I have been studying Hebrew for awhile and thought I'd check out the Yiddish course. Got 58 XP so far, so not enough for a flag. 2 more XP.
What languages compliment Yiddish? I understand Yiddish is based on many European languages.
Also someone said the letters are the same as for Hebrew. That might be true, however so far, they aren't pronounced the same! Ayin ע is pronounced "eh" whereas in Hebrew it is whatever sound that word has for a vowel. Ah, eh, oh, oo etc. So I don't find it helpful to learn the Hebrew alefbet from the Yiddish, other than getting acquainted with the shape of the letters.
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DeRoodeMan
21161310
May be ukranian, belarusian but not russian. Do you heared about the Pale of Settlement? Jews were forbidden to live in russian provinces. With a few exceptions
.misha.PLUS
25322
Pale or not, but Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian were spoken by peasants in villages. Jews spoke Yiddish and Russian in Odessa and Kiev, Yiddish and Polish in Warsaw, Vilno and Minsk, etc.
DeRoodeMan
21161310
Jews were living not only Odessa, Kiev, Wilno. And many jews who lived in shtetls didn't speak russian, ukrainian, polish etc
.misha.PLUS
25322
Jews living in a small shtetl somewhere in Ukraine had to communicate somehow with the Ukrainians from nearby villages. They used the local lingua franca - Polish in the west, Russian farther east.
DeRoodeMan
21161310
The language spoken in the east of Ukraine and the very south of Russia, where the Zaporozhye Cossacks were resettled, is not russian, it is surzhik . Surzhik is similar to russian just as yiddish is similar to german Or niederdeutsch/nedersaksisch with hochdeutsch. But there are fewer loan words in yiddish. Sometimes it's easier for me to understand ukrainian speakers than surzhik.
DeRoodeMan
21161310
Surzhik = russian + ukrainian around 50/50
DeRoodeMan
21161310
If you insist that yiddish is borrowed from the russian vocabulary, name the words that yiddish is borrowed from the russian language. As far as I know, everything was exactly the opposite. In the russian language there are many borrowings from yiddish: thieves' jargon, youth jargon of the late USSR, and the russian language in Odessa was very strongly influenced by yiddish, up to a change in grammatical structures
.misha.PLUS
25322
Examples of Yiddish words borrowed from Russian/not Ukrainian? Here is what I saw here on Duolingo within the last 15 min or so: granitsa = border in Russian and Polish (not Ukrainian though).
.misha.PLUS
25322
I find it hard to believe that Jews spoke Ukrainian before 1930s. My grandparents didn’t. My dad did speak it, as well as natives, but only because he went to Ukrainian school. For him it was Yiddish at home, pigin Polish in the street. They lived in a little majority-jewish village just east of the pre-1939 Soviet-Polish border.
DeRoodeMan
21161310
граница - границя - граніца - granica (rus - ukr - bel - pol)
DeRoodeMan
21161310
Parents of my dad spoke in ukranian before 30s. They left Ukraine during the war and did not return there. Whether my mother's parents spoke ukrainian, I find it difficult to tell, but my grandfather began to learn russian when he was a teenager. Before that, he knew only yiddish and a little hebrew (he studied at the cheder). Until the end of his life, he was subscribing to סאָוועטיש הײמלאַנד. They lived in the Poltava province and then in Kharkov. They were evacuated at the begin of the war, those who could not or did not want to evacuate were shot.
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