Speaking Yiddish on the Street
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- Опубліковано 10 тра 2012
- Kalman Weiser explains that when he speaks Yiddish in public he is often interrupted by Yiddish speakers. (Yiddish with subtitles)
To learn more about the Wexler Oral History Project, visit: www.yiddishbookcenter.org/tell...
i am a native yiddish speaker and its really nice to see people actually still care about the language
I would like to learn Yiddish as a Chinese 🎈
I love Hebrew and yiddish ♡♡
In which areas of the world do young people have Yiddish as a native language?
@@offrampt New York, Manchester, Antwerp etc... anywhere there's a sizeable Hassidic or Orthodox community
@@offrampt there are also Yiddish speaking communities all over Israel (Jerusalem, Bnei Brak), also in Ukraine, Sweden and Quebec. It's very rare to find young, secular Jews who know Yiddish. They probably only live in Ukraine and Russia.
omg i'm german and i understand a lot! this is so cool
im israeli and i dont understand 1 word ); this is so sad
+zISRAELz bederechclal
+michael benzur at the start
Yiddish probably carries more German words than Hebrew words. The Yiddish-speaking people originally lived in or near Germany, at least up until the Holocaust.
yes yiddish is way closer to german than to hebrew. it uses a lot of hebrew words because german uses a lot of hebrew words... really, tons and tons of them. if you read german, you could probably identify some words because they seem familiar
I speak German and I half-understand it, it's amazing! I'd love to learn it one day
+Faey Lep geht mir auch so...
Half way there
LP von Zupfgeigenhansel - Yiddische Lieder - sehr schöne musik mit soft Yiddisch.
As a german speaker, I'd love to learn it in one day
Same
An old joke: A Jewish man traveling on business from NY goes to eat at a delicatessen in Philadelphia. It's great, the food, the service: the waiter is Chinese, yet he speaks perfect Yiddish, takes the man's order, brings him his food, everything in beautiful Yiddish. At the end of the meal the man goes to pay the check, compliments the owner on the restaurant, and says, "And the waiter? Where did he learn to speak such wonderful Yiddish." The owner gestures with forefinger to lips: "Shhh... not so loud... He thinks we're teaching him English."
the kind of joke your grandpa tells you and you fake laugh out of pity
Alte meisse
yener khinezisher man hot a mazl! Ikh ken nish keyn yidish.
the chinese waiter doesn't want to learn English? and he lives in NY? I don't get the joke
The Chinese waiter WANTS to learn English. But his teachers are the restaurant owners. They are instead teaching him Yiddish to help with their business. :)
A mere 80 years ago, it was the daily vernacular of 12 million people between Vilnius and Odessa. Not just Hasidim. Literature, theatre, journals, newspapers, all in Yiddish. A rich and vibrant culture. All lost forever.
Danke für Deine Geschichte.
Liebe Grüße aus Deutschland.
Sounds like a perfect hybrid between Hebrew and German. I speak Hebrew, would love to learn Yiddish. It is so sad such a beautiful language is no longer widely spoken.
ForeverRepublic I agree. Zionists tried to eliminate that language due to the Holocaust ( as we know.... there is a similarity between German language and Yiddish. And Survivors might have wanted to remove any kind of things are related to German culture at the time. )
It is the first time for me to listen to Yiddish. It sounds very beautiful to me.
It’s not a hybrid at all. It is German. It contains Hebrew and Polish/Lithuanian loan words but it is essentially German.
@@crimeandpunishment1130 No its because Hebrew is much more important then Yiddish
In New York it’s alive and well. You’ll actually hear some of the Hasidic and orthodoxy talk with a thick German like accent. Here’s the kicker, they were born here in the states
Irmi Schopf Its not the heartbeat of judaism, it may be a lifeblood of Ashkenazi Judaism, but not the whole.
he speaks a lovely yiddish
I am not Jewish and didn't even knew Yiddish was a language until I came to N.Y. I love the way it sounds especially when spoken by old, European Jews. I love their mannerisms, the way they use their hands and facial expressions. Wish I could speak it.!
