The temptation of language

[flemmings]

Matt Kressel posts about Yiddish, and suddenly I have a great desire to learn the language. We had The Joys of Yiddish at home (can't believe it came out when I was 18: I seem to remember reading it in high school) and like any large-NA-city-dweller my vocabulary includes a buncha Yiddish words that register to me as English-- spiel, kvetch, shlep, kibitz, schmooze, nosh, glitch, schlock, schmaltz, dreck, kitsch, shmatte, schmuck, nebbish, tuchus, schtick, and the one I only just learned from English writers, shtum. Suddenly I realize it's an actual *language*: verbs and nouns and adverbs and everything. Which probably conjugate and decline, if it's as High Germanic as all that, but likely not as hard as German, because err well very few European languages are, outside of the Slavic ones.

But of course there's a fly in that ointment. Yiddish is written in Hebrew. Teeny tiny Hebrew with its teeny tiny dots that make furigana look like child's play. Alas, I'm too old for that. Cobbler to his last: back to Japanese.

Comments

[chomiji]

But Hebrew has fewer letters than even English! And Japanese has so very many characters! Even if you're talking just the Hiragana/Katakana characters, that's a lot more than in Hebrew!

(I can read Hebrew letters, but my vocabulary is teensy, and my knowledge of grammar almost non-existent.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

But all the letters look alike! At least to my eyes. I did have a stab at learning them thirty years back, and even then... We won't mention the diacriticals, if that's what they're called.

And I know most of the characters by now, so yeah- why abandon a quarter century's study for the siren call of Yiddish?

[cerberusia.livejournal.com]

I'm a terrible one for being tempted to start new languages. I've got my hands full with Latin and Greek for my degree, but keep perusing 'Learn Turkish' sites and have looked up the basics of writing Persian, despite not knowing a single word of it. Turkish is of course written with the Roman alphabet and doesn't look terribly difficult, but Persian has the same problem as Hebrew & Yiddish. And I'm sitting on my hands so as not to order Van Ess' 'Spoken Arabic'...it's an affliction, a terrible affliction.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

An affliction indeed. Kind of like a compulsive gambler with his belief that the next roll of the wheel will pan out for him, though not (necessarily) as financially crippling as gambling.

I wish I'd had the discipline to keep on with my Greek; I might still be able to read Plato. It's one of the languages I keep meaning to go back and get in shape, because hell, Greek! So much wonderful stuff to read!

But then oh! Korean! So useful! and hangul keeps getting recced as the perfect writing system! and I live in Koreatown so the linguistic envelope is there!

And I always did want to learn Swahili as well...

Arabic however is one of those languages that people like me with no ear at all shouldn't even think of, so I never did. And probably would get nowhere with Swahili because so much of it comes from Arabic.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I think Yiddish is usually written without the vowels (apart from literally one or two under an aleph or ayin), like modern Hebrew - but the letter do look very similar until you get used to them. (At which point they make the magical leap to somehow looking totally unlike each other!)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The idea of reading a western language without the vowels doesn't appeal-- there are texters who do just that in English, and it doesn't work. I'm glad someone else thinks the letters look alike, but I suspect an acute ability to differentiate visually is needed here. As it is for Japanese too, but not quite as much.