to me as a native German speaker, Yiddish sounds like one of the many German dialects. It is just as easy for me to understand than a dialect I am unfamiliar with.
+jared _ English = Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) 50% Norman-French or French 30% to 40% Others 10% to 20% and English is clearly a Germanic language ! as a matter of fac t, Yiddish is a Germanic language
According to one research, the percentage of modern English words derived from each language group are as follows: Latin (including words used only in scientific / medical / legal contexts): ~29% French: ~29% Germanic: ~26% Others: ~16%
Germanic ? You mean Anglo-Saxon ? because other Germanic words in English are from Dutch or French, for example : from French : war, wait, warrant, hamlet, etc. (themselves from Old Low Franconian), haunt, equip, etc. (themselves from Old Norse), etc. the percentage of Germanic roots in English is obviously more than 50%. French is not a language group, the group is Romance, itself mainly derived from Late Latin. According to EOD the largest part of the Latin roots in English is from French, for example : poor, pain, match (fire), boil, cattle, car, catch, chase, etc.. The percentage of Latin roots borrowed by the Germanic group in ancient time is about the same in all the Germanic languages (same words too) : tile, pound, cooper, pepper, wall, etc. The scientific words directly borrowed from Latin are a very little percentage and for the other remaining Latin roots, OED explains it is hard to say if they were borrowed directly from Latin or through French....Your source is not serious, because it confuses different things
I'm from the U.S. and I've been learning German for awhile. I thought in this context the word would be Obst, since it's a fruit sold at the store that you would eat. Not talking about fruit as a biological thing as part of a plant. It says he's using Hochdeutsch, and that's what I was taught with. Is it okay to use those two interchangeably anyway?
@Alicia Kistner-King Tom Stellmaßek is right. The guy has mistranslated. He should have said Weintrauben. Frucht ist ein botanischer Begriff, Obst ein kulinarischer. Zum Beispiel ist eine Erbse ein Frucht, doch kein Obst. Weintrauben sind sowohl Früchte, als auch Obst. Es liegt an dir, was du meinen willst.
HALLO SISTRE*in german in context ,the tree got many fruits ,der baum hat viele fruechte ,but obst we use then never,obst is more the variety of kind of fruits
There are many German dialects that are further away from standard German than Yiddish is, would have been fun if the Bavarian guy had also spoken out the sentences in "boarisch" to compare.
Actually, the native German-speaker mistranslated some of the individual words-probably because he couldn’t remember the sentences given to him exactly. For instance, he translated “grapes” as “Früchte“ (fruits), instead of “Trauben,” and “highway” as “Autobahn” (freeway), instead of “Landstraße.” On the other hand, the Yiddish-speaker translated the latter word as “шосее/shosee,” which is also the Russian for “highway.” In any case, I enjoyed this video immensely, and hope your project was a smashing success!
It seemed like he was translating on the spot, considering his reaction to the sentence at the 4-minute mark. In which case he did an amazing job for someone who doesn't seem trained in interpretation. :)
for me, as a german. yiddish definitely sounds like a geman dialect - there are a lot of german dialects differing greatly - with some loan words, which is normal.. i understand everything. ...warm regards....
it sounds like swabian, badian or other dialects in Baden-Württemberg and the Elsass.Especially if you look at words like nej/neu/new or hüs/haus/house.
+Horrrrrrrrst yes kind of, right? My family originally came from that area and my grandma even sometimes speaks on that way, she's not speaking yiddish but old/low german, it sounds kinda funny sometimes. But theres also a bit of the silesian dialect in yiddish, for example there was this sentance about a bar and the yiddish speaking guy used a word that sounded like "Kretscham" for 'bar', and apparently "Kretscham" is the silesian word for bar as well, so yea.
meine erste Sprache ist deutsch, obwohl ich in den USA geboren bin. Da ich jedoch zuerst nach New York zog - nach der Uni - und erst dann nach Deutschland für 26 Jahre, waren mir einige jiddischen Wörter aus dem New Yorker Slang bekannt. I also (now) speak Esperanto and two years ago I read an article about how Yiddish influenced Zamenhof (Esperanto's "founder") - this clip helped me understand that pretty well. Großartiger Film!
Yiddish isn't my first language but I heard it a lot growing up which helped tremendously when I learned it latter. I use it pretty much every day, I don't always get to speak to someone in Yiddish but I'll at least exchange an email or two or a facebook message. My work also involves materials in Yiddish so I'm reading and translating things constantly, as well as transcribing interviews in Yiddish.
There is no danger for it dying out, because communities of tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews use it as their daily tongue, both in Israel, America, Europe and elsewhere, and this group is growing all the time.
Go to borough park in Brooklyn, you'll find plenty of Yiddish speakers there. Mostly religious people though, secular Jewish use of Yiddish is limited to around 50 or so words at this point.
Wow this was really interesting! Thanks for the great video! I am still amazed at how similar they are. As a German you can still get the gist of what he is saying in Yiddish.
In german "team "will be translated with "Mannschaft" (like the jüdisch one) The german guy speaks a kind of denglish (deutsch-englisch). I think its because he is so young.
+MizeeKazee Genau. Andererseits werden typisch jiddische Wörter aber auch in der deutschen Alltagssprache genutzt. www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Mischpoke Mischpoke wird aber ehr abwertend für die eigene Verwandtschaft genutzt.
This video doesn't show how close both languages realy are, because the commonly used words of both languages are different. for example the Yiddish speaking guy chose to say "klingen" while he German speaking guy chose to say "hört sich an", but he could have easily also use "klingen" As a German speaker could understand the Yiddish speaking guy better than a Dutch and much much better than a hardcore Bavarian. They seam to just use German words that are not so commonly used in Germany. Thats the feel you have if you listen to a Dutch, too. off topic: Also I was part of a fun experiment where Dutch people chatted in fake-German and Germans in fake-Dutch. It made comunication actually even more easy.
The German man finds funny that the Yiddish word for "hour", in the Ukrainian-Russian dialect, sounds like "shoo". It it an Ashkenazic rendering of the Hebrew word שָׁעָה. He may have recognized the word שטונדע, "shtunde", which is less used but does exist in Yiddish. The German from which Yiddish came from is a regional 15-century dialect of German, not the modern standardized German. Hence the difference in pronunciation.
My 93-yr-old mother is a native Yiddish-speaker (standard Lithuanian--her parents came over around 100 years ago). She not only uses "shtunde" but didn't recognize "sho" when I was getting help from her on my project of finally learning Yiddish using Weinreich's College Yiddish. He gave not "shoo" but "sho"--like shore without the "re"--BTW, he and other scholars give the time Yiddish branched off from Middle High German much earlier than 15th c. I think you meant 10th.
As a Linguist and German native speaker, I love this! I have no problem understanding the yiddish, although it helps to hear the German first. Also, I noticed some French loan words in the Yiddish, which are also used in parts of Germany (they are normal loan words where I live), esp. where French soldiers were present during the wars. Examples: Trottwar (Trottoir) (sidewalk), plage (not really used where I live), chaussee (highway). And yes he speaks Hochdeutsch - I can still tell he's from Bavaria haha.
Correct. This word is used in most Slavic languages (if not all). Plaża in Polish, Плажа in Serbian (same thing as in Polish) and Пляж in Russian and Ukrainian.
Yiddish is far more intelligible than I expected. I’m a native German speaker and also speak Alemannisch (Badisch and Swiss German both are Alemannisch dialects), and most of the Yiddish was understandable to me except for the words that stem from Hebrew (even some of those are quite commonly known in Germany like "Mischpoche" as slang or sometimes as "Rotwelsch" i.e. thieves’ cant). As the description states some of the non standard German words I know from my dialect, such as "Chrom" - my grandmother used to call the local store the "Chromer", I don't use that word and always wondered where it comes from. Also "epes" is common in all froms of Alemannisch, my local variant would spell it "öbbis", but phonetically it's very close. And using the French trottoir instead of "Gehweg" or "Bürgersteig" is also standard in my dialect (I’d never use the high German word it sounds so stiff to me).
da hash recht ,als badener klingt alles verstaendlich dutch und friesisch , viele finno nors worte altpreussische lithuanische verstehe mir genau so gut wie franzoesische oder schwaebsche ,schweizer mir verstehe sogar d pfaelzer alla gut
My father was in Germany in '68, he wasn't a german speaker but have been taught yddish as a kid, and manager very well to understand and beeing understood. he said pople was very well disposed and friendly- He bough there a zeiss ikon kamera which user un til the day of his death 40 years after.
An excellent demonstration !! Thank you for taking the time to make this video and post it. I wish I had learned more German & Yiddish from my father. I second one of the previous comments and agree. If only 70 years ago we could have joked and played as friends of different backgrounds as the guys in the video do now. Be well & thanks again.
Wow, I could understand a lot of the Yiddish, it was a bit different having words from outside of German and with a more guttural phonology, but it was easy to understand some
I knew there were kind of similar but this video was really helpful. Thanks a lot! There are also a lot loan words in german from yiddish and hebrew. Schmock and zocken (which I use when I play video games, well, most of us really)
Auch das Sprichwort: Es zieht wie Hechtsuppe, kommt daher. Hechtsuppe klingt so ähnlich wie die Wörter für Starken Wind. Es wird etwa Hecheßupp ausgesprochen. Aber vom Jiddischen habe keine Ahnung :D
This is pretty interesting, although I was hoping for a different kind of experiment. I'd like to see what happens if you go about your day in Germany, but talking to everyone in Yiddish instead of German.
It would be a cool experiment but with a lot of historical baggage considering WWII. That said I know some German and have a good sense of which words come from what sources so if I wanted to communicate with German speakers I could probably get by changing what words I use, speaking really slowly and shifting a few vowels. I've done it with tourists in NYC a few times. But if I were to speak more naturally they'd understand less (but still quite a lot). If so many people in Germany didn't speak English it would even be practical. That said German itself has so many dialects and accents I think most people in Germany would think "where the hell is this guy from?" instead of "why is he speaking to me in another language?" Eighty years ago every German would have recognized Yiddish (there were tens of thousands of Eastern-European Jews in Germany) but I don't think most people would know of its existence now, let alone be able to recognize it.
