Yep, my Mom referred to Yiddish, her native tongue, as "Jewish", since to her, that's simply what it was. It was what her family spoke at home and in their community -- before they snuck out of the Tsar's empire -- and completely distinct from what they spoke with non-Jews.
I adore Hebrew. While I’m not fluent yet I love the feeling of oneness with my community when praying and the feeling of connecting with centuries of Jews before me.
What a fantastic posting. I spoke onlyHebrew s. while attending Hebrew school as a very young boy. Unfortunately, I have lost most of my knowledge. I😢 have always wanted to learn Yiddish which his. What my parents ad grandparents spoke and reffered to it as speaking Jewish. Unfortunately, I cannot find. A legitimate place that teaches Yiddish. The spokesman inn this intro is super😢b! I look fore to more in this wonderful series. Shalom
I am from Tangier. I remember we spoke at home Haketia which is a blend of Spanish, Hebrew and Moroccan Arabic. There are also a lot of songs written in Haketia.
I've sent TH-cam videos of Ladino to non-Jewish Hispanic friends of mine and they said they were able to easily understand it. It does sound like a sweet language; a bit more musical than Spanish, maybe a bit more towards Portuguese. And thank you Eliezer Ben Yehuda.
@@levyman566 Of course he doesn't. The video is about Jewish languages, not just Ladino. I was thanking him for his role in reviving Hebrew, the national language and the most important language of our people.
I'm a Spaniard and, even though some of the consonant sounds are different, I find Ladino relatively easy to understand, especially compared to Portuguese, Italian or Romanian. Medieval Spanish seems to be its main ingredient. I can listen to Flory Jagoda singing "Ocho Kandelikas" and understand the lyrics quite well.
Very true. I am Spanish too and I've read a lot of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish, and Ladino is perfectly clear to me, and it has great charm. Ocho Kandelikas would mean "Eight Little Candles".
Thank you so much for this informative video. I am an Ashkenazi from Montreal who went to Jewish school and learned Hebrew and Yiddish and I was not aware of all these new/old Jewish languages.
Vos machst du, landsman! I am also Ashkenazi Jewish originally from Côte St. Luc, living in Toronto for many years now. My parents were fluent in Yiddish
@@factenter6787 Ich bin gut! I also lived in CSL etc...and Toronto but moved back home after 12 years (it's just not the same). My parents were both born in Mtl. but my Mother's parents spoke Yiddish as their first language. My Dad's parents were Hungarian and spoke English. P.S. I'm a landsfrau...lol Have a guten Shabbos!
There is Judeo-English now, spoken by Jews in Orthodox communities. It has a huge amount of Hebrew/Aramaic words in it, and Yiddish words. It is often called "Yinglish." Sometimes it is written in Hebrew letters to teach children who have have not yet learned ABC's.
I am from Holland and we have many Jiddisch words in our language. And I love that. Alas many of our jews are killed in the war, so the Jiddisch has not survived in our country.
Aramaic is not jewish but taken from the Assyrians. Jews speak English in USA. Not a jewish language. Berber is Berber. Sorry. You, again, are stretching it again.
@@saguntum-iberian-greekkons7014 I don't know the ratio of sephardic and ashkenazim Jews in the Netherlands before the war, but there were a lot more ashkenazim than sephardic Jews. I am from Amsterdam and Jewish and it is true that there were/are a lot of Jiddish words in the Dutch language and Amsterdam slang, but it is slowly disappearing in our daily conversations .
*_Thank you for this excellent video about some of our other languages..._* I have grandparents and great grandparents who immigrated to America. Paternal side came from Germany. Maternal side came from Russian Empire. They all brought their own languages, customs, and traditions with them. Several of my great grandparents never learned English as a language. My grandparents had to translate for them. My paternal grandmother spoke English, German, and Yiddish. She was a private nurse and all her clients were Jewish. My grandparents lived in a Jewish neighborhood too. Their next door neighbors were Jewish. I can still remember some of the traditional foods they brought to America with them. *_I subscribed to channel and look forward to learning more..._*
Good video but "Fiddler on the Roof" isn't an English translation of the Yiddish "פידלער אויפן דאך" ("Fiddler oifen dach"), as you imply. Rather, it's the opposite. The English name came first and was later translated into Yiddish and other languages. Of course, the English musical is based on Sholom Aleichem's "טביה דער מילכיקער" ("Tevye der milkhiker," Tevye the Milkman). which was written in Yiddish.
Thankyou for your comment. It is the only comment I have seen that I can relate to at all. I am from New Zealand. I am descended from a Solomon who was sent to Australia on a convict ship in the 1800's. I wish I knew more about who the Solomon brothers and their grandparents and great grandparents. I have a record of Fiddler on the roof. I take an interest in Jewish topics. Thankyou again for your comment. All other comments here are completely foreign to me. I only speak English and various words of Maori. Actually, I love your comment.
When the Emperor Nicholas the II was killed, the Russian Empire exploded with pogroms. Half of my ancestors fled and ended up in Bronx and NYC, and the other half (including my great-grandmother) moved and hid the fact that they're Jewish. She and my great-grandfather changed their names, baptized and started speaking Russian even at home, just to save their children from prosecution. Eventually, our Jewish ancestry faded into oblivion. 3 generations later, I'm born. And from my pre-teenage years I used to find Jewish history, languages and faith fascinating. I researched it, I learned the customs (albeit not directly) etc. I used to think that it's just my hyperfixation and nothing more. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my family actually *used* to be Jewish. I guess my intense interest and eventual coversion into Judaism were meant to be. My family didn't speak Yiddish. Yeah, my Mom still calls our cats "shlimazels", and we say "mazel tov" instead of "pozdravlyayu', but that's basically it. So I took it upon myself to learn Yiddish. Even if it's not the exact same dialect my ancestors spoke, even if it's clanky and lacking when I speak it - it's still a rich and beautiful language, and as a linguist and an Ashkenazi, I refuse to see the language die.
The Iraqi Christians that speak Aramaic are actually Assyrian or Chaldean. The Iraqi government started calling us "Iraqi Christians" in order to deny our identity and claim to our ancestral land. My family is from Barwar in northern Iraq and up until Saddam Hussain came into power there were several Jewish villages there and they all spoke Assyrian. Assyrian is still very similar to Hebrew and uses the same alphabet. Assyrians also use ancient Hebrew Names, for example my grandparents were Shmuel and Leia Benyamin.
That script used today to write Hebrew is actually the imperial Aramaic script, among others to write Aramaic like estrangela. The names are also local Assyrian and the Jews who lived in the region naturally adopted them. Names ending with El are local names. Michael, Daniel, Samuel, Emmanuel, etc. In reference to the supreme God El. As in Babel. The gate of God.
Judaism is a religion. Not an ethnicity. The name Hebrew itself doesn't refer to an ethnicity but to mixed groups of people who crossed to this land. That's the meaning of Hebrew in Semitic languages. To cross.
Ladino differs from modern Spanish, in the conjugation of second person (you) verbs. The Spanish that Cervantes wrote in is more like Ladino, than modern Spanish, as they use both the formal and informal forms for 2nd person. Modern Spanish has the informal form, but just uses the 3rd person with usted or ustedes for the formal form.
Ladino is basically old castilian, who didn't evolve like the spanish from Spain did. That's why it sounds softer and more alike portuguese or galegan.
And how about the American addition to Latino? ABETCHAR? It is the word for gambling, and it comes from American Sephardim early 1920, from “I bet cha”.
