Most of the Yiddish speakers lived in the Slavic territories: Ukraine, Belarus, Lithiania, and Poland, and I’m talking about the standard language of those areas. Of course, it has lots of Slavic words and expressions, it has a lot of Hebraisms too, but its vocabulary consists mainly of Germanic words, its grammar is basically Germanic and I doubt very much there is another non-Germanic Yiddish.Svet wrote:It's a Germanic language, if we're talking about the Yiddish of German immigrants. Yiddish, spoken by inhabitants of a Slavic country has much more Slavic words.
I used the transliteration to make the text more readable.Svet wrote:Not to mention that it's written with Hebrew letters - what you scribbled above was simply a latinized transliteration.
Well, just a couple of examples from my book:Yeshua.C wrote:"to learn" is a reflexive, and retains the reflexive pronoun. The same verb without it means 'to teach'.
Sorry, I hadn’t read the previous post.Yeshua.C wrote:Also, I specifically said that I own the same dictionary as the previous poster. Not simply a dictionary.
Most of the Yiddish speakers lived in the Slavic territories: Ukraine, Belarus, Lithiania
RCA wrote: but its vocabulary consists mainly of Germanic words, its grammar is basically Germanic and I doubt very much there is another non-Germanic Yiddish.
I think we’re talking about different things. You’re talking about the languages of the Jewish people (which are extremely different from the linguistic point of view), while I’m talking about just one of them, that is Yiddish, which linguistically is essentially and evidently Germanic, there can be no doubt about that. Don’t forget that Yiddish and old Hebrew coexisted in Europe, the former mainly as the spoken (and later as the literary) language, while the latter as the language of the liturgy (it is similar in that to, say, Ukrainian or Russian and Church Slavonic). As to the dialects of Yiddish, there are western and eastern groups of dialects, the standard language is based on the eastern dialects (that is Lithuanian-Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Polish), since the spoken dialects of the western Jews were mainly replaced by the non-Yiddish languages.Svet wrote: I think you're making the mistake of ignoring one of Yiddish's main characteristics - syncretism. There is Western Yiddish, there is Eastern Yiddish, there is South Yiddish and so on. They all have a different vocabulary, because they're borrowing from the main language of different countries. Then there is Ladino, which is being built on exactly the same principle, but in Spain and Portugal. That's one.
Second, this language has the role of enabling the communication exclusively between Hebrew-speakers. It is a common phenomenon - people live in a country, different than their own, they start using single foreign words, because they get use to them. When this happens over centuries, while the new generations become more and more integrated into society and less able to speak their mother language, the original Hebrew evolves into Yiddish.
Well, I think languages should be viewed first of all linguistically, otherwise we’ll have a real linguistic mess. From the linguistic point of view, Ladino is quite another language belonging to another linguistic group.Svet wrote:So, Yiddish is not a Germanic language - viewed historically, culturally or socially. It simply borrows a lot of German words and grammar, the same way that it borrows a lot of Slavic words in Eastern Europe. The same way that Ladino borrows from Spanish.
I can’t understand how the Hebraic script can bind a language lexically to Hebrew. Some Turkic languages used the Hebraic script, but they were Turkic, not Semitic. Some Slavic languages use the Latin script, but this can tell really little about their vocabulary, and so on...Svet wrote:Third: because it is not only spoken only by Jewish people, but it is also written with Hebrew letters - which binds the language not only genetically, but also lexically to Hebrew.
Well, I find it a bit weird to discuss in one section languages from different linguistic families.Svet wrote:Finally, I simply think, Yiddish could be moved to the Hebrew forum, because this way it won't get lost among thousands of other posts.
I was talking about the dialects of Yiddish, not about Lithuanian or Bealrusian.Svet wrote:Lithuanian has nothing to do with Belarusian, why do you write then with a dash?
Maybe it’s just a bit wrong forum for the ‘cultural arguments’?Svet wrote:I guess you're ignoring all my cultural arguments. Fine. Learn your Yiddish without soul and spirit, you hateful, ungrateful Linguist!!! I will gather all Hebrew-lovers, alllllll of them and will be back!
You can't really say Wörterbüchelchen. The Yiddish diminutive comes from the same -lein that makes Fräulein. In the South and in Austria, they prefer -lein to -chen, and it's frequently shortened to just -el. So, just like Yiddish has bisl, Austrian German has bissel (and other German dialects use bisschen).RCA wrote:A gutn ownt, ...!
Wos macht ir?
Far wos lernt ir jidisch?
Ich hob ojch a werterbichl!
(I’ve corrected a bit the original text).
And the translation:
Guten Abend, ...!
Wie geht es euch? (literally: was macht ihr?)
Warum (l.: für was) lernt ihr Jiddisch?
Ich habe auch ein kleines Wörterbuch (l.: Wörterbüchelchen)
ILuvEire wrote:In the South and in Austria, they prefer -lein to -chen, and it's frequently shortened to just -el. So, just like Yiddish has bisl, Austrian German has bissel (and other German dialects use bisschen).
German is just bad Yiddish and vice versa.BezierCurve wrote:EDIT: I suppose German will be next?
BezierCurve wrote:EDIT: I suppose German will be next?
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