The German speaking lad is struggling a bit to keep up with the translations, nevertheless a great video. Insanely fascinating how similiar these languages sound.
Being German travelling in Israel I have had fluent conversations with ohne side speaking German and the other side speaking Yiddish. Same thing with Mennonites in the US speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (which sounds a lot like Yiddish).
As an American Jew who grew up hearing Yiddish, I was amused by this. Sometimes I understood the German translation more and sometimes the Yiddish. English is largely a Germanic based language with hints of other languages. Yiddish is mostly middle German and Hebrew but can bits of Polish, Hungarian, and Slavic languages in it depending on where you are from.
And we could compare the following also: English/Dutch English/Frisian Dutch/Yiddish French/Spanish/Catalan Spanish/Arabic Hebrew/Aramaic And so on! :)
To a german who speaks more than one european language yiddish sounds not like bad german but a mixture of several european languages with the majority of words being german/allemanic origin. Probably reflects the huge area all over Europe where Jewish people used to be/and still are just a part of society. Interesting comparison tho, thanks
The first Jews came with the Romans and settled along the Rhine over 2000 years ago. No surprise that they developed in parallel and occasionally together. In certain areas, Germans used Hebrew words from Yiddish such as ISA for a goat but it was not Neuhochdeutch.
Cordelia, the something else is probably mostly Hebrew :P. There were a fair few words of Hebrew origin that he said. For instance, in the "we are not relatives but we are friends", the Yiddish words for "relatives" and "friends" that the guy used are from Hebrew
@willie vargas Actually there ARE in fact Hebrew word that have been incorporated into standard German. The same thing with American English. Funny h ow such a tiny population can have that sort of affect on other languages. I think it is because many Yiddish words just sound funny and people like to say them; they just don't know they are Yiddish. For example the word "glitch" the computer bug is a Yiddish word for a "fuck up". Many Germans I know say something like mazel tov or mit mazel.
@3:40 "Ich bin zu schnell gegangen [gefahren] auf der Chaussee ..." The word CHAUSSEE (French noun) harks back, I presume, to the Napoleon wars when major parts of Germany were under French influence. (I know that the upper stratum not only of the nobility used to speak French back then). As young boys, we used CHAUSSEE instead of the high German word LANDSTRASSE. Here is a nice poem using CHAUSSEE for rhyming purposes (Chaussee - weh). It also implicitly makes it clear that Chaussee, in fact, means LANDSTRASSE. Altona is a part of the city of Hamburg: DIE AMEISEN - Joachim Ringelnatz (1883-1934) In Hamburg lebten zwei Ameisen, die wollten nach Australien reisen. Bei Altona auf der Chaussee, da taten ihnen die Beine weh. Und da verzichteten sie weise, denn auf den letzten Teil der Reise. So will man oft und kann doch nicht und leistet dann recht gern Verzicht.
Note the French "la plage" for "the beach," rather than "der Strand." Yiddish first developed along the Rhine, the boundary between French and German-speaking regions, above 1000 years ago. Modern German did not yet exist. Neither did French. It's really post-Roman Empire, local Latin.Yiddish is Germanic grammar, plus mostly-Germanic words, with large admixtures of Hebrew, Romance, Polish, and English words.
That is a great video. To be absolutely honest, I had almost no idea about Yiddish being so close to German. It sounds like Swiss, I would have guessed you're from there by overhearing a conversation. I really like the fact that the Bavarian (curse his people) actually speaks Hochdeutsch and his Bavarian accent is minimal. Also, he's cool. Unlike politicians from there. Fascinating though, "ich bin zu schnell gegangen" = "I went too fast". It's the literal translation. I love those connections.
Love it! This is like my wife and I trying to talk with each other. Unfortunately neither of us is very expert. She has the advantage of having learned Litvaker Yiddish at home, while I only learned German in school. This video was a great help, and may resolve some breakfast table arguments. BTW, does anyone know if the simple past exists in Yiddish? My wife always comes up with "haben" (pronounced "hubben") plus the past participle, where I learned simple pasts like "er ging," " er war" er hatte," etc. Has the simple past really disappeared from Yiddish?
loving this video. as many here said yiddish is practically German with minor differences. It has much more German words in it than other languages, and follows old German grammatical rules.
very interesting... I noticed that Frank did translate some words incorrectly, however the - for me - interesting thing to see was that many yiddish words seem to be derived from French (or possibly Swiss German which contains many more French expressions). So, Jordan said "plage" for beach and also "trottoir" and "ekrane" for screens (in the movie theatre example) which is derived from "écran". The fourth French word was Chaussee...
Thank you for doing this comparison. My mother is half Jewish and half German,from Germany. My father was Dutch, so mom rarely spoke Yiddish. I'.I'm glad these 3 people did this project, it was so interesting.
Wie cool xD! I'm German and this is right! Yiddish sounds for a german like bad German, but also the other way around xDD. But it's not just German words in the Yiddish language available. I also heard something out French and Polish. Partially were English words here and maybe even more. For me yiddish sounds also a lot like dutch. But maybe I have just such a feeling ^^.
Wow! Thank you for this video. I couldn't even tell he was Bayerisch. I certainly thought the two would be closer than this though. I also noticed that some of the things COULD have translated the same. For instance: 'es klingt' means 'it sounds' in German as well but the German speaker just said it a different way.
Very interesting video! I had to smile at the use of Trottoir. It's still in wide use in the palatinate today. We have a lot of language leftovers adopted during the Napoleonic occupation here. For instance, I keep my cash in a Portemonnaie and not in a Geldbörse or Geldbeutel.
This is fun to watch. I love it and don't speak German, nor Yiddish. I can say that the two guys doing this seem like they are getting a kick out of each other while speaking and putting words together. Best of luck....good video. Keep it up.
I just remebered a quote of the film "train de vie" where they say german is like yiddish just without humour. i, as a german, think that's pretty accurate. :)
I should add that my my parents were German Jews and (as many of that group were) so dismissive of Yiddish I didn't even know the two languages were related until I heard Yiddish spoken in a documentary and realized "Hey! I can understand a lot of what these guys are saying!" I'm only now learning to appreciate it as a distinct language of its own.
carybo777 No. I put it in as an example of a children's book in German. As in that copy. There's also a Yiddish edition and I had planned to show both in their respective intros. But I couldn't find a picture of it.
This is so.funny..I speak all 3 languages and I love this.video. Yiddish sounds and is to a great part Mittelhochdeutsch. To.explain the.shuh thing. Shuh.sounds like Shoe or.Schuh in.German. And that is.funny. Good job.
+Shlomo Ben Miriam I noticed that too. Depending on region, the Yiddish word for hour could be pronounced like "shoo" or like 'show". The word for shoe in Yiddish is "shukh".
Levi.. There are some sub-dialects of what you call, Hasidic Y. "Shukh" is in single. "Sheekh" is in plural. An other synonym is "tufl" in single, "tuflen" in plural.
es hört sich eher an wie deutsch vor 200 jahren -was in einer engen sprachinsel (jüdische Viertel ) im "Ausland" /USA mit englisch konfrontiert wurde... nur der Slawische Satzbau irritiert.Wie das passiert ist,ist mir ein rätsel! Es ist allerding mehr deutsch davon zu verstehen als ZB schWitzerdütsch oder plattdeutsch. Ein sehr interressanter Beitrag; Thumps UP !!!
Hey folks that's normal: Jiddisch = Althochdeutsch (middle age), mostly. Althochdeutsch was the international language of the Hanse and their merchants. The Hanse was the early European Union of the middle age. It was a federation of the biggest northern European towns in business. ;) That was the territory from Frankfurt and Bruxelles to Stockholm and Oslo, from Nowgorod to London. Very easy reason. :)
No MizeeKazee . Plattdeutsch (the northern Plattdeutsch of the Frisian and the Saxon) in the country is very near of the Althochdeutsch in the middle age of the Hanse Towns . But over the last 300 years the Plattdeutsch has developed. At last you are right, too, it is very near because Plattdeutsch has their roods in Althochdeutsch. For that reason it is very easy to confuse. ;)
StringTheoryOfSound Actually, Mittelniederdeutsch (Middle Low German) was the lingua franca of the Hanse, not Althochdeutsch. So MizeeKazee has been almost right. Plattdeutsch or Low German is the descendant of Middle Low German which is the descendant of Old Saxon (Old Low German); it has not its roots in Althochdeutsch. Althochdeutsch made a vowel shift (e.g. p -> f, pf) that was not made in any of the other Germanic Languages (Frisian, English, Dutch, Low German respectively their direct ancestors). So the southern German varieties are the descendants of Althochdeutsch.
Panama Hat You're right! I mistook Old High German and Middle Low German. Old High German is primarily an old South German language that has developed during and after the Great Migration (Völkerwanderung) in the territories of the Alemanni, Lombards and Suevi. Because Suevi, Lombards originally came from the area of the later Middle Low German and now Plattdeutsch spoken and were understood mostly all over Germany. Therefore Althochdeutsch can also apply as a mother of Middle Low German in spite of the later Eastphalian influences on Middle Low German and the east area of the western Low German. However, we are now more Catholic than the Pope in the context of the Yiddish language. ;) But thanks for your note.
So strange (and cool)! Listening to Yiddish reminds me of listening to Dutch--not because they sound anything alike, but because if I listen closely enough, I can figure out what's being said, though in doing so I draw from my understanding of multiple languages.
Something similar happens with modern spanish and ladino (the spanis/hebrew language spoke by the spanish jews in the XV century). Even when I don't speak ladino I understand 90% of it just because I speak spanish.
