"Where did Yiddish come from?" (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

"Where did Yiddish come from?"
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iguanamon
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Message 1 of 5

20 June 2014 at 1:56pm | IP Logged

An essay in the online Tablet Magazine poses the question Where Did Yiddish Come From?

For those interested in history and linguistics, the story of a once thriving multi-country European language is an interesting read. It's a quite long essay. This is the first of two parts with the second part to be published next week.

Tablet Magazine by Cherie Woodworth wrote:

There are several hundred thousand Yiddish speakers today, perhaps even half a million, but the shtetls of Ukraine and Lithuania, where Yiddish was woven into the fabric of everyday life, have faded into dust. Yiddish was born in about the 10th century and thus rounded out an even millennium before being pulled under by the tide of history. If you want to know not just what Yiddish is but where it came from, how it managed to survive and even to flourish, you can do no better than the new edition of Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language—but be sure to read the footnotes. They extend for over 750 pages, are now published in English for the first time in the new Yale edition, and contain the most interesting, and controversial, part of what had seemed till now a fairly straightforward and unchallenged historical narrative.

Weinreich’s original text and notes were published in 1973, four years after his death. A partial translation into English—without the notes—was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980. Yale’s new edition thus finally makes available for the first time the greater part of Weinreich’s work—the notes are longer than the text—thoroughly edited by Paul Glasser. The notes cite research in two dozen languages and took more than a decade to edit and check even after they were translated. These notes are not just the usual formal apparatus, reassuring to any scholarly reader: They are essential to understanding Weinreich’s many-stranded argument about the relationship between culture and language. They also provide a subtle counter-argument to his lifelong thesis. Weinreich was a careful, fair, and judicious scholar, and it was in the notes to his monumental work that he gave place to the vexing confusion of counter-evidence to his main, and beloved, story of Yiddish origins and, by implication, the origins of millions of East European Jews and their descendants in America....

Edited by iguanamon on 20 June 2014 at 4:52pm
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Cabaire
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Message 2 of 5

20 June 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged

For someone who is interested in the history of the language but without the desire to learn the actual language, I would reccomend Yiddish: A nation of words written by Miriam Weinstein, too.
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Doitsujin
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Message 3 of 5

21 June 2014 at 11:27am | IP Logged

While were at the topic, the latest TTBOK podcast featured a short segment about an Israeli who single-highhandedly set up a Yiddish library in Tel Aviv.
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Random review
Diglot
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Message 4 of 5

29 June 2014 at 1:41am | IP Logged

FWIW this is a subject that I find quite interesting. I've heard several different
theories: the traditional one that it developed from MHG and moved eastwards from
there; that it developed from Bavarian (and moved eastwards from there), that it
developed from Gothic (yup, someone really argues that!) and even (which I find by far
least convincing) that it is a Slavic language relexified with Germanic vocabulary (and
Hebrew/Aramaic). I personally find none of these convincing and suspect the real story
will turn out to be much more complex.

The only thing I am totally convinced of is that (having tried to learn some) Yiddish
is a Germanic language. It's a rather strange one (just like English), but it
definitely feels Germanic. You only have to look at the rather cute Heath
Robinson* way Eastern Yiddish sometimes uses Germanic verb prefixes to try and express
notions of aspect under the influence of the surrounding Slavic languages. Similarly
the case system is sooooo familiar (if somewhat simplified in comparison) to me from
German.

I tried to learn a little Tok Pisin years ago, the words are mostly derived from
English but the feel of the language was very foreign (but quite pretty!); although I
don't know any Slavic language, I'm confident I'd notice if Yiddish wasn't Germanic.
So, yeah, I don't know any Slavic languages but I just can't see Yiddish as a
relexified Slavic language.

* Or Rube Goldberg, if you're from North America.
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fanatic
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Message 5 of 5

25 July 2014 at 1:02pm | IP Logged

When I worked at Ericsson's in Hannover I brought in a Yiddish language course I borrowed from the Hannover library
I played the first recording and told my colleagues, this is a Yiddish language course. They listened and said, we can speak Yiddish. It sounded like German with a strange accent and a couple of grammatical differences. We all understood it perfectly.

I watched the movie on television, "The Frisco Kid" with Harrison Ford and Gene Wilder. There was a segment where Gene Wilder, who spoke Yiddish, had to speak with Pennsylvania Dutch who spoke German. I understood both sides of the conversation perfectly but in the movie they couldn't understand each other. They should have been able to converse easily. Yiddish is definitely a Germanic language but it does differ from region to region.

We have an ethnic radio station in Melbourne, Australia, which has programs in more than 60 languages. (Great if you want to practice a language.) I understand some Yiddish speakers and others hardly at all.

I heard a good program in Yiddish on the history of the Yiddish language. I was in my car and couldn't record it. I understood the program quite well.

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