Yiddish

Yiddish ייִדיש, יידיש or אידיש, yidish or idish, pronounced , lit. 'Jewish'; ייִדיש-טײַטש, Yidish-Taytsh, lit. 'Judeo-German' is the West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during a 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a High German-based vernacular fused with many elements taken from Hebrew notably Mishnaic together with to some extent Aramaic; almost varieties also clear substantial influence from Slavic languages, in addition to the vocabulary contains traces of influence from Romance languages. Yiddish writing uses the Hebrew alphabet.

Prior to ] A current estimate from Rutgers University enable 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 in the rest of the world for a a thing that is caused or provided by something else of 600,000.

The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and invited the language לשון־אַשכּנז loshn-ashknaz, "language of Ashkenaz" or טײַטש taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the advanced name for ] but "Yiddish" is again the nearly common tag today.[]

Modern Yiddish has two major forms. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern Ukrainian–Romanian, Mideastern Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian and Northeastern Lithuanian–Belarusian dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided up into Southwestern Swiss–Alsatian–Southern German, Midwestern Central German, and Northwestern Netherlandic–Northern German dialects. Yiddish is used in a number of Haredi Jewish communities worldwide; this is the the first language of the home, school, and in numerous social environments among many Haredi Jews, and is used in most Hasidic yeshivas.

The term "Yiddish" is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddish cooking and "Yiddish music" – klezmer.

Prior to World War II and aliyah, immigration to Israel, further decreased the ownership of Yiddish among survivors after adapting to Hebrew and Yiddish-speakers from other countries such as in the Americas. However, the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities.

History

By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe. By the high medieval period, their area of settlement, centered on the Rhineland Mainz and the Palatinate notably Worms and Speyer, came to be known as Ashkenaz, originally a term used of Scythia, and later of various areas of Eastern Europe and Anatolia. In the medieval Hebrew of Rashi d. 1105, Ashkenaz becomes a term for Germany, and אשכּנזי Ashkenazi for the Jews settling in this area. Ashkenaz bordered on the area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews, who ranged into southern France. Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations.

Nothing is known with certainty approximately the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories work been include forward. As transmitted above, the number one language of the Ashkenazim may have been Aramaic, the vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread usage of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade. In Roman times, many of the Jews alive in Rome and Southern Italyto have been Greek-speakers, and this is reflected in some Ashkenazi personal names e.g., Kalonymos and Yiddish Todres. Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and non for common use.

The determine view is that, as with other Jewish languages, Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. In the issue of Yiddish, this scenario sees it as emerging when speakers of Zarphatic Judeo-French and other Judeo-Romance languages began to acquire varieties of Middle High German, and from these groups the Ashkenazi community took shape. exactly what German base lies behind the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed. The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the Middle High German dialects from which the Rhenish German dialects of the advanced period would emerge. Jewish communities of the high medieval period would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region, including many Hebrew and Aramaic words, but there is also Romance, Slavic, Turkic and Iranian influence.

In Max Weinreich's model, Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to decide in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia later known in Yiddish as Loter extending over parts of Germany and France. There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects. Both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this framework further in the mid-1950s. In Weinreich's view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two distinct list of paraphrases of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary and constructions needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes non accepted as a fully autonomous language.

Later linguistic research has refined the Weinreich framework or produced alternative approaches to the language's origins, with points of contention being the characterization of its Germanic base, the address of its Hebrew/Aramaic adstrata, and the means and location of this fusion. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base. The two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been parallel developments in the two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East. The structure of development proposed by the different theories do not necessarily rule out the others at least not entirely; an article in The Forward argues that "in the end, a new 'standard theory' of Yiddish's origins will probably be based on the work of Weinreich and his challengers alike."

Paul Wexler offered a model in 1991 that took Yiddish, by which he means primarily eastern Yiddish, not to be genetically grounded in a Germanic language at all, but rather as "Judeo-Sorbian" a proposed West Slavic language that had been relexified by High German. In more recent work, Wexler has argued that Eastern Yiddish is unrelated genetically to Western Yiddish. Wexler's model has been met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists. Das et al. 2016, co-authored by Wexler use human genetics in support of the hypothesis of "a Slavic origin with strong Iranian and weak Turkic substrata".

Yiddish orthography developed towards the end of the high medieval period. it is first recorded in 1272, with the oldest surviving literary or done as a reaction to a question document in Yiddish, a blessing found in the Worms machzor a Hebrew prayer book.

This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in an otherwise purely Hebrew text. Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or lessMiddle High German total in the Hebrew alphabet into which Hebrew words – מַחֲזוֹר, niqqud appears as though it might have been added by ascribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately and may not be indicative of the pronunciation of the rhyme at the time of its initial annotation.

Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in the slow 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community's adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this brand is the Dukus Horant, which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.

The advent of the printing press in the 16th century enabled the large-scale production of works, at a cheaper cost, some of which have survived. One especially popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh בָּבָֿא-בּוך, composed around 1507–08 and printed several times, beginning in 1541 under the title Bovo d'Antona. Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written פּאַריז און װיענע Pariz un Viene Paris and Vienna. Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, װידװילט Vidvilt often remanded to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars, presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Grafenberg. Another significant writer is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei, who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557.

Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This described secular works, such(a) as the Bovo-Bukh, and religious writing specifically for women, such as the צאנה וראינה Tseno Ureno and the תחנות Tkhines. One of the best-known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln, whose memoirs are still in print.

The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read מאַמע־לשון mame-loshn but not לשון־קדש loshn-koydesh, and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name usually given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish was ווײַבערטײַטש vaybertaytsh, 'women's taytsh', shown in the heading and fourth column in the Shemot Devarim, with square Hebrew letters shown in the third column being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being kind in vaybertaytsh also termed מעשייט mesheyt or מאַשקעט mashket—the construction is uncertain.

An extra distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddishon the same page. This is normally termed Rashi script, from the name of the most renowned early author, whose commentary is usually printed using this script. Rashi is also the typeface normally used when the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, is printed in Hebrew script.

The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch, i. e. "Moses German"—declined in the 18th century, as the Liptzin 1972.

In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture see the Yiddishist movement. Notable Yiddish writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem, whose stories approximately טבֿיה דער מילכיקער Tevye der milkhiker, "Tevye the Dairyman" inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof; and Isaac Leib Peretz.

In the early 20th century, especially after the Socialist Ukrainian People's Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the short-lived Galician Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries notably Poland after World War I led to an include in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO. In Vilnius, there was debate over which language should take primacy, Hebrew or Yiddish.

Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. ] This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries.