home Healthy eating What is the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish? History of languages, alphabet. Yiddish is a Germanic language, but also Jewish

What is the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish? History of languages, alphabet. Yiddish is a Germanic language, but also Jewish

All over the world.

Yiddish arose in Central and Eastern Europe in the 10th-14th centuries on the basis of Central German dialects (70-75%) with extensive borrowings from Hebrew and Aramaic (about 15-20%), as well as from Romance and Slavic languages (in dialects reaches 15%) . The fusion of languages gave rise to an original grammar that made it possible to combine words with a German root and syntactic elements of Semitic and Slavic languages.

About the name

The word "Yiddish" literally means "Jewish" in Yiddish. Historically also - taich, Yiddish-taich, (from ייִדיש־טײַטש‎) - “folk-Jewish”, or according to another version - “interpretation” in connection with the tradition of oral interpretation of Jewish texts when studying them. (The word Taich is related to the words Deutsch and Dutch, but is not equivalent, for example, to the adjective “German” in the sense of belonging to the German nation. The word itself is older than such a concept, and simply means in the original sense “folk”, that is, Taich in this context means colloquial).

In the 19th century and early 20th century, Yiddish was often called “jargon” in Russian. The term "Jewish-German" was also used.

Classification issues

Traditionally, Yiddish is considered a Germanic language, historically belonging to the Middle German dialects of the High German cluster of the West Germanic group.

Slavic language?

In 1991, Tel Aviv University linguistics professor Paul Wexler, based on an analysis of the structure and vocabulary of Yiddish, put forward a hypothesis that classifies Yiddish as a Slavic rather than a Germanic language. Later, in the book “Ashkenazi Jews: A Slavic-Turkic People in Search of Jewish Identity,” Wexler proposed revising the entire theory of the origins of Ashkenazis, Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewry. He views them not as descendants of people from the Middle East, but as an indigenous European people descended from the descendants of the Western Slavs - Lusatian Sorbs, Polabs, etc. Later, Wexler included among the supposed ancestors of Eastern European Jews also the Khazars and numerous Slavs who lived in Kievan Rus in IX-XII centuries.

Wexler's theory did not gain support in the scientific community. In academic circles (including at Tel Aviv University, where P. Wexler works) it is viewed as a curiosity generated by the author’s own political views. At the same time, some researchers believe that the role of the Slavic component in Yiddish is perhaps somewhat more significant than previously thought.

Linguogeography

Range and numbers

Beginning of the 21st century

Determining the current number of Yiddish speakers is very difficult. During the 20th century, most Ashkenazi Jews switched to the language of the countries where they live. However, from the censuses of some countries it is possible to obtain the number of Yiddish speakers.

According to the census results Hungary Of the 701 Jews, 276 (40%) speak Hebrew at home. It is possible that this is an error in the interpretation of the concept of “language of one’s nationality” and either all of them meant Yiddish, or some of them meant Yiddish, and some of them meant Hebrew (as in the Russian census).

Based on the above data, the total number of Yiddish speakers in the world can be estimated at 500 thousand people. Similar data are given in some other sources: 550-600 thousand. At the same time, there are much higher estimates: from 2 million (KEE) to 3,142,560, but it is not explained on the basis of what methodology they are made.

Sociolinguistic information

Although among the majority of Jews Yiddish has given way to the languages of the surrounding population, deeply religious Jews (Haredi and especially Hasidim) communicate among themselves primarily in Yiddish, because, according to their concepts, Hebrew is a sacred language, and one should not talk about secular things in the holy language.

Dialects

Yiddish dialects

Isoglosses of Yiddish dialects

Yiddish consists of a large number of dialects, which are usually divided into Western and Eastern dialects. The latter, in turn, are divided into three main dialects:

northern(so-called Belarusian-Lithuanian dialect: Baltic states, Belarus, northeastern regions of Poland, western Smolensk region of Russia and part of Chernigov region of Ukraine),
southeastern(so-called Ukrainian dialect: Ukraine, Moldova, eastern regions of Romania, primarily Moldova and Bukovina, the southern part of the Brest region of Belarus and the Lublin voivodeship of Poland)
central(or southwestern, so-called Polish dialect: central and western Poland, Transylvania, Carpathian regions of Ukraine).

There are also transitional dialects.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a single put the sprach a common language spread mainly in universities.

In the USSR, the grammatical basis of the literary standard was Ukrainian dialect, while phonetics was based on northern dialect. Theatrical Yiddish, in accordance with the tradition leading from A. Goldfaden, corresponds to the average Ukrainian dialect(sometimes referred to in this context as Volynian). Western Yiddish, which some researchers (eg P. Wexler) consider as a separate language spoken by Jews in the western regions of Germany, Switzerland and Holland, is practically dead today.

Regional varieties of Yiddish show great variation in the vowel system, ranging from the opposition between short open i and long closed i, to patterns with complete parallel rows of short and long vowels. Dialects also contain ü and diphthongs ending in -w. However, literary Yiddish exhibits the greatest diversity in the consonant system. Some dialects lack the h phoneme, some differentiate fewer palatals, and Western Yiddish lacks a voicing distinction. Articulation varies in different regions from apical to (predominantly) uvular.

Writing

Spelling

Yiddish uses "square" writing. There are several variants of Yiddish spelling. The writing is based on the Hebrew alphabet with some standard diacritics: אַ, אָ, בֿ, וּ, יִ, ײַ, כּ, פּ, פֿ, שֹ, תּ Most words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic have retained their traditional spelling. Rest lexicon is a system of one-to-one correspondence between sounds, on the one hand, and letters or their combinations, on the other. At the same time, established traditions are preserved, concerning, for example, the graphics of certain final letters, or the rules about the initial unpronounceable א.

In the process of evolution in Yiddish, there has been a growing tendency to systematically use the letter א to represent the sound /a/, אָ to represent /o/; כ is used to convey /x/, וו - to convey /v/. Over time, the use of the letter ע as a symbol of the vowel sound /e/ became established. This innovation, characteristic of the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, which lost the consonant sound indicated by the letter ע, dates back to the 14th century. The methods of rendering diphthongs and unstressed vowels, as well as the rules of word division, varied significantly in different periods of history. Nowadays the diphthong /oi/ is indicated by the combination וי, the diphthong /ei/ by the combination יי, the diphthong /ai/ by the same combination with an additional diacritic sign - ײַ (the diacritic sign is not used in all publications). /ž/ and /č/ are represented by the digraphs זש and טש, respectively.

