I’m going to guess that Anon is not Jewish based on one word in the question. If Anon was Jewish, the question would more likely have been:
“What are your thoughts on Hebrew and Yiddish? Should Jewish children learn Yiddish the way they do Hebrew?”
The vs. is glaring and turns this into a loaded question suggesting there’s some sort of competition between Yiddish and Hebrew.
Before we get into the history, understand that Yiddish is important in my family.Zvee Scooler(actor in Yiddish theatre, famous in the Yiddish-speaking world as Der Grammeister for composing and reading Yiddish poetry on the radio for decades, and appearing in Fiddler on the Roof as the Rabbi) was a cousin. My grandmother sang me Yiddish lullabies. Nobody can question my affection for Yiddish or Yiddishkeit.
An Excruciatingly Brief and Incomplete History of Jewish Languages
Hebrew began as the spoken language of the ancient Israelites. It was the language of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), Jewish law, and prayer. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, it gradually stopped being a spoken vernacular. For more than 1,500 years, Hebrew functioned as a sacred and literary language while Jews spoke other languages in daily life. (We’ll come back to those languages in a minute.)
In the late 1800s, secular Zionists revived Hebrew as a modern spoken language. They created new vocabulary required by the modern world, published newspapers, and raised children in Hebrew-speaking homes. By 1948, Hebrew had been reestablished as the daily language of a growing Jewish society. It now connects Israeli Jews from diverse backgrounds and is spoken by more Jews than any other language in history.
Yiddish began around the 9th century in Central Europe, developing from medieval German mixed with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages, and became the daily vernacular of Ashkenaz Jews for centuries. It became a language of lullabies, labor unions, jokes, novels, and daily life. By the early 20th century, more than 10 million people spoke Yiddish.
The Holocaust (which the BBC, please note, carefully avoids mentioning above) wiped out about 5.5 million Yiddish speakers, but that wasn’t the only problem.
Stalinist repression finished off more in Soviet-controlled areas.
In Israel, early Zionist leaders discouraged Yiddish as tied to exile and powerlessness. It was also Germanic, and survivors of the Nazis, understandably, didn’t feel enthuastic about a mostly-German national language.
In America, Yiddish faded quietly and gradually, displaced by English and assimilation.
But Yiddish never died. It remained alive in Hasidic communities and in secular cultural circles.
Today, it’s taught, spoken, and studied worldwide.
Here’s the thing, though:
YIDDISH ISN’T THE ONLY DIASPORA JEWISH LANGUAGE
It requires willful ignorance and Ashkenaz chauvinism to pretend Yiddish is the Jewish language.
Yiddish is Judeo-German, but Jews created similar languages everywhere they lived.
Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) was spoken by Sephardic Jews after the 1492 expulsion from Spain
Judeo-Arabic was the daily language of Jews in Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, and Yemen. Much of medieval Jewish philosophy, including Maimonides’ works, was written in it
Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Italian and others were spoken across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and southern Europe
These languages were not mutually intelligible. A Yiddish speaker from Warsaw could not converse with a Ladino speaker from Salonika…except in Hebrew.
Hebrew was used in prayer, scholarship, legal documents, and religious correspondence. It was the only shared language of the diaspora. A rabbi in Baghdad could read a responsum written by a rabbi in Krakow in Hebrew. Hebrew provided the common framework that kept Jews connected when they shared no other language.
Hebrew united the diaspora.
So (asks the Jew who knows the basic history of these languages), why does this non-Jewish Anon mistakenly believe that Hebrew and Yiddish are in opposition?
I blame the Bundists.
The Bundists and Their Heirs
The General Jewish Labour Bund championed Yiddish, socialism, and diaspora autonomy. Its core idea was doikayt (“hereness”), the belief that Jews should not seek national self-determination, that Jews should remain stateless and fight for equality wherever they live.
Bundism is dead. Most of the Bundists were murdered in Europe.
Bundism’s spirit survives only in some contemporary Western circles that reject Zionism and embrace diaspora-centered identity. Among some anti-Zionist Jews, Yiddish revival has become performative protest, not really about recovering a grandmother’s language, but about making a political, antizionist statement.
But if we do as these neo-pseudo-bundists suggest and elevate Yiddish as the Jewish language, what does that do to the Sephardim, the Mizrahim, the Jews from India, China, Persia, and everywhere else Jews built civilizations without ever encountering Yiddish?
Those Jews are no less Jewish than Ashkenazim. The bundists who stayed in Europe mostly died in the Holocaust, and faulting other Jews for running when their “hereness” was plotting their murder is tone-deaf, history-blind, and offensivelystupid - this includes Hannah Einbinder.
Elevating Yiddish above Hebrew and other diaspora Jewish lanuages erases millions of Jews’ lived experiences. It’s ignorant, false, and shameful.
______
The claim that Yiddish and Hebrew are in an adversarial relationship is a modern politicization and weaponization of language.
They don’t compete
Hebrew and Yiddish serve different purposes, express different parts of Jewish experience, and reflect different historical layers. They coexist naturally.
