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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.

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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

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...

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