bis hundert un tzwanzik yor
By glazou on Monday 22 March 2004, 13:59 - General - Permalink
People who had a hard life, I mean a really hard one, who faced death every day, who survived by pure miracle, who had to work days and nights for living, should deserve a peaceful and painless death.
Comments
Hello Daniel,
was that entry in Yiddish? Was it about someone who survived the Holocaust in Germany?
I am just curious, so do let me know.
- Jay
Jay: yes, the title is in yiddish; and yes, that's about someone who survived the Holocaust.
Meant "till 120 years old"
It's amazing how yiddish is nearer to german than shwyzerdeutsch (german-like spoken in Switzerland) is.
Also not to difficult to understand for people who speak Dutch. In my city (Antwerp), we have a lot of Jewish people living here (mostly people who emigrated from Eastern Europe after WWII), and we can help them in shops, etc ...
Yiddish is german. I am not meaning it's a pidgin; it _IS_ german. But a one thousand years old german from the Ruhr-Alsace area. With words and expressions imported from hebrew and french, of course. I can quite easily understand Alsacian if people don't speak too fast. I can quite well understand Letzembürgish (sp?). On the other way, I was told about a small german village where the local dialectal word for "family" is "mishpruche" and nobody there knew why
Of course, that's the hebraic word for family.
flore: true, if we limit ourselves to germanic roots. But if I tell you in yiddish that I'll be attending a "khasseneh" this week-end, you won't get it if you don't know that hebraic root.
Of course Daniel, I don't pretend to understand yiddish... neither do I for schwyzerdeutsch ! When you call in Zürich and hear a message in schwyzerdeutsch that tells you to press a touch, but you don't know who you are going to talk to if you do that, that's terrible...
And if a swiss tells you "Grötzi !", I'm not sure you'll understand
Flore: That would be "Grüezi" (Grüss dich) and in Bern we are even more polite, we say "Grüessech" (Grüss Euch).
On a sidenote: Daniels Blog is really one of the most eclictic I've ever seen
Daniel> it's spelled "Lëtzebuergesch" as far as I can tell... As for the resemblance with Elsaesser, I've had a shock when I first visited Strasbourg and heard some locals speaking it, as it has many similarities with Luxembourgish, although the intonations strongly differ.
(Greetings from Luxembourg, by the way (: )
Hello Daniel,
thanks for the reply. I lived (and worked) in the Hunsrueck mountains of Germany (in Rheinland-Pfalz) for a year - and I realized that the local dialect there is very similar to Yiddish. I did so after I looked at the words to a book of photographs from pre-WWII Eastern Europe shetetels ( think that's the right word) by Roman Vishniac. The words are accompanied by trancribed texts of children's Yiddish poems. The pictures are mostly of Jewish chilren who lived in Poland, Lithuania and other countries.
For example:
(Yiddish)
Shpilt aykh, libe kinderlekh -
Der friling shoyn bagint
would be the following in German
Schpielt euch, liebe Kinder
Der Fruehling schon beginnt
and in English it would be:
Play on, dearest little ones,
For Spring has come anew
and in the Hunsruecker dialect it might be ( I am not sure of this, since I was only a visitor):
Schpielt aysh liebe Kinner
De Frihling schayn beginnt (or beginne)
My former co-worker Willi has a neat page on that dialect:
home.t-online.de/home/w.h...
The funny thing is that after a year there, I can understand Yiddish.
Dat is ayne komische Sache, yo yo!
Jay: spielen in German is not reflexive, so the German verse would be
Spielt liebe Kinder,
der Frühling beginnt schon.
Hello Daniel,
thanks for the correction. You are right - it is most probably not reflexive.
I guess you must quite a few different languages (!).
- Jay