It's interesting to see that the old yiddish typewriter layout is actually not identical to the modern hebrew typing layout.
While they're almost identical, about 5 letters have been swapped: ח, א, ס, ף, and ב is just removed from where it is in the modern layout, and moved to the top right, in a location that modern keyboard's don't have (to the right of where P would be, in QWERTY).
Well of course it's not identical - they were assembled independently (this one by some random schmoe in New York) optimized for different letter and digram frequencies in different languages. I'm actually impressed by how similar they are.
Another reason for difference, aside from frequency differences in the two languages, is that this keyboard distinguishes some characters that aren't on modern Hebrew keyboards. For example, there are separate אָ and א, בּ and ב, etc.
Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic.
It’s unfortunate that because of the number advantage Eastern Europeans (and historical events) Jewish culture was completely altered.
Authentic Jewish culture and traditions, which were dominant before the holocaust and are so much part of the Middle East and of course deeply influenced by, and influencing on, Islam and Arabic, are obscured.
Some suggest the difference is more than tradition, and we are in fact separate people.
Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Zionism tried so very hard to burry it and the culture it represented.
> Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic.
Not really true. It's a fusion of Germanic, Slavic (and today English and Dutch) with Hebrew and Aramaic. One thing that's amazing about Yiddish is the ability to shift from a secular to sacred level within the same language. The language and the culture is a tension between the two, and the writing of Yiddish expresses this by the fact that it reserves a whole set of letters only for religious words.
[Edited to add]: And its Hebrew words are not "forced into it". It's the language of Ashkenazi Jewry who used Hebrew and Aramaic in their day-to-day life too.
There's a Yiddish joke that illustrates the extent that Yiddish has a borrowed vocabulary.
A Rabbi is at an event with the Kaiser. The Kaiser says to him 'Sprichst du Deutsch' - 'do you speak German?'.
The Rabbi replies confidently 'avadah, iz doch unserer mama loshon' - 'certainly, it's our mother tongue'.
The joke being that 'avadah' (certainly) is Aramaic, and 'loshon' (tongue) is Hebrew, so all the Kaiser would understand is 'gibberish our mother gibberish'.
Semitic languages have a root and pattern system which is central to the language and does not exist in Yiddish, that's why it's "forced". The Aramaic is of course a central connecting element in all these languages, including Arabic.
To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively.
It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue.
It’s not just the language barrier of course, but secularization, education etc.
The term “ashkenazi” refers to tradition (reading of the Bible in, customs etc.) but they’re still two different groups, and even more so when you speak about Hasidim.
In Israel at least they’re still uneducated and very poor (living of donations, subsidies, not sharing civil burdens etc.) very much like they lived in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Ukraine...) in the Russian empire until the early 20th century.
Yiddish is at least as divergent from Hochdeutsch as Platt or Dutch. It has significant Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and Lithuanian derived vocabulary and the word order is significantly influenced by Slavic languages. It’s pretty easy to learn if you speak German but so is Danish.
Ashkenaz is not just a tradition, it’s an ethnic grouping, even if Galicians and Litvaks are historical sub groups.
Hasidim are not uneducated. They’re highly educated in something you do not, it seems, value, Jewish religious law. They do not live in a manner like they did in the Pale of Settlement. They’re much less economically active and far more integrated into the political community.
> It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue.
I personally wouldn't take my source of knowledge about Yiddish from father of the movement whose whole ambition was to abandon the Yiddish world.
> To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively.
Sorry but this is plain wrong again. A fusion language of German and Judeo-Semitic languages emerged from around the region of Germany at some point, the earliest writings of which are dated about a thousand years ago. This language spread and came to be known as Yiddish. The 18C Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Moses Mendelsohn in particular derided this Germanic 'jargon'. Where the Haskalah spread in Central and Western Europe, Ashkenazi Jews abandoned Yiddish for the major languages of their hosts - eg High German, French. In the east, especially Poland, where Jews tended to be much poorer and derided by the rich Jews to their west as 'Ostjuden', Yiddish remained the language of Ashkenazi Jewish community. and so it was until the Khurbn (Holocaust/Shoah), Stalin's post-War liquidation of Yiddish intellectuals and the State of Israel's only recently relaxed hostility to the language and culture. Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to America eventually felt the need to abandon the language too. And that's how a language almost died.
Except it didn't, because religious (Haredi) Jews, who represented a small minority of Jews pre-WWII, had too much at stake in Yiddish - commentaries, writings, the Tzenereneh, teachings - and didn't feel the same need to assimilate as secular Jews. So today the vast majority of Yiddish speakers across the world come from the religious tradition, including the one Israel.
Ashkenazi is associated with German, secular Jews, emancipated and mostly assimilated already by the end of the 19th century.
Eastern-Europeans are neither of that and BTW, using religious study as "education" is misleading.
In the modern world Hasidim and Haredim are not very different from the Taliban (including their objection to education of girls). There are exceptions of course, but the general attitude is very hostile to the idea of modernity in every aspect.
Before you talk about "terroism" and the Taliban, allow me to remind you that Eastern-European Jews are very central to the fascist "revival" in Israel (some of their "leaders" are imports from the USA and Russia)... from Meir Khanh in the 80s, to Baruch Goldstein and the horribleness of whatever is growing in the Settlements in the occupied territories these days.