I first heard Yiddish in a W 79th Street bagel place in NYC. I was thrilled to hear it and had a conversation about it (in English) with the group of older people.
They are still teaching it at the Workers Circle: circle.org/what-we-do/yiddish-language/
You can learn Yiddish. Duolingo, Workman's Circle, YIVO and other places offer online instruction. Check it out. It's my favorite language.
I understand and speak Pennsylvania Dutch, the language of the Old Order Amish. It actually has no Dutch in it. Someone in the US misheard Deitsch and thought it was Dutch. It’s a combination of Low German, Ladino, English, and, in some Amish, the Swiss version of German spoken in the early 1800’s. At any rate, I can understand Yiddish well enough to get the general idea of what’s being said. I’ve studied elementary Hebrew and can read and write the alef-beis, therefore, I’m able to read some Yiddish as well.
Actually "Dutch" was just the word at the time that Anglos used to describe anyone from the Germanic-language area. Douglas Madenford explains it very well on his channel where he teaches Pennsylvanisch Deitsch.
I understand Yiddish , My parents and grandparents spoke it , even though they were born in North America. I wish I learned it as kid and am happy to hear younger people speak it .
+lasbagman1 very nice
Did they not want to teach it to you? I mean it's great you understand it a bit
lasbagman1 zeir shein
Yiddish is probaly the most expressive language , the words have heart in them
R.I.P To the officer, and God bless his family
Let me introduce you to Punjabi
It was so wonderful to see such a young and handsome guy like you talking the mamaloschen!
Ahhhh, hearing Yiddish is music to my ears!
I hope that this language is kept alive -- it kept a group of people together who might have perished without the commonality of this language.
Hebrew as a spoken language was brought back - and should also be learned, especially in order to pray in Hebrew.
Come to Williamsburg, Brooklyn you'll hear plenty of it
Whoever you are, you speak beautifully and have the accent I remember from my grandparents.
It's lovely to hear ..
I first heard Yiddish in the opening scenes of The Cobbler and as a student of German I was amazed at how much I understood. Blew my mind! It's a really cool sounding language and I'd love to learn how to write it.
You write it with Hebrew characters.
My grandmother was born in Prague in 1930 and still speaks Yiddish. I grew up on the northside of Chicago and you can still hear it spoken in some of the Jewish areas.
I think it's beautiful, people sharing their culture. I don't understand much Yiddish, but I love to hear it. This is what New York is all about :)
To me, it's the most beautiful language. It sounds so friendly an d makes me feel warm. I speak German and can understand quite a bit.
It's good to hear what my great grandparents really sounded like.
Mick White same
Sounds like Dutch or German with a Arab Accent
thats actually a allemaniac dialect. listen to swiss german, it will probably sound arab to you too
Wario Toad 32 that's pretty funny because it's not related to arabic at all, it's a jewish language
يوسف صالح Listing to it more it sounds like German from like 1000 years ago but Yiddish is pretty close to Old or Middle High German.
Both are semitic languages, though. So they are related.
Yiddish sounds nothing like Dutch
Yiddish and other Judeo-something languages are so awesome, even here in Greece, my grandmother speaks little Romaniotika(Judeo-Greek) really amazing...
I never heard that term-Romaniotika Judeo-Greek.
me and my family are yiddish speakers and we get stared at allot but it makes me proud to be hasidic Jew
So cool! I learned German all through high school and college. I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of words I was able to understand during this interview.
As a German native speaker I can understand Yiddish really good, and it sounds very related to the Bavarian dialect I speak.
I speak German and could understand a lot. Yiddish should be preserved at all costs. Amazing cultural heritage!
It is not "a dialect," it is a full independent language. If you had any idea the sheer size of Yiddish dialectology, and how many variants there are from how many locations and time frames, you would understand how little sense referring to it as a dialect makes.
