Yiddish
(Redirected from Yiddish language)
| Yiddish | |
|---|---|
| ייִדיש, יידיש or אידיש yidish/idish/yidish | |
| Pronunciation | [ˈjɪdɪʃ] or [ˈɪd ɪʃ] |
| Native to | Central, Eastern, and Western Europe |
| Region | Europe, Israel, North America, other regions with Jewish populations[1] |
| Ethnicity | Ashkenazi Jews |
Native speakers
| (1.5 million cited 1986–1991 + half undated)[1] |
| Indo-European | |
| Hebrew alphabet (Yiddish orthography) | |
| Official status | |
Recognised minority
language in | |
| Regulated by | no formal bodies; YIVO de facto |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | yi |
| ISO 639-2 | yid |
| ISO 639-3 | yid – inclusive codeIndividual codes: ydd – Eastern Yiddishyih – Western Yiddish |
| Glottolog | yidd1255[2] |
| Linguasphere | 52-ACB-g = 52-ACB-ga (West) + 52-ACB-gb (East); totalling 11 varieties |
Yiddish (ייִדיש, יידיש or אידיש, yidish/idish, lit. "Jewish", pronounced [ˈjɪdɪʃ] [ˈɪdɪʃ]; in older sources ייִדיש-טײַטש Yidish-Taitsh, lit.Judaeo-German)[3] is the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century[4] in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a High German-based vernacular fused with elements taken from Hebrew and Aramaic as well as from Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages.[5][6][7] Yiddish is written with a fully vocalized version of the Hebrew alphabet.
The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז (loshn-ashknaz, "language of Ashkenaz") or טײַטש (taytsh), a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn, lit. "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from לשון־קודש (loshn koydesh, "holy tongue"), meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. The term "Yiddish", short for Yidish Taitsh ("Jewish German"), did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts,[clarification needed] but "Yiddish" is again the more common designation today.[citation needed]
Modern Yiddish has two major forms. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern (Ukrainian–Romanian), Mideastern (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian), and Northeastern (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern (Swiss–Alsatian–Southern German), Midwestern (Central German), and Northwestern (Netherlandic–Northern German) dialects. Yiddish is used in a number of Haredi Jewish communities worldwide; it is the first language of the home, school, and in many social settings among many Haredi Jews, and is used in most Hasidic and many Lithuanian yeshivas.
The term "Yiddish" is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddishkeit("Ashkenazi culture"; for example, Yiddish cooking and "Yiddish music" - klezmer).[8]
Prior to the Holocaust, there were 11–13 million speakers of Yiddish among 17 million Jews worldwide.[9] 85% of the approximately 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,[10] leading to a massive decline in the use of the language. Assimilation following World War II and aliyah, immigration to Israel, further decreased the use of Yiddish both among survivors and among Yiddish-speakers from other countries (such as in the Americas). However, the number of speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities.
Origins[edit]
The established view is that, as with other Jewish languages, Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. In the case of Yiddish, this scenario sees it as emerging when speakers of Zarphatic and other Judeo-Romance languages began to acquire varieties of Middle High German, and from these groups the Ashkenazi community took shape.[11][12] Exactly what German base lies behind the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed.
In Weinreich's model, Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter) extending over parts of Germany and France;[13] There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects. Both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in the mid-1950s.[14] In Weinreich's view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two distinct versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish.[15] They retained the Semitic vocabulary and constructions needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes not accepted as a fully autonomous language.
Later linguistic research has finessed the Weinreich model or provided alternative approaches to the language's origins, with points of contention being the characterization of its Germanic base, the source of its Hebrew/Aramaic adstrata, and the means and location of this fusion. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base.[12][16] The two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been parallel developments in the two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East.[9] The lines of development proposed by the different theories do not necessarily rule out the others (at least not entirely); an article in The Forward argues that "in the end, a new 'standard theory' of Yiddish’s origins will probably be based on the work of Weinreich and his challengers alike."[17]
Paul Wexler proposed a model in 1991 that took Yiddish, by which he means primarily eastern Yiddish,[15] not to be genetically grounded in a Germanic language at all, but rather as "Judeo-Sorbian" (a proposed West Slavic language) that had been relexified by High German.[12] In more recent work, Wexler has argued that Eastern Yiddish is unrelated genetically to Western Yiddish. Wexler's model has met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists.[12][15]
History[edit]
By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe which came to be called אַשכּנזי Ashkenazi, "Ashkenazi Jews, from Hebrew: אַשכּנז Ashkenaz(Genesis 10:3), the medieval Hebrew name for northern Europe and Germany.[18] Ashkenaz was centered on the Rhineland (Mainz) and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer), in what is now the westernmost part of Germany. Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German principalities of the time, and it included northern France. Ashkenaz bordered on the area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews, who ranged into southern France. Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations.[citation needed]
Nothing is known with certainty about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. The first language of the Ashkenazim may, as noted above, have been the Aramaic language, the vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade. In Roman times, many of the Jews living in Rome and Southern Italy appear to have been Greek-speakers, and this is reflected in some Ashkenazi personal names (e.g., Kalonymos and Yiddish Todres). Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and not for common use. Much work needs to be done, though, to fully analyze the contributions of those languages to Yiddish.[citation needed]
It is generally accepted that early Yiddish was likely to have contained elements from other languages of the Near East and Europe, absorbed through migrations. Since some settlers may have come via France and Italy, it is also likely that the Romance-based Jewish languages of those regions were represented. Traces remain in the contemporary Yiddish vocabulary: for example, בענטשן (bentshn, "to bless"), ultimately from the Latin benedicere; לייענען (leyenen, "to read"), from the Old French lei(e)re; and the personal names בונים Bunim (related to French bon nom, good name) and Yentl (Old French gentil, "noble"). Western Yiddish includes additional words of ultimate Latin derivation (but still very few): for example, אָרן orn (to pray), cf. Old French "orer".[19]