Some Jews grow up speaking Yiddish at home and Hebrew at school. Some pray in Hebrew, read poetry in Yiddish, and text friends in English.
Jewish culture has always contained multiple languages. No single one defines us, but Hebrew uniquely unites us - and I say this as someone whose Hebrew suuuuuuuuuuucks.
Nobody is erasing Yiddish. It’s taught in universities, supported by Israeli institutions, and used as a first language in Hasidic schools.
There is room for Yiddish. There is room for Hebrew. There is room for Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and all the languages we spoke in exile and continue to speak in sovereignty.
Anon asked: Should Jewish children learn Yiddish?
Jewish children should learn what connects them to their people and their history.
These languages don’t compete. They accumulate, compliment, collaborate, and preserve memory while carrying us forward.
That complex relationship with languages?
That’s very, very Jewish.
The notion that Hebrew/Israel/Zionists are destroying Yiddish is another facet of holocaust inversion. The nazis and soviets killed over two thirds of Yiddish speakers between them. Israel saved a large proportion of the remaining Yiddish speakers. Who then chose to speak Hebrew to communicate with other Jews who didn’t speak Yiddish, while many maintain Yiddish as a language for home and school. Israel has the second-largest Yiddish-speaking population in the world today.
I have sometimes called the IPA chart “a periodic table of speech sounds”. The layout of the modern IPA chart traces its origins back to Pāṇini’s method organizing the consonants of Sanskrit. Well,
Mendeleev published his periodic table of all known elements and predicted several new elements to complete the table in a Russian-language journal. Only a few months after, Meyer published a virtually identical table in a German-language journal.[39][40] Mendeleev has the distinction of accurately predicting the properties of what he called ekasilicon, ekaaluminium and ekaboron (germanium, gallium and scandium, respectively).
[…]
For his predicted three elements, he used the prefixes of eka, dvi, and tri (Sanskrit one, two, three) in their naming.
[…]
By using Sanskrit prefixes to name “missing” elements, Mendeleev may have recorded his debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns of speech sounds (exemplified by the Śivasūtras in Pāṇini’s Sanskrit grammar). Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on Pāṇini[45] at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to honor Pāṇini with his nomenclature.
Gaidhlig and Scots become official languages in Scotland today with the Scottish Languages Act coming into force after it was voted on back in June.
Key parts of the legislation includes the right for parents to request Gaelic schools for their local area, and will help with standardisation of language teaching across the board.
Good signs for the future. In the future would be very interested to see parents (and everyone else) getting access to the same learning materials so they can learn alongside their kids.
Let’s talk about the h in Neanderthal. Somewhere in the hills between Wuppertal and Düsseldorf, in the west of Germany, the small river „Düssel“ formed an impressive gorge of about 1 km length (2/3 of a mile) and 50 m depth (180 ft). It was quite impressive, especially since the surrounding countryside does not look mountainous at all, and it quickly became very famous.
One of its earliest documented fans was one Joachim Neander, a lutheran preacher and composer of church chorals in the 17th centuries. He held sermons here and wrote many of his compositions in the beautiful area. To honour him, in the 19th century this valley became known as Neander’s valley, or in german and in the spelling of the time, Neanderthal, where „Thal“ means valley. Note that in german, the „h“ is always silent, the language has no „th“ sound. This, by the way, is why most germans can’t make it unless they’ve trained, and that is why the stereotypical german accent in movies features Ze Germans talking about Zat Zing over Zere.
If you want to see this famous valley today… tough luck. They blew it up. The area had always been home to some limestone mining, but in the 19th century, it got industrialised, and in short order most of the impressive sights at the time where destroyed in quarries.
It was in one of these quarries that italian workers (the underpaid immigrants of choice for heavy and dangerous work in Europe at the time) in 1856 discovered bones that soon became the subject of intense scientific debates. Eventually people agreed that this was more or less a pre-historic form of fossil human beings. And when it came to giving it a scientific name, british scientist William King in 1863 coined the term „Homo neanderthalensis“, after the then-standard spelling of the name of the valley where it was found.
When it comes to english, this is basically the end of the story. The derived term „Neanderthal“ became popular and has only ever referred to the species, never the valley.
In Germany, however, the German Orthographic Conference of 1901 put in place new rules for all sorts of spelling, in many cases the first time that there were consistent rules at all. And the experts there took the opportunity to simplify a great deal of things, even including place names. For example, the city of Cologne used to be called Ceulen, and became Köln - matching how it was always pronounced, but the similarity to the english term got lost. One of the changes was that the silent h disappeared in Th combinations such as „Thal“. It’s now just Tal.
This was also applied to Neander’s valley, which is nowadays the Neandertal. The skeleton found there is also called „Neandertaler“. But the scientific name remains Homo neanderthalensis, because that is not really a german word anyway, and if only german scientists decided to change it, this would lead to nothing but trouble.
