Yes, so?
I’m not saying English or Yiddish aren’t Germanic.
I’m saying characterising Yiddish as simply High German with a different alphabet is a bridge too far.
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Specifically this was in Al Jaffee’s work, who is Jewish.
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There are many words you’re probably familiar with (if American english is your mother tongue, especially) that are Yiddish:
I think you can likely thank food (specifically NYC deli culture) and the influence of Jewish comedians in early Vaudeville for that…
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It’s the sound my bare foot made when I step-slid on some raccoon poop in our yard.
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I did not make that claim, though. Most every linguist would agree that Yiddish would absolutely be placed in the Germanic family, that its origins are in Middle High German, and that it incorporates loan words from near and far. There’s no fight here.
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This. This statement is what I thought was over-essentializing Yiddish as more or less a form of Middle High German instead of a language of more sources.
You were more expansive in your later comments.
I can see it, especially with its cognates in German and Dutch/Flemish. Glitch, glitschig, and so on. and even French glace. Using it to indicate a slip/skip/stumble is quite fitting in hindsight.
I am only a hobby linguist, so I cannot make any claims to the history of Yiddish, nor what Yiddish gave German and vice versa. But it is close enough that when I learned German I could read Yiddish and understand Yiddish speakers.
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You have touched on some excellent points here. Standardization of languages is really relatively new: a good deal of this comes with the upheavals of the period around 1848, and attendant nationalisms. Literacy was rarer in general. The entire field of [historical comparative] linguistics comes directly from the field of philology, which is all about tracing texts and manuscripts.
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Both things are true. I still think this is a distinction without a difference.
Insofar as I did not expand upon ‘more or less’ to indicate that all languages have loan words incorporated, I might see your point, but this feels like an ‘angels dancing on the head of a pin’ kind of argument now. Let’s not fight.
Yiddish is such an expressive language. Schmuck. Kibbitz. Schmatta. My New Jersey in-laws reliably doubletake whenever I manage to slip something into my natural southwestern drawl.
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You mistake Middle High German (Mittelhochdeutsch) with the similar term for “proper” German, Hochdeutsch. The former is a term for a regional dialect of written German from older texts, where High German meant Alpine regions. Middle High German was written (I dare not write spoken) to the north of Bavaria but to the south of Low German dialects like Saxony, Prussia, and so on. .
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Thank you - I may well have assumed too much. Hochdeutsch vs Plattdeutsch
It doesn’t help that there are two distinct meanings for Hochdeutsch: the academic one for the old form that evolved into Bavarian/Austrian dialect, and the modern term meaning modern German (and is based on the Hannover dialect).
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I’ve posted this before, but it seems to belong here too:
English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
–James D. Nicoll
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Oh please, “glitch” is not a Yiddish word, what schmuck came up with that one.
/s
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Some putz* or schnook, undoubtedly.
*(Thanks to MAD #212 for introducing me to that word, almost 40 years ago)
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Yiddish really does give us some of our most expressive words to the point where if there is a well known Yiddish synonym, I almost always prefer it:
Klutz
Kvetch
Nosh
Putz
Schmuck
Shtick
Spiel
Tchotchke
Tush
Schmooze
Schlong
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Yep. And per my copy of “A Dictionary of Yiddish Slangs & Idioms” (Fred Kogos), Yiddish “… enjoys borrowings from other languages and countries along the routes Jews have painfully traveled since the 11th century, when Yiddish was born.”
All languages are magnets!
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I think “spiel” is proper German. And tuchus or tookus is the correct Yiddish word, tush is similar but I think has a different origin.
Strangely, my mother gave me a hard time about using the word “schmuck” when I was a kid, “that’s not a nice word!” Our family isn’t Jewish but my grandfather spoke Yiddish fluently (he apparently needed it for business in the old country.)
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