a point of yiddish grammar

[lord of the mark]

in a previous thread i posted something in yiddish. GePap thought that a difference in word order from German was sign of it being Yiddish. I must confess, i think in this instance the yiddish word order should have been the same as the German, and it was different soley due to my error.

I do not post that there as Ming has insisted that that thread stay on topic.

[Spiffor]

I must admit this thread is highly intriguing.

Reminds me when Kepler, long ago, posted a thread on a precise point of philosophy, and the spamfest was opened

[GePap]

What I was told, or heard, is that yiddish uses more of a Hebrew strcuture with german words. What you wrote, for examples, the verbs seemed to me to be in the wrong places.

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by Spiffor
I must admit this thread is highly intriguing.

Sure thing.

How many people are able to analyse a point of yiddish grammar on Apolyton ? No more than half a dozen

How many of this 6 posters will remember a non referenced thread on the same subject ? 50%

How many of the three yiddish grammar addicted will remember the sentence, not mentionned in the opening post ? No more than one likely.

Conclusion :

This thread is a private secret conversation held in a coded language, between LOTM and GePap.Should not be tolerated for long by a reasonnably paranoïd Mod.

[Harovan]

I don't know Yiddish, only German, but I have a record with some Yiddish songs and (despite that I don't understand many of the words) the word order seems to be pretty much the same.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap
What I was told, or heard, is that yiddish uses more of a Hebrew strcuture with german words. What you wrote, for examples, the verbs seemed to me to be in the wrong places.

I wrote Ich nisht schriebt

As you correctly pointed out, in German this would be incorrect word order.

I cant say for sure, but on rereading, i think the more common yiddish usage would be Ich schriebt nisht, which would match the german order. I must admit that I am not aware of any differences between yiddish and german grammar - doesnt mean there arent any, just shows the limits of my knowledge. The main clue that this was yiddish was the use of the word Loshen (hebrew for tongue) to mean language - a word that doesnt exist in German.

Note this current thread was not meant to disagree with you GEpap - just to avoid having people be misled about Yiddish due to my own error.

[Gangerolf]

What's the position of Yiddish these days?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap
What I was told, or heard, is that yiddish uses more of a Hebrew strcuture with german words. What you wrote, for examples, the verbs seemed to me to be in the wrong places.

about 70% german words, 20% Hebrew words, and about 10% slavic words - and an occasional romance word thrown in to confuse everyone. But thats for "eastern yiddish" historically there was a "western yiddish" spoken in germany, Italy, austria - but that died out in the early 19th c, when native jews of those lands acculturated. Mainly of interest now because of certain classic and.or historic texts in western yiddish. (Yiddish spoken in Berlin or Vienna in say 1910 would have been eastern Yiddish, spoken by migrants from Poland and Russia)

And correct usage is sometimes disputed - the one time i took a formal class in Yiddish the text gave a word roughly "familie" as equivalent to english family - presumably a word of German origin. Yet ive always heard yiddish speakers use the word "mishpocha" from the Hebrew. Perhaps a dialect difference between the northern Lithuanian dialect and the southern Ukrainian/galician dialect, or just pedantry on the part of the textbook.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Gangerolf
What's the position of Yiddish these days?

To quote my real world self "its a dead language, but dead like Latin, not dead like Etruscan"

The elderly who spoke it are dying out, for the most part. Its still spoken as a birth tongue in hasidic families in the US and Israel (and Belgium?) but those families in the US are generally bilingual in english and AFAIK the ones in Israel are biliingual in Yiddish and Modern Hebrew. At least in the US i see the Yiddish used in chasidic households gradually being infiltrated by English words, even where Yiddish words likely exist - part of the problem being that these people arent well read in Yiddish, other than religous works.

There is said to be a "revival of Yiddish" among secular and modern religious Jews, but as far as i can tell this is limited to people taking intro courses and listening to klezmer music. Occasionally one runs into a secular family attempting to raise kids in Yiddish - not quite as odd as someone raising their kid in Klingon, but close to it. Theres said to be a similar revival in Israel, but I doubt its very deep there either.

Queen of the mark wanted to teach Princess of the mark yiddish. Given the need to teach her Hebrew, for her to pursue her secular studies, and to do all the things that kids do, there really isnt time. Shes picked up some at the houses of Chassidic relations, but their english is definitely better than her Yiddish.

So as i said , dead language, but dead like Latin, not dead like Etruscan.

[Gangerolf]

So it's mainly a household language, but there are probably some media and literature as well? How many speak it? I found a source saying 3 million but I find that hard to believe..http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=YDD

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Gangerolf
So it's mainly a household language, but there are probably some media and literature as well? How many speak it? I found a source saying 3 million but I find that hard to believe..http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=YDD

well given that there only around 13 million jews in the world, and that probably almost 4 million are sephardim (jews of spanish, african and asian descent) with no connection to Yiddish, that mean about 1 in 3 of all ashkenazim (jews of central and east europeans descent) Id say thats impossible. Even given the date of 1991 mentioned at your site. There are probably less than three hundred thousand hasidim who speak it as a household tongue, and probably no more than a million or so elderly people who COULD speak it, given the opportunity. There could be a million or so more who have some familiarity with it, the children of those elderly people, people with Hasidic relatives, and participants in the revival.

[Spiffor]

Gefilte Fish

There! I exposed my familiarity with Yiddish (only word I know)

[Ecthy]

lotm, this is truly interesting