| The National Yiddish Book Center is doing a phenomenal job of
collecting old books and other materials (they recently came up
with 85000 pieces of sheet music in Boro Park!). They not only
collect and catalog the material, but they make sure it gets
distributed to libraries and other places. Starting as somebody's
hobby a few years ago, they have grown into a first-rate cultural
resource. They deserve much support.
Their newsletter is a real trip, a good attempt to have an English
newsletter with a real yiddische spirit.
David
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| Before noticing this new topic, I had posted a reply back in 254, which I have
now split into two parts. The part dealing with the nature of the language
Yiddish is here.
Calling Yiddish a dialect of German is correct, but it's more complex than that.
Its relationship to German is actually very similar to the relationship between
German and English.
Yiddish originated from the Franconian Middle High German dialect in the ninth
century. (Especially interesting to me, because the German dialect I learned
during two years in school in W�rzburg is Lower Franconian. Minor tangent --
do not confuse High German, meaning historically and linguistically those
dialects in the higher (southern) parts of Germany with the current word
"Hochdeutsch" which is the official common language). The word Yiddish
actually is short for Yidish Daytsh - J�disch Deutsch - Jewish German.
Beginning in the 14th century, extensive migrations of Yiddish speakers into
slavic territory occured, and the language, now cut off from its German source,
developed into a rich literary language. Yiddish has been influenced by the
surrounding Slavic languages since that time. (This is why I say that Yiddish
and English have a similar relationship to German -- they are effectively both
German dialects, but English was cut off from German much earlier and was
influenced by different languages such as French after the Norman conquest
in 1066.)
There are four principal dialects of Yiddish: Western (Switzerland, Alsace-
Lorraine, Bohemia, western Slovakia, and northern Hungary, and, until the
19th century, in Germany and the Netherlands), Central (Central and Southern
Poland), Northeastern (Lithuania and Belorussia), and Southeastern (the Ukraine
and Romania). Until the 18th century, literary Yiddish was based primarily on
the western dialects of the language, but in the 19th century a new standardized
language based on an eastern European dialect but making compromises among the
several dialects arose. The Yiddish dramatists Abraham Goldfaden and Joseph
Lerner were important in developing the language and its literature.
World War II dealt Yiddish a blow from which it will probably not recover.
/john
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