Re: Yiddish/ Hebrew help - please

On Oct 8, 4:36 am, mm <NOPSAMmm2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:58:40 +0000 (UTC), "Abe Kohen"





<ako...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"mirjam" <mir...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3c7fae50-c070-4d76-aaa4-2781fde009fa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sergei !

Yiddish isn`t German with a Unique Accent , Yiddish is first of all a
Jewish Language. It has many German roots it also has many Hebrew
roots, as well as many other words and terms that were absorbed into
it  and used in each area where it was spoken .

The Holocuast murdered most of the Yiddish speakers.
Yiddish was a lively langugage and before the Holocaust it was a
Secular langugae, whose speakers produced and created a whole world of
literature, theatre and almost a complete Jewish Culture. Quite a big
part of the Yiddish writers also wrote in Hebrew .

These days there is a revivalto Yiddish culture both in Israel and
outside Israel. Many Jews in Isreal who learned a lot of the Hebrew
translations of Yiddish writers [in fact this literatures is part of
Our Cultural background] now wish to read it in the original . There
is a lively Yiddish Theatre in Israel.

mirjam

Mirjam,

While I speak "religious" Yiddish fluently (or at least used to) I am not so
enamored by it. One reason is that at least half of Israel is not Ashkenazi
and have no "zika" to Yiddish and might even find the name of the language
offensive - ma ani lo Yehudi? - as the name implies.

You have inferred it, but the name doesn't imply it.  Nothing about
the word means Sephardim aren't Jews.  There were millions of Yiddish
speakers and they didn't think Sephardim were not Jews.  What more
proof do you need?   A) There is no reason why Jews can't have several
languages. (In fact they do.) And there is no reason why each of them
couldn't be called "Jewish" however one says that in the given
language.

My mother called Yiddish "Jewish".  When she spoke in English, she
said that she spoke "Jewish", becaue Yiddish in English is Jewish.

In Spanish and maybe Ladino, Jewish is Judaico.  There is no reason
Sephardim can't call Ladino Judaico, and translate that to Jewish when
they speak Englsh.

When my Syrian friend
in sinnergogue says "Yiddishkeit" I wince.

There is no reason he can't use Yiddish words too. He probably knows
several languages.   Why don't you say "Ritos religiosos de los
judíos" and that will make things even.



Also w.r.t. a previous post by another poster, I have never heard Yiddish
speakers use the term schadenfreude.

Neither have I. I wondered about that part.

That term is strictly German IMHO. So
my maternal grandfather who spoke hochdeutsch might have used it but not in
a Yiddish conversation. A religious Jew might use the Hebrew "Simcha La-eid"
or "Simcha La-id" instead.

Despite what Joe said, there is plenty of Hebrew in Yiddish,
especially when it comes to things related to or even remotely related
to Judaism.

BTW, when I was in Yerushalayim, at a religious bookstore, I noted
that they had Shabbes spelled shin, aleph, beis, ayin, sov, a phonetic
Yiddish spelling of Shabbes, even though Hebrew words in Yiddish are
normally spelled as they are spelled in Hebrew.  I presume they didn't
spell it shin, beis, sov because too many people would pronounce that
Shabbat.  This just shows how complicated things are.  Should
Ashkenazim be offended that some spell the word with five letters
instead of its proper Yiddish spelling of 3 letters?  And how common
is it to spell it this way?

This is Soviet Yiddish. See the following excerpt from Wikipedia ( As
I understand that Hebrew letters are not allowed, I have named the
letters instead.):

"The first action formally undertaken by a government was in the
Soviet Union in 1920, with the abolition of the separate etymological
orthography for words of Semitic origin. This was extended twelve
years later with the elimination of the five separate final-form
consonants (as.indicated in the table below {omitted _A.H.]) which
were, however, widely reintroduced in 1961. The changes are both
illustrated in the way the name of the author Sholem Aleichem is
written. His own work uses the form "shin-lamed-vav-mem--`ayin-lamed-
yod-khaf-final mem" but in Soviet publication this is respelled
phonetically to "shin-qometz aleph-lamed-`ayin-mem--aleph-lamed-double
yod-khaf-`ayin-mem" also dispensing with the separate final-form mem
and using the initial/medial form instead. This can be seen, together
with a respelling of the name of the protagonist of his Tevye der
milkhiker (originally "tet-bhet-yod-heh", changed to "tet-`ayin-double
vav-yod-heh"), by comparing the title pages of that work in the U.S.
and Soviet editions illustrated next to this paragraph ."

However, seeing this orthography at a religious bookstore in
Yerushalayim is highly unusual.

Best,

And also to you.  Moadim l'simcha (there's that simcha again.)


Hagim u-zemanim lesason.

Amitai

Abe

--

Meir


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Survey of the use of Yiddish in English
    ... Jewish Language." ... Americans:  but the specification of "American Jewish ... while others are found in Yiddish but not in German. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Arabian Jews
    ... everyday language somewhere in the last centuries BC. ... jewish communities living in Arabia before the advent of islam. ... Hebrew sin etymologized correctly as Arabic *sh*i:n, ... this has lead some modern scholars to ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Arranging Project
    ... Thank you, Arlene, my Jewish ancestry is out of Germany so it was probably ... My interest lies with the folk songs that might be significant ... > of Jewish folk songs is going to include songs in both Hebrew and Yiddish. ... Hebrew is the ancient language of prayer... ...
    (rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic)
  • Re: Yiddish/ Hebrew help - please
    ... than one language whose name in English was Jewish. ... between an English or Hebrew b and v, like a b without the explosive ... themselves with all the Jews who spoke Yiddish, ... and they speak Yiddish and English at home. ...
    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)
  • Re: "Anglican leader urges ban on gay bishops" - Associated Press
    ... Old Testament was written in and what language Jewish boys have to ... and not Biblical Hebrew? ... But biblical Hebrew was spoken in the synagogues through the centuries, as the scriptures were read and understood, even though the vernacular may have been something different. ... Rabbinic Judaism does, of course, post date the Jewish scripture, and we need to review carefully rabbinic interpretation and not assume that the pre-rabbinic view was necessarily the same. ...
    (uk.religion.christian)