Some publishers still do not comply with all the rules. The IVO spelling is considered standard, but religious publishing houses prefer the old system. In many newspapers, old proofreaders refuse to change their long-established skills dating back to pre-World War II Europe. Since the 1920s In the Soviet Union (and then in communist and pro-Soviet publishing houses in a number of other countries), the principle of historical and etymological spelling of words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin was rejected and the phonetic principle was adopted, which denies the traditional adherence to Hebrew and Aramaic spelling when writing words from these languages. In 1961, the USSR returned to writing final letters.

From the history of language

In medieval Germany, there was a thieves' jargon "kukumloshen", based on Yiddish.

Literature

Dictionaries and monographs

Russian-Jewish (Yiddish) dictionary: Ok. 40,000 words. Compiled by R. Ya. Lerner, E. B. Loitsker, M. N. Maidansky, M. A. Shapiro. - 2nd ed., stereotype. - M.: Rus. lang., 1989. - 720 with ISBN 5-200-00427-6 - Contains an overview of Yiddish grammar

Max Weinreich “Here you go” ( geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh- history of the Hebrew language), in 4 vols. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research: New York, 1973.

Translated into English:

Max Weinreich. History of the Yiddish Language, in 2 vols. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1980. ISBN 0-226-88604-2
Max Weinreich. History of the Yiddish Language, in 2 vols. (first complete translation). Yale University Press: New Haven, 2007. ISBN 978-0-300-10887-3 and ISBN 0-300-10887-7

Neil G. Jacobs. Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005, ISBN 0-521-77215-X

Literature in Yiddish

Category:Yiddish writers
Category:Yiddish poets

Notes

Jewish languages
Afroasiatic languages
Hebrew	Ancient Hebrew Medieval Hebrew Modern Hebrew
Hebrew-Aramaic languages	Old Judean Samaritan-Aramaic Galilean-Aramaic East Jordanian Babylonian Judeo-Aramaic Palestinian Judeo-Aramaic Zahu Barzani Urmia Erbil Hulaula

When it comes to the language of the Jews, everyone immediately thinks of Hebrew. In fact, the Jews gave the world 2 more languages: Yiddish and Ladino.

What are their similarities and differences?

Hebrew, the language of the Jews, which has existed for over three thousand years; The oldest dateable literary monuments of Hebrew, preserved by the biblical tradition, date back to the 12th century. or 13th century BC e. (for example, Song of Deborah, Judges 5:2–31), the first inscription is presumably from the 10th century. BC e.

Hebrew is a language of Semitic origin. In addition to Hebrew, the Semitic languages also include Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), Ethiopian and some other languages of Western Asia. The Phoenician and Ugaritic languages, which together with it belong to the Canaanite branch of the Semitic group of languages, are especially close to Hebrew.

Largely due to the fact that Hebrew belongs to the Semitic group of languages, Jews were mistakenly classified as Semitic peoples. This is where anti-Semitism came from; the Jews themselves are representatives of Hasidic peoples.

The history of Hebrew has six periods:

Biblical (until the 2nd century BC) - books were written in it Old Testament(Hebrew ha-Sfarim or TaNaKh);

Post-biblical - scrolls of the dead seas ( Qumran manuscripts), Mishna and Tosefta (the influence of Aramaic and Greek can be traced);

Talmudic (Masoretic) - lasted from the 3rd to the 7th century, when Hebrew ceased to be a language everyday communication, but survived as a language of writing and religion. Monuments of this period are some parts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds;

Medieval (until the 18th century) - diverse religious literature, works on Kabbalah, scientific and legal treatises, secular poetry. During this period, the traditional pronunciation of various Jewish communities took shape: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemenite, Baghdad, etc.;

The era of Haskalah (Hebrew “enlightenment”, cultural and educational Jewish movement of the 18th-19th centuries) - Hebrew becomes the language of high literature, enriched with neologisms;

Modern - from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

Briefly about the features of the Hebrew alphabet. For writing in this language, the Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew “alef-bet”) is used in a version of the square font, consisting of 22 consonant letters. Five letters have an additional style for the final letters in a word. Four consonant letters in modern Hebrew are used to write vowels (these letters are called "reading mothers").

Complete recording of vowels is possible with the help of vowels (Hebrew “nekudot”) - a system of dots and dashes invented during the Masoretic period, standing next to the consonant letter. In addition, Hebrew letters can be used for numerical writing, since each letter has a numerical correspondence (gematria).

Writing is done from right to left; there is no difference between uppercase and lowercase letters, which is typical for European languages. When writing, letters, as a rule, are not connected to each other.

IN late XIX century, the process of reviving Hebrew began, which by that time had long since become dead (this is the name for languages that are not used for everyday communication and are not native to anyone). Hebrew is the only example that a dead language can be made alive! A significant role in the revival of Hebrew belongs to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (aka Leizer-Yitzchok Perelman). Ben Yehuda's family became the first Hebrew-speaking family in Palestine, and Eliezer's eldest son Ben Zion (later named Itamar Ben Avi) became the first child to speak Hebrew as his native language.

The pronunciation of Sephardi Jews has become the norm for the pronunciation of modern Hebrew. In the 1980s, Hebrew became the language of instruction at the Alliance School (Jerusalem). In 1884, Ben-Yehuda founded the newspaper Ha-Tzvi (Russian: Gazelle; Eretz Ha-Tzvi - Land of Gazelle - one of the ancient poetic names of Israel). He is also responsible for the founding of the Hebrew Committee, which became the Hebrew Academy in 1920, as well as the creation of the “Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.” Thanks to the work of Ben Yehuda and others like him, Hebrew is now spoken by approximately 8 million people.