There is no clear definition about what makes a languages versus a dialect. The Russian, Jewish, German, American linguist Weinreich said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
@@detlefkarPrecisely. The difference is a purely political one. Nobody speaks any language without a dialect. The much vaunted, allegedly 'correct' UK accent known as Received Pronunciation is just another spoken dialect. Just listen to an elderly upper class Brit pronounce 'plastic' as 'plawstic'.
Native german speaker here, I've noticed that the more I listen to Yiddish the more I understand it.
***** Around 70% of the conversation.
I speak Yiddish myself and the more I see people speaking in German, the more I realize I understand and know a lot of it already from knowing Yiddish. The Yiddish language is at least 80% Germanic after all.
Yes, and German also has many Yiddish words in it, like ausgekochtes Schlitzohr, Schmock and many others.
***** Yeah I know those words.
>"native german"
>turkish surname
Like poetry.
This is so wierd for me, both a Hebrew and German speaker. My mind is attempting to constantly interpret as one of the 2 languages
It is vital that Yiddish be preserved for future generations. It’s a great pity that they don’t learn it in the Jewish Schools in line with Hebrew. Yiddish songs are fantastic to listen to as they often tell a story. Shalom
People saying it sounds like German, well, Yiddish is a descendant of High-German.
That's true. In Germany there are some places where the dialect sounds like yiddish.
+ajhare2 Not of High German (which is modern German) but of Middle High German, an earlier form of German, spoken roughly from 1050AD to 1350AD.
Seleuce Thank you correcting my mistake :)
+Seleuce And also a specific south-western kind of medieval German. To a certain degree, it still resembles some dialects in south-western Germany, for instance by using the suffix -le as diminutive , some irregular verb forms and certain expressions (like "gass" for "street" in general, whereas "Gasse" in modern high German only denotes a narrow street).
SiggiNebel Yes, modern Schwäbisch dialect is the German dialect which comes very close to Jiddish. People who speak Schwäbisch usually are able to understand up to 90% of Jiddish without having ever heard it before, with some Hebrew knowledge they will even fully understand. That goes both ways.
Btw, I hope you make another video and speak on any random subject - in Yiddish. I'd love to find out how many words that I remember. Again, yours is a beautiful accent.
I almost wanted to cry listening to this for some reason. Thinking about my Ashkenazi heritage and what my yiddish-speaking ancestors must have sounded like, the same ones who escaped concentration camps, and came here through Ellis Island from Hungary.
If your ancestors weren't from North-east Hungary or Transylvania most likely they spoke Hungarian or German, not Yiddish.
I speak some German and I can understand a lot of this, it's neat! Especially when my uncle and cousin speak Yiddish I understand them fully and it's C O O L
im german and i can understand some of it, mostly nouns which are exact to german words.
but for me this sounds very much like a mix of swiss german (schwizerdütsch) and swabian (schwäbisch). when 2 people have a conversation in these dialects, i understand even less then in yiddish, so that makes sense
@Irmi Schopf For those who don't understand.............do you also understand bavarian? the Bavarian dialect contains a lot of Yiddish words!
Als schwabe kann ich dir sagen dass sich schwäbisch so nicht anhört, schweizer-deutsch wohl eher
@@patrickweiler3fc09 According to Max Weinreich, Yiddish originally emerged in Jewish communities between Trier, Regensburg, Speyer 1000 years ago, so linguistically it is based on a mix of Bairisch, Allemannic and Moselle-Franconian.
But, what neither Schwytzerdütsch nor Bavarian have is those many Hebrew and Slavic loanwords and even grammatical influence that Yiddish has. They are woven so deeply into the language and form such and integral aspect of it, that Yiddish is quite different from any of the extant German dialects.
Maybe the forms of German spoken by German settlers at the Black Sea, the Volga or in Ukrainian Galicia before the war had a similiarly strong Slavic influence, but I'm not sure about that, as there is very little evidence of those dialects that survived.
