Talk:Yiddish

Why Is This Called A Germanic Language and Not A Creole Language?

It is a creole language. It is a creole of Hebrew and European languages. It is a Semitic language as much as it is a Germanic language. Yiddish speakers were reading and translating the Hebrew Torah the whole time. Speakers of modern Hebrew read from the same Torah as 3,000 years ago and can make sense of it. This is evidence of Yiddish being a semitic language. 2600:1700:2770:E9D0:C5A4:629E:2BE2:9971 (talk) 08:36, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Please supply references to reliable sources stating in such a declarative manner that this is true. As for your reasoning, the syntax of Yiddish is unmistakably Germanic. The Yiddish speakers who could read and translate the Hebrew Torah were able to do so because they also knew Hebrew; a person who spoke only Yiddish wouldn't be able to read the Torah at all. Speakers of modern Hebrew read from the Torah because it's in Hebrew, Yiddish has nothing to do with it. Largoplazo (talk) 13:41, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

I think that Yiddish is not a creole language. Creole would be a language created by uprooted people -especially slaves- , who do not understand each other having different origines, using the vocabulary of where they have ended up but creating their own grammar. This is definitely not the case for Yiddish. It is a German dialect from the Rhineland (Mainz) and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer) of the 10th century that developed partly independently from German since then, subject to influences of the respective local languages where it was spoken. It still mostly keeps the German grammar nowadays. From the written Yiddish example in the article there is only one word, "koved" -dignity-, that is not German or at least I don't understand as a German native speaker, even though the orthography of some of the words is quite different from todays High German. Mregelsberger (talk) 11:08, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Yiddish - the Name

«In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but "Yiddish" is again the most common designation today.»

I must first admit that I have no own knowledge of Yiddish other than having heard it speak and read it. But I am a native German speaker.

As Yiddish, especially its Western dialects, is a variant of German that is quite understandable to German speakers I think there is a misunderstanding in the sentence from the article quoted above. The name for Yiddish (transliterated to Jiddisch in German) was always Yiddish, which literally means Jewish in German. In modern High German we would write and say Jüdisch (Jewish, with a Ü sound like in the French word "rue"). In many German dialects and in Yiddish however, the "ü" is and was not pronounced as in "rue" but as the "i" in Yiddish, which means that Yiddish is the way Yiddish speaking Jews and many native German speakers would pronounce the word "Jüdisch", the meaning of which is both "Jewish", i.e. the language of the Jews and the adjective "jewish". Possibly in English literature the language was called "Jewish", which would have been a correct translation of "Jüdisch", the High German word for Yiddish. Mregelsberger (talk) 11:08, 6 September 2026 (UTC)