Yiddish (from jüdisch, "Jewish")- the language of European Ashkenazi Jews, historically belonging to the Middle German dialects of the High German subgroup of the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. Yiddish appeared in the upper Rhine between the 10th and 14th centuries, incorporating a large array of words from Hebrew and Aramaic, and later from Romance and Slavic languages.

Yiddish has a unique grammar, within which the German root is combined with elements of other languages. Slavic elements were also introduced into the Germanic sound system of the language - for example, sibilant Slavic consonants.

Before World War II, 11 million Jews spoke Yiddish. Today the exact number of native speakers is unknown. Census data from the late 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century suggest that greatest number Yiddish-speaking Jews live in Israel (more than 200 thousand people), the USA (about 180 thousand), Russia (more than 30 thousand), Canada (more than 17 thousand) and Moldova (about 17 thousand people). In total, according to various sources, there are from 500 thousand to 2 million people living on the planet who speak Yiddish.

Yiddish has Western and Eastern dialects, within which they distinguish a large number of dialects. Among Hasidim in the United States, a common dialect arose based on the Transylvanian version of Yiddish; in the USSR, a variant with the phonetics of the Belarusian-Lithuanian (northern) and the grammar of the Ukrainian (southeastern) dialect was considered as the standard Yiddish language. In the 1920s, Yiddish was one of the four state languages Byelorussian SSR.

Yiddish, like Hebrew, uses the square Hebrew alphabet. The direction of the letter is also the same.

To learn about the fate of Yiddish, let us turn to the article “Israel Speaking Yiddish” by A. Lokshin:

"European Jews spoke Yiddish for over a thousand years. At the beginning of the 20th century, literature created in this language was presented to a number of Jewish theorists as a kind of “territory” for a people who had no homeland. There was such a concept as Yiddishland - a special Jewish fatherland. This term was first introduced by the Yiddishist and public figure Chaim Zhitlovsky, who wrote that the spiritual-national home is the place where “our vernacular and where every breath and every word helps to support the national existence of our people».

However, in Palestine the Jews, whose “homeland” had hitherto been the text, created a physical home that was identified with one of the languages. Thus, the part was passed off as the whole. The choice of Hebrew as the national language was a direct result of the selective approach of early Zionist ideologists to various periods of the history of the Jewish people. The pre-diaspora existence, the pre-exile period, was surrounded by a halo of romanticism. Antiquity became a source of legitimization and a subject of admiration. The language of the Bible was perceived as part of an era of pure thoughts and goals. The culture of “Yiddishland” has undergone a decisive reassessment. With one revolutionary blow she was deprived of the place she occupied.

The traditional Zionist imperative was, among other things, that the new settlers who arrived in Palestine completely abandoned everything familiar and familiar to them in their old homeland, in the countries where they had lived for centuries. The key point for immigrants from Eastern Europe, according to traditionalist historians, there was a rejection of Yiddish in favor of Hebrew, the exclusivity of which was emphasized by Zionism. Zionist ideologists proceeded from the fact that a new nation should be formed in Eretz Israel, which had nothing in common with the Galut Jews. Yiddish was interpreted as a “jargon” associated with the culture of the rejected Galut. On the personal and collective refusal of the Halutzim pioneers from the language of the Diaspora as the most important element The Zionist “birth again” is written by a number of leading Israeli researchers.

It is significant that it is ancient Hebrew language became the basis for a new Israeli culture. The question is posed, which, in fact, the study is intended to answer: “What happened to Yiddish, its culture and the speakers of this language” in the country of Israel?

Yiddish was rejected not only as the language of Galut, but also as the language of the old Yishuv, with which the Zionist pioneers wanted nothing to do. Indeed, Jews of European descent who lived in Eretz Israel in mid-19th century centuries, the majority spoke Yiddish. They existed through haluqa, a system of collections and donations made by Jewish communities outside the country. The Yiddish-speaking old Yishuv was strikingly different from the image of an independent and proactive Jewish community that the Zionists sought to create.

The rejection of Yiddish by the early Zionists was so total that at some stage they were ready to prefer not only Hebrew and the associated set of cultural ideas, but even Arabic culture. Driven by romantic European orientalist ideas, the halutzim viewed some of its elements (clothing, food, certain customs) as diametrically opposed to Jewish diaspora life and, therefore, suitable for “introducing” the “new Jews” into the environment.

Due to the fact that Hebraic ideology had a negative attitude towards the use of phrases and words from other Jewish languages in Hebrew, Yiddish expressions were “pretended” to be foreign. In this way, many borrowings from Yiddish entered modern literary Hebrew relatively “conflict-free”, as well as into Hebrew slang of the 1940s and 1950s. Haver quotes Yosef Guri, who notes that about a quarter of the thousand idioms in spoken Hebrew are calques of Yiddish.

By 1914, the language of instruction in Jewish educational institutions in Eretz Israel was declared exclusively Hebrew. In 1923, the mandate authorities named Hebrew one of the official languages of Palestine, along with English and Arabic. The leaders and ideologists of the Yishuv confidently created a dominant narrative in which the existence of an alternative culture or even a subculture with its own language was unacceptable, because it called into question the complete success of the Zionist project.

It seemed that the victory of the Hebrew was complete. The official attitude towards “forgetting” Yiddish was so total that even the long conflict between Hebrew and Yiddish itself was crowded out of collective memory. Thus, one of the pillars of Israeli historiography, Shmuel Etinger, in his seminal work, mentions... the Hebrew-German “language dispute” of 1913 (then the Jewish-German Charitable organization"Ezra" advocated the introduction of German as the language of instruction in technical schools of the Yishuv, which caused a sharp response).

The majority of residents of the new Yishuv (the Jewish community after the 1880s) in the first decades of its existence remained natural speakers of Yiddish and continued to speak this language. At that time, the Yishuv was not yet able to fully function using Hebrew alone. Neither the founders of Tel Aviv nor the Zionist immigrants in the new settlements began speaking Hebrew overnight. However, this did not stop them from often using the adjective “Hebrew” instead of “Jewish”: Tel Aviv - the “Hebrew” quarter of Jaffa, “Hebrew” workers, etc.

