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No one speaks it, and it’s not even a language. So say the detractors. But they’re so wrong, insists one famous fluent speaker

October 9, 2009 09:40
davidschneider

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Anonymous,

Anonymous

3 min read

I’ve always been fascinated by Yiddish. Though it wasn’t my mame-loshn (“mother tongue” — the name Yiddish speakers give to Yiddish), it was my Mama’s loshn. As a kid she used to do things like stand over me when I was eating and say: “Shlof gikher, ikh badarf dos kishn” (“Sleep quicker, I need the pillow”).

I didn’t actually learn the language till I was at Oxford — so technically I speak Oxford Yiddish or, if you prefer, the Queen’s Yiddish — and I’ve loved it ever since. But as every Yiddishist will tell you there are certain prejudices and kvetches that constantly crop up when discussing this language which one 18th-century scholar felt should really be called Hebreo-barbarish. So here, for Hebreo-barbarish lovers everywhere, are my attempts at crushing the Top 5 Yiddish kvetches.

Kvetch 1: It’s just a bastardised German.
About 1,000 years old, Yiddish is approximately 70 per cent Germanic, 20 per cent Hebrew/Aramaic and 10 per cent Slavonic, served with a cheeky seasoning of Romance elements (bentshn, to bless, comes from the Latin benedicere; cholent from the medieval French for “hot”, as in the modern chaud). So yes, Yiddish is, to use the Yiddish term, a mish-mash. But then so are many languages; so is English. In fact you could say of Yiddish and English that one of them is a crazy if expressive bastardised German with a highly irregular grammar, and the other one is Yiddish.

Kvetch 2: It’s not a language, it’s a dialect.
It’s easy to identify a language when it’s tied to a country. In fact, some clever linguist with time on his hands once said that a language is a dialect with an army and navy. But it’s part of the miracle of Yiddish that there has never been a “Yiddishland” yet at its peak the language was spoken by 11 million people from New York to Krakow to Cape Town, and they were all capable of understanding each other. Surely that qualifies as a language.