What is Yiddish? - a very short introduction
The most important Jewish language is, of course, Hebrew.
Other Jewish languages developed in the Diaspora (that means among the
emigrants from Palestine) under the influence of the languages of the
environment. The best known of them are Ladino - the language of the
Sephardim (Jews who follow the traditions of those who lived in the
Middle Ages on the Iberian Peninsula) and the language of the Ashkenazim
(descendants of the Jews living in the mediaeval Germany) - Yiddish.
The origins of Yiddish are to be found approximately a thousand years ago in
western Germany.
From the 9th century one can call it a separate language. Its basis are
German dialects, but it contained also some Hebrew elements and was written
in Hebrew script. Important for the development of Yiddish are the 14th and
the 15th century. At the time, following the widespread emigration of the
German Jews eastwards - Yiddish was divided into two branches - the Western
Yiddish, which gradually ceased to exist in the centuries to follow, and the
Eastern Yiddish, which enriched with the Slavonic elements gave birth to the
contemporary Standard Yiddish.
There are three basic dialects of Eastern Yiddish: Central (Polish), Northern
(Lithuanian)
and Southern (Ukrainian). The influence of these three components on the
standard language
was not equal in its various subsystems. The standard pronunciation is most
similar to the northern one, however, the grammar bases on the central and
southern dialects.
Yiddish is the language of the rich and fabulous literature. The oldest known
sentence in Yiddish comes from the prayer book from Worms from the year 1272:
gut tak im betag s wer dis makhazor in bes hakneses trag and is
written inside the Hebrew characters. From the 16th century there are known
Yiddish transcriptions of German folk literature (Volksbücher), as well as
works which should help to read and understand holy texts. Around that time
came also first Bible translations into Yiddish.
The modern Yiddish literature starts in the time of the Enlightenment when
the center of literary
creativity shifted eastwards. Three writers are called the fathers of the
classical Yiddish literature:
Mendele Moykher Sforim, Ickhok Leyb Perets and Sholem Aleykhem. Some
confirmation of the international importance of the Yiddish literature came
when Isaak Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.
Singer lived first in Warsaw and since 1935 in New York.