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

[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.