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In an earlier article, we asked why the Jewish bourgeoisie and the nationalists are enemies of our mother-tongue. In this article, we will see how true it is that our language is a crippled one, even the name of which should not be written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The usual derision that is posed against our language is that it is a mixture of different languages. \u201cAs if it belongs as a language\u201d say the scoffers, \u201cA pidgin Yiddish and a pidgin Belorussian; half Jewish and half Ashkenazi. One utters the phrase \u2019tsen tisyatshi*<\/a> kapoyres\u2019 (ten [unclear plural noun] of atonement) for example, in three words, one is German, one is Russian, and one is Hebrew!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above all, this idea is a bit of an exaggeration. Yiddish is really not as terribly mixed up as people present it to be. In reality, Yiddish consists primarily of three elements: German, Slavic, and Hebrew. And it cannot be said that the three elements are evenly represented in our language. Our language is primarily a Germanic language in which Hebrew and Slavic words are mixed. And the German words are so much homier than the Hebrew and Slavic ones, which are nullified like a handful of sand which is kneaded into a lump of clay. What is important is that these other words are very few in total and make up barely any of the language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, our language is a European language, just as we are now a European people, and we have created new words to reflect life and research, just like in German and in French. The word \u201cphonograph\u201d we speak as well as the Dutch and the word \u201cradio\u201d not worse than the Russians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is sometimes thought that because a language is a composite of different languages it is lower than other, cleaner languages. But now everybody knows that English is the most popular language in the world, the richest and the healthiest. What is relevant to the literary value of English is that in the whole Christian world, from its onset to the present day, only one Shakespeare has come of it. And he wrote in English. English is composed of German, Latin, French, Celtic, Scandinavian, and so many other sometimes civilized and sometimes wild languages, all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chiefly, it is now accepted by the philologists that every living language must grow. It must pick up new words and new phrases in order to express new ideas and emotions. And every growing language takes on these expressions – they form from neighboring languages, which are then digested and tinted with their own color. Only a dead language, like Latin, or an isolated language, like Chinese, can exist without these loan words. Our Yiddish cohabitates and mingles with the outside world, thereby becoming richer and broader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A second very common message about our mother-tongue is that \u201cIt has no grammar.\u201d This allegation is as senseless as the one we have previously examined. In these cases, when people say \u201cgrammar\u201d and what they mean is a textbook describing the language, this allegation may be correct. But every schoolboy knows that the grammar of a language does not depend on a textbook, it depends on him. The grammar of a language exists within the language \u2014 in properly speaking, in using forms of words, in seeing how the words are related to one another, in speech, and in writing. No language manifests its own rules, they are worked in through the rites and livelihoods associated with the language and in the customs that the writers and speakers preserve. Then, the language is classified as such and written about in a textbook so that the future writers and speakers can speak the way their ancestors would have spoken. A grammar of English, for example, may take all the conventions that John Ruskin or Matthew Arnold used in their written work and lectures, and make rules based on them, but the grammar itself was born before it was written down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yiddish has a grammar as real as that of any other language. It is true that a Lithuanian Yiddish speaker might say \u201ca hun\u201d to mean a hen** <\/a>whereas a Polish Yiddish speaker might say \u201ca hin\u201d and so forth, but this is just a regional difference, or, one might say, a dialect, and the same is also true in other languages. An Englishman, for example, would say \u201ccows,\u201d whereas a Scotsman would say \u201ckuze\u201d (we will speak more about dialects later). But in the same dialect, properly speaking, there exist the same variations. When we were small children, we would say \u201cshtekener\u201d (sticks) and \u201cvegener\u201d (wagons), and our parents would laugh at us, and we learned from this to say \u201cshtekns\u201d and \u201cvegn.\u201d This is how we learned Yiddish, not with a written grammar saying \u201cDo not say \u2018shtekener,\u2019 only \u2018shtekns.\u2019\u201d The same is what happens when we hear a native Yiddish-speaking child say: \u201cShe is laughing on me,\u201d and indeed we do laugh at her until she learns that the Yiddish grammar is \u201cShe laughs at (literally: of) me.