9 messages over 2 pages: 1 2
William Camden
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6271 days ago
1936 posts - 2333 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French
| Message 9 of 9 28 May 2010 at 2:51pm | IP Logged |
urubu wrote:
Fazla wrote:
It's not much about pronounciation, what interests me the most is to
know if the structure of the language itself is identical, if the great great majority
of words are identical or not. Basically, I want to know if it makes sense to learn
Yiddish TO learn German with little effort later on(I know it sounds stupid, but as I
have my reasons for liking more Yiddish thus putting more effort into it instead of
German, I want to know if this is affordable). |
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For me as a German speaker, the degree to which Yiddish is transparent ranges wildly
(i.e. from 100% to 0%), depending upon the number of Slavonic & Semitic words, and
unfamiliar Germanic cognates.
Let's take this example (from: Salzia Landmann, Jiddisch):
"A gevesene mark-yidene emigrirt keyn Yisroel un farkoyft in Tel-Aviv epl. Zi zitst
lebn ir koysh un farbet die koynem mit a nign: "Tapukhim, lemakoyr, lekhamoyr".
The first sentence is completely transparent, as this literal translation shows:
"Eine gewesene Marktjüdin emigriert gen Israel und verkauft Äpfel in Tel-Aviv"
(Normal German: Eine ehemalige (jüdische) Marktverkäuferin emigriert nach Israel und
verkauft in Tel-Aviv Äpfel/English: A former (Jewish) marketwoman emigrates to Israel
and sells apples in Tel Aviv.)
In the second sentence only the beginning is clear:
'Zi zitst...' (DE: Sie sitzt/EN: She sits)
The following four words are incomprehensible:
lebn (looks like DE 'Leben'/EN 'life', but that does not make sense, it actually means
DE 'neben'/EN 'next to')
koysh (DE: Korb/EN: basket)
farbet (DE: ruft herbei (literally: verbittet)/EN: beckons)
koynem (DE: Kunden/EN: customers)
The end of the second sentence seems to be transparent, but is actually misleading.
'mit a nign' looks like 'mit einem Nicken' (EN: with a nod) but it actually means
'chanting melodically'.
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koysh is of Slavic origin (cf. kosz in Polish, meaning "basket").
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