[TUHS] An amusing error message

[cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan)]

Ori Idan scripsit:

> In Israel Yiddisch still exists and spoken mainly by old people who
> came from Germany. As much as I know there is still a newspaper written
> in Yiddisch.

There's one in New York City, too:  <http://yiddish.forward.com>.
It's hard to count, but there are probably between 1 and 2 million
Yiddish-speakers worldwide.  In particular, many Haredi (so-called
ultra-Orthodox) Jews outside Israel use it as a home language, so it is
still being passed on to children, and it is still used as a language
of religious education.

> Yiddisch writing is even stranger as it uses the Hebrew alphabet.

Before mass literacy, Jews (who were almost all literate in Hebrew,
at least the males) traditionally wrote the language of the country
they were in using the Hebrew alphabet.  Consequently, there were and
in some cases still are Jewish versions of French, German, Spanish,
Georgian, various Arabic colloquials, Aramaic, Tat, and other languages.
Yiddish is the most different of these from the goyish version.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
And they pack their lyrics till they're so damn dense
You could put 'em in your yard and you could use 'em for a fence.
      --Alan Chapman, "Everybody Wants to Be Sondheim"