Reply To: How can I learn Yiddish?

Home Forums Local & Neighborhood Issues How can I learn Yiddish? Reply To: How can I learn Yiddish?

#1327425
Ex-CTLawyer
Participant

@770Chabad
There is no such thing as ‘real Yiddish’
It is a language that picked up words as the people left Germany (ashkenaz) and moved east through Poland, The Baltic Sates and Russia. It picked up more word as the post 1871 waves of immigrants reached America.
Your Chasidische Yiddish is no more real than my Litvak Misnagid Yiddish.

As my Oma (my maternal grandmother) on the German side used to say. “Yiddish is a gutter language, spoken by the peasants from the east” I don’t agree with the word peasant, as plenty of upper income and intellectuals spoke Yiddish in Vilna and elsewhere, But it really is a corrupted dialect of middle German, just as Ladino (used by the S’fardim) is a dialect of 1400s Spanish.

Unlike French, which has an official language institute which must approve new words, Yiddish is ever changing and evolving.

I can remember my Litvak Great Grandfather cringing when listening to someone who substituted ‘P’ for ‘B’…I remember him asking one man: Tell me are you Jewish or a Galitzianer?

My Yiddish was learned in morning public high school which I attended before Yeshiva from 1-9 PM. It was one of 12 foreign languages offered at the time. The teacher, also taught Hebrew, and World History. He was born in Yerushalayim in the the 1930s, Chasid, came to America when the Yishuv ended, married a Modern Orthodox woman and taught public school for 30 years to afford to send his kids to yeshiva. He didn’t thibk that the Yiddish spoken by the Chabad Rabbis at the local Day School was the ‘real Yiddish’ it was Americanized Yiddish, his was Israeli Yiddish..3 generation removed from Poland,