@@trudigoodman4825 1st, just only a theory, not a real fact, probably false, that you read in a random jewish website that wants to claim everything as jewish. 2nd, who cares? Are you going to bash him or pray him for having a whatever small % of jewish blood? Like if that matter. At the end what I thought is that you are jewish if you follow judaism as a religion. Not only that, he was baptised and it is known where. And his father aswell, and his grandfather aswell, both working at some point of their lifes in the Spanish Inquisition. And his grandmother ans her father arewell known too, and so on. If there was something jewish in him, it's non important whatsoever. Giving importance to that is showing lack of brains.
Only one mistake. Ladino didn't "end up sounding different". Ladino sounds like old spanish. Castillan pronunciation evolved (for instance in "x" sound), but not Ladino's.
You're somewhat right in that Ladino maintains phonetic distinctions found in old Spanish that modern spanish has mostly lost, but Ladino (as all languages do) has also evolved over time.
Ladino has words from other language as well. For example, ladino as spoken by Turkish Jews, will use words in Turkish, but also...French. /song: Anderlina Tzarfati ya la esta sufriendo/ la gisbe que ya la hace/ ya la está sintiendo/ le está parezendo que non se va a saber/ se quitó de la muger/ ___ en su alma El guerco le lleve el alma... *la gisbe le hace. Gisbe is the small pot where you roast Turkish coffee. Hacerle la gisbe, is to warm him up, or excite him. Another word I can think of is "acharvar" "ajarvar" to hit someone. "Si lo vas a ajarvar, ajarvame a mi primero", if your going to hit him, hit me first." / ven Hermoza ven con mi, que mi padre es cugundi (textile worker), te va a darte un brocal de crepe de Shin. (China in French, Chine, pronounced Shin.) Little things like that.
My dads family was from Romania, and my maternal grandmother was from Russia. They always had arguments, (in Yiddish) about which one of them spoke the real Yiddish.
Thank you! I am part Ashkenaz, Sephard and probably Mizrahi. I grew up around people speaking many languages including Yiddish. It was really my first language, with alot of English thrown into to it. Yinglish, really. I am musician, singer, actor and writer. I sing in a variety of languages, including Yiddish and Ladino. You gave a very good explanation of Yiddish. Most people try and call it Germanic. It isn't. It has German elements depending on where and how you learned it, but there are all kinds of languages in Yiddish. It is very polyglot. Some people don't realized that Yiddish is a real language with grammatical structures, tenses, verbs and forms. So is Ladino. So are the other Jewish Languages. I am a member of the National Yiddish Book Center. There is something like 5 main dialects of Yiddish, and maybe as many as 10-12 sub-dialects of Yiddish. I'll bet the other Jewish languages have something like this going on too. Jews ended up everywhere. I laugh when people in the South say Coniptshon Fit. It's the department of redundancies department. What they are saying is Fit Fit. Lots of Southerners say this without even knowing that Coniptshon is from Hebrew. And that Yiddish speakers use it alot.
And Ladino is just archaic Spanish. In studying for a Spanish minor it's just a centuries old dialect of Spanish, easily and interchangeably identifiable with old forms of Spanish.
"...Yiddish is a real language with grammatical structures, tenses, verbs and forms." As opposed to what? An unreal language? All languages, including pidgins and creoles, have grammatical structures, tenses, verbs and forms. If they didn't, people wouldn't understand one another, and thus such languages would quickly cease to exist.
Loved this video! Thank you for sharing some of the lesser-known languages; it’s especially important given how many were likely lost due to the Holocaust. I love the way that the language persevered and survived, the same way that the Jewish people have. 💚
There was a Jewish community in Provence with a fusion language called "Shuadit." The community flourished for a time and contributed to Jewish scholarship. A friend of mine, while studying for the rabbinate, learned to read Jewish exegesis in Shuadit.
@@2degucitas The name looks like "Jew-speak" in French. However, Provence was not a part of France until after the French Revolution. The south of France was a part of a linguistic continuum of post-Latin Romance languages, of which Catalan is the most prominent survivor.
@@infinitelink "Languedoc" and "Occitanie" refer to the language once spoken in Mediterranean France. "Oc" meant "Yes," rather than the standard French "Oui." During the nineteenth century, variant French dialects were suppressed in order to create a unitary national linguistic community.
My own family is Persian Jewish, but from a region where they spoke Aramaic. So, Aramaic and Hebrew were their only languages. And yes, ancient Hebrew and modern Hebrew are close enough to easily understand both, if you speak one 😊
Where did your family live exactly? Mine was from Keshan and Esfahan, I think. I wonder if they spoke Judeo Farsi, or just Farsi? Nobody told me, I only found out we were Jewish almost by accident.
@@SYA357 there's TONS of Persian Jews from Kashan and Esfahan. Very common in the Jewish community 😊 My family was more of an exception, from Sanandaj, near Kurdistan.
@@danieljmarvin Ironically, the vowels have been in contention for so long that you see fights about them in the Greek gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees--where you won't even "get it" (what's going on) without some familiarity with the schools of Rabbinic thought back then (such as over when divorce is permissible), today which we might say "Jesus was contending for the position we know today as identified with Shammai, Judaism eventually, largely, took the side of Hillel, while the scriptures referred to by the former in saying "Moses permitted..." are used by him in a kind of Irony, as their and context indicates "immorality", so Jesus was identifying his opponents position as an intentional obvious, willful, intentional misconstruing of the vowels!!!!!! Hence the words "... because of the hardness of your hearts..." By the time of Massoretes adding vowel marks to their copies of the Torah it was a grave necessity: Hebrew was basically dead and soon (they knew) to be forgotten, and there's uncertainty then (centuries after that episode I refer to captured on the gospels) as to what is and isn't correct. Just a dilettantes speculatiom but: it seems Abjads are actually awful to maintain a memory because they're in part really a reminder of material rather than a record, which is different from what is not meant by an "alphabet" which is used to record entire phonemes rather than forms that can suggest possible phonemes in order to aid recalling possible options and then wittling down to a few or one based on context. The Hebrew Scriptures (rather notoriously given the... implications for the idea of an "Oral" Torah) actually record that at one point all Israel had FORGOTTEN the law until the book of the law was found and read aloud to the people... which serves perhaps as a counterpoint in some ways to my idea about Abjads OR the language was still well enough understood and writing/reading still strongly possessed in the language... from which one might infer that much of the culture was transmitted orally not through reading (makes sense given the cost of books), and which also seems to be verified by the evidence of teaching the law to youth via reciting-recalling (each new piece continually retried throughout the day). If you have a culture that's "high" context and transmitted through memorization though, you don't need writing that records phonemic units, just that elicits the approximate words and the rest flows to mind. Whereas if you have a low contact culture, your writing system better tend toward transmission via the text over retrieval of what was transmitted via being taught by people.
שלום ותודה אח יקר! I was born in Libya and we spoke Italian and a judeo arabic dialect that have very unic words that Arabic don't have. When I have reserched about the origen of them I have found that they are from Spanish origen. Fore exemple: Pacadillo- a dishe made frome minced meat came frome the spanish word Pacadio. The word Labis- pencil came frome the word Lappis. Ect ect.
Pacadio doesn't exist, it comes from de word picadillo. Picadillo comes from picado, which means, shredded. The lappis doesn't exist either, it's lápiz, that comes from the latin word labis, which means stone.
We love Yasmin. I especially love her duets with concha Buika. You will not believe this combination, but Yasmin sings with many people I really like when I Noche Mas, when she sings it with a Greek singer, and he sings it in Greek, and she sings it in Ladino. It’s an old one, because she is pregnant in this video.