The order in which Yiddish and Hebrew coexisted in the Jewish communities of Europe and each of them took its place in a system established for centuries, was radically transformed in Zionist Palestine. Hebrew was intended for everyday use, but at the same time it also remained a language of high culture, and Yiddish was completely delegitimized. Officially it became an anomaly, although it remained the de facto language of many, if not most, people, including the 1930s. Ben-Gurion’s words are symptomatic that in propaganda the Zionists are forced to use many languages, but for “our cultural work, Hebrew remains the only language.” In essence, this approach returned the situation to the traditional division into the language of high culture (Hebrew) and the utilitarian language of everyday life (Yiddish).

The dual position of Yiddish was that it was a mother tongue, both loved and rejected for ideological reasons. Leading Israeli historians usually ignore the psychological difficulties of immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe “growing into” Hebrew. Haver's research allows us to talk about a cultural and mental split that occurred at the intersection of ideology and personal experience.

Haver notes that Israeli literary historians who study the history of Hebrew culture essentially ignore the existence of Yiddish literature in Palestine. Meanwhile, during the period of the second Aliyah (1904–1914), Yiddish literature developed quite rapidly in Eretz Israel. The possibilities of Hebrew literature of that time were very limited, since the normative style of new prose in Hebrew arose at the end of the 19th century, that is, even before spoken Hebrew became a reality.

The work of a considerable number of Yishuv writers does not fit into the Zionist narrative. They wrote in Yiddish or both Yiddish and Hebrew. The vitality of Yiddish literature in the Yishuv is explained, among other things, by the fact that, in comparison with Hebrew literature, Yiddish literature was diverse, flexible, and provided more opportunities for reflecting social and ideological differences in society. This allowed the Yiddish writers of Palestine, who shared Zionist aspirations, to create a polyphony that reflected the heterogeneity of the early Yishuv.

The writers whose work is analyzed in the book reflect various generational, ideological and aesthetic trends. The author examines the work of Zalmen Brohes, a writer from the period of the second aliyah, whose early works were largely non-Zionist in nature and offered a more complex and varied vision of Palestine than the books of some of his (and our) contemporaries, which idealized the Zionist identity of the pioneers. Another of Haver's heroes, Avrom Rives, also sought to reflect the cultural and ideological diversity of the Yishuv, his works being “populated” by Arabs and Christians. Until her death in the mid-1960s, the poetess Rikuda Potash also wrote in Yiddish...

Moreover, Hebrew literature was also not free from Yiddish influences. Analyzing the construction of sentences and phrases in such undisputed Israeli classics as Yosef Chaim Brenner and the early Agnon, Haver notes the decisive influence on them of the linguistic structures of Yiddish. Brenner was generally one of the few public figures of the Yishuv who allowed himself to speak of Yiddish as a “Zionist language,” “the language of our mothers that bubbles in our mouths.”

Haver not only returns the Yiddish culture of the Yishuv to the reader and introduces essentially unknown texts into circulation - she draws a continuous line, offers an alternative to the generally accepted view of the history of Israeli literature, and builds its “shadow” version. She manages to prove that Yiddish literature was very popular and widespread in the Yishuv - suffice it to say that between 1928 and 1946, 26 literary magazines in Yiddish were published in Eretz Israel. Moreover, at the end of the 1920s, Yiddish culture in the Yishuv was experiencing a kind of “renaissance” (including in the new “Hebrew” city of Tel Aviv - in 1927, the number of reader requests for newspapers in Hebrew and Yiddish in the Tel Aviv public library Aviva was about the same). This is partly due to the arrival of immigrants from the fourth aliyah (1924–1928) (the so-called “Grabski aliyah” from Poland), who widely used Yiddish and were often far from Zionism (it is no coincidence that some contemporaries and researchers accused them of introducing galut into Palestinian reality values).

At the same time, in 1927, the board of directors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem approved a plan to create a Yiddish department at the university. But at that time it turned out to be impossible to implement this project. The opening of the department was opposed by influential Zionists (including Menachem Usyshkin), as well as the radical organization Meginei Ha-Safa Ha-Ivrit (“Brigade of Defenders of the Hebrew Language”), which consisted mainly of students from the Herzliya gymnasium, who organized the persecution of Chaim Zhitlovsky during his visit to Palestine back in 1914. The "Brigade", founded in 1923, was active until 1936, especially active in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In public opinion, she was associated with right-wing Zionist revisionists. Its activities were directed mainly against the use of Yiddish (it is significant that the English language did not cause any negative reaction among the members of the “brigade”). In connection with the proposed opening of the department, posters were issued in mourning frames: “The Department of Jargon - the destruction of the Hebrew University” and “The Department of Jargon is an idol in the Hebrew Temple” (the Hebrew University was compared to the Temple in many publications and speeches of that time). As we see, the young secular zealots of Hebrew wrote about Yiddish as a tselem ba-heikhal - a pagan idol in the Temple - that is, they used rabbinic sources to compare the intention to establish a Yiddish department with the desecration of the Temple by the Greco-Syrian conquerors and Roman emperors in the 1st century AD. e. Yiddish, the language of a thousand-year-old culture, was demonized as an alien, illegal “jargon” that threatened unity, posing a danger to the formation of a new Hebrew nation, the symbol of which was the university - its “temple.”

And only in 1951, after the destruction of Yiddish culture as a result of the Holocaust and the policy of state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, as well as after the creation of the State of Israel, when Yiddish no longer posed a threat to Hebrew, the Yiddish department was finally opened. Its creation marked the beginning of the legitimization of Yiddish in Israeli culture. Dov Sadan, speaking at the opening of the department, said that Yiddish helped preserve Hebrew. However, even here Yiddish was relegated to the status of a secondary cultural phenomenon existing in the service of Hebrew. The hierarchy of the two languages became obvious, with Hebrew being the master and Yiddish the servant.

However, as Haver has shown, the role of Yiddish in the life of the Yishuv clearly went beyond the function of preserving the revived Hebrew. The same Dov Sadan, who described Yiddish as a servant of Hebrew, in 1970 used completely different terms. Speaking about Jewish bilingualism to a Yiddish audience in New York, Sadan described the unique vision of the Yiddish writers of the Yishuv: “This special group had important– she opened new horizons and new land for Yiddish literature: the Land of Israel, not as childhood nostalgia or a tourist theme, but as a tangible, everyday experience of the development and struggle of the Yishuv.”