This is fascinating. I studied German (and Spanish) in college and beyond, and live in NYC. When I hear Hasids speaking Yiddish, I find that I can understand a pretty good amount, but some words definitely throw me off. I guess that would be the Slavic influence?
Some people seem to have trouble realizing who is speaking German and if he is a native speaker. The guy on the right is clearly a native German speaker (and so am I) and but I'm not sure about the one on the left since I don't speak Yiddish, but he seems to have some kind of foreign accent, so maybe it's only his second language. So yeah, guy on the right speak perfect native High German whereas the guy on the left apparently speaks Yiddish, but I can't judge how well he speaks it.
Not very familiar with Yiddish, but the speaker here does sound quite American. To me he sometimes sounds like an American speaking German with a few non-german words thrown in. (The word for "carpenter" was Polish/Ukrainian/slavic, right?
In Yiddish ו is equivalent to a long u and וו to w in German or v in English, so ווו is wu in German and vu in English. ז is s/z. ע is used in Yiddish as a short e vowel sound, so זענט is zent. Both ח and כ/ך make a sound like the ch in loch or ch in some German dialects, sometimes written as kh. ווי is wi/vi ן is a final נ, so ווילן is wilen/vilen. אַ is a short a sound. צ is z/tz, יי is a long a or a long i so צוויי is zwei/tzvei which can rhyme with either bay or lie. ט is t. אָ is a short o.
I'm an American so my body-language is completely Americanized. There's an old Yiddish joke about how when the first telephones were brought to a small town in Poland an old man was taught how to use the phone. "Hold the receiver with your right hand and hold the mouth-piece with your left." The man looked at the instructor confused and said "but which hand do I use to talk with?" :)
The sentences could habe been much more similar if they had tried to use the exact same expressions. First sentence in German: Es gibt mehr Leute die Deutsch sprechen als Yiddisch Exact translation: There are more people who speak German than Yiddish I don't speak Yiddish, but it sounds like: Esach[?] mehr Menschen reden Deutsch wie Yiddisch What one could say in (slightly colloquial) german: Mehr Menschen reden Deutsch wie Yiddisch. Which mens: More people speak german than Yiddish.
It doesn't matter how close languages are when it comes to determining whether they're separate languages or just dialects. The only thing which matters is what the speakers of it consider it to be. To me it's a separate language, also because there's a different culture attached to it. There's much more to it than just mutual intelligibility, otherwise Danish, Swedish and Norwegian would have to be referred to as Scandinavian and Arabic would have to be split into several languages.
Such a nice "experiment"! I've always been interested in Yiddish. Not only does is it partially sound like German, it also reminds me of the hessian dialect.
Yiddish came from Middle High German with Hebrew,Slavic, and other words mixed in picked up by the people intheir travels, so the base of the language is Germanic.
There is a story that the Germans serving in the Roman Army in Judea 2,000 years ago married Judean women and brought them to Germany. Their children were the first Ashkenazi Jews since they were brought up by the Jewish women in Jewish faith while their German husbands fought and died for the Roman empire. Their native language was ancient German which was transformed into Yiddish because many Jews moved east to Poland.
It is startling to me that almost none of the comments below reflect any knowledge of history. ALL languages change over time; NONE are "pure". Most Native English speakers would view Old English (see "Beowulf") as a completely foreign language. Middle English (see Chaucer) might be partly puzzled out, but most English speakers would require a translation into Modern English. A language is a system, but it is never a CLOSED system like mathematics. This is because mathematics deals with abstractions, so it can be "perfect". Natural human languages, however, are always vulnerable to change, due to foreign trade, war, immigration, emigration, literary influences, slang, various classes within a society, and every kind of specialized trade or profession. Yiddish began as a variant of Middle High German. It was bound to diverge simply because in the Middle Ages, Jews in the Rhineland were confined to their own communities. Because of massacres of Jewish communities as a warmup for the First Crusade (beginning 1096--- SEE the Wikipedia article "Persecution of Jews in the Crusades"), many Jews migrated Eastward to then-hospitable Poland, of course taking their Yiddish language with them. Later some of these Jews moved further east to the Ukraine and Russia. So it is not surprising that over time, these various Jewish communities absorbed some local Polish or Russian vocabulary into Yiddish. The fact that the Torah and the Prayerbook dominated Jewish religious life led to the adoption into Yiddish of much Hebrew vocabulary. This Yiddishized Hebrew would of course not be understood by today's modern Israeli speakers of Hebrew, the official language of the State of Israel, revived as a spoken language beginning in the late 19th Century.
+Solomon Epstein Interestingly enough, modern Hebrew has been influenced by Yiddish and German, even though Yiddish was discouraged by the early Zionists.
Actually, a lot of the Hebrew words in Yiddish are exactly the same as their comparisons in modern Hebrew. For example,I speak Hebrew, and when I hear Yiddish I recognize a lot of words from Hebrew.
The main influence is the rheinlandisch dialect of german, and there are a lot of similarities. You'd could "Trottoire" in cologne as well (which is a city build by the romans and has a documented jewish history that goes back to the year 320+), and while most germans would count like "fuenf (five), elf(eleven)" it would also be the yiddish sounding fuenneff and elleff in the rhein-ruhr-area dialects
"Trottoir" is adopted and commonly used in many German dialects. Here in Palatina we only use the word "trottoire" when we talk, when we write we (have to) use the high-german "Gehweg".
Trottoire and Chaussé was also used in former German. There are much more french phrases in german.(vis á vis, á mass, perdu,...) The french Hugenottes brought it to Prussia in the 18th century.
As a native German speaker, and a long history of family background that are Jewish, and Yiddish speakers, i can understand everything. When i visit my cousin in NY he doesn't speak German but he speaks Yiddish and him and i are able to communicate easily.
At that point I had starting learning it six or seven years earlier. I did Ukrainian Yiddish because that's the dialect I heard growing up in my family so it sounded natural to me.
Yiddish, like German, is a High German language which diverged from German about a millennium ago. It is more of a hybrid language (like English) because it embodies elements of Hebrew and Slavic languages (as English, which is a heavily Romanized Germanic language as of 1066 and the Norman invasion of Britain.) Incidentally, English is a Low German language more closely related to Dutch and Plaatduutsch.
Interesting. However, if you took a person from the South Western part of Germany and not a person that speaks standard German - there would be less of a difference. Just saying. ;)
P.S. The German guy keeps saying "Jüdisch" - which is not the right word, since in German, when referring to the language, the proper word is also "Yiddish" (however spelled "Jiddisch"). "Jüdisch" is used when talking about Jews in general.
You are right and even if the German guy would be a Bavarian native speaker the difference to Yiddish would be much smaller. The guy is from Bavaria but you can hear that he is not used to speak Bavarian.
...and even some Greek ,believe it or not. It is a real multi-cultural language that took many centuries to become what it is today. And it has several main dialects which do sound somewhat strange to a person unfamiliar with them!
I was asked if Yiddish is big in word size. The first Yiddish-English/Eng-Yd dictionary was published in 1891 by the great scholar Alexander Harkevy. I use the 22nd edition (1937) but I don't believe it was ever really updated. For example, it has no entry on either side for airplane (or aeroplane). It has about 20,000 entries on the Yiddish side. Imagine adding all the 20th and 21st century new words. There was not another such dictionary until 80 years later when another great scholar, Uriel Weinreich, finally had his published (posthumously). Now there is a new one, but it's only Yiddish to English. It happens that I just ordered these 2 and will see how many entries they have.
I've been learning some German for a while, took a break to learn more Japanese, now hearing this I want to get back into German AND learn some Yiddish. It sounds awesome!
I did not mean to suggest anything. You were cool in that video and I appriciate your input. Its funny, but I'm also an American schmuck. Some time ago ,I watched myself on the video and I noticed some hand movement that I would never thought existed. Good joke, it proves that good humor does not have to involve bad words and does not have to be offensive.
As a native German speaker I am extremely impressed by the person speaking German. He speaks it flawlessly...unless of course he is a native speaker then it makes sense ahaha. And the Yiddish I understood almost perfectly haha :).
I really enjoyed your video. Just wanted to point out that several words used by the yiddish-speaker were in reality hebrew - such as "shoe". In Yiddish one would say "shtunde" as in German . Other ex: war would be "krieg", not "milchama"; family is "familye", not "mishpacha"; friends is "freund", not "chaveirim"; etc making Yiddish a lot more similar sounding to German...
+Nicolai Czempin I thought so too... but what about carpenter? isn't that schreiner in German? I thought zimmerman is the guy who builds a wooden roof?
Yiddish is now really only spoken by Haredi Jews. In Israel we have some non-Haredi Ukrainian immigrants who still speak it among themselves and older people (also Ladino). I know it still has some prevalence there (in Ukraine). Also Sweden, Quebec, USA, etc. (Quebec has the only active Yiddish theatre). Switzerland and the Netherlands also have an older generation of speakers, mostly of Western-Yiddish, which is far less common than Eastern-Yiddish, which is actually growing.