Oy gevalt this escalated fast. I thought this was about typing in a language called Yiddish, and you're bringing the discussion to Kahan and Goldstein? Can you imagine if this was an article about typing in Pashtun and someone escalated it to talk about the Taliban? At the very least it's not very HN is it? (Ahem, moderators?)
My friend, I appreciate that from Israel you might identify Yiddish with Haredim (religious Jews) because they're the main ones who speak it in your country anymore, but what I am trying to say is that Yiddish != Haredim. Yiddish is a language and a culture that is a millenia old. It exceeds anything you might find in Mea Sharim. Clearly you are secular and anti-religious but stop projecting that onto Ashkenazi culture as a whole.
Here are some secular Yiddish things in Israel you might want to get check out.
Given their weird insistence that European-descended secular Israelis are not Ashkenazi, I strongly doubt that this person is from Israel. Their political and ethnic vocabulary is totally divorced from Israeli discourse.
The European components (called, in Israeli discource, Ashkenazi) of the secular Israeli mainstream overwhelmingly trace their roots to Eastern Europe; Ben Gurion was born in Poland, Dayan's parents were from Ukraine, and the fathers of both Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu were born in Poland.
As Eastern European Jews secularized, many of them began to use non-Jewish languages for secular literature, while others (notably the more nationalist or socialist ones, e.g. the Bund or the Folkists) began using Yiddish as a secular language. However, those who went to Israel used Hebrew for these purposes, and those who stayed in Europe were killed.
Generally, it sounds like you're working under the misconception that the ultra-Orthodox and National Religious [1] are ethnically different from European-descended secular Israelis. They are not. They are distinguished by the ideological leanings of their grandparents in the early-20th-century, after which point individuals moving between the blocs became less and less frequent (though not unheard of).
[1] Very different groups, by the way - the National Religious uniformly speak Hebrew, and are most of the religious people in the settlements you're talking about.
Indeed, Yiddish is used in Israel, but consider the demographics here. Foreigners don’t come into much contact with the Yiddish-using Haredim. The Haredim tend to stay within their own communities, which are not neighbourhoods where just any tourist is going to pass through. Even when I have often been picked up by Haredim when hitchhiking in Israel, it is hard to have any kind of exchange with them; they will help out a non-religious person, but not chat with them.
So, the Israelis whom foreigners are likely to come into contact with are the whole rest of the population. They do not use Yiddish or know a thing about it. Considering how much the more secular part of the country dislikes the Haredim, I can see how they would bristle at any question about a cultural feature they see as Haredim-linked.
"Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox community" ... that's my point. They are not "Israeli" in the sense understood by this term today. They might as well be in Brooklin or some shtetl in Poland. Israel is not relveant for them in any meaningful way (excpet for the traditional "shnor").
Those Eastern European Jews are also the secular Israeli mainstream, and also most of American Jews. They are, as the paper says, mixed European and Middle Eastern. That paper's results had the mixture for Ashkenazim as approximately 80/20, while others have it at 50/50 or 40/60, with varying low levels of admixture from the Caucasus.
> Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Zionism tried so very hard to burry it and the culture it represented.
People who hate the Hasidim? Ashkenazi Labour voters?
> In religious circles, it is the Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, particularly the Hasidic Jews and the Lithuanian yeshiva world (see Lithuanian Jews), who continue to teach, speak and use Yiddish, making it a language used regularly by hundreds of thousands of Haredi Jews today. The largest of these centers are in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem.
There are also active communities of Yiddish speakers in the US, and elsewhere.
> In 2011, the number of persons in the United States above the age of 5 speaking Yiddish at home was 160,968.[65]
> There are a few predominantly Hasidic communities in the United States in which Yiddish remains the majority language including concentrations in the Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Williamsburg neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York, in the 2000 census, nearly 90% of residents of Kiryas Joel reported speaking Yiddish at home.[66]
Which are not Israeli... some are anti zionists in fact, but that’s not the issue. Equating American jews, Hasidic community or not, with being an Israeli is a common mistake and a real put off to most us.
> There are also active communities of Yiddish speakers in the US, and elsewhere.
Emphasis not in original. I was not equating Israeli Jews with other Jews. If you have a problem speak plainly. I’m aware Israelis and Jews in the diaspora are not the same, American Jews and Israelis in America are separate communities and leftist politics are normative among American Jews and a remnant of a dead ideology in Israel for two. American Jews think Israelis are rude and vulgar.
Oh my. I'm the maker of the only-cross platform Yiddish keyboard (well, macOS, Windows, Linux). I've made variants of QWERTY and the Israeli keyboard and they've been well received but life got in the way, they've suffered from bitrot, I had to take my site down,[0] people have asked me to put it back up and its been nagging me on my to do list for ages.
This post has given me resolve to sort it out today!
Also, I'd never heard of this Jonas and I'm going to add his variant too.
Haven't tried Assimil's course, but I'd recommend Lily Kahn's excellent Routledge guide, Colloquial Yiddish, which aside from being pedagogically excellent is very funny and had me laughing a lot.
There are also many courses on offer around the world. One of the great things about them is they tend to also pass down Yiddish culture too, not just the language. Happy to help you find one and get you on track to read IB Singer!
While they're almost identical, about 5 letters have been swapped: ח, א, ס, ף, and ב is just removed from where it is in the modern layout, and moved to the top right, in a location that modern keyboard's don't have (to the right of where P would be, in QWERTY).