Haver does not concern the period of existence of the State of Israel. But we know that Yiddish was never expelled from collective memory and was not forgotten. With the beginning of the great aliyah from the USSR/CIS, which coincided with the awakening in Israeli society of interest in its roots and the cultural heritage of the Diaspora, the language of European Jewry received state support. Currently, there are Yiddish clubs throughout the country, a Yiddish theater operates in Tel Aviv, and a number of Israeli authors write in Yiddish (most of them come from Soviet Union), Yiddish studies are conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University fiction in this language. In some schools in Israel, Yiddish is included in the curriculum."

Interesting facts about Yiddish:

1) At the beginning of the 20th century, Yiddish was one of the official languages of the Belarusian Soviet Republic, and the famous slogan: “Workers of all countries unite!”, written in Yiddish, immortalized the coat of arms of the republic.

Proletarier fun ale lander, farajnikt sikh!

2) One of the reasons for the adoption of Hebrew as the official state language is the incredible similarity of Yiddish with German, which was completely inappropriate after World War II.

3) Some words of Russian slang migrated to us from Yiddish, for example: ksiva, pots, parasha, fraer, shmon, etc.

4) Tel Aviv University linguistics professor Paul Wexler hypothesized that Yiddish came not from the Germanic, but from the Slavic language group, but fans this statement practically none were found.

5) Three sayings that best explained the difference between the two languages approximately 50-100 years ago:

They learn Hebrew, but they know Yiddish.

He who does not know Hebrew is not educated; he who does not know Yiddish is not a Jew.

God speaks Yiddish on weekdays and Hebrew on Saturday.

All these sayings tell us that a century ago Yiddish was a colloquial, everyday language that absolutely everyone knew, and Hebrew, on the contrary, was the sacred language of the Torah, not known to every Jew. But those days have passed and everything has changed exactly the opposite.

Jewish-Spanish (Sephardic, Judesmo, Ladino) , conversational and literary language Jews of Spanish origin. Before World War II, a significant number of speakers of Judeo-Spanish lived in Greece and Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and fewer in Romania. In the 1970s the number of speakers of Jewish-Spanish in the world reached 360 thousand, of which 300 thousand lived in Israel, twenty thousand each in Turkey and the USA, and fifteen thousand in Morocco.

Much of the vocabulary and grammatical structure of Judeo-Spanish can be traced back to the Spanish dialects of the Middle Ages, although there are also strong influences from Catalan and Portuguese languages. The influence of Hebrew is manifested mainly in the field of religious terminology. The vocabulary of the Hebrew-Spanish language contains a significant number of borrowings from Turkish, Arabic, French and Italian languages. In the eastern Mediterranean region, Judeo-Spanish is called different names: judesmo, ladino, romance, spaniol. Native speakers of Judeo-Spanish have been using it since the 19th century. the name Judesmo, literally “Jewishness” (cf. Yiddish - Yiddishkeit). Although the name "Ladino" has become widespread, modern science the name “Jewish-Spanish language” is adopted, while “Ladino” is assigned only to the language of Bible translations, which contains a lot of borrowings and distortions from Hebrew and copies the syntax of Hebrew. A dialect of Judeo-Spanish spoken in North Africa is called Haquetia.

Hebrew-Spanish uses the Hebrew alphabet with a number of modifications to convey specific phonemes. Early texts are written in square letters with or without vowels, but most printed publications use the so-called Rashi script. In Turkey, since 1928, the Hebrew-Spanish language has used the Latin alphabet in print.

According to one point of view, the Jews living in Spain used the same language as the non-Jews, but their language retained many archaisms and acquired an independent existence after the expulsion of the Jews from the country in 1492. According to another point of view, widely accepted in modern science, the Jewish-Spanish language had distinctive features long before 1492 linguistic features not only due to the presence of Hebrew words, but also due to the influence of other Judeo-Romance languages and greater susceptibility to Arabic influence.

In the field of phonetics, Judeo-Spanish is characterized by diphthongization of the vowels o > ue and e > ie, which is also common in Castilian Spanish, but in many words there is no diphthongization. In Jewish Spanish The distinction between the three groups of consonants is also largely preserved.

Morphological differences from Spanish are expressed in changes in the gender of some nouns; singular forms are used to mean plural and vice versa; some pronominal forms are used differently than in standard Spanish; archaic forms are preserved in the conjugation of a number of present tense verbs; the use of diminutive forms of nouns and adjectives is more common than in modern Spanish.

Syntax of Judeo-Spanish influenced different languages differs significantly from the syntax of Spanish.

Languages close to Judeo-Spanish and apparently absorbed by it are Judeo-Catalan, the language of people from Eastern Spain, and Judeo-Portuguese. The last one received independent development in Holland, Northern Germany and Latin America. In the 18th century The Jewish-Portuguese language was adopted by the blacks of Dutch Guiana (modern Suriname), who called it Joutongo (Hebrew). Only in the 19th century. they switched to Dutch.

Before modern man who has decided to go to Israel for permanent residence will have a choice: what language he will need to learn - Yiddish or Hebrew.

Many representatives modern society They cannot even imagine that, in essence, these languages are not the same set of letters and sounds, but two independent languages. They say that one form of the language is colloquial, that is, generally accepted for the Jewish people, and the other is literary, or standard. Yiddish is also often considered one of the many dialects of the German language, which is absolutely true.

Yiddish and Hebrew are actually two separate worlds, two independent languages, and these linguistic phenomena are united only by the fact that they are spoken by the same people.

Hebrew

Enough for a long time Hebrew was considered a dead language, just like Latin. For hundreds of years, only a limited circle of people were allowed to speak it - rabbis and Talmudic scholars. For everyday communication, the spoken language was chosen - Yiddish, a representative of the European linguistic language group (Germanic). Hebrew was revived as an independent language in the 20th century.

Yiddish

This language was introduced into Jewish culture from the Germanic language group. It originated in southwest Germany approximately in 1100 and is a symbiosis of Hebrew, German and Slavic elements.

