My Mother's Yiddish | Hacker News Reader

My Mother's Yiddish

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47 pointsdrjohnson19 comments

Yiddish was largely derived from Middle High German, and the irony of ironies is that the language that united Jews is so close to the language of Hitler.

Rest assured that the irony is on hitler too: in many polish towns the only thing remaining that remenbers one that this was Germany once are the inscriptions at yewish cemetries.

Just imagine that the holocaust Never happened: German would be much closer of what the Nazis thought it should be, a world-wide spoken language.

Bloomberg didn't study Physics because you had to know German for that. Accadamia abandoned German. As did most of german-americans.

Yiddish was the defacto language of many Zionist settlers. Israel speaking German, unimaginable today but a Real concern for zionist theorists that complained about too few people adopting hebrew.

Made me sad... apparently a good 1/3 of Americans spoke German before WWI, after which anti-German hysteria caused a decline in German speakers in America. So it was not only the Nazis that were responsible for German's decline.

Some of the fall-off was the natural turn of immigrants' children to the English they heard all around them, and likely as not marrying spouses whose family spoke only English, or English and something other than German. My father's father spoke German (well, Plattdeutsch) in the house growing up, but my father had to learn it at school.

But the hysteria played some role. My father's mother, whose mother's family was from the Palatinate, only got to take three years of German in high school; somebody who imagined himself patriotic broke into the high school in 1917 and burned all the German textbooks. I believe Nebraska outright banned the teaching of German during those years.

Language shift occurs in nearly every immigrant community in the United States, and nearly all indigenous communities. It's not natural so much as it's that language ideology and policy in the U.S. is very hostile to anything but English monolingualism.

Take heart, German descent folks are a silent minority (46 million) that have done very well for themselves.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21642222-america...

They aren't all that silent, but the noise they make is in English...

It was the German defeat in WWI -- not WWII -- that helped make Hebrew, rather than German, the official language of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology, and the oldest university in Israel)[1].

By the time WWII broke out, Hebrew had long since solidified its position (though Yiddish and German were, of course, spoken by many until long after).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Technion_%E2%80%...

Good Point. Hebrew very likely would have become de facto language without the Holocaust, but it sureley served at least as a final coffin nail. While many still understood German, who wanted to hear it or even speak it? The sheer effect on a personal level Must have been tremendous for so many speakers.

An absolouteley subjective Note: When listening to todays Hebrew, I can't let go of hearing a German talking. Besides from a couple of sounds (like the "ch" in "chuzpe" and some vocal pronounciations) I feel like I could easily learn to speak hebrew (without knowing what I'm saying of course). English native speakers might relate when imagining German and Israeli people speaking english.

The accent depends on the origin of the speaker's family. Hebrew spoken by those descended from Jews who'd immigrated from Arab countries sounds more like Arabic, while that spoken by descendants of European Jews does indeed sound like German or even French.

>> Just imagine that the holocaust Never happened: German would be much closer of what the Nazis thought it should be, a world-wide spoken language.

That's a great point

Having grown up with a small sprinkling of Yiddish words in my parents' vocabulary, I agree with Sasha Baron Cohen's character in The Dictator, where he says "I like Yiddish, the words sound like what they mean". I actually made this same comment to my Dad 15 years ago, and he told me it only seems that way since my brain learned the words in context.

My grandfather grew up in Brooklyn with Yiddish as his primary language. On his first day of Kindergarten, probably 90 years ago, the teacher held up a fork and asked the class what it was called. He answered "Gopel".

On his first date with my grandmother, he wanted to take her to the Yiddish theatre in NYC. But my grandmother refused, not being proficient enough. Today the idea of live vaudeville Yiddish theatre in the USA is almost unfathomable.

And some of this Yiddish is still getting thru to my kids. Eg, they'll say they bumped their keppe (head, pronounced 'keppy'). I've always liked the sound of that. My wife even heard our Italian baby sitter here in London, at the playground babysitting another child, say in Italian accent "aww did you bump your keppe?"

My favourite Yiddish quote : "A pish on a fartz iz vi a regn on a duner". Translation : To pee without farting is like rain without thunder.

> "A pish on a fartz iz vi a regn on a duner". Translation : To pee without farting is like rain without thunder.

Is that phonetic? You write "on a" twice, but I'm thinking of the German word "ohne", meaning "without". But then I know little German and even less Yiddish.

"a" is an article in Yiddish (like English); אָן (on) is indeed the word for "without" (of course it's related to German "ohne").

Yiddish "a" is from the same root as modern German "ein".

> To be a mensch was the pinnacle of her moral code, and it didn’t matter that it meant “man.” Women could be mensches, too...

Nitpick: "Mensch" is actually gender-neutral (in Standard German it just means "person" or "human being", not "man" (which is "Mann").

In Yiddish (at least as spoken to me), it often has a masculine connotation.

There are couple of books by Leo Rosten, Joy of Yiddish and Joy of Yinglish, that teaches Yiddish words through jokes and anecdotes. It used be my bedside reading for an year! Once you learn Yiddish words and the phrases, the sitcom dialogues started making more sense (like "from your lips to God's ears" or such turn of phrase).

Michael Chabon's essay "A Yiddish Pale Fire", which discusses his encounter with a Yiddish travel guidebook that eventually inspired "The Yiddish Policeman's Union", is a great read too, if you can track it down. Looks like it's disappeared from the Web.

On a related note, there is highly educative book on Yiddish called: "If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It In Yiddish" by L.B. Epstein [1].

Yiddish curses put any other language's curses to shame. They use a lot of very well thought analogies. They also sometimes revive a bit of the (lost) history of the Jewish people pre-wwII.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Anything-Nice-Yiddish/dp/0806...

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