I think, Djuhuri is spoken mostly by Mountain Jews, who are originally from Azerbaijan. Georgian Jews speak Kivruli, which is a dialect of Georgian. Not sure about Buhari and Tajik Jews, though.
Just correction,Juhuri was mentioned in the video(He called it in the video Judeo Tat),Tat are Shia Muslim Iranian subgourp(who are not Persians but Iranians)who live in border region between Iran and Azerbaijan and Jews in Caucasus speak similar dialect.Juhuri spoken in mainly in East/Central Caucasus(NOT Georgia or Armenia),this is Azerbaijan,Dagestan,Chechenya and Kabardino Balkaria(Nalchik),maybe in modern times there are more places but these are the traditional regions of Jews.
I'd really like to give attention to Italkim: the language that was spoken by italian jews, the oldest jew community of Europe. Few people know about it...
When I was a kid, my grandmother said I sounded like I was speaking Yiddish (I’m a native English speaker). At the time, I thought she made up the word. Didn’t realize it was a real thing until my teens 😅🤨🤦🏽♀️
My Bubbee ( whom imigrated from Russia, spoke much Yiddish ( G-d Rest Her Soul) as I spent many weekends with her and Zade, ( whom immigrated from Poland ) It was a wonderful times in my life.I spoke Yiddish around them, and at home,. I miss them very much and I still use Bubbee's recipe to make our Family Brisket at home for dinner and for our Families for Speak Observances and gatgerfings ✡ Thank you for s sharing this with us , today . My children know when I speak Yiddish they are either in trouble o.o I am Kevilling. They absolutely know Yiddish, as we all ( the grown ups ) use. It daily in our conversations 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟✡🇬🇧
There is also Judeo-Georgian, we call it kivruli, (ყივრული) 🇬🇪🇮🇱. As Georgian myself, who's native language is Georgian, is really hard to understand, Judeo-Georgian, first time when i hear it, i had feelings that was familiar but was hard to understand meaning of sentences ❤😊
Juhuru and Bukhori, which you called "Judeo-Tat" and "Judeo-Tajik", are still very much alive and actively spoken, with contemporary literature and media (for example, the newspaper Vatan, which is published in Dagestan to this day).
I once met a fellow whose first language was Yiddish. He said that it was so similar to Medieval German, that he could read easily read the original William Tell in its old language.
It would had been odd if Yiddish became the national language of Israel. Adding the narrative and lie that “Jews comes from Europe” Thx God Hebrew became the national one officialy
Interesting video. I'm 90% Chinese and 10% Dutch (from my maternal grandmother line). 2 years ago, I found out that my grandma is actually a Dutch Ashkenazi after some personal documents/records were found in her old hometown in Rotterdam. I still can't believe it even until now. My mom, dad, and I live in Indonesia. We never talked about this because u know...anything related to "Jewish" mostly receives a bad perception by the majority of people here. (We're planning to move out tbh) Well, from this video, Im getting more interested in the history of Jewish diaspora community. I also particularly attracted to Yiddish (I and my mom have already learnt pretty basic phrases since like 6 months ago).
My maternal grandfather, born in Ioannina, Greece spoke Yevanic - or Judeo-Greek. He was a Romaniote Jew and NOT Sephardic as most Greek Jews are descended from Spanish or Portuguese Jews who settled there after 1492. The Romaniote Jews were the original and indigenous Jews of mainly the province of Epirus in Greece, around the Third Century BCE. It could be argued this was the first permanent settlement was by Jews in Europe.
A lot of modern languages were "constructed" by educated men from the elite who decided that they needed a national language, and that it had to take the place of whatever learned or classical language that they themselves had studied in as well as that of whatever empire they had previously belonged to. That's how they imported all these words into their dictionaries that ordinary people did not use before, and also complex grammatical constructions from whatever classical language they used. Before that learning to read and write often went hand-in-hand with learning a scholarly language used by administrators. Another thing the new nation states that grew up in the 19th and 20th centuries sometimes did was to deliberately separate themselves from their neighbours, or from similar people with a different religion. Among illiterate South Slavs, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim might have had some different words for things relating to religion, but their schools taught them to use different alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic) for Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian, and that helped foment the hatred that led to genocide. In British India, Hindustani was a lingua franca in the North, but the new states of India and Pakistan encourage the switch to words of Arabic or Sanskrit origin in Urdu and Hindi which use completely different alphabets nowadays, whereas at street level and in Bollywood films they are almost the same. Something like that has happened to "Jewish" in modern Israel.
I’m married to a Moroccan and have been struggling with Darijah (Moroccan Arabic) for years. I was surprised to hear Darajah spoken on an Israeli film a few years ago, and to learn there is a Darijah school in Israel where Moroccan Israelis can learn their families language. I also met a Moroccan Israeli on a college course I was doing years ago and we became good friends due to our Moroccan connections. When I travelled to Jerusalem to pray at the AlAqsa mosque( I’m Muslim) she was a diamond and helped me no end. In Essaouira Morocco your Synagogue and cemetary is still there being cared for by faithful Moroccans, I even saw a store holder studying Hebrew anticipating a Moroccan Jewish return. We love our Moroccan Jewish neighbours, my wife was brought up in the Mellah (Jewish quarter) of Rabat. Come home we miss you.
I was born in Brazil but,my parents came from Portugal. Our surname is Mendes. I'm now Mendes Costa. Obviously from marriage. I found that Mendes and Costa are names that are of Jewish origin. That's because the Jews that came to Portugal, think around the Medieval period were forced to change their names and religion to Christianity. They chose names that represented nature. Like,Costa which means coast and Ribeiro which means a river bank or a small stream. You were also talking about the word pencil. In the Portuguese language we say "lapis"
Growing up I thought 'szmata' was a Polish word and I thought 'kvetch' was an anglicized corruption of 'kwieczyć' which I just assumed was Polish for 'complain'. And yes, in NYC you'll see people who present as African-American and East Asian kvetching about all the schvitzing they're doing.
Szmata doesn't ring a bell (so I guess it probably has slavic/polish origin), but Kvetch sounds the same as the German verb "quetschen" (in Dutch "kwetsen") which means "to squeeze" (a lemon) or like the noun "Quetschung" which means a bruise or pinch (like, god forbid, of body parts in an accident).
ב''ה, the history of the diaspora as Yiddish developed will take you through, well, Prussia (and further into Slavic regions perhaps). Scholars, at least, were settled and corresponding throughout Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and so on in that era. (For the troubled Jewish definition of throughout.)
I am from eastern Europe and my parents were fluent in Yiddish. When I came to the USA, I found out orthodox Jews spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and English at the same time
I’ve seen it argued before that Esperanto is a jewish language, as its creator L.L Zamenhof was jewish, though i’m not sure if I agree as I feel he intended it not to be tied to any one culture or ethnicity. In any case the Nazis certainly saw it as a Jewish language and speaking it was illegal and extremely dangerous. Disclaimer: Mi parolas iom da Esperanto.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. It was informative and pointed out things I always think a good Jew or linguist or Israeli hebrew speaker automatically know. Thank you!
Jews were reusing Hebrew as an everyday language as far back as the Safed circle in the middle seventeenth century. Hebrew to an extent was used intercommunally without ever ceasing in written form because Jews from Spain couldn't speak to Jews from Iran in their everyday tongues.
