[Sca-cooks] OT, OOP Gifts at Hanukah

[Lilinah]

Philippa wrote:
>Well, uhm....Yiddish is a conglomerate language of German, language
>of Country of Origin for speaker and Hebrew. Indeed, some of Yiddish
>takes it's words straight from Hebrew. In any case, Chanukah is a
>Hebrew word. Oh and btw, Yiddish was always written with the Hebrew
>alphabet.

Well, uhm... English is a "conglomerate language", too, in the way 
you mean. After all, about 70 per cent of modern English words have a 
Latin, or at least Romance language, origin. But English is not a 
Romance language. We commonly use the words "shampoo" and "pajamas" 
which are from India. English also includes words from Arabic, Malay, 
Turkish, Chinese, etc., languages that are not even Indo-European. 
But these words do not negate the fact that historically English grew 
from a Germanic language base. Nor do borrowed words cause Yiddish to 
defy its historically High German roots.

What determines a language's family is not what other languages is 
has, uh, "borrowed" from, but what is the core of its structure and 
basic words, its historical source, and the source of its basic 
words, and usually its grammatical and syntactic structures.

Yiddish has an historically High German base, regardless of from 
which other languages words have been borrowed. Also, much of the 
borrowing from other languages has taken place rather recently, in 
the past 250 years or so, not counting the Hebrew words which form, 
for the most part, a very specifically focused vocabulary within 
Yiddish.

Also, i've heard even Jews say that Yiddish is Low German, because 
they are confusing the linguistic terms "High German" and "Low 
German" with some idea of class. The core of Yiddish is High German, 
where "High" refers to the mountainous areas of central and southern 
Germany, as well as the Alps. This is in contrast to Low German which 
is spoken along the flat northern sea coasts of Germany, and the 
eastern Netherlands - there used to be more forms of Low German, but 
they are dying out.

A number of articles on wikipedia are pretty good such as the one for Yiddish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish
(yeah, some suck, but that's why they want readers to improve them)

-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita