Gilbert Morgan <gilbertmm(a)sdf.org> wrote: |Haha, wasn't Mark Twain who famously butchered it this way? The two languages are so alike -- how pleasant that is; we say 'Ach! Gott!' you say 'Goddamn.'” --steffen

Gregg Levine scripsit: I know this is said in jest, but to speak in earnest for a moment, Yiddish hasn't borrowed much from German: rather, Yiddish and modern German are descended from a common ancestor, and so Yiddish is no more ungrammatical German than English is ungrammatical Dutch. See also generally <http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html> -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Your worships will perhaps be thinking that it is an easy thing to blow up a dog? [Or] to write a book? --Don Quixote, Introduction

Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit: Well, that's true enough. It's also true that modern standard German is a "Middle German dialect", in the technical sense of the English word "dialect", which is not the same as the technical sense of the German words "Dialekt" and "Mundart". That is, both have been handed down from parents to children directly from Middle German, spoken in many varieties throughout the German-speaking lands in the 11th to 15th C. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin

Kurt H Maier scripsit: If this is addressed to me (there's no way to tell), I am not claiming anything of the sort. Yiddish and German are sibling languages. Yiddish has borrowed a lot of Hebrew, but is not genetically related to it. That's all. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org That you can cover for the plentiful and often gaping errors, misconstruals and disinformation in your posts through sheer volume -- that is another misconception. --Mike to Peter

Ori Idan scripsit: There's one in New York City, too: <http://yiddish.forward.com>. It's hard to count, but there are probably between 1 and 2 million Yiddish-speakers worldwide. In particular, many Haredi (so-called ultra-Orthodox) Jews outside Israel use it as a home language, so it is still being passed on to children, and it is still used as a language of religious education. Before mass literacy, Jews (who were almost all literate in Hebrew, at least the males) traditionally wrote the language of the country they were in using the Hebrew alphabet. Consequently, there were and in some cases still are Jewish versions of French, German, Spanish, Georgian, various Arabic colloquials, Aramaic, Tat, and other languages. Yiddish is the most different of these from the goyish version. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org And they pack their lyrics till they're so damn dense You could put 'em in your yard and you could use 'em for a fence. --Alan Chapman, "Everybody Wants to Be Sondheim"