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Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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 also would say Viennese sounds especially close to Yiddish.

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...

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 would agree, which is why I specified :)

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