Yiddish is only influenced heavily by MHG. (Middle High German)
As a Dutchie I can understand 80% of spoken German but almost nothing of Yiddish, while Germans can understand a lot of yiddish... The only word I understood was "menschen/mensen" (people)
I love listening to yiddish. I wish I had learned it when I was a kid.
It's never too late. I'm 84 and I've been taking Yiddish conversation courses for the last six months.
I speak German and up until now I've thought Dutch were the closest language to German. But now I'm convinced it's Yiddish. So much I can understand from it, wow!
Yiddish is based on Medieval High German (Upper German). It also contains some Aramaic, Hebrew (and later some Slavic words as Jews migrated eastward). There are various regional pronunciations. Here is another example. Blaybn gezunt, un shtark ;)
ua-cam.com/video/K9gG37zLGdQ/v-deo.html
Native german speaker here. It's funny because I can understand a lot. To my ears that sounds limilar to the way I heard old german people from Silesia or East Prussia speak
Eric0816 Yiddish is simply High German from the Middle Ages, si of course a native German speaker can understand. Except for the Hebrew and Polish loan words.
You’ve heard Silesian German dialect? Wow I’ve met 1 person in my lifetime who speaks it. Silesian German is basically Yiddish without the Hebrew aspect
What a beautiful thing. I wish I could speak it but I don't know whether Assimil's course on Yiddish is good enough for teaching myself some of this amazing language.
Assimil's course material for most languages is great! It's been 2 years so I have no idea if you've realized this for yourself in the intervening time, but anyways although it can't replace immersion and you only get what you put in it, by my memory their Yiddish material is pretty good :>
You won't pick up dialectal features that way (e.g. many American Chassidish dialects basically ate huge parts of their grammar under the influence of English) and much of the Yiddish you're likely to encounter isn't YIVO, but it's not like it's some impenetrable forest -- you'll adjust c:
I think it might be a little bit harder for a non-native but really it's a very little bit, mostly just sounds and vocabulary and some tiny tiny bits of grammar.
Best of luck! Or if you've already done some learning then how did it go?
It's just amaizing...it sounds so similar Dutch language.
i´m austrian and i find it very interresting to listen - i too understand more than i thought
Once my grandmother passed away so did the Yiddish that was spoken in our home I am so sorry to say.
Yiddish is about 80 percent medieval German,15 percent Hebrew,3percent Slavonic and 2percent Romance languages.
I just started to learn Hebrew 9 months ago and it sounds mixed with German and sort of Hebrew. What sounded a bit like Hebrew to my ears is when he makes the Z sound and the throat sound "Khet".
I love Hebrew and yiddish♡♡
שלום!
I would like to see Yiddish written in the English alphabet in something like this, because then you can see the relationship. You can clearly hear the Germanic influence, of course.
Come to Williamsburg in Brooklyn NYC we would love to talk to you in Yiddish
I am learning German and I understand what he's saying (almost).
Beautifull.
eich dank deier asach , eich hob lieb Yiddish,
I would love to learn Yiddish someday
He has a good Yiddish. 👍
He speaks mainly a Galician Yiddish and sprinkles of Lithuanian Yiddish lol
Very interesting.
I'm from Lithuania
My grandma and grandpa used to fight (in a friendly way) about him being a Galicianer and her a Litvak! :-)
@Jimmy Kudo They didn't speak Yiddish in Persia
Galician? Wow. That has to predate 1492, yes?
Thanx for the reminder...😁🥰🤭🤗😏👏👏👏😊
Something about Yiddish speaks to me. I tacitly understand the whole Germanic vs Slavic but Slavic has always touched my soul almost like a racial memory. TLDR: I like Yiddish
I just looked up Judeo-Greek and found out that almost zero people speak it anymore. Now I'm super curious about your family history and your grandmother's life story.
I wonder if I keep speaking Spanglish, maybe it'll turn into it's own language tambien?
