Clarifying the language’s roots could affect the way European Jews look at their own heritage, and its origins are not that clear. Traditional thinking says Yiddish, which is largely Germanic, originated in Western Europe. But new questions are being raised about whether the massive Jewish populations of Eastern Europe really could have originated in the West. Now some scholars wonder if Yiddish could have originated farther east.
These theories are explained in an excellent New York Times article that also traces the renewed popularity of Yiddish, at www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.yiddish.html For a brief overview on the state of Yiddish today, see “What is Yiddish?” at www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/Yiddish/English/yiddish.html
There are a few online Yiddish dictionaries — including http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/diction.html — although none is as comprehensive as one you’d get in the store. However, you may enjoy the Travlang Dictionary because it speaks to you. It’s at www.travlang.com/languages/yiddish
One of the hottest areas of Yiddish pride is pronunciation. If you say kugel and I say kigel, we may be headed for a bit of a tsimmes. The Yiddish Atlas Project at Columbia University — www.columbia.edu/cu/cria/Current-projects/Yiddish/herzog.html — is an attempt to document and record the varieties of Yiddish speech. The home page –www.columbia.edu/cu/cria/ Current-projects/Yiddish/yiddish.html — has a link to the online audio archive, which you can sample.
We all know that Yiddish words have permeated the English language. Someone has taken the time to search all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary with “Yiddish” in the etymology field and came up with 123. The listings, from “bagel” to “zaftig,” include “heimish,” “tchotchke” and “glitzy.” The Web site is at http://liberty.uc.wlu.edu/~hblackme/oed/yiddish.html But I particularly like a list of words in “Yinglish” or “Yidlish.” These words sound like they came from Yiddish but really are English. Some examples: “bedridden,” “conniption,” “epistle” and “farfetched.” (Try them out loud!) The list is at http://rtt.colorado.edu/~biasca/fake_yid.html
Ready for a test? Try the online Yiddish quiz at www.joods.nl/jiddisj/jidquiz.html Sample question: “Someone who falls on his back and hurts his nose is a: (a) Kvetsh (b) Shlemazl (c) Shlep or (d) Shmuz.”
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of Yiddish Web sites are American. But I was particularly interested in pages from a bit farther afield. Imagine the irony that a Yiddish page from Poland is created by a non-Jew. Magdalena Sitarz loves Yiddish and teaches it at the Jagiellonian University. She created the Unofficial Cracow’s Yiddish Page for her students as an introduction to Yiddish language and culture. It’s at www.cyf-kr.edu.pl/~ufsitarz/yiddish.htm
Whatever you do, don’t miss the “Yiddish Radio Project,” an opportunity to eavesdrop into a lost world: America’s Yiddish-speaking community of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. This incredible radio documentary series is the product of years of painstaking work by Henry Sapoznik, who has spent almost two decades hunting down recordings from the golden era of American Yiddish radio. The “Yiddish Radio Project “originally aired on National Public Radio and now you can kvell over the recordings whenever you’d like, at http://yiddishradioproject.org
And finally there’s Der Yapanisher Yid, newsletter of the Japan Yiddish Club, at www.kanji.org/ kanji/jack/yiddish/dyy.htm You don’t have to be Jewish or even Japanese to be intrigued by the article “Fascinated by Jewish Languages,” at www.ts-cyberia.net/ essay_j.html In it Tsuguya Sasaki explains how as a young student in northern Japan, he began to learn foreign languages, including Hebrew. His curiosity eventually brought him to Israel, where he studied and eventually taught Yiddish. According to Tsuguya “Maybe it was all bashert, who knows.”