The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
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Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu
(Edit: pasted wikipedia link)
My favourite anecdote from this period was when my wife crossed a family on the trail at the lake, and one of the kids asked a question of the father about "the lady", as if she couldn't understand, and they were all surprised when she answered "sure, sure". ("doch, doch", written left-to-right, from her point of view; "dokh, dokh", written right-to-left in a different script, from theirs)
I have no revisionist intentions here :)
Are there any Italian or Piedmontese / Venetian traces in Yiddish?
Relevant? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Italian_languages
This n=1 sample shows even run of the mill can be good at languages.
Oy veh!
>>understandibility for me
It’s also a good example: it’s easy to understand for me because in German, “oh weh!” is a very common phrase.
(The “official” YIVO transliterations are not widely used, in practice.)
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/
No idea where the other guy got their %age numbers from, unless you only count specific parts of the family tree.
I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on junk-in junk-out statistical models (which is often the case with cluster-analysis).
I’m simply curious here, cluster analysis is the only method I can think of (other than guessing/categorizing arbitrarily).
So when our thread’s ancestor (pun unfortunate) says “45% Levantine” they mean they 45% of people alive today that are from that region (which includes many European immigrants). I bet this gets very messy given immigration patterns. Like which immigrants count as ancestry sample, and which don’t? For this problem I would personally use cluster analyses, however I would probably simply give up, knowing that cluster analysis would give me junk (and ultimately arbitrary) results with such noisy (and potentially skewed) data.
EDIT: The answer was right there next to this quote, in one of the aside picture for the same article[1]. They use Principal Component Analysis. Which IMO is even more fraught than cluster analysis, as you have even more control over what you want to get out of the model. If I remember correctly PCA—along with factor analyses—is used heavily in personality psychology and intelligence testing, the latter of which is very famous for radicalized pseudo science.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_DNA_test#/media/F...
I don't think it's "some" -- I think that's 100% of it.
As far as genetics go, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of question begging involved in identifying specific genetics with regional cultural groups in the first place.
(The Jews who were already in Germany prior were much more assimilated and less religious than their Eastern counterparts, which is why they often have more Germanic names. This appears in other forms across European Jewry, e.g. Litvaks, being more Western, typically being less religious and more assimilated than the Galitzianers.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah?useskin=vector
Out in the stetls (in rural towns), there was far less assimilation (although a lot of interaction). For example, in Poland prior to WW2, Jewish society was almost a parallel world. Polish Jews had their own religious institutions, shops, and, at various times, a parallel government. For centuries, Poland was like two separate worlds that inhabited the same physical space.
It's really too bad that it ended. I grieve for something I never even knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland?...
That settles it, then ;)
Prussia, let alone Prussian “identity” is not something that existed well into the mid to late modern era.
Calling someone from Cologne Prussian was about as silly as claiming that Belgian Walloons were Dutch prior to 1830. Most people who lived in the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1900s weren’t really Prussian in most senses.
There was a large population of Jews in Berlin but most of the remaining ones lived in the Rhineland, Westphalia etc.
> don't put your life on the line
Or you’re conscripted and not given a choice.
I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic. This is a recurring theme in Ashkenazi literature: Yiddish is understood to be the מאַמע־לשין -- the mother tongue, essentially grounded and practical, in contrast with Hebrew.
(Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however. Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones.)
Ah, we had one Yiddish speaker in r/germany who ragequit after it was pointed out to him that Yiddish basically just sounds like an Eastern-European dialect of German to native speakers, with a number of Hebrew words thrown in, and German native speakers usually can understand it after being exposed to it for some time (like for all dialects, you need to adjust your hearing).
> Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however.
Well, it's definitely not "broken" German, it follows the same pattern as other German dialects with influences from other languages. Phonetic shift plus imported words.
> Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones
German has quite a number of words of Hebrew origin [1], and nobody finds them offensive, or somehow not desirable.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem...
(I don’t know anything about the commenter you’re referring to, but I suspect I would be mildly annoyed by a forum of Germans insisting that my family’s mostly dead language was “just a dialect“ of their language. Which is distinct from the unobjectionable claim that Yiddish is a Germanic language.)
The Weinstein witticism has already been posted once in this thread: a sprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot :-)
In any case I've heard from the mouths of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews who had been through the Nazi concentrationary system that they in some respects had an easier navigating it than Western or Greek Jews because they spoke "more or less German".