Maybe it will. Look up Ladino.
Yeah Ladino is way more like spanish than german is like yiddish
i like the way yiddish sounds
Kann mir jemand, bitte Beispiele geben, welche Hebräische Wörte es in deutschen gibt? Danke.
I used to write letters to the relatives for my grandparents. One family had the surname of Wexler which BOUBBE and ZADDY always pronounced as Vexler. I thought Vexler was their actual name.
"Yiddish: Phrase Dictionary and Study Guide" published by Language/30 Eductional Services Washington DC 1995, explains the basic grammar of Yiddish. It is easy to understand and use actively. Many phrases for social interaction are included. The international catalogue number is: ISBN 0 910542 90 2.
It amazes me to think that I followed this about 50% from an O level in German from '76......
Wow, my first time hearing this language. It sounds so much like German!
I'm Dutch and I understand almost everything he is saying. Good to know!
Wat lul je nou stommerd, je verstaat hooguit een paar woorden maar voor de rest niks.
I took a few Hebrew lessons with an online tutor. I've watched a documentary or two in modern Hebrew. What has struck about Hebrew is how it seems to sound unlike any other language. It doesn't really sound like Arabic, except for maybe some of the rough kchh sounds in some words. It doesn't sound like German. It doesn't sound like any other language. BUT after watching this video, I am convinced that the phonology of Yiddish came to influence modern Hebrew a lot (either directly or indirectoy). It's interesting because Hebrew is a Semitic language with similarities to Arabic grammar, in the verb roots grammar pattern, for example. Yet, its sound is unique. It's like Yiddish came from German mixed in with some Hebrew vocabulary and then fully evolved into Modern Hebrew with the rise of Herzl's movement in late 19th Century and the resurrection of Hebrew as a spoken language bot confined to liturgical and religious use. But when spoken, the phonology is definitely highly influenced by Yiddish, yet doesn't sound German. Fascinating.
as a german I had to watch it twice to understand it. but then it sounded really clear to me. only some parts are really off.
It is a. beautiful language ,I wish I spoke it.
I don't speak Yiddish, but I felt like I could almost understand the Yiddish in this video. My mother, born in the US, and my grandparents, born in eastern Europe, spoke Yiddish. My father understood it but didn't speak it. It seemed like they used Yiddish when as their secret language when they didn't want us kids to hear what they were saying. Also certain jokes or concepts were much better expressed in Yiddish. I also remember how, by the time I was a teen, my grandmother once gave me something handwritten in Yiddish to translate into English or Hebrew. I couldn't since I never learned Yiddish. She then asked: "Don't they teach you anything useful in school?" I felt bad since I didn't know it, so I took what I thought was the closest, which was Russian. My grandmother could speak a little Russian with me, but I felt like she was a bit offended to speak it with me. Perhaps she would have preferred that I knew Yiddish.
I wish I had learned Yiddish from my family when I was young. I'd like to learn it, and maybe I will.
Hearing Yiddish spoken is like music to me, takes me back 70 years to Brooklyn. I can understand most of what I hear but I can't speak Yiddish, much to my dismay.
Which dialect of Yiddish is this?
im hearing german, dutch, arab, brazilian and russian all at the same time. how's this even possible????
This is Yiddish with Hebrew accent.
It does. I'm swiss so my native language is swiss-german and I said it sounds A BIT like swiss-german, not that it sounds completely like swiss-german.
This has been written about in scholarly articles
Hi, can anyone out there help me translate a hand-written Yiddish letter from my grandfather into English? I can help you in exchange with English, French or Dutch!
I know a little Plattdeutsch and I could understand a little bit of this. Kool.
Speaking German as a 2nd language,I get most of what that dude is saying, it s amazing. It has a Dutch pronounciation, with german words.
This is the weirdest sounding language I’ve ever heard. I love it.
