Yiddish

Our professional language experts include native Yiddish speakers experienced in the nuances of the language and the requirements of effective translation. Want a quote right now? Click here. If you prefer to first learn more about the Yiddish language and its various dialects, keep reading.

Yiddish

Yiddish Language

Yiddish stands in relation to German somewhat as Haitian Créole stands in relation to French. It is a language, or dialect, that originally arose among a community of immigrants out of the necessity of communicating with a dominant host population but which over time became the principal or even the sole means of communication within the immigrant community itself. In the case of Yiddish, the immigrant community’s principal shared linguistic heritage – Hebrew-Aramaic – was preserved alongside the adopted dialect, whereas in the case of Créole a fundamental diversity of linguistic heritage (multiple, mutually unintelligible African tribal languages) led to the complete displacement of the home tongues by the immigrant dialect.

It is significant that the Hebrew-speaking immigrants who were to become Yiddish speakers arrived in the Rhine valley in the 900’s A.D. either from Italy, over the Alps, or from eastern France -- in both cases already as speakers of Romance tongues in addition to Hebrew-Aramaic. The grammatical habits of Romance languages are reflected in the sentence structure of Yiddish insofar as the latter diverges significantly from German sentence structure – most notably from the latter’s sometimes lengthy delay in the completion of compound verb forms, whereby the participle and/or secondary auxiliary is made the last word in the sentence, fulfilling the expectation aroused by the much earlier appearance of the primary auxiliary (for example: “Ich habe sie, trotz weitgehenden Untersuchungen, seit Jahren nicht mehr wiederfinden können”).

Another significant divergence from German grammatical practice is the elimination of many inflections and the alteration of noun genders.

Although Yiddish fist evolved in the Rhineland and constituted a simplified dialect of German into which many vocabulary items of Hebrew-Aramaic origin were incorporated, the language was later carried far into Eastern Europe by the migration of Jews into Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, as well as into the East Central and South Central regions of Europe comprised within the Habsburg empire.

Chronic contact with Slavic languages resulted in new imports of vocabulary as well as changes in pronunciation, such that dialects of Yiddish are distinguished as between Western Yiddish, Northeastern Yiddish, Central Yiddish, and Southeastern Yiddish, the geographical modifiers referencing the entire Yiddish-speaking area.

Yiddish is a written and well as a spoken language. It employs the Hebrew alphabet in spite of its essentially German constitution. It is a literary language that has been used for translation of and commentary on the Bible as well as for the recording of religious legal proceedings. There is also a secular Yiddish literature based on the Eastern dialects.

A

Afar

Afrikaans

Akan

Albanian

Amharic

Arabic

Aramaic

Armenian

Ashanti

Aymará

Azerbaijani

B

Bafut

Bahasa

Bambara

Basque

Bassa

Belarussian

Bemba

Bengali

Bislama

Blackfoot

Bosnian

Breton

Bulgarian

Burmese

C

Cajun

Cambodian

Cantonese

Catalan

Cebuano

Chamoro

Chichewa

Chinese

Chinook

Creole

Croatian

Crow

Czech

D

Danish

Dari

Dhivehi

Dutch

Dzongkha

E

Edo

English

Estonian

Ewe

F

Faroese

Farsi

Fijian

Fijian Hindi

Filipino

Finnish

French

Frisian

Fulani

Fuuta Jalon

G

Ga

Gaelic

Galician

Georgian

German

Gikuyu

Greek

Greenlandic

Guaraní

Gujarati

H

Hausa

Hawaiian

Hebrew

Hindi

Hmong

Hungarian

I

Ibo

Icelandic

Ilocano

Ilonggo

Indonesian

Italian

J

Japanese

Jola

K

Kannada

Karen

Kazakh

Khalkha Mongol

Khmer

Kinyarwanda

Kirghiz

Kirundi

Kissi

Kiswahili

Koniagui

Kono

Korean

Kurdish

Kwanyama

Kyrgyz

L

Laotian

Latin

Latvian

Liberian

Lingala

Lithuanian

Luxemburgian

M

Macedonian

Malagasy

Malay

Malayalam

Malinke

Maltese

Mandarin

Mandingo

Mandinka

Maori

Marathi

Marshallese

Mirandese

Moldovan

Mongolian

N

Nauruan

Navajo

Ndebele

Nepali

Niuean

Norwegian

Nzema

O

Oriya

Oromo

Ossetian

Otetela

P

Palauan

Papiamento

Pashtu

Polish

Polynesian

Portuguese

Provencal

Punjabi

Pushtu

Q

Quechua

R

Romanian

Russian

S

Samoan

Sanskrit

Scots

Serbian

Sesotho

Sign Language

Sign Language - American

Sindhi

Sinhala

Sinhalese

Sioux

Slovak

Slovenian

Somali

Soninke

Spanish

Sranan

Swahili

Swati

Swedish

T

Tagalog

Tajik

Tamil

Telugu

Tetum

Thai

Tibetan

Tigrigna

Tokelauan

Tongan

Turkish

Turkman

Tuvaluan

Twi

Tzotzil

U

Ukrainian

Urdu

Uzbek

V

Valencian

Vietnamese

Vlaams

W

Wallisian

Welsh

Wolof

X

Xhosa

Y

Yanomami

Yiddish

Yoruba

Z

Zarma

Zulu

Get Your FREE Quote
Sitemap  |  Privacy Policy  |  Terms & Conditions  |  Copyright  |  © 2024. Baystate Interpreters, Inc. All Rights Reserved