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Comment by blueyes | Hacker News Reader

I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...

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> I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic.

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.)

Many linguists even call it Judeo-German (and Ladino, the Sephardic language, Judeo-Spanish)

> I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic.

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...

It’s mostly about diminution: Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, but describing one as a dialect of the other is likely to cause offense. This is particularly salient in the case of Yiddish, where relabeling as a dialect distorts the historical relationship between European Jewry and Europe.

(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 :-)

Having grown up as an American Jew, it has been a recurring revelation of how much of what I think if as "Jewish" culture is actually German.

Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).

Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.

I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.

Well, your hypothesis is wrong. They are not related beyond a few percent at best.

It looks like there's a mixed consensus on ancestry, but a fair bit of evidence they at least intermixed with European locals since prehistoric times [0]

[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.

To be clear, that paper is not arguing Jewish ethnic groups were intermixing with European locals since prehistoric times, it is arguing that the Ashkenazi Jews (or perhaps it would be better to say: the proto-Asheknazi Jews) assimilated lots of European converts with ancestry in Europe dating back to prehistoric times.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5380316/

Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.

My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?

It is not that genetic simmilarity is inherently meaninglessness. Just that it is not a good proxy for the social concepts people are generally using it to talk about.

I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from?

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).

I'd think bones from a couple hundred or thousand or ten-thousand years ago would provide a okay trail.

I don’t think the ancestry tests compare the DNA with archeological finds. If they did I wouldn’t trust it given the relatively small sample size of archeological finds with intact DNA.

The usual tests certainly don’t. But some scientific studies do: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

I thought those were done to investigate migratory patterns, movements, and inter-connectivity of historic populations, not to establish ancestral lineage of living population, and certainly not to assign a geographical region to existing ethnic groups.

Yeah I think it's clustering and dimensionality reduction. E.g. if French people form a rough cluster in DNA space and Japanese people form another cluster, someone with a French mom and Japanese dad would show up as a data point roughly halfway between those two clusters.

I went on a little Wikipedia expedition hoping to find the methodology (and failed), but I did find an interesting (though not surprising) quote from one scientist (Adam Rutherford): “[These tests] don’t necessarily show your geographical origins in the past. They show with whom you have common ancestry today.”

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 imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification.

I don't think it's "some" -- I think that's 100% of it.

A lot of people think I am Mexican.

How do estimates of genetic origin relate to ethnic affiliation? Ethnicity is about culture, customs, and language, not genetics.

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.

You don't think people from a certain place tend to share similar genetics?

It would be ahistorical, at least: many of the Jews in 1920s Germany had fled pogroms in Ukraine and Russia just 20 or 30 years prior. Many were not particularly integrated, and only spoke Eastern Yiddish dialects.

(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.)

The amount of assimilation was not homogeneous anywhere in Europe. In urban environments, some Jewish families were highly assimilated, and there was a great deal of interaction between Jewish people and Gentiles. If these dynamics are interesting to you, you might want to read about the haskalah:

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?...

Most Yiddish speakers (or even their ancestors for many generations) didn’t live in Germany, though.

Many Germans didn't live in Germany at that time either, Hungary, Romania, contemporary Poland etc had very big German population.

Was in Poland over the summer and, as a Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, I felt right at home culinarily (except for the pork).

> Was in Poland ... as a Jew ... I felt right at home

That settles it, then ;)

Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the region of modern Germany and its surroundings prior to the 20th century. Shifting alliances of nominally independent city-states combined with evidence toward enthusiastic adoption of distributed printing and popular literacy could be argued to underpin some of the more positive ideals of the EU today, despite the negative interludes.

> Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity

Prussia, let alone Prussian “identity” is not something that existed well into the mid to late modern era.

Yes, it's a relatively late concept, but one could rationally argue it's objectively more correct than 'German' in default modern interpretation, both spatially in that it additionally encompasses what is now western Poland, and temporally in that it is closer to the timeframe in question. As for identity, this can be argued until the cows come home, but many Jews served in the Prussian army (google suggests 100,000-150,000) and you don't put your life on the line without some sense of connection. Little did they know their families would soon be killed by the successor of the very state they had fought to protect.