To the extent that it is disdained is, for some people, because it seems old-fashioned, how immigrant grandparents used to speak. Others had an inferiority complex. With urbanization into the German-speaking cities where the locals were educated in the national school system, Yiddish sounded as though its speakers were ignorant peasants. Some who despised Yiddish didn't even consider a real language. It was like a pidgin language for a foreign element to try to communicate with civilized people. On the other hand, it is uniquely Jewish, a vehicle of Jewish culture. Some of the traditional values which are rooted in the Torah (Hebrew Scripture) can't be conveyed very easily in other European languages. I know this difficulty from speaking English. For example, from an anthology authored in 1943, reprinted in 1995, is a recollection of a famous rabbi, Aryeh Leib (born? died 1811). He says that when he was three years old: 'Un er hat mir aroifgeleigt di heilige hant oif'n hartz'n, un fun yemolt on iz mir warm.' In English: 'And he [the elderly, saintly Grand Rabbi of that region] laid his holy hand on my heart, and since then I have been warm.' In German: 'Und er [ältere, heilige Großrabbiner von dieser Region] legte seine heilige Hand auf mein Herz, und seitdem habe ich warm gewesen' [by Google Translate]. Who is going to remember this history and explain it if we all cease to speak Yiddish? Rabbi Aryeh Leib became warm for the rest of his life? Warm in the heart -- enthusiastic, optimistic. In dem Maße, dass es verschmäht wird, für einige Leute, weil es altmodisch scheint, wie Einwanderer Großeltern zu sprechen. Andere hatten einen Minderwertigkeitskomplex. Mit Urbanisierung in den deutschsprachigen Städten, wo die Leute in der nationalen Schulsystem erzogen wurden, klang Jiddisch, als ob seine Sprecher unwissend Bauern waren. Einige, die Jiddisch verachtete hielt nicht einmal eine wirkliche Sprache. Es war wie ein Pidgin-Sprache für ein fremdes Element zu versuchen, mit zivilisierten Menschen zu kommunizieren. Auf der anderen Seite ist es eindeutig jüdisch, ein Fahrzeug der jüdischen Kultur. Einige der traditionellen Werte, die in der Tora (hebr Schrift) verwurzelt sind, können nicht sehr leicht in anderen europäischen Sprachen gefördert werden. Ich weiß, diese Schwierigkeit aus dem Englischen spricht. [German from Google Translate]Yiddish's earliest development predates the Nazis by 800-900 years. Does the fact that the Nazis developed sciences mean that afterwards there was a disdain for science? Jiddisch frühesten Entwicklung früher die Nazis von 800-900 Jahren. Bedeutet die Tatsache, dass die Nazis entwickelten Wissenschaften bedeuten, dass danach eine Verachtung für die Wissenschaft war? [German from Google Translate]
Veldrin, it *was* refused by the Jewish society, but *not* because it was related to German. When Israel was founded, there was a lot of debate for what its official language should be. Yiddish, as the majority of immigrants would be coming from Europe? Arabic, which the Jewish communities already living in Palestine spoke? Or Hebrew, which had been revived about a century earlier but was still only spoken by a minority of people? Eventually Hebrew won out, with this nationalistic idea of "speaking the ancestral Jewish language in the ancestral Jewish homeland". So when Israel was founded, there was great pressure on all the Yiddish-speaking immigrants to stop speaking Yiddish and only speak Hebrew. Theatres refused to show plays in Yiddish, publishers refused to publish books in Yiddish, etc. It was all Hebrew Hebrew Hebrew. There was a saying: "עברי, דבר עברית!" (ivri, daber ivrit!), i.e. "Hebrew (person), speak Hebrew!". Yiddish was seen as the language of the diaspora, it represented Jews having to assimilate to the non-Jewish world. Speaking Hebrew again was seen as reclaiming your true independent Jewish identity. The thing is, ultra-religious Jews believe that Hebrew is the "holy language", and is too holy to be used as a common everyday language. Therefore, they still use Yiddish as their everyday language, and only use Hebrew for religious purposes like prayer or studying Torah. I'm actually quite surprised that Yiddish is the 4th biggest language in Israel. I would have guessed that the 4 most spoken languages would be Hebrew, Russian, English and Arabic, in that order. I guess though that since the ultra-religious Jews 1) have many many kids, and thus have a rapidly increasing population, and 2) live in isolated communities and rarely interact with the outside world, that the number of Yiddish speakers in Israel could actually be quite high, even though one would rarely encounter Yiddish in the street.
I'm german native speaker and I could understand every single word of the yiddish speaker. Some of the words which are used in Yiddish but not in standard german (for example "do" for "hier" (which means "here")) are used in Badisch, the german we use in south-west germany. It sounds a bit like our Badisch language, maybe I culd understand it because of that :) But the picture ad the music at the beginning which should show german culture just showed bavarian culture, which is NOT the same!
i think the experiment would have been better if the two people were told what to say out of the presence of the other. i wonder how much they would have understood each other
Yiddish has a lot of Hebrew, Polish and Russian words, not only German. As someone noted, it even has some French words depending on the speaker. There are many different words for the same thing depending on regional and even city dialects. I would be willing to bet that the Yiddish speaking American's family passed through France or Belgium before they landed in the US.
The wealth of loanwords is understandable: it was the language of Jewish people throughout Europe. It's kind of like the inverse of modern English, which eats words off of other languages it meets and spits its own words into their mouths. Who knew philology could be so nasty? ;P
Marko Antonio Italian and Spanish can easily understand each other because their languages are very similar. but for a Italian speak with a Portuguese is much more complicated
So True ....im italo-romanian with yiddish ancestry from Bukowina Area :) yeh yiddish jiddisch idis or yiddisch have a lot of different way of spoking :)
Leaving aside the improbability, this is an assertion that Jews owe it to Polish nationalists to speak Polish, but Poles do not owe it to Jews to learn Yiddish. (Improbable: the US is 10% Latino, as Poland was 10% Jewish. The Latinos speak English, for better or for worse). Speaking Polish isn't the real complaint, and never made any Jews more acceptable to Poles. The problem is, Jews aren't Catholics. In a Catholic Jesus Love Thy Neighbor society, "not Catholic" is a death sentence.
to me as a native German speaker, Yiddish sounds like one of the many German dialects. It is just as easy for me to understand than a dialect I am unfamiliar with.
Ich bin aus dem Siegerland, bin aber in Deutschland ein bisschen herumgekommen und verstehe Dialekte ganz gut.
Same for me.
I'm from Frankfurt but have also lived in the Pfalz. I also know a little Ivrit.
Das versteh ich als Österreicher auch sehr gut...
Mersteh yiddish verter zenen fun alter daytsh. S'iz a zeyer daytsher sphrakh mit a bisl hebraish. Guten tog.
Gulliver the Gullible are there any german dialicts you can hardly understad? who speaks the most original german?
For me as a german I understood nearly everything of the yiddish language. This is amazing.
My grandfather was a French Jew, in the same street we lived I had a friend whose grandfather was German, and they managed to talk to each other.
yiddish= 80% german + 10% slavic + 10% hebrew
something like that, but german is really the dominating part
cool cat 70% german + 15% hebrew + 10% slavic + 5% romance
+jared _ English = Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) 50% Norman-French or French 30% to 40% Others 10% to 20% and English is clearly a Germanic language ! as a matter of fac t, Yiddish is a Germanic language
According to one research, the percentage of modern English words derived from each language group are as follows:
Latin (including words used only in scientific / medical / legal contexts): ~29%
French: ~29%
Germanic: ~26%
Others: ~16%
Germanic ? You mean Anglo-Saxon ? because other Germanic words in English are from Dutch or French, for example : from French : war, wait, warrant, hamlet, etc. (themselves from Old Low Franconian), haunt, equip, etc. (themselves from Old Norse), etc. the percentage of Germanic roots in English is obviously more than 50%. French is not a language group, the group is Romance, itself mainly derived from Late Latin. According to EOD the largest part of the Latin roots in English is from French, for example : poor, pain, match (fire), boil, cattle, car, catch, chase, etc.. The percentage of Latin roots borrowed by the Germanic group in ancient time is about the same in all the Germanic languages (same words too) : tile, pound, cooper, pepper, wall, etc. The scientific words directly borrowed from Latin are a very little percentage and for the other remaining Latin roots, OED explains it is hard to say if they were borrowed directly from Latin or through French....Your source is not serious, because it confuses different things
+jared _ i think the 5% romance is included in german
Grapes are also in german "Weintrauben", not "Früchte" that means fruits..
I'm from the U.S. and I've been learning German for awhile. I thought in this context the word would be Obst, since it's a fruit sold at the store that you would eat. Not talking about fruit as a biological thing as part of a plant. It says he's using Hochdeutsch, and that's what I was taught with. Is it okay to use those two interchangeably anyway?
It´s okay, Obst is mostly used for fruits:-)
@Alicia Kistner-King
Tom Stellmaßek is right. The guy has mistranslated. He should have said Weintrauben.
Frucht ist ein botanischer Begriff, Obst ein kulinarischer. Zum Beispiel ist eine Erbse ein Frucht, doch kein Obst. Weintrauben sind sowohl Früchte, als auch Obst. Es liegt an dir, was du meinen willst.
Obscht in tongue;)
HALLO SISTRE*in german in context ,the tree got many fruits ,der baum hat viele fruechte ,but obst we use then never,obst is more the variety of kind of fruits
There are many German dialects that are further away from standard German than Yiddish is, would have been fun if the Bavarian guy had also spoken out the sentences in "boarisch" to compare.
Actually, the native German-speaker mistranslated some of the individual words-probably because he couldn’t remember the sentences given to him exactly. For instance, he translated “grapes” as “Früchte“ (fruits), instead of
“Trauben,” and “highway” as “Autobahn” (freeway), instead of “Landstraße.” On the other hand, the Yiddish-speaker translated the latter word as “шосее/shosee,” which is also the Russian for “highway.” In any case, I enjoyed this video immensely, and hope your project was a smashing success!
It seemed like he was translating on the spot, considering his reaction to the sentence at the 4-minute mark.
In which case he did an amazing job for someone who doesn't seem trained in interpretation. :)
da hast recht chaussee sagt man auch für strasse
Pinky jezyk,jeden i drugi,ale Yiddish jest bogatszy
for me, as a german. yiddish definitely sounds like a geman dialect - there are a lot of german dialects differing greatly - with some loan words, which is normal..
i understand everything.
...warm regards....
For me, Yiddish sounds also a little bit like dutch.
+ndrstrapp if it sounds like anything its more like Luxembourgish
+ndrstrapp I think Yiddish sounds a bit like the german dialect they used to speak in Königsberg.