Queens College, a division of CUNY (City University of New York), began offering degree programs in Yiddish circa 1970. I believe that they were the first in the country. I googled "Yiddish university programs" and found that today there are at least fifty such programs, world wide. I had heard of the Yiddish programs at Harvard University and at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I was surprised by some of the other locations: U of Minnesota, Ohio State, UCLA, Idaho, Tokyo, London, Vienna.
It was not Yiddish, but Jewish studies. It offered courses in Yiddish but not enough credits to graduate with a language major in Yiddish because it only went up to a certain up to credits. I was graduated QC in 1979. I took Yiddish 1 in 1977 with Pessl Semel.
@@forestrego4655 I stand corrected. The Workmen's Circle (now: the Worker's Circle) was a Yiddishist socialist organization, with Yiddish schule scattered around the country. My cousin attended his after-public school neighborhood "elementar" for four years. Then he went on to the "mittel schule," located on East 14th Street, a few doors east of Union Square. The father of Seth Rogen was a Workmen's Circle employee on the West Coast. The Workmen's Circle is still around and still socialist. I ran into some of their representatives at a Bernie Sanders event in Chicago in 2017. I didn't ask about the Yiddish schule.
Ladino is my 3rd language... Been studying for around 6 years. Been working on Portuguese for about a year... English, Spanish, ladino, Portuguese, and interestingly enough I found out I understand French Creole. Let's just say never studied it, nothing, had a full conversation with someone who speaks French creole.
And you’re also forgetting places like Romania and what was the other place? Yeah they speak also Latino they’re Eastern European but they also speak Latino. I’m sorry I don’t remember countries very well at the moment my brain is not working properly, but when I came to this country I kind of got a shock when one of the ladies I work with who came from Romania was speaking and Latino and I understood every word she said because I had learned it. It was one of my many mother tongues. I’m using voice to text in this so when you see the word Latino it should read LADINO the only reason that word is in capitals is because I had to spell it out one letter at a time and that’s how it put it. Please understand I am handicap my hands don’t work very well and I’m using voice to text, which is a big problem.
Very interesting. Thanks. It is important to mention that in it's first years, Israel actually banned any Jewish language other than Hebrew. The nation's leaders (especially Ben Gurion) realized that without one language, they cannot build a nation. This was destructive for Yiddish and Ladino, but it gave a great contribution to the wonder of Hebrew revival
It also gave some Israelis that I met the lousy superior attitude of telling me that because I spoke and sang in Yiddish and Ladino that I was a bad Jew, because I didn't speak Modern Hebrew.That I had an Ashkenaz way of speaking and reading Hebrew. I hated that kind of racist, lousy attitude. That superior thinking. I was told literally, that Yiddish was the language of oppression by Israeli Jews. My response was that Yiddish is the language of love. So is Ladino.
I truly don't know what to answer, for your anti Israeli/anti Zionist approach is obvious. However, all I can say is that Hebrew revival is the greatest achievement of Zionism. Today Hebrew in not only the language of the Jews who live in Israel, but also the language of many Arabs and many other non Jews
I got an ad for this video and after a quick google search I’m delightfully surprised and extremely grateful! From all directions UNPACKED both looks like and is a fount of well researched, well meaning knowledge presented comfortably and earnestly that answers questions commonly not asked because people are hesitant to broach anything approaching a sensitive subject!
I used to work for a Jewish outfit in New York. I remember my boss explained to me the difference between a schmuck and a shmeckel. I won’t explain here.
There’s modern Israel Hebrew which is different from ancient Hebrew There are several forms of Yiddish one version is Lithuanian and the other one is Hungarian Ukrainian for lack of a better term. There was a western German version called Yakakak I think that’s about disappeared Ladino from Spain which is functionally like modern Spanish Oh there’s a Judeo Italian version
Want to learn more about what Judaism has to say on things? Check out our other channel Big Jewish Ideas! www.youtube.com/@BigJewishIdeas
Also my country Thailand. The Thai language it come from Sanskrit, Hebrew,and Aramaic
My grandmother when she spoke English always said that she grew up speaking "Jewish" and she was from Ukraine.
My grandparents spoke “Jewish,” too.
It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I found out that speaking Jewish was Yiddish.
You got it right, יא. Yiddiš is literally Jewiš. Yiddiš = יידיש. Jewiš = יידיש.
Because "Yiddish" literally means "Jewish" in Yiddish.
@@Kurtlane I know this now, of course.
I did not know this back then. ❤️
Yep, my Mom referred to Yiddish, her native tongue, as "Jewish", since to her, that's simply what it was. It was what her family spoke at home and in their community -- before they snuck out of the Tsar's empire -- and completely distinct from what they spoke with non-Jews.
I adore Hebrew. While I’m not fluent yet I love the feeling of oneness with my community when praying and the feeling of connecting with centuries of Jews before me.
What a lovely way of putting it.
What a fantastic posting. I spoke onlyHebrew s. while attending Hebrew school as a very young boy. Unfortunately, I have lost most of my knowledge. I😢 have always wanted to learn Yiddish which his. What my parents ad grandparents spoke and reffered to it as speaking Jewish. Unfortunately, I cannot find. A legitimate place that teaches Yiddish. The spokesman inn this intro is super😢b! I look fore to more in this wonderful series. Shalom
my mother is also button the orginal is de butoon
אני עצובה שאנחנו לא מבטאים את האותיות השמיות (ח, ע, ט, ק) כמו שצריך יותר.
Wow if you truely want a challenging read in yiddish try reading the talmud its a classic fictional comedy 😂
I am from Tangier. I remember we spoke at home Haketia which is a blend of Spanish, Hebrew and Moroccan Arabic. There are also a lot of songs written in Haketia.
sounds like a folk music album from your town would be just Epic!
@@Kotazo85 you speak yiditsh
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Lol loo like last Koopl
😅😅😅😅😅
I've sent TH-cam videos of Ladino to non-Jewish Hispanic friends of mine and they said they were able to easily understand it. It does sound like a sweet language; a bit more musical than Spanish, maybe a bit more towards Portuguese.
And thank you Eliezer Ben Yehuda.
Um Eliezer Ben yehuda has nothing to do with ladino
You are right. My mother speaks Ladino and is able to communicate very well with any Hispanic here in the States.
@@levyman566 Of course he doesn't.
The video is about Jewish languages, not just Ladino.
I was thanking him for his role in reviving Hebrew, the national language and the most important language of our people.
@@shevetlevi2821 ok just saying though people still knew Hebrew
@@levyman566 True. But glad it ended up being Hebrew as there's no Ashkenazi, Sephardic or Mizrachi bias. Hebrew unites us all.
I'm a Spaniard and, even though some of the consonant sounds are different, I find Ladino relatively easy to understand, especially compared to Portuguese, Italian or Romanian. Medieval Spanish seems to be its main ingredient. I can listen to Flory Jagoda singing "Ocho Kandelikas" and understand the lyrics quite well.
Me too
And the other way around. My mother speaks Ladino and can understand Spanish rather well.
Very true. I am Spanish too and I've read a lot of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish, and Ladino is perfectly clear to me, and it has great charm. Ocho Kandelikas would mean "Eight Little Candles".
"Muchas fiestas vo fazer, kon alegria i plazer" sounds a lot like a mix of spoken Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish to me
How cool! Thank you for sharing this!
Thank you so much for this informative video. I am an Ashkenazi from Montreal who went to Jewish school and learned Hebrew and Yiddish and I was not aware of all these new/old Jewish languages.
