Yiddish translation of Gita (?)

[Lars Martin Fosse]

At 21:55 19.01.98 -0200, you wrote:
> Let me remind
>>you that Hebrew startet out at the beginning of this century even "deader"
>>than Yiddish is today. Dying languages can be brought back to life.
>>
>Yes but Hebrew was ( and is ) a language which is deeply rooted in the
>foundations of Jewish mind and  culture, being its very linguistical
>archetype, intrinsically connected with its various expressions. Not so with
>Yidish, which derives from a language with a largely different  set of
>values.

Before this turns into the Yiddish List, I'll allow myself one final remark
since your description of Hebrew reminds me of old-fashioned language mysticism.

Yiddish is a mixture of Hebrew, German and Slavonic languages, spoken before
the Holocaust by approximately 10 million people in Eastern Europe. It has a
1000 year old history and was spoken exclusively by Jews. In this period,
Hebrew was first and foremost a ceremonial language, like Latin in the
Catholic Church. Yiddish is now a dying language for two historical reasons:
1) the Holocaust, which killed a great many Yiddish speakers, and 2) the
language policies of the Jewish State, which chose a modernised form of
Hebrew as the national language and wanted to get rid of "the language of
the gettos". Not all Jews are equally happy about this, because Yiddish
represents a living literary and cultural tradition that is very, very
Jewish. Languages, by the way, do not have values. They transmit values. A
language is just a neutral agent. Yiddish is just as rooted in the
foundations of the Jewish mind and culture as Hewbrew, even if many modern
Jews want to disown it. As it is today, Yiddish seems mostly to be used by
ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel and the US. But there are Jews trying to
revive the culture and to give Yiddish a broader platform than the
ultra-orthodox one. And from what I read in the newspaper today, Yiddish
songs are still popular in Israel.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse


Dr.art. Lars Martin Fosse
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