As a special exception, though, the museum for the skeleton at the site uses the old spelling as Neanderthal, to stay closer to the scientific name. If you want to visit it, you can take the S28 railway service from Kaarst, Neuss, Düsseldorf, Mettman and soon Wuppertal, to the station… Neanderthal. In 116 years of train service, no company ever saw fit to change the name, possibly because of the museum right next door.
A side effect of the “th” thing: It also disappeared in people’s names… sometimes. You will find both Thomas and Tomas, and Thorsten and Torsten. Depends on the person; ask to see their passport if you’re really unsure. Actually they will generally have learned to say “without h” or “with h” whenever introducing themselves years before you met them. I’m Torsten without h, for example.
There’s no real reason why you need to know this, it’s just something I found interesting and wanted to share.
this blog slays absolute penis 🔥💯 on the note of emojis can you explain why they aren’t hieroglyphics? an enemy of mine is annoyingly touting that they are because she saw it on tiktok once 🙃
(this is one topic that i don’t get sick of reiterating because i love hieroglyphs so much)
“hieroglyphic” is the term applied to a couple of ancient writing systems, especially egyptian (the domain where the term originated) and mayan. generally, it refers to writing systems with notably pictorial elements, that is, systems where the signs’ pictorial origins are recognizable. i’ve seen some claims that hieroglyphic writing is limited to monumental texts, which may be accurate for egyptian—i believe different versions of the script, hieratic and demotic, were used for non-monumental writing—but is definitely not true for mayan glyphs, which also appear incised and painted on portable objects and in codices and graffiti.
ALT
the classic mayan logogram AK “turtle,” representing a turtle shell.
although emojis are obviously pictorial, they don’t have the linguistic value that hieroglyphics do. any “hieroglyphic” system is encoding a specific language, and none of them are actually “pictorial,” which would indicate something like an ideographic system where every symbol stands for an independent idea. (this was a popular early explanation for egyptian hieroglyphs among european scholars, but 19th-century decipherment pretty roundly shut that down. it was also suggested for mayan glyphs in the 19th and even 20th centuries—including among very prominent mayanists—but again, thoroughly disproven.)
so: hieroglyphic systems represent specific linguistic units, which may or may not have semantic associations. phonograms are used for their sound referents, like alphabetic signs. logograms are used for their semantic referents, but also (in my experience) point to specific words. both egyptian and mayan hieroglyphic scripts make use of some kind of complementation in cases of homophony or polyvalence, where a determinative (for egyptian) or syllabogram (for mayan) is associated with a logogram to clarify its intended referent.
ALT
the logogram WITZ “mountain” with initial complementation by the syllabogram wi (shaded in gray), clarifying the word’s pronunciation.
emojis, having no agreed-upon linguistic value, can be described as pictorial or ideographic. we don’t have a system of associating specific sounds with individual symbols, and in cases where a symbol can have multiple meanings, there’s no formalized understanding of complementation to clarify (you just have to figure out your interlocutor’s intention from context clues).
there’s also an important social factor to consider here: writing systems do not get developed and especially disseminated without an infrastructure to back them up. as law (2015:162)* writes, “writing needs complex society more than complex societies need writing.” script practices can change from the bottom up, sure, but without social structures in place surrounding those script practices, they’d have nowhere to go**. emojis have no such structure. they are unformalized, unstandardized, and entirely lack a pedagogical infrastructure. there’s no way to tell everyone what their singular meanings may be. and, honestly, there aren’t enough of them for a full writing system! logosyllabaries have at minimum hundreds of symbols, and that’s even with the ability to write phonetically using syllabograms alone. coe and van stone (2005:18–19)*** very accurately call out how ambiguous and unwieldy a purely logographic system would be, requiring thousands upon thousands of individual signs to represent the full breadth of human conceptual capability.
…anyway, that’s been my soapbox.
*Law, Danny. 2015. “Reading Early Maya Cities: Interpreting the Role of Writing in Urbanization.” In A World with Cities, 4000 BCE – 1200 CE, edited by Norman Yoffee, 158–81. The Cambridge World History, III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
**Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, and Marcus W. Feldman. 1981. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
***Coe, Michael D., and Mark Van Stone. 2005. Reading the Maya Glyphs. 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson.
illustrated examples from Kettunen, Harri, and Christophe Helmke. 2019. Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs. 16th ed. Wayeb.
ah, so you *could* use emojis for a hyroglyphic writing system, as they are direct pictoral signifiers, but this use would be different to how emojis are used regularly
Interesting
let me be clear: “hieroglyphic” is NOT a technical distinction for writing systems in general. the roman alphabet is also originally derived from pictorial symbols, but they’re so abstracted now as to be unrecognizable.
literally any set of visual symbols could theoretically be co-opted for writing.
I vaguely recall that Aztec codices were being increasingly thought to have a similar writing system to Maya underlying them. Has that approach gone anywhere toward a potential formal decipherment?
aztec script does seem to have a higher proportion of logography/ideography than maya script but there’s a similar phonetic complementation principle at work.
hey, person who said they knew someone mentioned here and wanted to tell them about this post? pLEASE DO NOT
Anonymous
ALT
ALT
