Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 April 14

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April 14

Are Yiddish and German mutually intelligible?

--AboutFace 22 (talk) 20:27, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Questions about mutual intelligibility are relative, but for educated native speakers, basically, yes, with the desire and effort. Yiddish speakers (whose vowel system is simplified) might have difficulty distinguishing or pronouncing the ö and ü. There is a lot of Semitic vocabulary, that a standard Hochdeutsch speaker might need explained. Otherwise they are quite close, and not considering Yiddish a dialect of German is more political/cultural than linguistic.

I don't speak either language fluently, my school German is rusty, but if you search the dials (or now the internet) you hear the similarity. I enjoy Klezmer music, and miss a word or two each sentence, but get the gist. And if I had to negotiate a-mutually beneficial transaction with a Yiddish-only speaker, I would certainly be able to do it auf Deutsch.

We have plenty of native/fluent speakers here, and just looking here at Google gives all sorts of info. μηδείς (talk) 21:04, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Like Medeis, I can understand both Yiddish and German reasonably well, but I'm not fluent in either. To add to what Medeis said, there is an asymmetry between Yiddish and German: namely, Yiddish has quite a few words borrowed or derived from Hebrew (as well as, to a lesser extent, from Russian, although it depends on where the Yiddish speaker is originally from). The Hebrew-derived words would be alien to the ear of a German speaker, and will not be understood. In German, on the other hand, understandability of the language depends quite a bit on a dialect. I can understand news on German TV quite well, and so will probably a Yiddish-speaking person; but I can't understand Swiss German at all (I tried). Finally, written language is mutually incomprehensible: Yiddish uses Hebrew alphabet and German uses Latin alphabet. --Dr Dima (talk) 21:38, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

I just did an experiment listening to this video (skip the first minute until you get to the two young men, live). I noticed basically that I understood both equally, and paradoxically, the Yiddish speaker better, because he also used French words "chaussee" where I missed the German. Also, they often said the same thing but with different word choices, equally comprehensible, like car vs automobile in American English. In many certain circumstances there was no difference except accent, such as the sentences about being Philadelphia Eagle's fans. μηδείς (talk) 21:47, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

My grandfather's first language was Yiddish. He said he could always understand spoken (High) German, but learning how to speak proper German himself took him considerable effort. This confirms, in a way, the asymmetry that Dr Dima mentioned. --51.9.70.236 (talk) 22:43, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

It's well worth noting that the well-known linguistic aphorism "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" originated with a Yiddish linguist. --Jayron32 21:50, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much! It is all very interesting information but I have now another issue. I don't understand the saying you just quoted although I've seen it before: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." What is the meaning of it? It is hard to admit that I don't comprehend a metaphorical meaning but here I am. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 22:10, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

"When the speakers of a dialect have their own army and navy, that makes their dialect a language." --51.9.70.236 (talk) 22:43, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Or put another way, the distinction between "dialect" and "language" is often political rather than linguistic. In principle, linguistics ought not to care about politics, but it is difficult to sanitize from political considerations. --Trovatore (talk) 22:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The meaning is politics means more than anything else in determining these things. A fairly recent example is the issue over the former Yugoslavia. When they were one country, the official language was Serbo-Croatian. When the republics broke up, suddenly they spoke Serbian in Serbia and Croatian in Croatia and Bosnian in Bosnia etc. Language is intensely tied to things like culture and national identity, and to say one speaks a language means something different than to say that one speaks a dialect of another nation's language; as if to imply that your language is a lesser form or a bastardized version of the other nation's language. It's very messy. --Jayron32 22:47, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Chinese is the reverse of German/Yiddish. The characters are common to all dialects but the dialects themselves are mutually unintelligible. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 05:58, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Not entirely true. There are characters, recognised as standard characters, that represent words that exist only in certain Chinese languages or specific dialects. In some cases, there are multiple characters that represent (what was originally) the same word, the pronunciation of which has diverged so significantly that a different character is needed. For example, 俺 or 冇. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:12, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Be aware also that the term "dialect" applied to language(s) in China stems from a poor translation choice into English in the early 20th century, compounded by decades of political policy to gloss over linguistic differences (which has in recent years been somewhat reversed). Many of the "dialects" of the Chinese language family are no closer than different languages in Europe derived from Latin, others are even more distant, or entirely unrelated: latterly the term "topolect" has been proposed as a politically neutral replacement term. This has all been discussed very extensively on the professional linguistics blog Language Log, where several of the contributors are Chinese Language(s) experts.