+unitrvl Luxembourgish is just a German dialect.
it sounds like swabian, badian or other dialects in Baden-Württemberg and the Elsass.Especially if you look at words like nej/neu/new or hüs/haus/house.
+Horrrrrrrrst yes kind of, right? My family originally came from that area and my grandma even sometimes speaks on that way, she's not speaking yiddish but old/low german, it sounds kinda funny sometimes.
But theres also a bit of the silesian dialect in yiddish, for example there was this sentance about a bar and the yiddish speaking guy used a word that sounded like "Kretscham" for 'bar', and apparently "Kretscham" is the silesian word for bar as well, so yea.
meine erste Sprache ist deutsch, obwohl ich in den USA geboren bin. Da ich jedoch zuerst nach New York zog - nach der Uni - und erst dann nach Deutschland für 26 Jahre, waren mir einige jiddischen Wörter aus dem New Yorker Slang bekannt. I also (now) speak Esperanto and two years ago I read an article about how Yiddish influenced Zamenhof (Esperanto's "founder") - this clip helped me understand that pretty well. Großartiger Film!
Yiddish isn't my first language but I heard it a lot growing up which helped tremendously when I learned it latter. I use it pretty much every day, I don't always get to speak to someone in Yiddish but I'll at least exchange an email or two or a facebook message. My work also involves materials in Yiddish so I'm reading and translating things constantly, as well as transcribing interviews in Yiddish.
That is very interesting! I hope Yiddish will not die out as a spoken language!
There is no danger for it dying out, because communities of tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews use it as their daily tongue, both in Israel, America, Europe and elsewhere, and this group is growing all the time.
abc.. No. In Israel the UO speaks a Jerusalemite dialect.
@@abcabcboy they usually speak hebrew in israel
Go to borough park in Brooklyn, you'll find plenty of Yiddish speakers there. Mostly religious people though, secular Jewish use of Yiddish is limited to around 50 or so words at this point.
Wow this was really interesting! Thanks for the great video! I am still amazed at how similar they are. As a German you can still get the gist of what he is saying in Yiddish.
In german "team "will be translated with "Mannschaft" (like the jüdisch one)
The german guy speaks a kind of denglish (deutsch-englisch). I think its because he is so young.
+MizeeKazee Genau. Andererseits werden typisch jiddische Wörter aber auch in der deutschen Alltagssprache genutzt. www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Mischpoke Mischpoke wird aber ehr abwertend für die eigene Verwandtschaft genutzt.
It's notable that the German speaker doesn't translate American football but that the Yiddish speaker does.
This video doesn't show how close both languages realy are, because the commonly used words of both languages are different.
for example the Yiddish speaking guy chose to say "klingen" while he German speaking guy chose to say "hört sich an",
but he could have easily also use "klingen"
As a German speaker could understand the Yiddish speaking guy better than a Dutch and much much better than a hardcore Bavarian. They seam to just use German words that are not so commonly used in Germany. Thats the feel you have if you listen to a Dutch, too.
off topic:
Also I was part of a fun experiment where Dutch people chatted in fake-German and Germans in fake-Dutch. It made comunication actually even more easy.
The German man finds funny that the Yiddish word for "hour", in the Ukrainian-Russian dialect, sounds like "shoo". It it an Ashkenazic rendering of the Hebrew word שָׁעָה. He may have recognized the word שטונדע, "shtunde", which is less used but does exist in Yiddish.
The German from which Yiddish came from is a regional 15-century dialect of German, not the modern standardized German. Hence the difference in pronunciation.
Okay, so in Ulm as Native Speaker, which language would it be? Please.
My 93-yr-old mother is a native Yiddish-speaker (standard Lithuanian--her parents came over around 100 years ago). She not only uses "shtunde" but didn't recognize "sho" when I was getting help from her on my project of finally learning Yiddish using Weinreich's College Yiddish. He gave not "shoo" but "sho"--like shore without the "re"--BTW, he and other scholars give the time Yiddish branched off from Middle High German much earlier than 15th c. I think you meant 10th.
OtisFan1
There are different ways to pronounce the Ashkenazi kamatz. To the Lithuanians is "oh", to the Galiztianers and Romanians it is "oo".
Interesting how so many don't know that.
Plattdeutch-in general. Interestingly, modern Austrian German is VERY similar in pronounciation...
As a Linguist and German native speaker, I love this! I have no problem understanding the yiddish, although it helps to hear the German first.
Also, I noticed some French loan words in the Yiddish, which are also used in parts of Germany (they are normal loan words where I live), esp. where French soldiers were present during the wars. Examples: Trottwar (Trottoir) (sidewalk), plage (not really used where I live), chaussee (highway). And yes he speaks Hochdeutsch - I can still tell he's from Bavaria haha.
could also be polish for beach
Correct. This word is used in most Slavic languages (if not all). Plaża in Polish, Плажа in Serbian (same thing as in Polish) and Пляж in Russian and Ukrainian.
Yiddish is far more intelligible than I expected.
I’m a native German speaker and also speak Alemannisch (Badisch and Swiss German both are Alemannisch dialects), and most of the Yiddish was understandable to me except for the words that stem from Hebrew (even some of those are quite commonly known in Germany like "Mischpoche" as slang or sometimes as "Rotwelsch" i.e. thieves’ cant). As the description states some of the non standard German words I know from my dialect, such as "Chrom" - my grandmother used to call the local store the "Chromer", I don't use that word and always wondered where it comes from. Also "epes" is common in all froms of Alemannisch, my local variant would spell it "öbbis", but phonetically it's very close. And using the French trottoir instead of "Gehweg" or "Bürgersteig" is also standard in my dialect (I’d never use the high German word it sounds so stiff to me).
da hash recht ,als badener klingt alles verstaendlich dutch und friesisch , viele finno nors worte altpreussische lithuanische verstehe mir genau so gut wie franzoesische oder schwaebsche ,schweizer mir verstehe sogar d pfaelzer alla gut
My father was in Germany in '68, he wasn't a german speaker but have been taught yddish as a kid, and manager very well to understand and beeing understood. he said pople was very well disposed and friendly- He bough there a zeiss ikon kamera which user un til the day of his death 40 years after.
Chromer=Kolonial (ware)? in granny's Baernduutsch. No one says it anymore.
Hä nai wer hät's denkt das ich do Badner find
Trottoir was a real surprise.
An excellent demonstration !! Thank you for taking the time to make this video and post it. I wish I had learned more German & Yiddish from my father. I second one of the previous comments and agree. If only 70 years ago we could have joked and played as friends of different backgrounds as the guys in the video do now. Be well & thanks again.
Wow, I could understand a lot of the Yiddish, it was a bit different having words from outside of German and with a more guttural phonology, but it was easy to understand some
I knew there were kind of similar but this video was really helpful. Thanks a lot!
There are also a lot loan words in german from yiddish and hebrew. Schmock and zocken (which I use when I play video games, well, most of us really)
+Veldrin Minamoto "Tohuwabohu" auch Hebräisch
„Tacheles redden“ -- Google Translate recognizes this! 'Straight talking."
Auch das Sprichwort: Es zieht wie Hechtsuppe, kommt daher. Hechtsuppe klingt so ähnlich wie die Wörter für Starken Wind. Es wird etwa Hecheßupp ausgesprochen. Aber vom Jiddischen habe keine Ahnung :D
vermasseln!
This is pretty interesting, although I was hoping for a different kind of experiment. I'd like to see what happens if you go about your day in Germany, but talking to everyone in Yiddish instead of German.
When my sister took her first trip to Austria (we're Canadian), she told me she was thinking; why the hell is everybody speaking Yiddish here ...LOL.
I can't tell if you are joking or not. :/ This is like thinking "why is everyone speaking Mexican in Spain?"
It would be a cool experiment but with a lot of historical baggage considering WWII. That said I know some German and have a good sense of which words come from what sources so if I wanted to communicate with German speakers I could probably get by changing what words I use, speaking really slowly and shifting a few vowels. I've done it with tourists in NYC a few times. But if I were to speak more naturally they'd understand less (but still quite a lot). If so many people in Germany didn't speak English it would even be practical. That said German itself has so many dialects and accents I think most people in Germany would think "where the hell is this guy from?" instead of "why is he speaking to me in another language?" Eighty years ago every German would have recognized Yiddish (there were tens of thousands of Eastern-European Jews in Germany) but I don't think most people would know of its existence now, let alone be able to recognize it.
The German speaking lad is struggling a bit to keep up with the translations, nevertheless a great video. Insanely fascinating how similiar these languages sound.
I'd like to see anyone do better than the "German-speaking lad" at translating. He was VERY good,.
Being German travelling in Israel I have had fluent conversations with ohne side speaking German and the other side speaking Yiddish. Same thing with Mennonites in the US speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (which sounds a lot like Yiddish).
This is great! Unlike the naysayers, I'd say both of the translators did fantastic. Thank you, ikhveysnit.
As an American Jew who grew up hearing Yiddish, I was amused by this. Sometimes I understood the German translation more and sometimes the Yiddish. English is largely a Germanic based language with hints of other languages. Yiddish is mostly middle German and Hebrew but can bits of Polish, Hungarian, and Slavic languages in it depending on where you are from.
And we could compare the following also:
English/Dutch
English/Frisian
Dutch/Yiddish
French/Spanish/Catalan
Spanish/Arabic
Hebrew/Aramaic
And so on! :)
+ BFDT. May I also sujest - French/English and English/French.
Russian/Belorussian
Eesti/suomi
i have no idea how so many people could dislike this video. really interesting, keep up the good work
nächten = gestern . In a Swiss valley dialect nächti = gestern :)
This is a really good video. I love the sound of Yiddish.