Prussia was a state that included plenty of culturally in no way Prussian territories in the 1800s.

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.

My dad learned Yiddish in his family home, both parents were immigrants and native speakers, though he never spoke it. But he loved to watch WWII movies, and would translate the German dialog for us and sometimes correct the subtitles.

As a speaker of Viennese German and English, I have no problem understanding spoken Yiddish.

I also would say Viennese sounds especially close to Yiddish.

A lot of words and expressions in the old Viennese dialect are Yiddish, though that dialect has all but disappeared from day to day interactions (you can find it in old movies and recordings).

I'm guessing the reason why is that the Jews migrated northwards from the Levantine / Africa / Spain upwards through Italy, Austria and then Germany, Poland, the Baltics.

Are there any Italian or Piedmontese / Venetian traces in Yiddish?

Relevant? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Italian_languages

I know Jews used some Latins phrases in their languages. But it's too late for look up some sources...

I would agree, which is why I specified :)

I‘m a run-of-the-mill West German dude with no particular talent for languages, and second this. It’s somewhere between “normal” German and Dutch in terms of understandibility for me.

Run of the mill, he says, he says, in his second tongue, using correct grammar, idiomatic phrases, and perfect spelling.

This n=1 sample shows even run of the mill can be good at languages.

Oy veh!

He said run-of-the-mill West German, not just run-of-the-mill.

>and perfect spelling

>>understandibility for me

https://www.google.com/search?q=understandibility

I made that one up intentionally, but didn’t want to put it in quotes because I already had one word in quotes.

OK.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-hilarious-histo...

;)

Pretty sure it has to “oy vey”.

It’s also a good example: it’s easy to understand for me because in German, “oh weh!” is a very common phrase.

“Veh” is an attested but less common spelling, so it doesn’t have to be “vey.”

(The “official” YIVO transliterations are not widely used, in practice.)

I saw the film A Serious Man[0] at a cinema in Amsterdam when it came out. There's an opening scene with Yiddisch dialogue and it had no subtitles but judging from the laughs everyone understood it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serious_Man

There is also Ladino, which is very close to Spanish and if you know Spanish you can understand it.

Close your eyes, hear an Israeli speak English and then a German and the only difference you will notice is the same intonational difference between standard German and Yiddish. Other than that, they basically will have the same accent.

That couldn't be further from the truth. They're so different one would never confuse the two, or believe them related.

Is there a regional aspect to it? I have been listening to a lot of Yiddish/Russian music lately and people say that there are a lot of Russian loan words and it is hard to understand for non-Russian Yiddish speakers.

Yep -- Eastern and Western Yiddish are mutually intelligible, but have substantially different accents and word choices. Most people speaking Yiddish today speak an Eastern dialect.

Compare hindi/urdu...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504

Aren't they essentially the same language (unlike Yiddish vs. German)?

Yiddish is pretty much a high German dialect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Not really. They're close, but definitely not the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu

(Edit: pasted wikipedia link)

In theory sure. I think in practice it is very common that a Hindi or Urdu speaker will talk to someone else speaking "the other language" and not even realize it.

We spent several years in a francophone ski station that attracted a fair number of Haredi tourists. My wife and I had several brief convos with them, and I'm sure from their side they were in yiddish, while from ours they were in german.

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 wasn't trying to be pedantic :) The OP's claim was that they are essentially the same language. My point was that while they are mutually intelligible to a large extent, Hindi and Urdu are distinct languages. That was pretty much it.

I have no revisionist intentions here :)

Yiddish follows the same pattern as other Jewish languages, ie. starting out as a sociolect of the local language with additional Hebraic vocabulary for subject matters specific to Jews. It doesn't seem any less German than say Austro-Bavarian.

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".

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