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> 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 aft

by 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 :-)

by dirkt 2y ago

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 :-)