To a german who speaks more than one european language yiddish sounds not like bad german but a mixture of several european languages with the majority of words being german/allemanic origin. Probably reflects the huge area all over Europe where Jewish people used to be/and still are just a part of society. Interesting comparison tho, thanks
The first Jews came with the Romans and settled along the Rhine over 2000 years ago. No surprise that they developed in parallel and occasionally together. In certain areas, Germans used Hebrew words from Yiddish such as ISA for a goat but it was not Neuhochdeutch.
Cordelia, the something else is probably mostly Hebrew :P. There were a fair few words of Hebrew origin that he said. For instance, in the "we are not relatives but we are friends", the Yiddish words for "relatives" and "friends" that the guy used are from Hebrew
@@AndreRhineDavis ja, he used 'mispokheh' and 'khaverim'
@@AndreRhineDavis ja, he used 'mispokheh' and 'khaverim'
@willie vargas Actually there ARE in fact Hebrew word that have been incorporated into standard German. The same thing with American English. Funny h ow such a tiny population can have that sort of affect on other languages. I think it is because many Yiddish words just sound funny and people like to say them; they just don't know they are Yiddish.
For example the word "glitch" the computer bug is a Yiddish word for a "fuck up".
Many Germans I know say something like mazel tov or mit mazel.
@3:40 "Ich bin zu schnell gegangen [gefahren] auf der Chaussee ..."
The word CHAUSSEE (French noun) harks back, I presume, to the Napoleon wars when major parts of Germany were under French influence. (I know that the upper stratum not only of the nobility used to speak French back then). As young boys, we used CHAUSSEE instead of the high German word LANDSTRASSE. Here is a nice poem using CHAUSSEE for rhyming purposes (Chaussee - weh). It also implicitly makes it clear that Chaussee, in fact, means LANDSTRASSE. Altona is a part of the city of Hamburg:
DIE AMEISEN - Joachim Ringelnatz (1883-1934)
In Hamburg lebten zwei Ameisen,
die wollten nach Australien reisen.
Bei Altona auf der Chaussee,
da taten ihnen die Beine weh.
Und da verzichteten sie weise,
denn auf den letzten Teil der Reise.
So will man oft und kann doch nicht
und leistet dann recht gern Verzicht.
I'm German and I understood every single Yiddish word (: Good job, guys^^
Note the French "la plage" for "the beach," rather than "der Strand." Yiddish first developed along the Rhine, the boundary between French and German-speaking regions, above 1000 years ago. Modern German did not yet exist. Neither did French. It's really post-Roman Empire, local Latin.Yiddish is Germanic grammar, plus mostly-Germanic words, with large admixtures of Hebrew, Romance, Polish, and English words.
I'm really enjoying this. Thanks. A sheinem dank. Danke schön.
That is a great video. To be absolutely honest, I had almost no idea about Yiddish being so close to German. It sounds like Swiss, I would have guessed you're from there by overhearing a conversation.
I really like the fact that the Bavarian (curse his people) actually speaks Hochdeutsch and his Bavarian accent is minimal. Also, he's cool. Unlike politicians from there.
Fascinating though, "ich bin zu schnell gegangen" = "I went too fast". It's the literal translation. I love those connections.
Love it! This is like my wife and I trying to talk with each other. Unfortunately neither of us is very expert. She has the advantage of having learned Litvaker Yiddish at home, while I only learned German in school. This video was a great help, and may resolve some breakfast table arguments.
BTW, does anyone know if the simple past exists in Yiddish? My wife always comes up with "haben" (pronounced "hubben") plus the past participle, where I learned simple pasts like "er ging," " er war" er hatte," etc. Has the simple past really disappeared from Yiddish?
+Larry Hecht Yiddish generally has no simple past tense (anymore).
Thanks. Did it exist at one time?
***** Thanks.
Olve Utne Thanks!
The Yiddish I speak, we only use perfect tense, with "hubben" "Ikh hub gegessen" =I ate
loving this video. as many here said yiddish is practically German with minor differences. It has much more German words in it than other languages, and follows old German grammatical rules.
very interesting... I noticed that Frank did translate some words incorrectly, however the - for me - interesting thing to see was that many yiddish words seem to be derived from French (or possibly Swiss German which contains many more French expressions). So, Jordan said "plage" for beach and also "trottoir" and "ekrane" for screens (in the movie theatre example) which is derived from "écran". The fourth French word was Chaussee...
Thank you for doing this comparison. My mother is half Jewish and half German,from Germany. My father was Dutch, so mom rarely spoke Yiddish. I'.I'm glad these 3 people did this project, it was so interesting.
Wie cool xD! I'm German and this is right! Yiddish sounds for a german like bad German, but also the other way around xDD. But it's not just German words in the Yiddish language available. I also heard something out French and Polish. Partially were English words here and maybe even more. For me yiddish sounds also a lot like dutch. But maybe I have just such a feeling ^^.
Excellent demonstration! Good deal, guys and girl asking the questions!
very unusual for someone who's young and secular to speak fluent Yiddish
Wow! Thank you for this video. I couldn't even tell he was Bayerisch. I certainly thought the two would be closer than this though. I also noticed that some of the things COULD have translated the same. For instance: 'es klingt' means 'it sounds' in German as well but the German speaker just said it a different way.
i can understand both of them fine except for the Jiddish words of Hebrew orgin.
I Know both German and Dutch, and Am an native Skandinavian.
Very interesting video! I had to smile at the use of Trottoir. It's still in wide use in the palatinate today. We have a lot of language leftovers adopted during the Napoleonic occupation here. For instance, I keep my cash in a Portemonnaie and not in a Geldbörse or Geldbeutel.
This is fun to watch. I love it and don't speak German, nor Yiddish. I can say that the two guys doing this seem like they are getting a kick out of each other while speaking and putting words together. Best of luck....good video. Keep it up.
I just remebered a quote of the film "train de vie" where they say german is like yiddish just without humour. i, as a german, think that's pretty accurate. :)
I should add that my my parents were German Jews and (as many of that group were) so dismissive of Yiddish I didn't even know the two languages were related until I heard Yiddish spoken in a documentary and realized "Hey! I can understand a lot of what these guys are saying!" I'm only now learning to appreciate it as a distinct language of its own.
Did they seriously put "The little Prince" into this video, claiming it to be German??
carybo777 No. I put it in as an example of a children's book in German. As in that copy. There's also a Yiddish edition and I had planned to show both in their respective intros. But I couldn't find a picture of it.
+ikhveysnit Numbers in Dutch are ver similat to German and Yiddish.
1 - een
2 - twee
3 - drie
4 - vier
5 - vijf
6 - zes
7 - zeven
8 - acht
9 - negen
10 - tien
11- elf
12 - twaalf
13 - dertien
14 - viertien
15 - vijftien
16 - zestien
17 - zeventien
18 - achttien
19 - negentien
20 - twintig
+Armin Meyer ja ist es! wurde von einem Franzosen geschrieben der Kampfpilot im WW2 war und bei Malta abgeschossen wurde
Yes, but the Dr. Seuss book wasn't Yiddish in origin either....it's just an example.
ikhveysnit Yeah but it's still kind of weird because it's a french book. they could have used a german book as a example
This is so.funny..I speak all 3 languages and I love this.video. Yiddish sounds and is to a great part Mittelhochdeutsch. To.explain the.shuh thing. Shuh.sounds like Shoe or.Schuh in.German. And that is.funny. Good job.
+Shlomo Ben Miriam I noticed that too. Depending on region, the Yiddish word for hour could be pronounced like "shoo" or like 'show". The word for shoe in Yiddish is "shukh".
In the Hasidic Yiddish we say "sheekh" not "shukh"
Levi.. There are some sub-dialects of what you call, Hasidic Y. "Shukh" is in single. "Sheekh" is in plural. An other synonym is "tufl" in single, "tuflen" in plural.
es hört sich eher an wie deutsch vor 200 jahren -was in einer engen sprachinsel (jüdische Viertel ) im "Ausland" /USA mit englisch konfrontiert wurde... nur der Slawische Satzbau irritiert.Wie das passiert ist,ist mir ein rätsel! Es ist allerding mehr deutsch davon zu verstehen als ZB schWitzerdütsch oder plattdeutsch. Ein sehr interressanter Beitrag; Thumps UP !!!
Hey folks that's normal:
Jiddisch = Althochdeutsch (middle age), mostly.
Althochdeutsch was the international language of the Hanse and their merchants.
The Hanse was the early European Union of the middle age. It was a federation of the biggest northern European towns in business. ;)
That was the territory from Frankfurt and Bruxelles to Stockholm and Oslo, from Nowgorod to London. Very easy reason. :)
Hilarious idea, thanks for sharing your project!
I was thinking "Plattdeutsch" was the language of the Hanse?
No MizeeKazee . Plattdeutsch (the northern Plattdeutsch of the Frisian and the Saxon) in the country is very near of the Althochdeutsch in the middle age of the Hanse Towns . But over the last 300 years the Plattdeutsch has developed. At last you are right, too, it is very near because Plattdeutsch has their roods in Althochdeutsch. For that reason it is very easy to confuse. ;)
StringTheoryOfSound
Actually, Mittelniederdeutsch (Middle Low German) was the lingua franca of the Hanse, not Althochdeutsch. So MizeeKazee has been almost right. Plattdeutsch or Low German is the descendant of Middle Low German which is the descendant of Old Saxon (Old Low German); it has not its roots in Althochdeutsch. Althochdeutsch made a vowel shift (e.g. p -> f, pf) that was not made in any of the other Germanic Languages (Frisian, English, Dutch, Low German respectively their direct ancestors). So the southern German varieties are the descendants of Althochdeutsch.
Panama Hat
You're right! I mistook Old High German and Middle Low German.
Old High German is primarily an old South German language that has developed during and after the Great Migration (Völkerwanderung) in the territories of the Alemanni, Lombards and Suevi. Because Suevi, Lombards originally came from the area of the later Middle Low German and now Plattdeutsch spoken and were understood mostly all over Germany. Therefore Althochdeutsch can also apply as a mother of Middle Low German in spite of the later Eastphalian influences on Middle Low German and the east area of the western Low German. However, we are now more Catholic than the Pope in the context of the Yiddish language. ;)
But thanks for your note.