Differences

Hebrew is a language related to religious culture for Jews; it is in this language that Holy Bible- the most important artifact of the Jewish people. The Torah and Tonakh are also written in the holy language.
Yiddish is today considered the spoken language in Jewish society.
Hebrew, on the contrary, is officially recognized as the official language of Israel.
Yiddish and Hebrew differ in phonemic structure, that is, they are pronounced and heard completely differently. Hebrew is a softer sibilant language.
The writing of both languages uses the same Hebrew alphabet, with the only difference being that in Yiddish vowels (dots or dashes under and above letters) are practically not used, but in Hebrew they can be found all the time.

According to statistical data, it is known for certain that about 8,000,000 people live in the territory of modern Israel. Almost the entire population today chooses to communicate with each other exclusively Hebrew. It, as stated above, is the official language of the state; it is taught in schools, universities and other educational institutions, in which English is popular and relevant along with Hebrew.

Even in cinemas, it is customary to show English and American films on this foreign language in the original, occasionally accompanying some tapes with Hebrew subtitles. Most Jews speak exclusively Hebrew and English.

A small group of people use Yiddish in conversation - about 250,000, these include: older Jews and the ultra-dox population.

At the very beginning of the 20th century, Yiddish was among the official languages that could be found on the territory of the Belarusian SSR; the famous communist slogan about the unification of the proletarians was written in it on the coat of arms of the republic.
Perhaps the most main reason The adoption of Hebrew as the official state language can be attributed to the fact that in its sound Yiddish is very much like the German language, because it is essentially its variety. After the end of World War II, such similarity was extremely inappropriate.
In Russian prison jargon you can find a huge number of words from Yiddish: parasha, ksiva, shmon, fraer, and so on.
A scientist from the Tel Aviv Institute, Paul Wexler, suggested that Yiddish did not originate from the German language group, as previously thought, but from the Slavic one, but this fact has not been officially proven.
Jews believe that a person who does not know Hebrew can neither be called educated nor be considered such.

Influence on folklore and literature

Yiddish has become a stable soil for the creation of literary and folklore works, which modern world are considered the richest cultural phenomena. Until the 18th century, researchers clearly traced the difference between literary works written in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

Hebrew was intended to satisfy the preferences of the educated nobility, whose ideals lay in social, religious, intellectual and aesthetic life. The less educated society was content with works written in Yiddish: these people were not familiar with traditional Jewish education. Written sources in Yiddish were educational in nature; they were presented in the idea of various kinds of instructions.

In the 18th century, the Haskalah movement arose, which included Jews who advocated the adoption of European cultural values that arose during the famous Age of Enlightenment. During this period, a split occurs between the old and new literature, the same thing happened with folklore works. Literary works, written in Hebrew, ceased to be in demand and were banned, everything began to be written exclusively in Yiddish. The situation changed only in the 20th century, when the Hebrew language was revived.

There are many Jewish languages, but the most important among them is Hebrew, the language of the religious tradition of Judaism and the modern state of Israel. Jews believe that in Hebrew the Creator spoke to the first man - Adam. Be that as it may, Hebrew has existed for more than three thousand years - this language is much older than Latin.

Hebrew emerged as an independent language in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. The first Hebrew monument is the Song of Deborah - part of the Old Testament Book of Judges, which dates back to the 12th-13th centuries BC. e. The oldest surviving Hebrew inscription, the calendar from Gezer, dates back to the 10th century BC. e.

Hebrew belongs to the group of Semitic languages, which in turn is part of the Afroasiatic (Semitic-Hamitic) linguistic macrofamily. Among the Semitic languages existing in our time are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Assyrian-New Aramaic, among the dead languages are Phoenician, Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), Ugaritic and others.

The history of Hebrew has six periods:

Biblical (until the 2nd century BC) - the books of the Old Testament were written in it (Hebrew ha-Sfarim or TaNaKH);

Post-biblical - Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran manuscripts), Mishnah and Tosefta (the influence of Aramaic and Greek can be traced);

Talmudic (Masoretic) - lasted from the 3rd to the 7th centuries, when Hebrew ceased to be the language of everyday communication, but was preserved as the language of writing and religion. Monuments of this period are some parts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds;

The era of Haskalah (Hebrew “enlightenment”, cultural and educational Jewish movement of the 18th-19th centuries) - Hebrew becomes the language of high literature, enriched with neologisms;

Modern - from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

Briefly about the features of the Hebrew alphabet. For writing in this language, the Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew “alef-bet”) is used in a version of the square font, consisting of 22 consonant letters. Five letters have an additional style for the final letters in a word. Four consonant letters in modern Hebrew are used to write vowels (these letters are called "reading mothers").

At the end of the 19th century, the process of reviving Hebrew began, which by that time had long since become dead (this is the name for languages that are not used for everyday communication and are not native to anyone). Hebrew is the only example that a dead language can be made alive! A significant role in the revival of Hebrew belongs to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (aka Leizer-Yitzchok Perelman). Ben Yehuda's family became the first Hebrew-speaking family in Palestine, and Eliezer's eldest son Ben Zion (later named Itamar Ben Avi) became the first child to speak Hebrew as his native language.

Yiddish (from jüdisch, "Hebrew") is the language of European Ashkenazi Jews, historically belonging to the Middle German dialects of the High German subgroup of the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Yiddish appeared in the upper Rhine between the 10th and 14th centuries, incorporating a large array of words from Hebrew and Aramaic, and later from Romance and Slavic languages.

Before World War II, 11 million Jews spoke Yiddish. Today the exact number of native speakers is unknown. Census data from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st year suggest that the largest number of Yiddish-speaking Jews live in Israel (more than 200 thousand people), the USA (about 180 thousand), Russia (more than 30 thousand), Canada (more than 17 thousand) and Moldova ( about 17 thousand people). In total, according to various sources, there are from 500 thousand to 2 million people living on the planet who speak Yiddish.

Yiddish has Western and Eastern dialects, within which a large number of dialects are distinguished. Among Hasidim in the United States, a common dialect arose based on the Transylvanian version of Yiddish; in the USSR, a variant with the phonetics of the Belarusian-Lithuanian (northern) and the grammar of the Ukrainian (southeastern) dialect was considered as the standard Yiddish language. In the 20s of the last century, Yiddish was one of the four state languages of the Belarusian SSR.