(No doubt PalaceGuard008 is aware of all this, but others might be interested.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:14, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

This question has been thoroughly worked out by the well-known Sinologist Victor Mair, see his comprehensive article from 1991 [1]. Also his article [2] about the universality of Chinese characters myth, where he shows that in most cases Chinese characters are hardly suitable to write non-Mandarin "dialects" or in other words: Chinese characters = the characters for writing Mandarin. Also see John DeFrancis's book [3] about the same myth.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

If that's what they said, then they are using "Chinese characters" in a very restrictive sense. Flowers of Shanghai was written in Wu and had to be translated into Mandarin to be comprehensible for Mandarin readers, but it was clearly written in Chinese characters. It would be very odd to say that it was not written using Chinese characters. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 12:45, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

@PalaceGuard008: Well, it looks more like the case with the Latin alphabet. It was devised specifically to write Latin, but anyway it has been adopted for hundreds if not thousands of languages. In this case we may speak, for example, about the French or the English alphabets, but still we may call them the Latin alphabet. So English a and French a are technically or visually are equal to Latin a, but in each language the symbol means different things. So the Chinese characters were first and foremost devised to represent the definite speech of definite localities or definite social groups. Continuing the analogy, many Chinese characters would have different meanings and pronunciations in different Chinese varieties, much alike the letters of the Latin alphabet. But the adoption of the Chinese characters goes beyond of the adoption of letters. The adoption of the Chinese characters is more like for writing the English word "water" one would write aqua but say anyway /wɔːtə/. Sooner or later, the English would devise their own neologisms like aqua casus (pronounced "waterfall"), but as you understand such a word never existed in Latin and would be incomprehensible for Latin speakers. So the Chinese characters were adopted by Wu speakers, then they developed their own way of writing (including new characters) that ended up to be incomprehensible for the Northerners. (Sorry, if it seems to be a little bit late, but I wrote it before the archiving of the topic.)--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:28, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

On the original question, for Yiddish and German, there is a case of asymmetric mutual intelligibility. That is, Yiddish speakers understand a higher percentage of standard German speech than the percentage of Yiddish speech that standard German speakers can understand. That is because the percentage of standard German vocabulary that is similar to Yiddish vocabulary is greater than the percentage of Yiddish vocabulary that is similar to standard German. Others have mentioned the Semitic component of Yiddish vocabulary, but there is also a huge Slavic component. That said, most of the basic vocabulary in both languages is similar. I am a non-native near-fluent speaker of standard German with only a very small exposure to Yiddish (having grown up on Long Island where words like shlep and shmooze were part of my vocabulary even though I'm not Jewish). Not too long ago, I overheard a Yiddish conversation on a subway platform, and, although a few words threw me off, I understood the basic gist. To me, Yiddish sounds like German with a heavy accent and a heavy sprinkling of non-German jargon mixed in. Marco polo (talk) 13:40, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I have no reference for this, but one thing that might make Yiddish more understandable to native speakers of German (compared with those who learned it as a second language) might be the fact that there are a number of colloquial German words of Yiddish (and often originally of Hebrew) origin, which non-native speakers might not be familiar with, because they are not necessarily taught in German classes. When I compare the List of English words of Yiddish origin with the corresponding list of German words of Yiddish origin, my impression is that the words on the German list have stronger and more general traction in spoken German than the words on the English list do in English, even in spoken American English. (but like I said, this is not referenced) ---Sluzzelin talk 14:25, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Also note that formal registers of Yiddish, especially in writing, use a more heavily German vocabulary, including direct borrowing from Modern German. Your average reader of modern 'journalistic' Yiddish (e.g. me) can probably understand contemporary written German easily, after mastering the orthography. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 15:27, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

off topic editorializing μηδείς (talk) 18:03, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I want to make a comment on "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Now that I understand the meaning I want to say that it is a very, very clumsy expression. There are many countries in the world with small group of people speaking distinctly different languages and nobody would claim they are dialects of the official language. They have neither an army nor a navy. E.g. Brazil, Russia, etc. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 18:04, 16 April 2016 (UTC) Clumsy? It's hyperbole for the sake of driving the point home. I couldn't find ibershpitst anywhere, but that would be a possible yiddishification of German überspitzt, "over-pointed", which is what adages often are. They can also be clichéd and annoying, of course. ---Sluzzelin talk 01:11, 17 April 2016 (UTC) It is annoying. There is no witticism in it at all. Just a lame attempt of being funny. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 17:13, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

IPA question

In a posting on the Language Log blog at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25105 , one person thinks a word can be pronounced /əˈɹɑɪ̯/ or /ˈɔɹ.i/ . I'm sorry if the IPA doesn't work here. What word is this? I think it might be "eyrie", but I'm not sure. 212.105.160.248 (talk) 22:59, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

wikt:awry --51.9.70.236 (talk) 23:06, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

I remember an episode of That Girl where the Marlo Thomas character said 'awry' in a sentence, rhyming it with 'hoary', and her boyfriend played by Ted Bessell had half an hour of fun at her expense. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:26, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Or "lorry"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:22, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Red lorry, yellow lorry - great tongue twister for Japanese people. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 13:03, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks all for the answers. 212.105.160.248 (talk) 15:46, 17 April 2016 (UTC)