So strange (and cool)! Listening to Yiddish reminds me of listening to Dutch--not because they sound anything alike, but because if I listen closely enough, I can figure out what's being said, though in doing so I draw from my understanding of multiple languages.
Something similar happens with modern spanish and ladino (the spanis/hebrew language spoke by the spanish jews in the XV century). Even when I don't speak ladino I understand 90% of it just because I speak spanish.
Thanks for designing, participating, and sharing this project!
2:15 "Früchte"(fruit) is not the correct German translation for "grapes". Correct would bei "Weintrauben" or "Trauben".
+karlmall ... the word the yiddish guy uses
This is fascinating. I studied German (and Spanish) in college and beyond, and live in NYC. When I hear Hasids speaking Yiddish, I find that I can understand a pretty good amount, but some words definitely throw me off. I guess that would be the Slavic influence?
+Jed..Not the Slavic, but the Jerusalemite influence.
Some people seem to have trouble realizing who is speaking German and if he is a native speaker. The guy on the right is clearly a native German speaker (and so am I) and but I'm not sure about the one on the left since I don't speak Yiddish, but he seems to have some kind of foreign accent, so maybe it's only his second language. So yeah, guy on the right speak perfect native High German whereas the guy on the left apparently speaks Yiddish, but I can't judge how well he speaks it.
He has a fine Yiddish accent. Yiddish natives can have a variety of pronunciations.
Not very familiar with Yiddish, but the speaker here does sound quite American. To me he sometimes sounds like an American speaking German with a few non-german words thrown in. (The word for "carpenter" was Polish/Ukrainian/slavic, right?
Yeah many words too or proverbs are slavic.
The guy on the left is American which I think, influences his accent in Yiddish.
@@tonaaspsusa 'Stoler' is just germanised 'stolarz'.
In Yiddish ו is equivalent to a long u and וו to w in German or v in English, so ווו is wu in German and vu in English.
ז is s/z. ע is used in Yiddish as a short e vowel sound, so זענט is zent.
Both ח and כ/ך make a sound like the ch in loch or ch in some German dialects, sometimes written as kh.
ווי is wi/vi ן is a final נ, so ווילן is wilen/vilen.
אַ is a short a sound.
צ is z/tz, יי is a long a or a long i so צוויי is zwei/tzvei which can rhyme with either bay or lie.
ט is t.
אָ is a short o.
I'm an American so my body-language is completely Americanized. There's an old Yiddish joke about how when the first telephones were brought to a small town in Poland an old man was taught how to use the phone. "Hold the receiver with your right hand and hold the mouth-piece with your left." The man looked at the instructor confused and said "but which hand do I use to talk with?" :)
The sentences could habe been much more similar if they had tried to use the exact same expressions.
First sentence in German: Es gibt mehr Leute die Deutsch sprechen als Yiddisch
Exact translation: There are more people who speak German than Yiddish
I don't speak Yiddish, but it sounds like: Esach[?] mehr Menschen reden Deutsch wie Yiddisch
What one could say in (slightly colloquial) german: Mehr Menschen reden Deutsch wie Yiddisch.
Which mens: More people speak german than Yiddish.
"Esach"=Many
thats very interesting , the Yiddish word for “ Inn House" , comes actually from bulgarian "kruchma"
Krechma is used in many languages. Even in a Theodore Bickel song.
Kretchma. Lots of words sound and mean the same thing in even unrelated languages. Kretchma is also Russian.
No, it does not come from Bulgarian ...lol.
I speak both languages badly and I mix them both up. I have given up trying to speak either correctly.
he has a Russian accent, I also had a harder time understanding him. My grandma was born in Poland, and had a much more "German" accent.
It doesn't matter how close languages are when it comes to determining whether they're separate languages or just dialects. The only thing which matters is what the speakers of it consider it to be. To me it's a separate language, also because there's a different culture attached to it. There's much more to it than just mutual intelligibility, otherwise Danish, Swedish and Norwegian would have to be referred to as Scandinavian and Arabic would have to be split into several languages.
"shosea" is also French: chausee (means paved road)
Such a nice "experiment"!
I've always been interested in Yiddish. Not only does is it partially sound like German, it also reminds me of the hessian dialect.
Yiddish came from Middle High German with Hebrew,Slavic, and other words mixed in picked up by the people intheir travels, so the base of the language is Germanic.
There is a story that the Germans serving in the Roman Army in Judea 2,000 years ago married Judean women and brought them to Germany. Their children were the first Ashkenazi Jews since they were brought up by the Jewish women in Jewish faith while their German husbands fought and died for the Roman empire. Their native language was ancient German which was transformed into Yiddish because many Jews moved east to Poland.
It is startling to me that almost none of the comments below reflect any knowledge of history. ALL languages change over time; NONE are "pure". Most Native English speakers would view Old English (see "Beowulf") as a completely foreign language. Middle English (see Chaucer) might be partly puzzled out, but most English speakers would require a translation into Modern English.
A language is a system, but it is never a CLOSED system like mathematics. This is because mathematics deals with abstractions, so it can be "perfect".
Natural human languages, however, are always vulnerable to change, due to foreign trade, war, immigration, emigration, literary influences, slang, various classes within a society, and every kind of specialized trade or profession.
Yiddish began as a variant of Middle High German. It was bound to diverge simply because in the Middle Ages, Jews in the Rhineland were confined to their own communities.
Because of massacres of Jewish communities as a warmup for the First Crusade (beginning 1096--- SEE the Wikipedia article "Persecution of Jews in the Crusades"), many Jews migrated Eastward to then-hospitable Poland, of course taking their Yiddish language with them. Later some of these Jews moved further east to the Ukraine and Russia.
So it is not surprising that over time, these various Jewish communities absorbed some local Polish or Russian vocabulary into Yiddish.
The fact that the Torah and the Prayerbook dominated Jewish religious life led to the adoption into Yiddish of much Hebrew vocabulary. This Yiddishized Hebrew would of course not be understood by today's modern Israeli speakers of Hebrew, the official language of the State of Israel, revived as a spoken language beginning in the late 19th Century.
+Solomon Epstein Interestingly enough, modern Hebrew has been influenced by Yiddish and German, even though Yiddish was discouraged by the early Zionists.
ATOPO@MSN.COM, SoniaStern
חוץ מסןף התגובה הכול נכון. בוודאי שאפשר להבין מילים באידיש שמקורן בעברית. חלקן אפילו עשו דרכן לעברית מאידיש. שמוק שפריץ וכו'.
Actually, a lot of the Hebrew words in Yiddish are exactly the same as their comparisons in modern Hebrew. For example,I speak Hebrew, and when I hear Yiddish I recognize a lot of words from Hebrew.
Simply amazing! I love the two languages :)
Thanks for this funny video!
Surprising that the Yiddish word for sidewalk is very similar to the French word "trottoire" meaning sidewalk.
The main influence is the rheinlandisch dialect of german, and there are a lot of similarities. You'd could "Trottoire" in cologne as well (which is a city build by the romans and has a documented jewish history that goes back to the year 320+), and while most germans would count like "fuenf (five), elf(eleven)" it would also be the yiddish sounding fuenneff and elleff in the rhein-ruhr-area dialects
"Trottoir" is adopted and commonly used in many German dialects. Here in Palatina we only use the word "trottoire" when we talk, when we write we (have to) use the high-german "Gehweg".
Thanks. I hadn't realized that French influenced German dialects this much. I am fluent in French but only beginning to study German.
Trottoire and Chaussé was also used in former German. There are much more french phrases in german.(vis á vis, á mass, perdu,...) The french Hugenottes brought it to Prussia in the 18th century.
Thank you for the history. Given its fluidity and complexity, it seems best to think of history on a regional or city basis.
As a native German speaker, and a long history of family background that are Jewish, and Yiddish speakers, i can understand everything. When i visit my cousin in NY he doesn't speak German but he speaks Yiddish and him and i are able to communicate easily.
At that point I had starting learning it six or seven years earlier. I did Ukrainian Yiddish because that's the dialect I heard growing up in my family so it sounded natural to me.
Yiddish, like German, is a High German language which diverged from German about a millennium ago. It is more of a hybrid language (like English) because it embodies elements of Hebrew and Slavic languages (as English, which is a heavily Romanized Germanic language as of 1066 and the Norman invasion of Britain.) Incidentally, English is a Low German language more closely related to Dutch and Plaatduutsch.
Interesting. However, if you took a person from the South Western part of Germany and not a person that speaks standard German - there would be less of a difference.
Just saying. ;)
P.S. The German guy keeps saying "Jüdisch" - which is not the right word, since in German, when referring to the language, the proper word is also "Yiddish" (however spelled "Jiddisch"). "Jüdisch" is used when talking about Jews in general.
I was about to bring that up!
You are right and even if the German guy would be a Bavarian native speaker the difference to Yiddish would be much smaller. The guy is from Bavaria but you can hear that he is not used to speak Bavarian.
...and even some Greek ,believe it or not. It is a real multi-cultural language that took many centuries to become what it is today. And it has several main dialects which do sound somewhat strange to a person unfamiliar with them!
Because of yiddish, hebrew has adopted alot of german words,
In hebrew we even pronounce the months exactly like germans do
I was asked if Yiddish is big in word size. The first Yiddish-English/Eng-Yd dictionary was published in 1891 by the great scholar Alexander Harkevy. I use the 22nd edition (1937) but I don't believe it was ever really updated. For example, it has no entry on either side for airplane (or aeroplane). It has about 20,000 entries on the Yiddish side. Imagine adding all the 20th and 21st century new words. There was not another such dictionary until 80 years later when another great scholar, Uriel Weinreich, finally had his published (posthumously). Now there is a new one, but it's only Yiddish to English. It happens that I just ordered these 2 and will see how many entries they have.