Yiddish, like Hebrew, uses the square Hebrew alphabet. The direction of the letter is also the same.

The other major Jewish community, the Sephardim, spoke (and some still do) their own Hebrew language, Ladino. This language, also called Giudio, Judesmo or Spagnol, belongs to the Ibero-Romance subgroup of the Romance language branch and is a development of the medieval Judeo-Castilian dialect. The spread of Ladino in the diaspora is associated with the exodus of Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century.

The main Ladino dialects are Romanian, Yugoslavian and Turkish. People from North Africa call their dialect "Hakitia". Today, about 100 thousand people speak different Ladino dialects.

Ladino writing exists in various variants - the Hebrew alphabet (Rashi font), Latin and Turkish letters derived from them, the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic. There is also such a conservative option as the use of the Old Castilian alphabet (Spanish alphabet of the 15th century).

Other Jewish languages are rather ethnolects (speakers of an ethnolect, being included in the linguistic field, nevertheless consider themselves a separate people): Romaniotic (ethnolect of Greek), Jewish-Shiraz (Western Fars), Yinglish (English), Miandobar (Azerbaijani) and so on .

Story >> The unknown about the known

“Partner” No. 10 (97) 2005

Yiddish is a Germanic language, but also Jewish

Many older Jewish immigrants understand German quite well and try to speak it, using not only German, but also Yiddish words in their speech. In most cases, their German interlocutors understand the “strange” German of these immigrants. Two years ago, our author Marina Agranovskaya already talked about the Yiddish language, but today we want to give the floor to Mikhail Pievsky, a man who speaks Yiddish and knows its history. What do you, dear reader, know about this language?

First of all, let us turn to the history of the Jewish Diaspora. Jewish society in the Diaspora is divided into Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Many readers know the meaning of these words: Ashkenazim is the Jewish name for Germany, and Ashkenazim, who spoke Yiddish, call Jews who came from the countries Western Europe, excluding Spain and Portugal, as well as migrants to Eastern Europe and their descendants. Ashkenazim also call the descendants of Jews who moved to the American continent and speak Yiddish. The name Sephardi comes from the word Sefarad - Spain. The language of Jews - immigrants from Spain and Portugal, who later moved to Turkey, other Mediterranean countries and Arab countries - is Ladino, which we will talk about separately.

The largest Jewish community in the world is Ashkenazi. At least until the thirties of the twentieth century, Yiddish was the “home” language for the Jews of this community. The number of Yiddish speakers on the eve of World War II was estimated at 11 million. It decreased sharply due to the extermination of millions of European Jews and the later displacement of Yiddish by the languages of surrounding peoples, and in Israel by Hebrew.

According to the majority of Diaspora Jews, Yiddish is capable of uniting people from different communities. Even the ultra-Orthodox, who generally stay away from secular life, attend cultural events held in Yiddish, including performances by klezmer musicians.

Orthodox believe that Hebrew is the sacred language of the Torah (loshn koidesh) and can only be used for conversations with God. In their daily communication they speak Yiddish. Therefore, Yiddish continues to exist as a spoken language in places such as Bnei Brak in the Tel Aviv area, Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, Brooklyn in New York. In these neighborhoods you can hear Yiddish on the streets, even from children.

It is believed that Yiddish is one of the Indo-European languages (Germanic group), the everyday and literary language of Ashkenazi (i.e. Germanic) Jews. It developed in the 10th - 14th centuries on the basis of one of the High German dialects, which underwent intensive Hebraization and later Slavicization. The writing system is traditional Hebrew, adapted to convey the Yiddish phonetic system.

Where was Yiddish born? There is no clear answer to this, as to many other questions regarding this language. Researchers put forward various versions, enriching the scientific literature with new facts and ideas. The history of the Yiddish language is full of mysteries and blind spots. One of the researchers, Max Weinreich, believed that Yiddish, characterized by a stable combination of Germanic and Semitic elements with the addition of lively Slavic humor later in Eastern Europe, arose in the western regions of Germany, in the Rhine River basin. Gershon Ben-Yehuda (960 - 1028), whom Weinreich considers the founder of Ashkenazi Jewish civilization, lived there. Ben-Yehuda's students were the teachers of Rashi (Reb Shlomo Yitzchaki, 1040 - 1105), the spiritual leader of Jewry in Northern France, the largest commentator on the Talmud and TANAKH. According to another theory, Yiddish was born not in the Rhine basin, but in the area between the Danube and Elbe rivers. This version is based on the fact that already in the 12th century, the oldest Jewish quarter in Germany was located in Rotenberg. Rabbi Yehudi Hasidim (1150 - 1217), leader of the Hasidim Ashkenaz movement and author of the book Seifer Hassidim, lived there. The author of the essay "What is Yiddish" Hoax Prilutsky (1882 - 1941) says that there is no dialect of Yiddish that is not related to any German dialect.

Prilutsky’s works on the dialects and phonetics of Yiddish largely determined the modern orthography of this language. But this does not mean that all Germanic dialects are represented in Yiddish. To reduce the number of its sources to a minimum, it is necessary to correlate with Yiddish the dialects of the German language of those places where Jews lived in the Middle Ages. Then it will be known for certain where Yiddish originated. Some later researchers established the relationship of the Germanic elements in Yiddish with the Bavarian dialect. And in the 80s and early 90s of the 20th century, a number of works appeared on the presence of Semitic elements in Yiddish and their spread among Ashkenazim. The presence of different languages in one territory had a certain influence on each other.

Yiddish is a Germanic language. Therefore, it is natural that most words in Yiddish are of Germanic origin. Next come Semitisms (Hebraisms, Aramaisms), Slavisms, Romanisms. Yiddish originated among the assimilated Jewry of Germany and contains, according to recent studies, 68% German words, 17% Hebrew and 15% Slavic. The new Hebrew language was originally called "taich" (read Deutsch), later - Jewish-German, and since the 18th century, the enlighteners of the Mendelssohn school gave it the name "jargon". From the 19th century to the present day it has been called “Yiddish”. According to many linguists, as long as Jews spoke Yiddish-Taich only in Germany, it was not yet independent language, but only a variant (jargon) of German. Yiddish became a language in the full sense of the word when, starting from the 13th, and mainly from the 15th-16th centuries, Ashkenazi Jews moved from Germany to Slavic lands.

