Today's Post had a nice story on a survey of migration of Yiddish words into English. Yiddish is a strange creature--itself a hybrid language of mostly German and Hebrew. It's also rapidly dying as a primary spoken language. But it's unique expressive qualities are causing more and more words and phrases to be used widely.
"The study aims to determine who uses Yiddish and Hebrew words and how, as well as other distinctive hallmarks of Jewish speech such as phrasing and pronunciation.
The researchers sent out their queries about a month ago, hoping for 2,000 responses. They wound up with more than 41,000 and have started analyzing the data earlier than expected. (For more information on the survey and to contact the researchers, go to www.huc.edu.)"
We need this study like a hole in the head.
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5 comments:
Yiddish is not dying yet. Yiddish is still alive. There are more than one million speakers of Yiddish around the world.
Here is a great website from "The Society to Establish Yiddish as the National Language of Israel."
Chaim Katzenellenbogen
www.myoyvey.com
I really didn't know that one million people spoke Yiddish! Mostly as a Ney York native I'm familiar with it's influence there. Some words like Maven, I didn't even know were Yiddish words.
Yes. it surprised me too because I live in a rural area where there are few Yiddish speakers. According to Wikipedia there are about 180,000 Yiddish speakers in NY State alone.
Chaim Katzenellenbogen
I found a great Jerry Seinfeld video on this site and wanted to share it with everyone.
www.myoyvey.com
Please indulge me with a few answers to some questions I have since I don't know much about the subject at all. Part of my family is from Poland so there is some cultural overlap but I'm not Jewish.
I really sort of like th idea of Yiddish becoming the language of Israel. Is there much support for the idea? It seems a bit more of a living language than Hebrew. From a link of your site.
I think some people sort of see Yiddish as being a peasant language and somehow not serious.I learned that Yiddish is closer to High German than modern German, just like cockney is closer to Old English.
Since several states in the USA, have official language laws, I propose that both Hebrew & Yiddish have official status in New York State,New Jersey,Pennsylvania,Florida,California,etc. The main reason that Yiddish is not the official language of Israel is because not all Jews are of Ashkenazic background. Hebrew is the language of Jewish unity!!!!
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