Deutsch), which survives in the modern Yiddish verb fartaytshn 'to translate '. In the past, various designations for the language were used that emphasized the close connection of German and Yiddish, such as the scholarly 'Judeo-German' and the Yiddish taytsh (cf. The name yidish in Yiddish means simply 'Jewish'. Sentences like this are quite common in Yiddish. Zeyde is Slavic, khanike is Semitic, and bentsh is from the Romance component. The basic grammar is Germanic, as are the function words der and hot, the past tense markers ge-and -t, and the word likht. A sample sentence that illustrates the mixture of components is the following: Der zeyde hot gebentsht khanike likht ('The grandfather blessed the Chanukkah candles'). This is certainly true, but most linguists would agree that at its core Yiddish is a West Germanic language, and thus a close cousin of English, and an even closer relative of German. The great Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich described it as a 'fusion language' that combines elements from Germanic, Slavic, Semitic, and other languages. However, there has been a resurgence of interest in Ashkenazic culture generally in recent decades, and Yiddish courses are now offered by many universities and Jewish cultural organizations. With the rare exceptions of young Yiddish activists, it is only in certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities that Yiddish remains the language of everyday discourse and is still learned by children. As a combined result of genocide in Europe, cultural assimilation in America, and official and unofficial pressure to shift to Hebrew in Israel and Russian in the Soviet Union, today there are probably fewer than two million speakers, most of whom no longer use it as their primary language. At its peak, in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust, there were perhaps ten or eleven million Yiddish speakers worldwide, making Yiddish the most widely spoken Jewish language. Yiddish has historically been the language of the Ashkenazim, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants around the world. Germanic, but with independent development from all other Germanic languages due to Slavic, Semitic, and other language contact and language-internal changes Hebrew letters, but with most vowels represented by letters rather than just diacritics orthographic systems include standard (YIVO) Yiddish, Soviet Yiddish, and conventionalized orthographies of Hasidic communities In Hasidic communities, robustly spoken by all generations within families and institutions in other communities, spoken primarily by elderly Jews but highly engaged in postvernacular ways There is no accurate count over 370,000 (per Ethnologue), but perhaps half a million worldwide Spoken in Central and Eastern Europe until the Holocaust secondary areas of Jewish immigration: North America, South America, Israel, Western Europe, Australia, South Africa Originated in medieval Germany, developed over centuries of Jewish migration through Slavic-speaking lands. Yiddish, yidish, yidish-taytsh, taytsh, zhargon, mame-loshn
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