What is Yiddish? A Brief History of the Mother Tongue

versus Yiddish investor idea Tish Yiddish is a either spoken or the mommy lotion for the Yiddish Mansion Girish well I'm Jewish as Irish means Jewish and Yiddish is an indo-european language more specifically a Germanic language that is spoken by a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people worldwide today primarily by the Hasidim and other high redeemed communities it's a combination of primarily high german it's a middle german hebrew aramaic polish ukrainian and a few Romance languages although that really depends on the dialects you're talking about yes there are dialects which does make things more confusing but as always in order to understand the language we need to go back a minute like a fat minute I saw boom is somewhere between 300 and 500 AD the Middle Ages basically and the Jews have settled along what we know as the Rhine Valley due to their emphasis on record-keeping and literacy many Jews were successful in setting up shop to do business with the locals across the Rhine over time the Jews started to migrate out into Germany and for a long time Romans forbade anyone from crossing over into what we call Germany the Romans portrayed them as savages and that they were unfit for civilized people however since the collapse of Rome the Jewish people started to venture in and out of modern Germany and do a little business with the local Germanic peoples at this time many of them spoke what we call Judea French in Judea Italian not much is going on linguistically in terms of Yiddish until the Jews get kicked out of France in the early 11th century and are forced to move east into western Germany shortly after we see the emergence of Western Yiddish a combination of high and middle German with Aramaic Hebrew and a little French and Italian Western yudish was primarily spoken in northern and central Germany as well as in the Netherlands not long after the Jews kind of got kicked out of many places across Europe so they kept migrating in search of a new home Scandinavia was simply too cold so they migrated east to Poland Lithuania Hungary and the Ukraine as they settled into their new homes it once again started setting up shop and doing business with the locals however at the time many people throughout Eastern Europe such as Poland were poor peasants and weren't very literate for the migrating Jews it didn't make much sense to adopt a new language that few people could read or write in so they kept the Yiddish as their primary language over time of course they picked up some lone words and now we have Eastern yudish between the 16th and 19th century we start to see the widespread use of Yiddish books plays essays and academic research was all written in Yiddish while speakers of Eastern Western and a couple more dialects had difficulty choosing which dialect to write in the yiddish writing system used hebrew letters and for the most part the difference wasn't really that large during the 19th century Eastern yudish pretty much became the dominant language of the literature that was produced talks of socialist revolution and anarchism became more and more popular with the publishing of the conquest of bread and this aroused the media and printing press Aneta speakers began adopting words like socialism and whatever loot see in fact Yiddish started becoming so popular that it was even supported in the early days of the Soviet Union during the 1920s the Soviets allowed you two speakers to publish books academic papers and essays in Yiddish as long as it wasn't in promoting religion so let's take a little break from history and talk about the language itself if we're talking about Yivo or standard Yiddish it's generally phonetic and you might find it a lot easier to pick up in Hebrew for example the alphabet or olive base looks pretty much the same except fouls are used a little differently for example the coments Aleph which in Hebrew our sound is pronounced and Yiddish with an O sound as in toys or home Yiddish and Germans sound very similar and in fact many can understand each other quite well of course the Irish has some vocabulary that is just non-existent in German for instance the word for hello is Sholem Aleichem and the word for Saturday is Shabbos another way to say hi in the Edition is topped which is from the Polish word tock meaning yes or go ahead linguistically it hasn't developed much and this is because many current speakers of the language live in culturally isolated communities across the world many consider to be a dying language and while the number of secular Jews speaking Yiddish is declining the number of hair Adeem or Orthodox Jews speaking the language is actually doing quite well many children's books have been published in Hasidic Yiddish spoken by the Hasidim linguistically it isn't as phonetic as academic Yiddish but the two are still quite similar when spoken going back to the history during the eve of the Holocaust there were around 13 million year speakers worldwide it's estimated that roughly 5 million of the 6 million jews who were killed during the Holocaust were yiddish speakers after the war many survivors emigrated to Israel and the United States and Canada those who went to Israel mostly adopted modern Hebrew and assimilated to Israeli culture those who came to the United States and Canada didn't really speak Yiddish at home in fear of possible anti-semitism it's for this reason that Yiddish is considered an endangered language I created this video because it's Pesach and I personally find Yiddish to be a pretty cool language it's got some nice sounds nice music and a lot of cool words like Schmucks schmeckle schmutz and schlep if you're interested in learning you - I have an entire article on how to learn Yiddish and I'll link it below so you can get started that's all for today thank you for watching as ICA's you

Channel: KOJII

Views: 23,653

Keywords: the yiddish language

Id: KhTM73gJaMI

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020