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Most people I know hate it.
Even my mother almost refuses to speak it and it was her first language. (She’ll speak it if spoken to in Yiddish, but nobody speaks it anymore that she knows)
The yiddish spoken today doesnt even sound good. I have an ear for accents , I even caught a woman I was carpooling with speaking chinese with an american accent and she couldnt believe I heard it.
I remember my grandmother speaking it and the yiddish I hear today and it sounds nothing like when she spoke it.
FYI Aramaic IS Spoken today. Its spoken mostly in Syria
what is wrong with the posters here? there is no such thing as a bad language. every language that you learn is good. yiddish is good. ivrit is good. hebrew is good. man alive.
as for the “jewishness” of each language, it all depends on what factors you use to determine jewishness of a language. both have many non-semetic words as part of their vocabulary but yiddish is mostly non-jewish words while ivrit is mostly jewish words. in fact, there are probably more “jewish” words in other semitic languages such as arabic than in yiddish. that being said, yiddish is only spoken by jews so it gets some points for jewishness for that. but then again, so is ivrit.
Yiddish is the most common language two Jews from different countries, with different native languages, can communicate with each other in.
@hershi – that depends on what sort of Jews. If one is a Satmar chossid from London, the second a Belzer from Antwerp, and the third a Yerushalmi, then yes, Yiddish might be the language that bonds them. For the rest of the world though, in all honesty, it’s English nowadays, I believe…
tcg, Yup English all the way
Crazybrit, what about American? Does the common language still separate us?
BTW, if one wants to discuss anti-religious, the biggest were the Yiddishist Bundists. The stood in front of Orthodox shuls on Yom Kippur and ate ham sandwiches.
Avi
I know this woman who went to YIDDISH School, I had never heard of such a thing and she told me it was a school where jewish culture was taught in an Anti-Religious environment
Zehavasdad: I think you should go learn Yiddish, maybe if you spoke it, you wouldn’t be so intimidated???
Waste of time, Except for my mother I dont know anyone who speaks it and she hasnt spoken it in years (It was actually her first language even though she was born here)
To those who feel that Yiddish is a relic to be put away on a shelf, you are wrong. A special language unique to Jews is important, as it is one of the factors that helped us survive throughout the generations – whether it was Aramiac, Ladino or Yiddish. However, to those who feel that we have to move on with the world’s predominant language of English, maybe we should embrace a language similar to what has been jokingly referred to as the Yeshivishe Shprach. An English language with much Hebrew and Yiddish mixed in and with no exacting grammar. And of course, it would have to be written using the aleph beis. Throughout history, no matter which language the Jews spoke amongst themselves, it was always written with the aleph beis! Although others have complained about Yiddish sounding like German, no one with any knowledge of Yiddish could imagine writing it using the regular alphabet.
Yiddish was actually written in both Latin Alphabet and Aleph Bais.
While this is largely forgotten today there was an entire yiddish secular culture , History, Plays, books Poems , Movies. Mostly famously Tevye the Milkman which became Fiddler on the Roof.
While the kadosh stuff was written in Aleph Bais the secular stuff increasingly became written with the Latin Alphabet
??? ????? ?? ??? ? ?????. ???????? ?? ??? ???? ???????? ???? ???? ?? ?? ???? ?? ???.
Did I just invent a new language? 🙂
To zahavasdad – I can’t say for sure, but I doubt that anyone – even the non-frum yiddishists – wrote yiddish in anything other than the aleph bais. i believe that is also true for all the poems and plays that you mention. Have you ever seen the original writings of those things? All of the bundist and yiddishist newspapers and writings that I ever saw were written with the aleph bais. I was in court many years ago when one of those non-frum yiddishists challenged whether I can read yiddish. He pulled out a yddish newspaper and I of course read it for him (by the way I never heard any yiddish until I was about 8 years old). If you did see any of those writings in the Latin alphabet I would venture to bet that they were transliterations of the originals.
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