From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Sun, 11 May 2014 02:00:59 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] An amusing error message In-Reply-To: References: <20140509210729.6D80618C09B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20140510002011.IEnjtHhZ%sdaoden@yandex.com> <8AE10DB9-3685-4E07-AA94-B991D41D8D9D@sdf.org> <20140510115158.x+L+UNYY%sdaoden@yandex.com> <20140510201801.GE17946@mercury.ccil.org> <20140510223942.e6o0M3U0%sdaoden@yandex.com> Message-ID: <20140511060058.GZ17946@mercury.ccil.org> 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: . 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"