Yiddish speakers today are mostly ultra-orthodox Jews. The language binds them together across country boundaries, and cuts them off from the surrounding society. Even in Israel, which runs on Hebrew.
This is recently relevant as the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox must end.[2] Many will speak only Yiddish. The IDF has a crash one month course in Hebrew for foreign Jews who want to join and some other ethnic groups, so they will cope. Israel nominally has compulsory military service, but the ultra-orthodox have been exempted so they can supposedly study Torah. When that started in the 1940s, only 4,000 were in that status. Now it's 1.4 million. There's currently political unrest in Israel over this.
[1] https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/A-bisl-Yiddis...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-court-ruling-ag-t...
Is there some implication that these people are doing something else? If there is no implication then there’s no need to include this word.
I know more about Ladino because I know Spanish and am always interested in romance languages. Many (though by no means all) of the differences between that and modern Castilian are that Ladino has not kept current with Spanish phonetic changes from the 1500s onwards. I believe I've also read Yiddish has a similar quality of seeming, from a distance, like it has some characteristics that might have been seen among German speaking gentiles in prior times.
I think that when you see separations of populations, you sometimes see the preservation of "archaic" language features.
There’s a large group of Ladino speakers in Turkey.
Archaic language features: I have heard that Quebecois French was some centuries behind what is spoken in France.
As an L2 german (standard & dialect) speaker who's learning a slavic language I think "fringe" may be the charitable way to put it. (I've experimented with alemannic dialect speakers and upon first exposure they tend to think of yiddish as a different german dialect with some bizarre vocabulary)
> In a lokh in der erd hot gevoynt a hobit. Nit keyn bridke, koytike, nase lokh, ongefilt mit di ekn fun verem un a dripendikn reyekh, oykh nit keyn trukene, hoyle, zamdike lokh mit gornisht vu zikh avektsuzetsn tsi vos tsu esn: zi iz geven a hobit-lokh, un dos heyst bakvemlekhkeyt. —JRRT
Lagniappe: https://www.petitnicolas.com/livre/le-petit-nicolas/le-petit...
(honorable mention to https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט )
Also, https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/dictionary.cgi says that "dripe" means "defecate (taboo)".
I wonder why anyone would think that. The words predominantly come from German, and the grammar is more of a thing of its own, far from resembling anything Slavic...
The standard historical explanation for this is that Yiddish began as a Germanic language, and the Eastern dialects developed after Jews were expelled from Germany in the 14th century and migrated East. There were already Jews living there, but the population grew tremendously with the migration.
Paul Wexler's thesis is that the Eastern dialects of Yiddish actually independently descend from early Jewish Slavic languages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language), and the Western dialects are derived from the Eastern ones.
"... a hypothesis that has been widely rejected by other Yiddish and Germanic linguists and geneticists", says his WP bio.
Iranian languages and peoples that are referred here are not from Iran though. During ancient and middle ages there were various Iranian peoples in Eastern Europe, speaking Iranian languages and distantly related to modern people in Iran. These were very prominent, with two of these peoples, Scythians and Sarmatians, being used as names for the whole East Europe during the times of ancient Greek and Rome. In early middle ages, the Iranian tribe Alans also spread to western Europe, and there are still Iranian peoples such as Ossetians living in north of the Caucasus. For the first century CE, it would be these Iranian populations in eastern Europe which interacted with Slavs and are a source of many loanwords.
I guess the theory goes so that a significant Iranian population in central or east Europe would have converted to Judaism and thus they would make up a large portion of European Jews' ancestry. It's probably not so, because while there certainly were many individuals or small groups converting and thus being part of Jewish ancestry, we don't really have evidence of large-scale conversions.
Of course there has been the whole political debate based on these theories, which goes to claim that "Jews are not Jews" because according to their views, almost all Ashkenazi Jews would be descended from European converts and have little to none Middle Eastern ancestry. This often goes to antisemitic direction if it's used as basis to deny some part of Jewish culture, for example. But if such conversions ever happened in a large scale, that was 1000 years ago, and surely the Jewish people whose ancestry is from one of those groups who converted, are as Jewish as are those with Middle Eastern ancestry.
> German Jews saw Knaanic and were inspired to create their own language
This is... not how it works. I know of only one case of "inspired to create their own language" in all of history, and it's Modern Hebrew. Which is a revival, not de novo.
A Shibboleth!
⁴Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” ⁵The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” ⁶they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’ ” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
Judges 12 4-6: