Talk:Yiddish/Archive 4

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

"Ashkenazi langauge" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Ashkenazi langauge. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Steel1943 (talk) 18:29, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Recognized minority language in what countries?

What the definition of a "recognized minority language"? If the Census Bureau and New York state print material in Yiddish, is it an official minority language? The US Census bureau has full-page adds in Yiddish and carries informational Yiddish material on its website. The New York State Dept of Ed certifies bilingual Yiddish-English teachers. The New York State Dept of Health also produces material in Yiddish, as noted CNN noted in 2019 when critiquing the translation. MichelleInSanMarcos (talk) 03:21, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

The factbox says that Yiddish is a recognized minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and Ukraine. However, the text of the article says that Yiddish has that status only in Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Clearly, these can't both be true--they agree on Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, and Sweden, but the factbox has four countries not listed in the main article. And that has one country not listed in the facctbox. User:Vicki Rosenzweig

I think "recognized" would have to mean officially recognized by law or decree. Regarding official minority languages in Sweden, for example, see here. "2 § Nationella minoriteter är judar, romer, samer, sverigefinnar och tornedalingar i enlighet med Sveriges åtaganden enligt Europarådets ramkonvention om skydd för nationella minoriteter (SÖ 2000:2) och den europeiska stadgan om landsdels- eller minoritetsspråk (SÖ 2000:3). I språklagen (2009:600) anges att de nationella minoritetsspråken är finska, jiddisch, meänkieli, romani chib och samiska." Largoplazo (talk) 09:20, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

The United States and various states and localities print some materials in languages other than English, but not only does the U.S. have no "recognized minority languages", it has no official language. (English is not official. This angers some people.) Largoplazo (talk) 09:25, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Propose to include Yiddish flag in the article

In 2014 there was a discussion here about the article "Yiddish Flag" being removed "due to the lack of external references either to the prototype flag or the initiative for its use", meanwhile the flag is still considered by the small Yiddish communities as their language flag, the examples might include the use of flag on Duolingo for the (yet) incoming Yiddish course or the Memrise Yiddish course. Gdominik100 (talk) 22:11, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

My first question is: What do we need flags for? As it is, I don't understand the obsession with including flag logos in every single list of countries, as though the countries' names aren't already there and aren't the primary way we identify them. How many flags are most people even able to associate with the correct country? I usually read it as a digression: "Germany's entrant in the contest this article is about was Dieter Krieger, and, by the way, this is what Germany's flag looks like. Hungary's entrant in the contest was Laszlo Karoly and, by the way, this is what Hungary's flag looks like. Iceland's entrant ...."

In addition, unlike sloppy websites like Duolingo, Wikipedia knows that there is no one-to-one correspondence between flags and languages and therefore doesn't pretend that there is.

Then, there is no flag that is "the Yiddish flag". A design that one person came up with and that Duolingo adopted because they wanted a graphic to use in lieu of a bona fide flag and that a few other people like doesn't thereby become "the Yiddish flag". Of interest to me was this. It simply cannot be Wikipedia's position, in the context of the current state of affairs, that such-and-such design is "the Yiddish flag", and thereby appropriate for use to represent Yiddish. Largoplazo (talk) 00:17, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

"the flag is still considered by the small Yiddish communities as their language flag" -- no, it isn't. There isn't even such a thing as a "language flag"--http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ -- 72.194.4.183 (talk) 23:00, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

I've now started a new article on the broader topic: Yiddish symbols.--Pharos (talk) 22:23, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Image for oldest Yiddish passage

I've uploaded an image of the "Gut tak im betage" passage as found in the Mahzor Worms here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Early_Yiddish_Passage.png Maybe someone should include it in the relevant section? Just a thought.

Gut taq im betage se vaer dis makhazor in beis-hakneses trage.

Isaacmayer9 (talk) 18:47, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Seems "official language" and "minority language" in infobox should be linked

The infobox has two phrases, "official language" and "minority language" that have their own articles on Wikipedia. I would think they should be linked in the infobox. But not sure how to do it as a template was used for the infobox.

Both terms are also used in the article. I linked the first use of both in the article. But I think it would be good to also link them in the infobox as I think some readers don't closely read the infobox but do closely read the article, and vice versa. Greg Dahlen (talk) 12:56, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: The Study of Language

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 1 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): SPLL, Bguti2, Llill2, Wsehwail (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Dquin3, Ivanatheslayer, Brian redmond jr, Lexxdavv, TramTrimTrom.

— Assignment last updated by UICLing (talk) 10:57, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

WikiEd Students: Respond to Peer Feedback

Students: Respond to your peer feedback by posting what changes you will make and what should be made to the article based on your peers' suggestions. Click "reply" below to respond. @SPLL, @Bguti2, @Llill2, @Wsehwail UICLing (talk) 16:28, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

@Dquin3 Thanks for your review. I'll try to add something new to the lead, as well as add more to the origin/history of Yiddish section. I will also try to incorporate and start a section on consonants and work on adding more information on the phonology. I will also keep an eye out for grammatical errors like you said.

@TramTrimTrom Thanks for your review. We'll continue working on contributing to the sandbox and main article.

@Brian redmond jr Thanks for your review. I'll try to see if I can add more information about the phonology of the language. I'll also try to add some information about the other stuff you mentioned, but I remember that a lot of that stuff was already in the main article.

@Ivanatheslayer Thanks for your review. I'll try clarify on the difference between the phonetic system and the traditional system. I'll also try to find information on the exceptions I was talking about. Llill2 (talk) 14:31, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

UNESCO endangerment classification

The UNESCO World Atlas of Languages currently lists Yiddish and Eastern Yiddish as “Potentially Endangered.” Only Western Yiddish is “Definitely Endangered.” The latter has constituted a minuscule part of the speech-community demographic for a long while and not even the WP feels need for a separate article about it. Conferring its endangered status on the categorization of the present article is therefore significantly misleading. I’m going to hold off on reverting the recent edit to that effect pending its discussion, since it would also need to be propagated upstream to the parent article for all such classification. Futhark|Talk 07:12, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Hey futhark I separately came to the same conclusion, and went ahead and implemented the changes. Just now I became aware of your comment. However I am not aware of how to remove the now outdated and misfactual categories currently ascribed to this article, along with applying any necessary edits to any parent articles. You, or any other, can go ahead and take care of that. I believe the changes to be undoubtedly warranted and under little dispute. 174.251.64.28 (talk) 23:27, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Aramaic as Lashon hakodesh

I became aware that Aamaic is referred to as Lashon HaKodesh (the Tongue of Holiness) in this article. I believe this to be misleading, for even if at occasional times it was referred to as such, as made apparent by 1 reference @Futhark raised, it is definitely not commonly referred to as such. As an orthodox jew I never heard it referred to as such, although every 5 year old orthodox jew will tell you Hebrew is Lashon Hakodesh. See the Mishna in Masechet Sotah 7:2-3 that refers to it as such. Indeed, the reason we refer to it as such has been discussed by early Jewish commentators, see Maimonides in Guide to the Perplexed 3:8, see also Nachmanides to Exodus 30:13, who both give reasons obviously only applicable to Hebrew. I believe the misconception we are discussing may have arose because of a statement of an early Jewish sage Rabbi Chanina quoted in the Talmud, Tractate Pesachim page 87b, where he states that Aramaic is akin to Lashon Hakodesh. Although from a Halachic (Jewish law) standpoint this may be the case, in practice only Hebrew is actually referred to as Lashon Hakodesh. For references see https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3354288/jewish/Why-Is-Hebrew-Called-the-Holy-Tongue-Lashon-Hakodesh.html, https://www.kby.org/english/torat-yavneh/view.asp?id=4010, and https://www.thejewishstar.com/stories/The-holiness-of-Hebrew-our-Lashon-Hakodesh,6709, articles that clearly only reference Hebrew as Lashon Hakodesh. Indeed, besides the out of touch wikipedia article on Lashon Hakodesh (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lashon_Hakodesh), one would be hard pressed to find a relevant source that naturally refers to Aramaic as Lashon Hakodesh. I do hold the description should be corrected in that article too. Please provide any input you have, so hopefully we can reach a concensus on the correct course of action. 174.251.64.114 (talk) 06:50, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Yitskhok Niborski is a prominent lexicographer and his dictionaries are not peripheral reference works but core authorities. His Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh-shtamike verter in yidish is written entirely in Yiddish and uses loshn koydesh as a Yiddish lexeme. The sources you cite discuss Lashon Hakodesh as a Hebrew lexeme. Given that this article is explicitly about Yiddish and presents it in a linguistic framework, I believe that it should reflect and cite the prior literature in that field. I do agree that it might be worth extending the article with an explanation of the difference between the Yiddish lexicographic perspective on loshn koydesh and the one you delineate about Lashon Hakodesh anchored in the orthodox Jewish community. Futhark|Talk 07:08, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

600,000 or 2 million?

"In the 1990s, there were around 1.5–2 million speakers of Yiddish, mostly Hasidic and Haredi Jews. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 in the rest of the world (for a total of 600,000)."

Am I missing something here? Which is it? That's a wild margin of error. Brassmonkey3212 (talk) 09:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

That's not a margin of error. That's 30 years of loss from native speakers dying, and new people not picking it up. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 15:49, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

As The Hand That Feeds You said, not a margin of error, simply the fate of under-supported minority languages in the modern world. Frzzl talk · contribs 16:14, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Okay, I was just confused because the text says the number is growing in Hasidic communities and the article doesn't seem to support that. But thanks to the both of you for clarification. Brassmonkey3212 (talk) 16:54, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Can someone please translate the inscriptions in an image in Commons?

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Please enhance the descriptions in the Commons image pages with texts in the images. - Altenmann >talk 01:55, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

None of these is in Yiddish. They're all in Hebrew. Largoplazo (talk) 03:23, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I was writing about Yiddish folklore and didnt pay attention. I will report this ta Hebrew talkpage. - Altenmann >talk 04:43, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Other German version for the "Language examples" section...

In the "Language examples" section, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is shown in Yiddish and compared with other languages. I noticed though that the official German version sounds a lot more different than the Yiddish than need be, simply because it's using different wordings. (German is a rich language, so lots of different wordings are possible.) So I thought it would be helpful if, for the German comparison, in addition to the official German version, another version in German were shown, written as closely as possible (while still being German) in wording and construction to the Yiddish, so as to have more of a direct "apples to apples" comparison. This is what I came up with:

"Jeder Mensch wird geboren, frei und gleich in Ehre und Recht. Jeder wird beschenkt, mit Verstand und Gewissen; Jeder soll sich führen, miteinander im Gemüt von Bruderschaft."

This version then only has two words - "Ehre" and the "einander" part of "miteinander" - which are fundamentally different than the Yiddish. The construction isn't exactly typical of modern German prose. It sounds a bit "poetic," one might say, but it would be fully comprehensible to a (monolingual) German speaker.

I'm thinking it would make sense to place this version between the transliterated Yiddish and the official German version. Not sure exactly how it should be labeled, but maybe something like "Yiddish-equivalent German translation"? -2003:CA:8717:D29F:5D79:AC58:31B7:2264 (talk) 00:50, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Update: Since it'd been a couple weeks and nobody objected, I went ahead and edited to add the new German version, in addition to the official German one. As I said, I think this makes sense, as this gives more of an "apples to apples" comparison. German has a lot of synonyms, so simply wording things differently can give a misleading impression of more difference than there actually is. -2003:CA:8717:D226:D00E:5FF3:6984:AEB6 (talk) 12:39, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I don’t know if there’s a formal policy about it but if the cited translations of Article 1 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are intended to serve a uniform purpose in articles about languages, only the sanctioned translations should appear in the section bearing the UDHR heading. The point about the proximity of Yiddish to German is already made with abundant clarity in the article. The personal rewording of a sourced text to make that point yet again resembles (if not constitutes) personal research. The added text is a really good translation and does support "apples to apples" comparison. However, this is an article about Yiddish, not German, and care needs to be taken to avoid any hint of editorial treatment of the one somehow being less an autonomous language than is the other. --Futhark|Talk 08:07, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. My intention here certainly wasn't to "editorialize," but simply to provide more of an "apples to apples" comparison. Like I said, with German or any other complex language with lots of synonyms, there are a multitude of potential ways of wording the same basic idea. So the problem that I see is that an English-speaking reader who's not proficient in either Yiddish or German would read the Yiddish and German texts and come to the conclusion that the languages are very different, when most of the difference here simply comes from differences in wording choices. I would say that making the sentence structures and word choices as close as possible, it better highlights the words which actually are different.....Of course sometimes these words are rather important keywords in certain sentences - for things like "dream" and "moon," which can make it difficult for German speakers to understand certain Yiddish sentences, even if they understand a large majority of the constituent words.

I'm not sure what the ideal solution is. I know some other articles about languages here have used the Lord's Prayer as a basis for comparison, and these translations typically use fairly similar wordings, especially if it's showing comparisons between different Romance languages, which all directly translated from the same Latin text....It'd be kind of odd though to use a Christian prayer as the basis of comparison for an article about a Jewish language. But perhaps one of the Psalms or some other verse from the Jewish Bible/Old Testament?

For now, it seems that adding a rewording of the German UDHR close to the Yiddish version works fairly well, but I'd say that even this isn't quite ideal, since the Yiddish transliteration uses more English type phonetics, whereas the German versions (both official and the more Yiddish-similar rewording) both use the official German standards....So an English speaker who's not very familiar with German likely wouldn't know that the German J is pronounced like an English Y, that the German W is pronounced like an English V, that the German V is pronounced like an English F, that the (single) German S is pronounced like an English Z, or that German speakers often pronounce the D at the end of a word like a T (hence native German-speakers often conflating "seit" (meaning "since") with "seid" (the informal 2nd person plural conjugation of "to be")). So the unofficial German version is actually even closer to the Yiddish than most monolingual English speakers would realize. I suppose there could be a "transliterated" version of the German, with more English phonetics, but then the table would become more cluttered. -2003:CA:8717:D288:8565:38CB:D2FF:D0F1 (talk) 15:38, 4 March 2024 (UTC)