Vos machst du, landsman! I am also Ashkenazi Jewish originally from Côte St. Luc, living in Toronto for many years now. My parents were fluent in Yiddish
@@factenter6787 Ich bin gut! I also lived in CSL etc...and Toronto but moved back home after 12 years (it's just not the same). My parents were both born in Mtl. but my Mother's parents spoke Yiddish as their first language. My Dad's parents were Hungarian and spoke English. P.S. I'm a landsfrau...lol Have a guten Shabbos!
A wonderfully researched based video. Kudos!
A wonderful 8 minute presentation .. thank you
There is Judeo-English now, spoken by Jews in Orthodox communities. It has a huge amount of Hebrew/Aramaic words in it, and Yiddish words. It is often called "Yinglish." Sometimes it is written in Hebrew letters to teach children who have have not yet learned ABC's.
Really? 😊
Yinglish is just Anglicized Yiddish. Basically: Bad Yiddish.
It is called yeshivish. Reoccurring terms found in study finds itself in the vernacular
Nu, ain’t Yinglish just English with a bunch of Jewish words that can be found in an ENGLISH dictionary?
@Rick Jones - Where ?
I love learning about things I had no idea about. Thanks!
I am from Holland and we have many Jiddisch words in our language. And I love that. Alas many of our jews are killed in the war, so the Jiddisch has not survived in our country.
These Jews were mostly Sephardic, righg?
@@saguntum-iberian-greekkons7014 - Non after Polish jewish immigration into Holland the Askenazi population outgrew the Sefardic one.
Aramaic is not jewish but taken from the Assyrians. Jews speak English in USA. Not a jewish language. Berber is Berber. Sorry. You, again, are stretching it again.
Dutch Jiddisch is the same as Jeckisch/Alsatian and French Jiddisch :) Western Ashkenazim ❤❤
@@saguntum-iberian-greekkons7014 I don't know the ratio of sephardic and ashkenazim Jews in the Netherlands before the war, but there were a lot more ashkenazim than sephardic Jews. I am from Amsterdam and Jewish and it is true that there were/are a lot of Jiddish words in the Dutch language and Amsterdam slang, but it is slowly disappearing in our daily conversations .
Very informative and well-presented. Excellent announcer.
*_Thank you for this excellent video about some of our other languages..._*
I have grandparents and great grandparents who immigrated to America. Paternal side came from Germany. Maternal side came from Russian Empire. They all brought their own languages, customs, and traditions with them. Several of my great grandparents never learned English as a language. My grandparents had to translate for them.
My paternal grandmother spoke English, German, and Yiddish. She was a private nurse and all her clients were Jewish. My grandparents lived in a Jewish neighborhood too. Their next door neighbors were Jewish. I can still remember some of the traditional foods they brought to America with them.
*_I subscribed to channel and look forward to learning more..._*
Just found your channel. Thank you so much for this video. I now want to know more about the Jewish people.
Good video but "Fiddler on the Roof" isn't an English translation of the Yiddish "פידלער אויפן דאך" ("Fiddler oifen dach"), as you imply. Rather, it's the opposite. The English name came first and was later translated into Yiddish and other languages. Of course, the English musical is based on Sholom Aleichem's "טביה דער מילכיקער" ("Tevye der milkhiker," Tevye the Milkman). which was written in Yiddish.
A very, very, very, very minor point, with very little to do with this lovely discussion of language that he's presenting.
Thankyou for your comment.
It is the only comment I have seen that I can relate to at all.
I am from New Zealand. I am descended from a Solomon who was sent to Australia on a convict ship in the 1800's. I wish I knew more about who the Solomon brothers and their grandparents and great grandparents.
I have a record of Fiddler on the roof. I take an interest in Jewish topics.
Thankyou again for your comment. All other comments here are completely foreign to me.
I only speak English and various words of Maori.
Actually, I love your comment.
I see that 19 people like your comment. I have never had that many people like any of my comments! Lol So yours is really very good.
Its important to preserve the languages .They are part of rich jewish culture
my grandfather was from turkey and spoke Aramaic and Ladino And Hebrew, from Him i learned how these Languages Sound
Very informative. Thanks for sharing!
Excellent 8-minute tutorial. I grew up Jewish and didn’t know a lot of what was discussed.
Thanks for a well spoken, informative video
This was so wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing. My mother is Ethiopian Jewish.
This was very educational, thank you. It's easy to take much for granted when immersed in it.
When the Emperor Nicholas the II was killed, the Russian Empire exploded with pogroms. Half of my ancestors fled and ended up in Bronx and NYC, and the other half (including my great-grandmother) moved and hid the fact that they're Jewish. She and my great-grandfather changed their names, baptized and started speaking Russian even at home, just to save their children from prosecution. Eventually, our Jewish ancestry faded into oblivion.
3 generations later, I'm born. And from my pre-teenage years I used to find Jewish history, languages and faith fascinating. I researched it, I learned the customs (albeit not directly) etc. I used to think that it's just my hyperfixation and nothing more. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my family actually *used* to be Jewish. I guess my intense interest and eventual coversion into Judaism were meant to be.
My family didn't speak Yiddish. Yeah, my Mom still calls our cats "shlimazels", and we say "mazel tov" instead of "pozdravlyayu', but that's basically it. So I took it upon myself to learn Yiddish. Even if it's not the exact same dialect my ancestors spoke, even if it's clanky and lacking when I speak it - it's still a rich and beautiful language, and as a linguist and an Ashkenazi, I refuse to see the language die.
Seems you have a 'Jewish soul'
Thankfully because others, like yourself, are (re)discovering the beauty of Yiddish, it will not die.
Where do you live currently, in Russia?
You are blessed
Very fascinating and educational. Thank you. I can’t imagine English having such drastic variations.
The Iraqi Christians that speak Aramaic are actually Assyrian or Chaldean. The Iraqi government started calling us "Iraqi Christians" in order to deny our identity and claim to our ancestral land. My family is from Barwar in northern Iraq and up until Saddam Hussain came into power there were several Jewish villages there and they all spoke Assyrian. Assyrian is still very similar to Hebrew and uses the same alphabet. Assyrians also use ancient Hebrew Names, for example my grandparents were Shmuel and Leia Benyamin.
That script used today to write Hebrew is actually the imperial Aramaic script, among others to write Aramaic like estrangela. The names are also local Assyrian and the Jews who lived in the region naturally adopted them. Names ending with El are local names. Michael, Daniel, Samuel, Emmanuel, etc. In reference to the supreme God El. As in Babel. The gate of God.
Your ancestors could also have been Christians of Jewish ethnicity.
Judaism is a religion. Not an ethnicity. The name Hebrew itself doesn't refer to an ethnicity but to mixed groups of people who crossed to this land. That's the meaning of Hebrew in Semitic languages. To cross.
@@NicoleCzarnecki I considered that but a DNA test proved I am 90% Assyrian.
@@anytajp7419 , what is the other 10%?
Very interesting presentation. Thank you 🌷
Ladino differs from modern Spanish, in the conjugation of second person (you) verbs. The Spanish that Cervantes wrote in is more like Ladino, than modern Spanish, as they use both the formal and informal forms for 2nd person. Modern Spanish has the informal form, but just uses the 3rd person with usted or ustedes for the formal form.
Ladino is basically old castilian, who didn't evolve like the spanish from Spain did. That's why it sounds softer and more alike portuguese or galegan.
de Cervantes had Jewish Ancestry.
And how about the American addition to Latino? ABETCHAR? It is the word for gambling, and it comes from American Sephardim early 1920, from “I bet cha”.
@@trudigoodman4825 1st, just only a theory, not a real fact, probably false, that you read in a random jewish website that wants to claim everything as jewish. 2nd, who cares? Are you going to bash him or pray him for having a whatever small % of jewish blood? Like if that matter. At the end what I thought is that you are jewish if you follow judaism as a religion.