\u201d***<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Our spirit and the spirit of Yiddish as it is currently used is the most natural, the freshest, and the healthiest possible, said in a Yiddish word – like dreydlekh (spinning tops). Our language has also developed its own humor, which cannot be translated into other languages without significant changes. In Yiddish there are a hundred words that have almost no equivalent in other languages. Should one, for example, try to translate the phrase \u201cMimo-nefshekh\u201d (one or the other) into a European language, or any of the special words that we use in a debate \u2014 the full translation will be \u201cnot this.\u201d The same is true of the diasporic nature of our language, the great variety of words from different languages in our speaking and writing reflects memories of our past, which invokes in our language earlier days, a sweet yet sad charm of the language. As Peretz said in jest: The word \u201cPoyln\u201d (Poland) shows us that in the time when our ancestors wandered from Germany to Poland, at night they came to a Polish fool who said to them in Hebrew \u201cPo-lin\u201d (here dwell) as to say this is where we should live. And they set up their tents, and in the nights following their conversation with the Polish fool and from then on, they called the land Poland . What sad and holy simple wordplay (From Po-lin to Poland). Coined in the olden days, it\u2019s stayed with us since over a hundred years back, but when we use another language? The meaning is lost.****<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is often said that our language has no future, and that it is therefore necessary to explain the power of Yiddish. What is the effect of a writer writing in Yiddish? Soon the flood of assimilation will come and infest the language, within the literature, within the dead and living men of letters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In such hypotheses one can never be sure. One such thinker was the English Lord Byron (who lived circa 300 years ago), who worried that the English language would go under, and that he and his work would be wiped off the face of the earth. He did not sleep for days, he toiled in mourning, translating his work into Latin. Now history laughs at the philosopher who counted the stars in the sky and didn\u2019t see the earth under his feet and foresee the magnificent future that awaited the English language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It may be that Yiddish will someday go under. In any case, it will be many years before either the Jews from Russia or Galicia forget their Yiddish. Then there is also the question of will. If the Jewish people love the Yiddish language, they will keep it together much longer. Meanwhile, we can see for ourselves that more talented people who could make a name for themselves in European languages choose to write in Yiddish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally we come to the last objection: Yiddish is an inconsistent, strange language, because it has so many dialects. The Lithuanians don\u2019t understand the Polish, the Polish don\u2019t understand the Galicians, and the Romanians don\u2019t understand anybody. This is the strongest objection, but they are scaring themselves. It is not a problem for Yiddish at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we have already noted, there are different dialects in every language \u2014 there must be dialects. This alone is also nothing. The objectionable difference is that, in other languages, there is one dialect which rules over the others, which plays the first fiddle and screams over all the others excessively, and perhaps this does not exist in Yiddish. Berlin German is, for example, the main German, and the Swiss and Swabian Germans and so forth are below it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But this has changed with time. Until the 15th century on Earth, English also had the chaos that we have now. But then the Kent (London) dialect, for political reasons, took power over the others. Such power given to a singular dialect will also befall us, through literary greatness and usurping, although this has not yet crystalized. In Russia, the Russian dialect plays first fiddle. This is because the greatest writers, Abramovitsh, Spektor, Sholem Aleichem, Frug and Peretz write in the dialect. The first newspapers \u2014 Kol Mevaser<\/em> and Folks-Blat<\/em> were edited by Jews from every land. Now the Folks-Tsaytung<\/em>, although the Editor is a Lithuanian (a brother of Z. Libin), is more Polish than Lithuanian. In America and in England, the oldest journalists were Lithuanian (Vintshevski, Kahan, and others) and therefore our literary Yiddish is more Lithuanian. And here on our stages the Jewish-Russian accent rules once more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n* This may be incorrectly transcribed, as it occurs on a part of the page that is difficult to read. I have run all possible transliterations by slavicist Elaine Wilson, who could not come up with a Russian match for any of them. <\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n** \u05d0\u05b7 \u05d4\u05d5\u05df<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n*** incorrect: \u05d6\u05d9 \u05dc\u05d0\u05b7\u05db\u05d8 \u05d0\u05d5\u05d9\u05e3 \u05de\u05d9\u05e8, correct: \u05d6\u05d9 \u05dc\u05d0\u05b7\u05db\u05d8 \u05e4\u05bf\u05d5\u05df \u05de\u05d9\u05e8<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n**** Entin seems to ignore that this story would translate very well to Hebrew, but that is relatively unrelated to his point.<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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