The question of the similarity of Yiddish with other Germanic languages is of interest. Similarities between Yiddish and German long time served as a reason for some authors to consider it a variant (jargon) of the German language. In reality, Yiddish and modern German are various languages who are connected only by common origin. According to Weinreich, they have a common ancestor in the dialects of medieval Germany. Over time, the differences between Yiddish and Middle High German became increasingly noticeable. Developing in its own way, Yiddish became an independent language, while Middle High German transformed into modern German. There are differences between Yiddish and German at the phonetic, lexical and grammatical levels. Yiddish is not a variant of any language. This is an original language of Germanic origin, which occupies a special place among the Germanic languages, unique to it. Yiddish has used the square Hebrew script since the 12th century.

In Eastern Europe, Yiddish is also divided into a number of dialects. Northeast: Lithuania, Belarus; eastern dialect: Latvia, Pskov, Smolensk, Bryansk regions. Russia; central dialect: Poland, Western Galicia; southeastern dialect: Ukraine, Moldova, Romania.

Typically, Jews used Yiddish in places where they experienced severe discrimination. Jews in Poland and Russia, for example, spoke Yiddish, while the vast majority of Jews in France and Germany spoke French and German. When Jews migrated to countries where they had equal rights, Yiddish was usually used only by the first generation. For example, in the 1920s in New York, 200,000 copies of Yiddish newspapers were sold daily.

Yiddish is a colorful language, and many of its most colorful words have entered the lexicon of non-Jews. Including in modern German More than 1,000 words from the Yiddish language are widely used. I will give just a few examples. Schlamassel - misfortune, trouble; Massel - luck, luck; meschugge - stupid, crazy; Mischpoke - family, Schickse - girl of easy virtue; Schmonzes is a useless business; Tacheles - honestly, openly; fair; Stuss - nonsense, nonsense; Tinnef - trash, waste; Schtetl - place; Kassiber - secret note; Schmiere - ointment, lubricant; Schmock is an idiot, a fool, Ganeff is a thief, Maloche is hard and useless work.

Today Yiddish is used less and less. However, it would be premature to predict the death of this language. The 1978 Nobel laureate Yitzhak Bashevis Singer, writing in Yiddish, noted that the decline of the Yiddish language was predicted already at the time of his arrival in the United States in 1935, however, this language still lives on, blissfully unaware that he is already considered dead.

Without denying, but, on the contrary, supporting the belief that Yiddish belongs to the Germanic group of languages and was born in the territories of Germany, we should not forget that it is still the language of the Jews, which also absorbed elements of the holy language - loshn koidesh (read - Hebrew). From Hebrew to Yiddish, and then further, both decent, purely colloquial words and not very decent ones came. For example, the Yiddish “bakitser” (in Ukraine - “bikitser”), meaning faster and shorter, came to us from the Hebrew word “akitsur”, which has the same meaning. To all of us since childhood famous word“tokhes” (in Ukraine - “tukhes”), meaning ass, came to us from the Hebrew word “takhat”. The word "mishpohe" - family comes from the Hebrew - "mishpaha". The marriage ceremony ends with a wedding - “hasene” - in Hebrew “hatuna”. In a wedding, the groom is “hosn”, and in Hebrew “hatan”. Bride is “kaleh” and the same in Hebrew. The relatives of the bride and groom become "mehutonim", and in Hebrew it sounds like "mehutan". Even in Israel, the Yiddish version of this word is more often used. The acquaintance of young people, as is customary in Jewish rite, is most often carried out by a matchmaker - “shadchen”. In Hebrew this word sounds “shadchan”, and the matchmaking process itself is called “shidah” in Yiddish, and “shidduh” in Hebrew. A wedding ritual canopy is called “hupe” in Yiddish (in Ukraine - “hipe”). It's the same in Hebrew. Let’s take such a characteristic Yiddish word as “ben-yochid”. I was also a “ben-yochid” - the only son in the family. In Hebrew, "ben" means son, and "yochid" means only one. In Yiddish there are a number of phrases containing the word “balabos” - owner, taken from the Hebrew “balabait” - owner of the house. How did the word cabman come about - “balagole” or “balagule”? This is the Hebrew “baal hagala”, where “agala” is a cart, a cart, and baal hagala is a carrier, a cab driver. "Balmeloche" (or "balmeluche") is a craftsman, in Hebrew "baal melacha", and "melacha or meloche" is a craft. Let us now also consider the well-known words from the Yiddish language: “meilekh” and “malke”. A very beautiful Yiddish song begins with the words: “Amol from Geven a Meilech...” - there once lived a king. “Meilech” is the Hebrew “melech” - king, “malke” - in Hebrew “malka” means queen.

The word "haver" - comrade - remains in Yiddish "haver", the Hebrew "yatom" - in Yiddish it sounds like "yosem" - orphan. The second chapter of Sholom Aleichem’s story “The Boy Motl” begins with the words: “The world is from gut, their bin a yosem” - “I feel good, I am an orphan.”

Who doesn’t know the word “ganef” - thief (in Hebrew “ganav”)? This word has become part of the jargon of German and English languages. In a good English or German dictionary you will find it without any reference to Hebrew or Yiddish. The congratulations of the “mazelts” are entirely constructed from Hebrew elements: “mazal tov” - good happiness, good happiness. Many people know the words “melamed” and « header" . "Melamed" is a teacher in "cheder". “Heder” was the name of the school in which “melamed” taught Jewish children the basics of Hebrew and TANAKH. The word "cheder" in Hebrew simply means "room" or "classroom for study." What does "melamed" mean? This is also a Hebrew word and means “teacher.” Let's not stop learning! Let us also try not to forget the language of our grandparents.

I would like to end this article with a quatrain from Boris Slutsky:

Yiddish, their language has long been ruined.

Diagnostics and diseases. Medicines from A to Z