Shalom aleykom; Yorkshire Deedaar here. Yiddish blended with Derbyshire Basque and smattered with Dutch/English. I have been studdying Yiddish quite recently, after an interest in my Sephardic herritage. My name is Dannan, but i was not told it untill aged 8. Qt; ''Always remember Son. That You are of the tribe of wandering Jews''. Then we get handed a silver trinket for remembrance. An uncomfortable imposition, for a child who wants to fit in with peers. A child doesnt like to be the odd one out. Now those things dont matter. I tell my children the same. I want to learn.
Well, some of us will never fit in with peers. You might as well let your freak flag fly.
Ladino was the language of the Sephardic Jews, not Yiddish.
A strange mixture that sounds like a cross between German and Dutch. I first heard Yiddish in a movie and was amazed to realise that my junior college German allowed me to understand quite á bit of what was said in Yiddish.
My great grandparents spoke Yiddish
recently I became interested in this language that I was so ignorant of. My grandmother used to speak to me in Yiddish and my grandfather ladino haha.
I am not a practitioner of Judaism, in fact here in Spain there are hardly any synagogues but I want to get closer to the community.
So if i now ladino i know some spanish and if i know yiddish i know some german 🤣
a groysn dank!
he was doing ethnographic research over 11 years ago! Very interesting! Wonder what he was looking into. 🤔
Me a german: understands almost every word
It's so... Curious. As someone who only speaks English, Romanian and Greek, at certain points it sounds like German, then it sounds like Hebrew, and in-between there's certain sentences where it sounds kinda Russian-ish.
I am learning modern Hebrew. It struck me how phonetically similar Yeddish and German are to Hebrew.
I am learning German, 2 years now. And Hebrew, 1 month now.
It is basically German and has little to no Hebrew ties.
I speak and understand german, and I'll say that I understand about 80% of what he said.
Looks like a mix of the guy who plays harry potter and the guy who plays loki in the avengers
I love all languages but speak only English, my mother spoke Gaelic so I understand the love of ancient languages.
This is nice, a Yiddish speaker with a good accent (not American accent). Antwerp has a huge Yiddish speaking population. Apparently Antwerp has one of the largest 'eruvs' in the world (whole city center), which allows Jews to not break Sabbath rules.
I've only ever heard a word or two of Yiddish so was confused how it originated from German. Listening to this I can hear the German influence now
Well, the thing is, written Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet and doesn't follow modern German spelling conventions, so the spellings of Yiddish words in Roman characters tend to be phonetic representations rather than reflections of the actual history of the word. In English we tend to write "shtetl," but the German Wikipedia page has "Schtetl." I've never seen "Stettl" before, but I suppose that one makes phonetical sense too.
Its mainly German but with Hebrew words as well
or the dialect that is spoken in Tyrol
That's not quite true-Yiddish emerged as a distinct language in the late Middle Ages, around the end of the Middle High German period. Since then, it's been heavily influenced both by the isolation you mention and by contact with Slavic languages. German speakers have told me they understand some Yiddish, but the two languages still differ a fair bit in grammar and vocabulary. I also thought "shtetl" was a diminutive of "shtot," the word for "town" (from German "Stadt"), but maybe that's BS.
How much part German speakers can understand this?
A German speaker told me it’s 85% the same. I don’t know where he got that number, and I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t speak Yiddish or German but I know a few words here and there, and I can pick out equally well from both languages.
If you are judging from the sample spoken here, there is a mere handful of words from either semitic or slavic origin. It's almost completely made up of germanic lexical choices, so this sample would be intelligible to a German speaker. Not so with all speakers. Depending on where it comes from and what's being discussed, the non-germanic element can rise to 25%, 35% or more words of nongermanic origin, and the sentence construction can take on a far more Semitic or Slavic character as well.
manthasagittarius1 Excatly. I wish people wouldn't think everyone in Germany can understand Yiddish.
they are both derived from high german.
It’s a mix of dutch and german with some hebrew slangs in it. Pretty cool language and it sounds noble.