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Yiddish and German share a large portion of their respective vocabularies, and have reasonably similar grammars. It has been claimed that some German speakers are able to understand speech in Yiddish, considering it similar to German spoken by Slavs. These observations lead some observers to describe Yiddish as a dialect of German (like Swiss German) rather than an independent language. However, most linguists consider Yiddish and German to be distinct languages, pointing out that
The linguist Paul Wexler has even gone so far as to claim that Yiddish was actually originally a Slavic language whose vocabulary was replaced with German words, though this view is rejected by most other linguists.
Others point out that the distinction between a "language" and a "dialect" is sometimes blurry, noting that:
Yiddish eventually split into Western (German) Yiddish and Eastern Yiddish. The latter in turn split into North-Eastern ( Litvish) Yiddish, Central/Mid-Eastern (Polish/Galician) Yiddish, and South-Eastern (Ukrainian) Yiddish. The Eastern Yiddish dialects and Modern Yiddish contain a great many words derived from Slavic languagesThe Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages are the languages of the Slavic peoples. They form a distinct group of Indo-European languages, with speakers in most of Eastern Europe, much of the Balkans, parts of Central Europe, and the northern pa.
Like Judaeo-Arabic and LadinoSee the Guatemala article for the Ladino peoples (also known as mestizo . Ladino is a Romance language, derived mainly from Old Castilian ( Spanish) and Hebrew. Speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardic Jews, but historically there have also bee (Judaeo-Spanish), Yiddish is written using an adaptation of the Hebrew alphabet. However, Yiddish itself is not linguistically related to Hebrew, even though it absorbed hundreds of Hebrew and Aramaic terms taken from Jewish tradition.
One curious aspect of the language is that it uses Latin derivatives for many of its words relating to religious rituals, apparently borrowing the terminology from Old French as spoken in Alsace and used by the Catholic Church. As an example, 'say grace after meals' is, in Yiddish, bentshn (בענטשן), which is apparently cognate with the same term that gave English the word benediction; while davnen (דאַװנען), meaning 'pray', is thought to be descended from the same root as the English word devotion. The Yiddish verb leyenen (לײענען) 'to read' also reflects a Romance background. There are a handful of other words which also derive from Old French, the most common of which, tsholnt (טשאָלנט) 'a Sabbath stew' (spelled cholent in English), probably derives from the French words chaud 'hot' and lent 'slow'.
Largely because of the influence of Jewish entertainment figures, many Yiddish words have entered the American English lexicon. In 1968, Leo Rosten ( 1908– 1997) published The Joys of Yiddish (BooksEnthsiast.com), an introduction to words of Yiddish origin used in the English of the U.S.A. See also " Yinglish".
Interestingly, in many cognates shared between Yiddish, German and English, the English pronunciation is often closer to Yiddish than German (examples include the indefinate article a/an and the noun "fire").
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