I've been learning some German for a while, took a break to learn more Japanese, now hearing this I want to get back into German AND learn some Yiddish. It sounds awesome!
Das ist ein lustiger Vergleich! Thanks for that funny idea and posting. :)
Grapes = Weintrauben in German, not Früchte (fruits).
i think he got confused, haha
that's what I was freaking out about, too
he was probably thinking about grapefruits. at least thats my impression.
How can you Freak out about Grapes??????????
I did not mean to suggest anything. You were cool in that video and I appriciate your input. Its funny, but I'm also an American schmuck. Some time ago ,I watched myself on the video and I noticed some hand movement that I would never thought existed. Good joke, it proves that good humor does not have to involve bad words and does not have to be offensive.
As a native German speaker I am extremely impressed by the person speaking German. He speaks it flawlessly...unless of course he is a native speaker then it makes sense ahaha. And the Yiddish I understood almost perfectly haha :).
Thanks for this video. I did never know both languages are similar like that.
shayn video. Ich komme aus Neuseeland. Ikh bin nisht a yid aber ikh ret a bisel Yiddish. Hob es in Melbourne Australien gelerent.
+ekksmann. Nice.
Even though I'm not totally fluent in German I still understand yiddish when it's written down!
I really enjoyed your video. Just wanted to point out that several words used by the yiddish-speaker were in reality hebrew - such as "shoe". In Yiddish one would say "shtunde" as in German . Other ex: war would be "krieg", not "milchama"; family is "familye", not "mishpacha"; friends is "freund", not "chaveirim"; etc making Yiddish a lot more similar sounding to German...
A lot of "rolling Kah's" in the Yiddish language!
Congrats! You figured out the story of every language! "X is just bad Y" is the most common way a language forms.
"grapes" sind Weintrauben
+Nicolai Czempin I thought so too... but what about carpenter? isn't that schreiner in German? I thought zimmerman is the guy who builds a wooden roof?
+unitrvl in Austria it's called "Tischler" i.e. someone who makes furniture, so I think you're right.
stoler is carpenter in Yiddish as far as i know, but we have the name tischler in Yiddish as last name, it means somebody who builds tables
Tischler is the same as Schreiner; just a regional variation. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tischler#Schreiner_und_Tischler
+unitvl. "Stoler" is a Slavic and a Russian word, adopted by Yiddish.
Good comparative linguistics.
We hope more good version and examples.
Yiddish is now really only spoken by Haredi Jews. In Israel we have some non-Haredi Ukrainian immigrants who still speak it among themselves and older people (also Ladino). I know it still has some prevalence there (in Ukraine). Also Sweden, Quebec, USA, etc. (Quebec has the only active Yiddish theatre). Switzerland and the Netherlands also have an older generation of speakers, mostly of Western-Yiddish, which is far less common than Eastern-Yiddish, which is actually growing.
+ForeverRepublic Wow, Western Yiddish is very rare. I wish I could hear a native speaker. I think that would be the most original form of Yiddish.
***** There is a handful of native speakers among the Jewish communities of Switzerland, France and Germany, most are over 50.
To the extent that it is disdained is, for some people, because it seems old-fashioned, how immigrant grandparents used to speak. Others had an inferiority complex. With urbanization into the German-speaking cities where the locals were educated in the national school system, Yiddish sounded as though its speakers were ignorant peasants. Some who despised Yiddish didn't even consider a real language. It was like a pidgin language for a foreign element to try to communicate with civilized people. On the other hand, it is uniquely Jewish, a vehicle of Jewish culture. Some of the traditional values which are rooted in the Torah (Hebrew Scripture) can't be conveyed very easily in other European languages. I know this difficulty from speaking English. For example, from an anthology authored in 1943, reprinted in 1995, is a recollection of a famous rabbi, Aryeh Leib (born? died 1811). He says that when he was three years old: 'Un er hat mir aroifgeleigt di heilige hant oif'n hartz'n, un fun yemolt on iz mir warm.' In English: 'And he [the elderly, saintly Grand Rabbi of that region] laid his holy hand on my heart, and since then I have been warm.' In German: 'Und er [ältere, heilige Großrabbiner von dieser Region] legte seine heilige Hand auf mein Herz, und seitdem habe ich warm gewesen' [by Google Translate]. Who is going to remember this history and explain it if we all cease to speak Yiddish? Rabbi Aryeh Leib became warm for the rest of his life? Warm in the heart -- enthusiastic, optimistic. In dem Maße, dass es verschmäht wird, für einige Leute, weil es altmodisch scheint, wie Einwanderer Großeltern zu sprechen. Andere hatten einen Minderwertigkeitskomplex. Mit Urbanisierung in den deutschsprachigen Städten, wo die Leute in der nationalen Schulsystem erzogen wurden, klang Jiddisch, als ob seine Sprecher unwissend Bauern waren. Einige, die Jiddisch verachtete hielt nicht einmal eine wirkliche Sprache. Es war wie ein Pidgin-Sprache für ein fremdes Element zu versuchen, mit zivilisierten Menschen zu kommunizieren. Auf der anderen Seite ist es eindeutig jüdisch, ein Fahrzeug der jüdischen Kultur. Einige der traditionellen Werte, die in der Tora (hebr Schrift) verwurzelt sind, können nicht sehr leicht in anderen europäischen Sprachen gefördert werden. Ich weiß, diese Schwierigkeit aus dem Englischen spricht. [German from Google Translate]Yiddish's earliest development predates the Nazis by 800-900 years. Does the fact that the Nazis developed sciences mean that afterwards there was a disdain for science? Jiddisch frühesten Entwicklung früher die Nazis von 800-900 Jahren. Bedeutet die Tatsache, dass die Nazis entwickelten Wissenschaften bedeuten, dass danach eine Verachtung für die Wissenschaft war? [German from Google Translate]
Veldrin, it *was* refused by the Jewish society, but *not* because it was related to German. When Israel was founded, there was a lot of debate for what its official language should be. Yiddish, as the majority of immigrants would be coming from Europe? Arabic, which the Jewish communities already living in Palestine spoke? Or Hebrew, which had been revived about a century earlier but was still only spoken by a minority of people? Eventually Hebrew won out, with this nationalistic idea of "speaking the ancestral Jewish language in the ancestral Jewish homeland".
So when Israel was founded, there was great pressure on all the Yiddish-speaking immigrants to stop speaking Yiddish and only speak Hebrew. Theatres refused to show plays in Yiddish, publishers refused to publish books in Yiddish, etc. It was all Hebrew Hebrew Hebrew. There was a saying: "עברי, דבר עברית!" (ivri, daber ivrit!), i.e. "Hebrew (person), speak Hebrew!". Yiddish was seen as the language of the diaspora, it represented Jews having to assimilate to the non-Jewish world. Speaking Hebrew again was seen as reclaiming your true independent Jewish identity.
The thing is, ultra-religious Jews believe that Hebrew is the "holy language", and is too holy to be used as a common everyday language. Therefore, they still use Yiddish as their everyday language, and only use Hebrew for religious purposes like prayer or studying Torah.
I'm actually quite surprised that Yiddish is the 4th biggest language in Israel. I would have guessed that the 4 most spoken languages would be Hebrew, Russian, English and Arabic, in that order. I guess though that since the ultra-religious Jews 1) have many many kids, and thus have a rapidly increasing population, and 2) live in isolated communities and rarely interact with the outside world, that the number of Yiddish speakers in Israel could actually be quite high, even though one would rarely encounter Yiddish in the street.
In Israel, Haredi Jews, speaks Jerusalemite dialect of Northern Yiddish.
I'm german native speaker and I could understand every single word of the yiddish speaker.
Some of the words which are used in Yiddish but not in standard german (for example "do" for "hier" (which means "here")) are used in Badisch, the german we use in south-west germany.
It sounds a bit like our Badisch language, maybe I culd understand it because of that :)
But the picture ad the music at the beginning which should show german culture just showed bavarian culture, which is NOT the same!
You should make an video where you compare Yiddish...Palatinate German and Pennsylvania Dutch.....would be more interessting
i think the experiment would have been better if the two people were told what to say out of the presence of the other. i wonder how much they would have understood each other
Yiddish has a lot of Hebrew, Polish and Russian words, not only German. As someone noted, it even has some French words depending on the speaker. There are many different words for the same thing depending on regional and even city dialects. I would be willing to bet that the Yiddish speaking American's family passed through France or Belgium before they landed in the US.
The wealth of loanwords is understandable: it was the language of Jewish people throughout Europe. It's kind of like the inverse of modern English, which eats words off of other languages it meets and spits its own words into their mouths.
Who knew philology could be so nasty? ;P
This all makes for such an interesting range of flavours in the language. Let's not even begin with Ladino &c!
Yeah I noticed the Yiddish speaker called beach "plage" which is French, whereas the German word is "Strand".
Marko Antonio Italian and Spanish can easily understand each other because their languages are very similar. but for a Italian speak with a Portuguese is much more complicated
So True ....im italo-romanian with yiddish ancestry from Bukowina Area :) yeh yiddish jiddisch idis or yiddisch have a lot of different way of spoking :)
Yet so different, yet I could understand some of the Yiddish, but I got lost. WOW thanks.
Yep, perfect high German. Do I hear a tiny, tiny Bavarian accent ? ;)
Leaving aside the improbability, this is an assertion that Jews owe it to Polish nationalists to speak Polish, but Poles do not owe it to Jews to learn Yiddish. (Improbable: the US is 10% Latino, as Poland was 10% Jewish. The Latinos speak English, for better or for worse). Speaking Polish isn't the real complaint, and never made any Jews more acceptable to Poles. The problem is, Jews aren't Catholics. In a Catholic Jesus Love Thy Neighbor society, "not Catholic" is a death sentence.