Not only that, he was baptised and it is known where. And his father aswell, and his grandfather aswell, both working at some point of their lifes in the Spanish Inquisition. And his grandmother ans her father arewell known too, and so on. If there was something jewish in him, it's non important whatsoever.
Giving importance to that is showing lack of brains.
Very much appreciate the video. I always enjoy learning about other languages. Thanks!
I don't speak Ladino, but I do remember Chad Gadya in Ladino.
It was one of my favorites.
Me too
Un cabrito
Very informative. Very well put together. Fantastic and exciting presentation. Great balance of direct speaking and use of clips.
Only one mistake. Ladino didn't "end up sounding different". Ladino sounds like old spanish. Castillan pronunciation evolved (for instance in "x" sound), but not Ladino's.
You're somewhat right in that Ladino maintains phonetic distinctions found in old Spanish that modern spanish has mostly lost, but Ladino (as all languages do) has also evolved over time.
Ladino has words from other language as well. For example, ladino as spoken by Turkish Jews, will use words in Turkish, but also...French. /song: Anderlina Tzarfati ya la esta sufriendo/ la gisbe que ya la hace/ ya la está sintiendo/ le está parezendo que non se va a saber/ se quitó de la muger/ ___ en su alma El guerco le lleve el alma... *la gisbe le hace. Gisbe is the small pot where you roast Turkish coffee. Hacerle la gisbe, is to warm him up, or excite him. Another word I can think of is "acharvar" "ajarvar" to hit someone. "Si lo vas a ajarvar, ajarvame a mi primero", if your going to hit him, hit me first." / ven Hermoza ven con mi, que mi padre es cugundi (textile worker), te va a darte un brocal de crepe de Shin. (China in French, Chine, pronounced Shin.) Little things like that.
What a great video! Hugs from the Netherlands
My dads family was from Romania, and my maternal grandmother was from Russia. They always had arguments, (in Yiddish) about which one of them spoke the real Yiddish.
Yiddish = Germanic
Ladino = Hispanic
I love this channel. I’m learning so, so much!
Thank you! I am part Ashkenaz, Sephard and probably Mizrahi. I grew up around people speaking many languages including Yiddish. It was really my first language, with alot of English thrown into to it. Yinglish, really. I am musician, singer, actor and writer. I sing in a variety of languages, including Yiddish and Ladino. You gave a very good explanation of Yiddish. Most people try and call it Germanic. It isn't. It has German elements depending on where and how you learned it, but there are all kinds of languages in Yiddish. It is very polyglot. Some people don't realized that Yiddish is a real language with grammatical structures, tenses, verbs and forms. So is Ladino. So are the other Jewish Languages. I am a member of the National Yiddish Book Center. There is something like 5 main dialects of Yiddish, and maybe as many as 10-12 sub-dialects of Yiddish. I'll bet the other Jewish languages have something like this going on too. Jews ended up everywhere. I laugh when people in the South say Coniptshon Fit. It's the department of redundancies department. What they are saying is Fit Fit. Lots of Southerners say this without even knowing that Coniptshon is from Hebrew. And that Yiddish speakers use it alot.
And Ladino is just archaic Spanish. In studying for a Spanish minor it's just a centuries old dialect of Spanish, easily and interchangeably identifiable with old forms of Spanish.
What is coniptshon? I'm a native Hebrew speaker and never heard this word.
"...Yiddish is a real language with grammatical structures, tenses, verbs and forms." As opposed to what? An unreal language? All languages, including pidgins and creoles, have grammatical structures, tenses, verbs and forms. If they didn't, people wouldn't understand one another, and thus such languages would quickly cease to exist.
@@inbarpaz8899 it means "fit" which is a mild form of seizure.
Are you a CEO of some firm?
Loved this video! Thank you for sharing some of the lesser-known languages; it’s especially important given how many were likely lost due to the Holocaust. I love the way that the language persevered and survived, the same way that the Jewish people have. 💚
There was a Jewish community in Provence with a fusion language called "Shuadit." The community flourished for a time and contributed to Jewish scholarship. A friend of mine, while studying for the rabbinate, learned to read Jewish exegesis in Shuadit.
Which languages is it fused of?
@@2degucitas The name looks like "Jew-speak" in French. However, Provence was not a part of France until after the French Revolution. The south of France was a part of a linguistic continuum of post-Latin Romance languages, of which Catalan is the most prominent survivor.
@@jonlenihan4798 thank you
@@jonlenihan4798 A form of Provencal maybe?
@@infinitelink "Languedoc" and "Occitanie" refer to the language once spoken in Mediterranean France. "Oc" meant "Yes," rather than the standard French "Oui."
During the nineteenth century, variant French dialects were suppressed in order to create a unitary national linguistic community.
That was very interesting! Thanks!
My own family is Persian Jewish, but from a region where they spoke Aramaic. So, Aramaic and Hebrew were their only languages.
And yes, ancient Hebrew and modern Hebrew are close enough to easily understand both, if you speak one 😊
Where did your family live exactly? Mine was from Keshan and Esfahan, I think. I wonder if they spoke Judeo Farsi, or just Farsi? Nobody told me, I only found out we were Jewish almost by accident.
@@SYA357 there's TONS of Persian Jews from Kashan and Esfahan. Very common in the Jewish community 😊
My family was more of an exception, from Sanandaj, near Kurdistan.
True, but if you speak modern Hebrew you probably have no idea how to read antient Hebrew with proper vowels or "nikud". You'll get the ideas though.
@@danieljmarvin Ironically, the vowels have been in contention for so long that you see fights about them in the Greek gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees--where you won't even "get it" (what's going on) without some familiarity with the schools of Rabbinic thought back then (such as over when divorce is permissible), today which we might say "Jesus was contending for the position we know today as identified with Shammai, Judaism eventually, largely, took the side of Hillel, while the scriptures referred to by the former in saying "Moses permitted..." are used by him in a kind of Irony, as their and context indicates "immorality", so Jesus was identifying his opponents position as an intentional obvious, willful, intentional misconstruing of the vowels!!!!!!
Hence the words "... because of the hardness of your hearts..."
By the time of Massoretes adding vowel marks to their copies of the Torah it was a grave necessity: Hebrew was basically dead and soon (they knew) to be forgotten, and there's uncertainty then (centuries after that episode I refer to captured on the gospels) as to what is and isn't correct.
Just a dilettantes speculatiom but: it seems Abjads are actually awful to maintain a memory because they're in part really a reminder of material rather than a record, which is different from what is not meant by an "alphabet" which is used to record entire phonemes rather than forms that can suggest possible phonemes in order to aid recalling possible options and then wittling down to a few or one based on context.
The Hebrew Scriptures (rather notoriously given the... implications for the idea of an "Oral" Torah) actually record that at one point all Israel had FORGOTTEN the law until the book of the law was found and read aloud to the people... which serves perhaps as a counterpoint in some ways to my idea about Abjads OR the language was still well enough understood and writing/reading still strongly possessed in the language... from which one might infer that much of the culture was transmitted orally not through reading (makes sense given the cost of books), and which also seems to be verified by the evidence of teaching the law to youth via reciting-recalling (each new piece continually retried throughout the day).
If you have a culture that's "high" context and transmitted through memorization though, you don't need writing that records phonemic units, just that elicits the approximate words and the rest flows to mind. Whereas if you have a low contact culture, your writing system better tend toward transmission via the text over retrieval of what was transmitted via being taught by people.
