Posted on 04/16/2012 9:09:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Oy! That’s meshuggah.
Makes me think of the Japanese/Jewish restaurant, Sosumi.
I gotta wonder what kind of japanese person would give a care about yiddish. I’m trying to make a list in my mind of the most useful languages to learn and yiddish is way down on the list...far below japanese in fact.
english
spanish
french
then it gets vague...maybe a tie between german, dutch, and portugese.
Chinese would be on the list if it wasn’t such a ridiculously difficult language.
So excluding chinese, next is probably a tie between russian, arabic, and japanese.
then maybe 25 more languages
then yiddish
Why is French above German?
Swahili-Yiddish online dictionary
Easy.
Where on the planet do you find native german speakers? germany, austria, and just a few other places near germany.
That’s it. Nowhere else. Sure there are minority enclaves in various places but they are insignificant.
Now french...
Canada
various islands in the carribean
various islands all around the world
one tiny country in south america
parts of north africa
parts of west africa
france of course
belgium
luxembourg
French beats german easily.
In fact, in some ways French beats Spanish.
French is the language of diplomacy and also of seduction.
Could you imagine attempting a seduction of a woman in German? Even a German one would prefer French..
Most useful depends.... English and Spanish are at the top of the list, but I’d put Arabic ahead of French, but that would depend on where you are at. If you are in East Africa then Swahili. If in West Africa, then French. North Africa Arabic. In India Hindi would get you around. Russia would get you around all of the Russias yes, but nowhere else
Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor (of Flemish origin) in thr 1500s supposedly said “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.”
thanks for a fascinating article..
An inaccurate description of Yiddish, which is essentially German with some Hebrew vocabulary and smaller borrowings from Russian and French. Yiddish is immediately intelligible to German speakers.
My experience is that with standard German you can use in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and get by in the Netherlands, but most of those countries speak English as well. French is useful not only in France (where they’ll refuse to speak English), but also Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, West Africa etc. and it was also the preferred second language for most of the world until the internet age..
One of the major sources he dealt with were libraries owned by left-wing Jewish organizations that had been founded decades ago and were going out of business.
I thought it was the Franophile Frederick the Great who said he only spoke German to horses and children.
And why Spanish to God and not Latin or Greek or Hebrew, or some other liturical language?
Yiddish-Japanese ping.....yeah...thats right.
My list was with the assumption that english is your first language and you live in the USA.
Until the internet age? Hmmm, I think English overtook French a little before then. I’d put it somewhere between 1950 and 1970.
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