The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the many dialects from which Standard German would emerge a few centuries later. In time, Jewish communities would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region. Although not reflected in the spoken language, a main point of difference was the use of the Hebrew alphabet for the recording of the Germanic vernacular, which may have been adopted either because of the community's familiarity with the alphabet or to prevent the non-Jewish population from understanding the correspondence. In addition, there was probably widespread illiteracy in the non-Hebrew script, with the level of illiteracy in the non-Jewish communities being even higher. Another point of difference was the use of Hebrew and Aramaic words. These words and terms were used because of their familiarity, but more so because in most cases there were no equivalent terms in the vernacular which could express the Jewish concepts or describe the objects of cultural significance.[citation needed]
Written evidence[edit]
It is not known when Yiddish orthography first developed. The oldest surviving literary document using it is a blessing in the Worms machzor,[20] a Hebrew prayer book from 1272. There is a scalable image online at the indicated reference. The Worms machzor is discussed in Frakes, 2004, and Baumgarten, ed. Frakes, 2005 – see the Bibliography at the foot of this article.
| Yiddish | גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזוֹר אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא |
|---|---|
| Transliterated | gut tak im betage se vaer dis makhazor in beis hakneses trage |
| Translated | May a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue. |
This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in an otherwise purely Hebrew text.[21] Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German written in the Hebrew alphabet into which Hebrew words – מַחֲזוֹר, makhazor (prayerbook for the High Holy Days) and בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ, "synagogue" (read in Yiddish as beis hakneses) – had been included. The niqqud appears as though it might have been added by a second scribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately and may not be indicative of the pronunciation of the rhyme at the time of its initial annotation.
Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in the late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf.[22] During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community's adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant, which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.
Printing[edit]
The advent of the printing press in the 16th century enabled the large scale production of works, at a cheaper cost, some of which have survived. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh (בָּבָֿא-בּוך), composed around 1507–08 and printed several times, beginning in 1541 (Isny) (under the title: Bovo d'Antona). Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written פּאַריז און װיענע Pariz un Viene (Paris and Vienna). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, װידװילט Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg.[23] Another significant writer is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei, who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557.
Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew, but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works, such as the Bovo-Bukh, and religious writing specifically for women, such as the צאנה וראינה Tseno Ureno and the תחנות Tkhines. One of the best-known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln, whose memoirs are still in print.
The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read מאַמע־לשון mame-loshn but not לשון־קדש loshn-koydesh, and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish was ווײַבערטײַטש (vaybertaytsh, 'women's taytsh', shown in the heading and fourth column in the adjacent illustration), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed מעשייט mesheyt or מאַשקעט mashket—the construction is uncertain).[24]
An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddish appear on the same page. This is commonly termed Rashi script, from the name of the most renowned early author, whose commentary is usually printed using this script. (Rashi is also the typeface normally used when the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, is printed in Hebrew script.)
Secularization[edit]
The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch,[25] i. e. "Moses German"[26]—declined in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment and the Haskalah led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. A Maskil (one who take part in the Haskalah) would write about and promote acclimatization to the outside world.[27] Jewish children began attending secular schools where the primary language spoken and taught was German, not Yiddish.[27] Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew, Western Yiddish survived only as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups". (Liptzin 1972).
In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture (see the Yiddishist movement). Notable Yiddish writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem, whose stories about טבֿיה דער מילכיקער (Tevye der milkhiker, "Tevye the Dairyman") inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof; and Isaac Leib Peretz.
20th century[edit]
In the early 20th century, especially after the Socialist October Revolution in Russia, Yiddish was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was more widely published than ever, Yiddish theatre and Yiddish cinema were booming, and it for a time achieved status as one of the official languages of the Ukrainian People's Republic,[28] the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic[citation needed] and the short-lived Galician Soviet Socialist Republic,[citation needed] and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO. In Vilnius, there was debate over which language should take primacy, Hebrew or Yiddish.[29]
Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. Michael Wex writes, "As increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were so quick to jettison Slavic vocabulary that the most prominent Yiddish writers of the time—the founders of modern Yiddish literature, who were still living in Slavic-speaking countries—revised the printed editions of their oeuvres to eliminate obsolete and 'unnecessary' Slavisms."[30] The vocabulary used in Israel absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and there was a similar but smaller increase in the English component of Yiddish in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.[citation needed] This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries.
Phonology[edit]
Yiddish phonology is similar to that of Standard German. However, it does not have final-obstruent devoicing and fortis (voiceless) stop consonants are unaspirated, and the /χ/ phoneme is invariably uvular, unlike the German phoneme /x/, which is palatal, velar, or uvular.
Yiddish has a smaller inventory of vowels than Standard German, lacking vowel length distinction and the umlauted vowels ö and ü.
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