Malek Groupie Christmas Island Joined 4340 days ago 60 posts - 76 votes
| Message 1 of 28 07 January 2013 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
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Edited by Malek on 22 March 2013 at 8:05pm
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Malek Groupie Christmas Island Joined 4340 days ago 60 posts - 76 votes
| Message 2 of 28 07 January 2013 at 11:07am | IP Logged |
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Edited by Malek on 22 March 2013 at 8:05pm
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Malek Groupie Christmas Island Joined 4340 days ago 60 posts - 76 votes
| Message 3 of 28 07 January 2013 at 11:16am | IP Logged |
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Edited by Malek on 22 March 2013 at 8:05pm
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geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4685 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian
| Message 4 of 28 07 January 2013 at 1:02pm | IP Logged |
Hi! Further to my PM, it looks like I found your log. How about that? I also study Dutch, French, Yiddish and
Hebrew, though not always in that order. If you add German (which I learned through childhood immersion), that's
basically my entire long-term set of goal languages to master (less of an emphasis on Dutch, but when you know
English, German, Yiddish and French you practically get it for free, right?).
So are you into Polish so that you can understand obscure/literary Yiddish vocabulary, or is there more to it than
that? I also have a long-standing fascination with the Russian language, which I justify based on its popularity
amongst the Israeli and local immigrant communities, but I suppose it also would make Shalom Aleichem a whole
lot easier to read, too.
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Malek Groupie Christmas Island Joined 4340 days ago 60 posts - 76 votes
| Message 5 of 28 07 January 2013 at 1:22pm | IP Logged |
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Edited by Malek on 22 March 2013 at 8:05pm
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geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4685 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian
| Message 6 of 28 07 January 2013 at 1:37pm | IP Logged |
Yiddish vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation all seem to vary pretty significantly depending on the
speaker/author. The people I've spoken with most tend to have highly Germanic vocabulary relative to what I've
seen in print almost anywhere (which makes things easy for me, of course). But have you ever tried reading any
classic literature? I find that when I try to read things written by people from Eastern Europe 100 years ago, it's
chock-full of loan-words from Polish and/or Russian that didn't ever make it into the universal everyday lexicon--
much like American and British Yiddish speakers/writers using excessive amounts of English. Shalom Aleichem was
particularly bad in this regard--he writes entire sentences in glatt Russian, especially when the Russian goyim are
speaking.
Also, obscurity is relative. Coming from a starting point of knowing German well and Herbew so-so, I generally
know that if I don't immediately recognize a word, it almost has to be a slavic loanword, usually Polish.
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Malek Groupie Christmas Island Joined 4340 days ago 60 posts - 76 votes
| Message 7 of 28 07 January 2013 at 1:43pm | IP Logged |
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Edited by Malek on 22 March 2013 at 8:05pm
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geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4685 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian
| Message 8 of 28 07 January 2013 at 1:50pm | IP Logged |
And if you have any experience with modern-day Chassidim I think you may find a greater amount of loshn-
koydeshdike verter there, as well, especially terms from the Talmud. I agree that the Slavic element adds
flavor...and makes the language feel a little bit more like a "secret" language, and not just phonetically transformed
German...but it makes it harder for me to learn, too!
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