@@danieljmarvin I mean, Hebrew is ONE language. We can understand both and read both
Fun fact: the most secret jewish language is the italki, italian mixed with hebrew. Only 200-350 people know this language.
שלום ותודה אח יקר!
I was born in Libya and we spoke Italian and a judeo arabic dialect that have very unic words that Arabic don't have. When I have reserched about the origen of them I have found that they are from Spanish origen.
Fore exemple:
Pacadillo- a dishe made frome minced meat came frome the spanish word Pacadio.
The word Labis- pencil came frome the word Lappis.
Ect ect.
Pacadio doesn't exist, it comes from de word picadillo. Picadillo comes from picado, which means, shredded.
The lappis doesn't exist either, it's lápiz, that comes from the latin word labis, which means stone.
@@juangarcia-vu9yg Actually, in Libyan Arabic, Labis means a pencil ✏️.
@@eelmohamed It is like Biskit in English which means one thing in America and something else in British English.
Lapis (latin: stone) used to mean a pencil in Italian as well. Disused by the 1960's I believe
The singer Yasmin Levy sings in Ladino. Her song "Una Noche Mas" is quite beautiful.
We love Yasmin. I especially love her duets with concha Buika. You will not believe this combination, but Yasmin sings with many people I really like when I Noche Mas, when she sings it with a Greek singer, and he sings it in Greek, and she sings it in Ladino. It’s an old one, because she is pregnant in this video.
There's another that you don't know! Called Djuri, used for centuries between buhars (Caucasus) Azerbaijani, Georgiani, Tajikistani Jews
I think, Djuhuri is spoken mostly by Mountain Jews, who are originally from Azerbaijan. Georgian Jews speak Kivruli, which is a dialect of Georgian. Not sure about Buhari and Tajik Jews, though.
In Instagram i knew an Armenian Jew. Very underrated
@Levi Sverdlov
That is the point that there are more Jewish languages 👍
@@yurysverdlov2935 There is also Karaim in Lithuania.
Just correction,Juhuri was mentioned in the video(He called it in the video Judeo Tat),Tat are Shia Muslim Iranian subgourp(who are not Persians but Iranians)who live in border region between Iran and Azerbaijan and Jews in Caucasus speak similar dialect.Juhuri spoken in mainly in East/Central Caucasus(NOT Georgia or Armenia),this is Azerbaijan,Dagestan,Chechenya and Kabardino Balkaria(Nalchik),maybe in modern times there are more places but these are the traditional regions of Jews.
Interesting video and so many interesting comments!
I'd really like to give attention to Italkim: the language that was spoken by italian jews, the oldest jew community of Europe. Few people know about it...
My mother was from Ukraine too. Now I am studying Yiddish. O love it.
My maternal bubby and sisters spoke Yiddish, loved hearing them speak 😊
Whoa, I was un-aware of this. Thank you!
When I was a kid, my grandmother said I sounded like I was speaking Yiddish (I’m a native English speaker). At the time, I thought she made up the word. Didn’t realize it was a real thing until my teens 😅🤨🤦🏽♀️
Really interesting. Thank-you.
I speak German as a second language and I really enjoy hearing Yiddish. I can understand most of it, which I find very fun and interesting.
I love this content, thanks for sharing...
My grandma is fluent in cuhuri, which is also a Jewish language
Such an interesting report.
I had no idea there were so many Jewish languages 5, amazing. I thought there were two. Very interesting and well done, Thank you!
Great video!!!
My Bubbee ( whom imigrated from Russia, spoke much Yiddish ( G-d Rest Her Soul) as I spent many weekends with her and Zade, ( whom immigrated from Poland ) It was a wonderful times in my life.I spoke Yiddish around them, and at home,. I miss them very much and I still use Bubbee's recipe to make our Family Brisket at home for dinner and for our Families for Speak Observances and gatgerfings ✡ Thank you for s sharing this with us , today . My children know when I speak Yiddish they are either in trouble o.o I am Kevilling. They absolutely know Yiddish, as we all ( the grown ups ) use. It daily in our conversations 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟✡🇬🇧
There is also Judeo-Georgian, we call it kivruli, (ყივრული) 🇬🇪🇮🇱.
As Georgian myself, who's native language is Georgian, is really hard to understand, Judeo-Georgian, first time when i hear it, i had feelings that was familiar but was hard to understand meaning of sentences ❤😊
Juhuru and Bukhori, which you called "Judeo-Tat" and "Judeo-Tajik", are still very much alive and actively spoken, with contemporary literature and media (for example, the newspaper Vatan, which is published in Dagestan to this day).
Very nice history lesson.
I once met a fellow whose first language was Yiddish. He said that it was so similar to Medieval German, that he could read easily read the original William Tell in its old language.
Excellent overview
It would had been odd if Yiddish became the national language of Israel. Adding the narrative and lie that “Jews comes from Europe”
Thx God Hebrew became the national one officialy
Great job!
Interesting video. I'm 90% Chinese and 10% Dutch (from my maternal grandmother line). 2 years ago, I found out that my grandma is actually a Dutch Ashkenazi after some personal documents/records were found in her old hometown in Rotterdam. I still can't believe it even until now.
My mom, dad, and I live in Indonesia. We never talked about this because u know...anything related to "Jewish" mostly receives a bad perception by the majority of people here. (We're planning to move out tbh)
Well, from this video, Im getting more interested in the history of Jewish diaspora community. I also particularly attracted to Yiddish (I and my mom have already learnt pretty basic phrases since like 6 months ago).
If your maternal grandma is jewish, so are you! Bless you
Thank you for your teaching
My maternal grandfather, born in Ioannina, Greece spoke Yevanic - or Judeo-Greek. He was a Romaniote Jew and NOT Sephardic as most Greek Jews are descended from Spanish or Portuguese Jews who settled there after 1492. The Romaniote Jews were the original and indigenous Jews of mainly the province of Epirus in Greece, around the Third Century BCE. It could be argued this was the first permanent settlement was by Jews in Europe.
They had a sinagogue in the old city of Jerusalem. Afterwards in the new city. We called them Yanina
Brilliant video.
A lot of modern languages were "constructed" by educated men from the elite who decided that they needed a national language, and that it had to take the place of whatever learned or classical language that they themselves had studied in as well as that of whatever empire they had previously belonged to.
That's how they imported all these words into their dictionaries that ordinary people did not use before, and also complex grammatical constructions from whatever classical language they used.
Before that learning to read and write often went hand-in-hand with learning a scholarly language used by administrators.
Another thing the new nation states that grew up in the 19th and 20th centuries sometimes did was to deliberately separate themselves from their neighbours, or from similar people with a different religion.
Among illiterate South Slavs, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim might have had some different words for things relating to religion, but their schools taught them to use different alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic) for Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian, and that helped foment the hatred that led to genocide.
In British India, Hindustani was a lingua franca in the North, but the new states of India and Pakistan encourage the switch to words of Arabic or Sanskrit origin in Urdu and Hindi which use completely different alphabets nowadays, whereas at street level and in Bollywood films they are almost the same.
Something like that has happened to "Jewish" in modern Israel.
I’m married to a Moroccan and have been struggling with Darijah (Moroccan Arabic) for years. I was surprised to hear Darajah spoken on an Israeli film a few years ago, and to learn there is a Darijah school in Israel where Moroccan Israelis can learn their families language. I also met a Moroccan Israeli on a college course I was doing years ago and we became good friends due to our Moroccan connections. When I travelled to Jerusalem to pray at the AlAqsa mosque( I’m Muslim) she was a diamond and helped me no end. In Essaouira Morocco your Synagogue and cemetary is still there being cared for by faithful Moroccans, I even saw a store holder studying Hebrew anticipating a Moroccan Jewish return. We love our Moroccan Jewish neighbours, my wife was brought up in the Mellah (Jewish quarter) of Rabat. Come home we miss you.
