On 11/10/18 10:28 AM, Beth Myre via Unicode wrote:
Hi Everyone,
Are we sure this is actually Yiddish? To me it looks like it could be
German transliterated into the Yiddish/Hebrew alphabet.
I can spend a little more time with it and put together some examples.
Beth
Is there really a difference? In a very real sense, Yiddish *IS* a form
of German (I'm told it's Middle High German, but I don't actually have
knowledge about that), with a strong admixture of Hebrew and Russian and
a few other languages, and which is usually written using Hebrew
letters. There's probably something like a continuum with "Yiddish" and
"German" as ranges or points.
Is the text *standard* German written with Hebrew letters? I don't
think so. Let's see, on the next-to-last page, end of first paragraph,
I see the phrase אויטאָריטא̈טען בעקרא̈פֿטינג, which would transliterate
to "oytoritäten bekräfting"—with umlauted "a", but "oy-" instead of
"au-" at the beginning. OK, I know in German "au" can be pronounced
"oy-" sometimes (I think), but at least
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A4t implies that this isn't
the usual/standard pronunciation (I make no claims as to expertise in
German). The text is littered with terms like בי״ד, abbreviation for
Hebrew בית דין, "house of judgment" or legal court, pronounced in
Yiddish "beisdin", or פסק (can't be German as it has no vowels!) meaning
"legal decision," from Hebrew—Hebrew-derived words in Yiddish do not
change their spelling, as a rule. There are definitely German spelling
features that are not found in later spellings, for example, double
letters in German are written double in the Yiddish spelling too, which
is quite unusual (you're used to letters in Hebrew never being silent or
even geminate, but always having at least a semi-syllable sound between
like letters, except in special cases, so it seems striking to see אללע
for a simple two syllables).
So I'm not sure if there's a *real* answer to your question, but it does
look to me like this isn't "normal" German, at least. And would it
matter, anyway?
~mark
