The Origins of Yiddish (2014)

I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...

The Jerusalem Post on Yiddish.[1]

Yiddish speakers today are mostly ultra-orthodox Jews. The language binds them together across country boundaries, and cuts them off from the surrounding society. Even in Israel, which runs on Hebrew.

This is recently relevant as the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox must end.[2] Many will speak only Yiddish. The IDF has a crash one month course in Hebrew for foreign Jews who want to join and some other ethnic groups, so they will cope. Israel nominally has compulsory military service, but the ultra-orthodox have been exempted so they can supposedly study Torah. When that started in the 1940s, only 4,000 were in that status. Now it's 1.4 million. There's currently political unrest in Israel over this.

[1] https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/A-bisl-Yiddis...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-court-ruling-ag-t...

From my understanding, the Jewish European languages, including Yiddish and Ladino (judeo-spanish) have a short of frozen in time quality.

I know more about Ladino because I know Spanish and am always interested in romance languages. Many (though by no means all) of the differences between that and modern Castilian are that Ladino has not kept current with Spanish phonetic changes from the 1500s onwards. I believe I've also read Yiddish has a similar quality of seeming, from a distance, like it has some characteristics that might have been seen among German speaking gentiles in prior times.

I think that when you see separations of populations, you sometimes see the preservation of "archaic" language features.

The article is quite interesting, but I have to say I don't understand why Yiddish being a Slavic language would suddenly mean that all European Jews are Iranian; the Slavic languages aren't descended from anything spoken in Iran in the first century CE. That really feels like it came out of nowhere.

These discussions generally do not cover Knaanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language. Based on Old Czech, it is the first language like Yiddish or Ladino and predates all of them by like 500 years.

If you are into this I reccomend the book Outwitting History; great read. https://shop.yiddishbookcenter.org/products/outwitting-histo...

"Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter) extending over parts of Germany and France.[29] There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish#Origins

I didn't know any serious linguist ever questioned that Yiddish is a variant of German. One might ask if Germanic and other IE languages carry some old Afroasiatic Neolithic stratum from before the spread out of Anatolia / Southern Caucasus but that's a much deeper question.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830501

>> His mother survived the war partially due to the fact that she was a native speaker of Polish and didn’t have the distinctive Yiddish accent, which is precisely what sent many Jews to their graves as the surest means of identifying them as Jews. (Her horrific experiences during the Holocaust are chronicled in a 1983 video from the Holocaust Memorial Center oral history project.) The lack of accent, coupled with the fact that neither of his parents looked stereotypically Jewish, enabled them to pass as Catholic Poles.

A Shibboleth!

⁴Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” ⁵The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” ⁶they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’ ” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.

Judges 12 4-6:

https://biblehub.com/niv/judges/12.htm