I was born in Brazil but,my parents came from Portugal. Our surname is Mendes. I'm now Mendes Costa. Obviously from marriage. I found that Mendes and Costa are names that are of Jewish origin. That's because the Jews that came to Portugal, think around the Medieval period were forced to change their names and religion to Christianity. They chose names that represented nature. Like,Costa which means coast and Ribeiro which means a river bank or a small stream. You were also talking about the word pencil. In the Portuguese language we say "lapis"
Cool video, didn't realize there were that many.
Growing up I thought 'szmata' was a Polish word and I thought 'kvetch' was an anglicized corruption of 'kwieczyć' which I just assumed was Polish for 'complain'.
And yes, in NYC you'll see people who present as African-American and East Asian kvetching about all the schvitzing they're doing.
Szmata doesn't ring a bell (so I guess it probably has slavic/polish origin), but Kvetch sounds the same as the German verb "quetschen" (in Dutch "kwetsen") which means "to squeeze" (a lemon) or like the noun "Quetschung" which means a bruise or pinch (like, god forbid, of body parts in an accident).
@@Long-Ball-Larry correct & schvitzing is of course schwitzen in german & sweat in english
ב''ה, the history of the diaspora as Yiddish developed will take you through, well, Prussia (and further into Slavic regions perhaps).
Scholars, at least, were settled and corresponding throughout Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and so on in that era. (For the troubled Jewish definition of throughout.)
I am from eastern Europe and my parents were fluent in Yiddish. When I came to the USA, I found out orthodox Jews spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and English at the same time
I’ve seen it argued before that Esperanto is a jewish language, as its creator L.L Zamenhof was jewish, though i’m not sure if I agree as I feel he intended it not to be tied to any one culture or ethnicity. In any case the Nazis certainly saw it as a Jewish language and speaking it was illegal and extremely dangerous.
Disclaimer: Mi parolas iom da Esperanto.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. It was informative and pointed out things I always think a good Jew or linguist or Israeli hebrew speaker automatically know. Thank you!
Daría cualquier cosa por volver a escuchar a mis padres hablar en Idish.
Gracias por tu hermoso vídeo 🙌 Shalom 💙🇮🇱💙
This is absolutely fascinating.
A pity Scots-Yiddish never amounted to anything more than a brief hybrid vernacular.
Fascinating. Thank you.
Jews were reusing Hebrew as an everyday language as far back as the Safed circle in the middle seventeenth century.
Hebrew to an extent was used intercommunally without ever ceasing in written form because Jews from Spain couldn't speak to Jews from Iran in their everyday tongues.
Brilliant as always
Queens College, a division of CUNY (City University of New York), began offering degree programs in Yiddish circa 1970. I believe that they were the first in the country.
I googled "Yiddish university programs" and found that today there are at least fifty such programs, world wide.
I had heard of the Yiddish programs at Harvard University and at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I was surprised by some of the other locations: U of Minnesota, Ohio State, UCLA, Idaho, Tokyo, London, Vienna.
It was not Yiddish, but Jewish studies. It offered courses in Yiddish but not enough credits to graduate with a language major in Yiddish because it only went up to a certain up to credits. I was graduated QC in 1979. I took Yiddish 1 in 1977 with Pessl Semel.
@@forestrego4655 I stand corrected.
The Workmen's Circle (now: the Worker's Circle) was a Yiddishist socialist organization, with Yiddish schule scattered around the country. My cousin attended his after-public school neighborhood "elementar" for four years. Then he went on to the "mittel schule," located on East 14th Street, a few doors east of Union Square.
The father of Seth Rogen was a Workmen's Circle employee on the West Coast.
The Workmen's Circle is still around and still socialist. I ran into some of their representatives at a Bernie Sanders event in Chicago in 2017. I didn't ask about the Yiddish schule.
I am truly happy that you mention Jude-Malayalam
Ladino is my 3rd language... Been studying for around 6 years. Been working on Portuguese for about a year... English, Spanish, ladino, Portuguese, and interestingly enough I found out I understand French Creole. Let's just say never studied it, nothing, had a full conversation with someone who speaks French creole.
I used to hear old folks refer to Yiddish as "Joosh." Ladino is a liturgical language. That of the Sefardi masses is Djudeoespanyol or Judeo-Spanish.
And you’re also forgetting places like Romania and what was the other place? Yeah they speak also Latino they’re Eastern European but they also speak Latino. I’m sorry I don’t remember countries very well at the moment my brain is not working properly, but when I came to this country I kind of got a shock when one of the ladies I work with who came from Romania was speaking and Latino and I understood every word she said because I had learned it. It was one of my many mother tongues.
I’m using voice to text in this so when you see the word Latino it should read LADINO the only reason that word is in capitals is because I had to spell it out one letter at a time and that’s how it put it. Please understand I am handicap my hands don’t work very well and I’m using voice to text, which is a big problem.
Bulgaria!
There are a bunch of Jewish Morgans from Scotland, by any chance any relation?
very infirmative and moving
Very interesting. Thanks. It is important to mention that in it's first years, Israel actually banned any Jewish language other than Hebrew. The nation's leaders (especially Ben Gurion) realized that without one language, they cannot build a nation. This was destructive for Yiddish and Ladino, but it gave a great contribution to the wonder of Hebrew revival
It also gave some Israelis that I met the lousy superior attitude of telling me that because I spoke and sang in Yiddish and Ladino that I was a bad Jew, because I didn't speak Modern Hebrew.That I had an Ashkenaz way of speaking and reading Hebrew. I hated that kind of racist, lousy attitude. That superior thinking. I was told literally, that Yiddish was the language of oppression by Israeli Jews. My response was that Yiddish is the language of love. So is Ladino.
I truly don't know what to answer, for your anti Israeli/anti Zionist approach is obvious. However, all I can say is that Hebrew revival is the greatest achievement of Zionism. Today Hebrew in not only the language of the Jews who live in Israel, but also the language of many Arabs and many other non Jews
There is a place for modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and Latino.
I got an ad for this video and after a quick google search I’m delightfully surprised and extremely grateful! From all directions UNPACKED both looks like and is a fount of well researched, well meaning knowledge presented comfortably and earnestly that answers questions commonly not asked because people are hesitant to broach anything approaching a sensitive subject!
Very informative.
Nitpick: 1:41 Golda Meir’s name was hebraicized from her married name, “Meyerson”.
You are great speaker at such a speed yet very eloquent I enjoy your unpacked show just becouse of you thank you
Ladino is still very understandable to a Spanish speaker, compared to 15th century English and modern English.
Nice to see you with a kipa talking about Judaism, perhaps next time you can make a video about jewish fashion, especially the ציצית garment.
I used to work for a Jewish outfit in New York. I remember my boss explained to me the difference between a schmuck and a shmeckel. I won’t explain here.
There’s modern Israel Hebrew which is different from ancient Hebrew
There are several forms of Yiddish one version is Lithuanian and the other one is Hungarian Ukrainian for lack of a better term. There was a western German version called Yakakak I think that’s about disappeared
Ladino from Spain which is functionally like modern Spanish
Oh there’s a Judeo Italian version
There are also Baltic Jewish languages.
I hear you mention Ladino and I subscribe.