresin 2y ago
  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).
  - searealist 2y ago
    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.
    - arresin 2y ago
      I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.
      - searealist 2y ago
        Well, your hypothesis is wrong. They are not related beyond a few percent at best.
      - kimixa 2y ago
        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/ 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.
woodruffw 2y ago
> 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.)
- jhbadger 2y ago
  Many linguists even call it Judeo-German (and Ladino, the Sephardic language, Judeo-Spanish)
- dirkt 2y ago
  > 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 (like for all dialects, you need to adjust your hearing). > Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however. Well, it's definitely not "broken" German, it follows the same pattern as other German dialects with influences from other languages. Phonetic shift plus imported words. > Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones German has quite a number of words of Hebrew origin [1], and nobody finds them offensive, or somehow not desirable. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem_Hebräischen_und_Jiddischen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem...
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    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 :-)
woodpanel 2y ago
Close your eyes, hear an Israeli speak English and then a German and the only difference you will notice is the same intonational difference between standard German and Yiddish. Other than that, they basically will have the same accent.
- mtVessel 2y ago
  That couldn't be further from the truth. They're so different one would never confuse the two, or believe them related.
29athrowaway 2y ago
There is also Ladino, which is very close to Spanish and if you know Spanish you can understand it.
swaginator 2y ago
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.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  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.
Bayart 2y ago
Yiddish follows the same pattern as other Jewish languages, ie. starting out as a sociolect of the local language with additional Hebraic vocabulary for subject matters specific to Jews. It doesn't seem any less German than say Austro-Bavarian. In any case I've heard from the mouths of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews who had been through the Nazi concentrationary system that they in some respects had an easier navigating it than Western or Greek Jews because they spoke "more or less German".

082349872349872 2y ago

Compare hindi/urdu... Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504

Koshkin 2y ago
Aren't they essentially the same language (unlike Yiddish vs. German)?
- sneed_chucker 2y ago
  Yiddish is pretty much a high German dialect.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  https://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 ago
  Not 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 ago
    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.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      We spent several years in a francophone ski station that attracted a fair number of Haredi tourists. My wife and I had several brief convos with them, and I'm sure from their side they were in yiddish, while from ours they were in german. My favourite anecdote from this period was when my wife crossed a family on the trail at the lake, and one of the kids asked a question of the father about "the lady", as if she couldn't understand, and they were all surprised when she answered "sure, sure". ("doch, doch", written left-to-right, from her point of view; "dokh, dokh", written right-to-left in a different script, from theirs)
    - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
      I wasn't trying to be pedantic :) The OP's claim was that they are essentially the same language. My point was that while they are mutually intelligible to a large extent, Hindi and Urdu are distinct languages. That was pretty much it. I have no revisionist intentions here :)

delichon 2y ago

My dad learned Yiddish in his family home, both parents were immigrants and native speakers, though he never spoke it. But he loved to watch WWII movies, and would translate the German dialog for us and sometimes correct the subtitles.

malermeister 2y ago

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

tosh 2y ago
I also would say Viennese sounds especially close to Yiddish.
- woodson 2y ago
  A lot of words and expressions in the old Viennese dialect are Yiddish, though that dialect has all but disappeared from day to day interactions (you can find it in old movies and recordings).
- emmelaich 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Italian_languages
  - snowpid 2y ago
    I know Jews used some Latins phrases in their languages. But it's too late for look up some sources...
- malermeister 2y ago
  I would agree, which is why I specified :)
ManuelKiessling 2y ago
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.

gizmo686 2y ago

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.

arresin 2y ago
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).
- searealist 2y ago
  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.
  - arresin 2y ago
    I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.
    - searealist 2y ago
      Well, your hypothesis is wrong. They are not related beyond a few percent at best.
    - kimixa 2y ago
      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/ 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.

woodruffw 2y ago

> 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.)

jhbadger 2y ago
Many linguists even call it Judeo-German (and Ladino, the Sephardic language, Judeo-Spanish)
dirkt 2y ago
> 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 (like for all dialects, you need to adjust your hearing). > Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however. Well, it's definitely not "broken" German, it follows the same pattern as other German dialects with influences from other languages. Phonetic shift plus imported words. > Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones German has quite a number of words of Hebrew origin [1], and nobody finds them offensive, or somehow not desirable. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem_Hebräischen_und_Jiddischen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem...
- woodruffw 2y ago
  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 :-)

woodpanel 2y ago

Close your eyes, hear an Israeli speak English and then a German and the only difference you will notice is the same intonational difference between standard German and Yiddish. Other than that, they basically will have the same accent.

mtVessel 2y ago
That couldn't be further from the truth. They're so different one would never confuse the two, or believe them related.

29athrowaway 2y ago

There is also Ladino, which is very close to Spanish and if you know Spanish you can understand it.

swaginator 2y ago

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.

woodruffw 2y ago
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.

Bayart 2y ago

Yiddish follows the same pattern as other Jewish languages, ie. starting out as a sociolect of the local language with additional Hebraic vocabulary for subject matters specific to Jews. It doesn't seem any less German than say Austro-Bavarian. In any case I've heard from the mouths of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews who had been through the Nazi concentrationary system that they in some respects had an easier navigating it than Western or Greek Jews because they spoke "more or less German".