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Itzik_s
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BS”D

What everyone is forgetting is that haimish Yiddish is full of Torah references and words from loshon koidesh. As I posted before, even a no parking sign in Williamsburgh, let alone lehavdil a drosho by a Yiddish speaking rov or Chassidishe rebbe, is so close to loshon koidesh that you barely need to understand the Germanic and Slavic components of Yiddish to know what is being said. Yiddish, especially as spoken today in the haimishe world, is really an adaptation of loshon koidesh for daily or informal use.

I never really needed to learn Yiddish to understand the Lubavitcher Rebbe ZY”A who spoke in Yiddish; I picked up the non lh”k words I needed from context. I learned everyday spoken Yiddish from friends who insisted on preserving it and from the songs of Chassidishe entertainers. And if I can’t remember or don’t know a word, I often substitute lh”k/ivrit conjugated in Yiddish (others use English in the same way; I probably speak Yiddish mostly with people from E”Y and copied their speech patterns).

In fact a relative of mine who is secular but can read Yiddish looked at an old headline from the Forward about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. When she saw the word “korbanois” written in loshon hakoidesh, she had no idea what the word meant and had to ask me to translate it because she never learned much in the way of lh”k or Ivrit.

The real holiness, though, is in keeping alive a language that is disdained by those who preached assimilation in the US and those who tried to create a new Jewish culture devoid of Torah roots in E”Y. And that is because the language as we speak it represents a world that was nearly exterminated by the fire of the Churban and the floods of assimilation and secularism.