How to Revive a Dead Language
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though. Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic (the language Maimonides wrote a lot of literature in), and Ladino were victims of the centralization of Hebrew as the common language for Jews.
Yiddish is a German dialect, Judeo-Arabic an Arabic dialect, and Ladino is a Spanish dialect and are all dying/dead languages with attempted revival movements in their own right, but nothing with too much steam and this article lays out a potential reason why; aside from traditional, historic, or cultural reasons, there's no real societal reason for these languages in today's world.
I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."
(As an apt parallel, albeit perhaps obscure to many here, saying Yiddish is not dead because the Haredim use it is like saying that Sogdian is not dead because it survives as Yaghnobi. But the Yaghnobi language used by some impoverished people in an isolated valley is a pale shadow of the cosmopolitan Sogdian language that was used before.)
Talk to a linguist if you want the very messy and complex details I just summarized to the point of butchering the truth.
This is an amazing piece of information, even more incredible it is the fact the modern speakers can read Nietzsche with no problem at all, what a fantastic coincidence.
I mean, what native German speaker could even begin to understand this Schiller poem, it is 200! years old!! It could be very well be written in proto-Germanic:
An den Frühling
Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!
Du Wonne der Natur!
Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen
Willkommen auf der Flur!
Denkst auch noch an mein Mädchen?
Ei, Lieber, denke doch!
Dort liebte mich das Mädchen
Und’s Mädchen liebt mich noch!
Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!
Du Wonne der Natur!
Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen
Willkommen auf der Flur!
In practice natives had trouble understanding each other if they traveled just a few villages over
How do you mean that? Of course there were different styles of speaking (especially in polite speech), but it‘s perfectly intelligible either way. In fact, even Martin Luther‘s German still sounds colloquial today (although the spelling was vastly different).
> English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500
That‘s a hundred years before Shakespeare. Who is decently understandable with some practice, but not what I would call „close“ to modern English.
To me, a fluent Spanish speaker, it sounds like a Spanish person with a foreign accent.
The pronunciation and grammar sounds a little bit off (with respect to Spanish), but otherwise I can understand this 100%.
As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows:
Swedish: understood just a few words
Dutch: understood some entire phrases
Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)
Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.
I grew up hearing my grandmother speaking Yiddish sometimes, my wife's dad is fluent and I love hearing Chabad rabbis break into it.
But.
The Yiddish and the other languages you listed are languages of the diaspora. They came to be because our people did not have a home and ended up speaking the dialects of their neighbors. It's incredibly empowering that there's now a country where our "real" (non-diaspor) language thrives.
Of course, there's a tremendous body of work written in those languages that is valuable and must be preserved but the fact that Hebrew is people's native language nowadays should only be celebrated.
As if they would have survived in the 20th/21st century without the respective communities being isolated (as it was the case when they existed).
They'd be forgotten aside from token phrases and liturgical uses maybe, like Yiddish were in the US in a couple of generations...
BTW, because modern Hebrew was revived from biblical Hebrew, biblical Hebrew is completely understandable to the modern Hebrew speaker, and sounds only a little archaic; something like how 18th century English sounds to a modern English speaker. Shakespeare's 16th century English is more foreign to the modern English speaker than biblical Hebrew is to the modern Hebrew speaker. English has continuously changed, while ancient Hebrew was transported to the late 19th century. Funnily, because the revivers of Hebrew preferred biblical Hebrew over, say, medieval Hebrew, medieval texts might sound more archaic to modern Hebrew speakers than more ancient ones.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_verbs#Stems
Interestingly most of original language is now gone and consist of many Arabic words. I was very surprised that most common words (say Tuesday if my memory serve me right) were lost first, but many more complex words not. Also traditional script is now gone and was replaced with modern made up script.
I'm using the same approach for Hebrew now, hope it works again. Latin is also on my learning list because of its importance in studying history, but I haven't seriously gotten to it yet.
ALGOL as the first language in CS education.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/22/452551172...
(There is both a textual and an audio version on that page.)
(See also: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1359574074326982664)
Have you ever heard the phrase "lost in translation" and thought about what it actually means?
This makes Russian more naturally suitable to (for example) poetry, but english for Technical writing