YIDDISH, A DYING LANGUAGE
by Chaim Pevner
Speaking as a native speaker of Yiddish, one who grew up in a community
where everybody spoke Yiddish, where all business and all everyday
activities were conducted in Yiddish, where the people around me lived their
entire life in Yiddish, twenty four hours a day, awake and asleep, in health
and in sickness, in hope and despair -- there is now absolutely no doubt
left in my mind that I am one of the last thoroughly fluent carriers of a
dying language.
The reason that this is true is quite simple -- the Yiddish speaking
community no longer exists. Because of the social nature of language, once
the community is dead the language is essentially dead. True, there are
still hundreds -- perhaps a few thousand fully fluent speakers of Yiddish
scattered about the world -- and there are perhaps a few households here and
there -- in Israel -- New York --a very few here and there -- where Yiddish
is still the dominant language of the home -- but very few. And there is no
outside community of Yiddish speakers on the street to backup this home use
of Yiddish. In the next generation Yiddish will be effaced. One sign that
the language is just about dead is that there are quite probably NO
monolingual speakers of Yiddish left -- in fact very few even whose dominant
language is Yiddish. I actually know several but, they are all very
advanced in years. Once they are gone it's all over -- a matter of ten,
possibly fifteen years.
Of course there will be a fairly large number of Hassidim who will continue
to use Yiddish as a religious language. It is the current practice still,
in many yeshivas to explain and discuss the mishnaic Torah commentaries in
Yiddish. Therefore, there are still young boys and teenagers who continue
to maintain a certain competence in Yiddish. However ;(1) this is a very
special, limited kind of religious Yiddish, which bears little resemblance
to the full secular language, and (2) Yiddish is unquestionably the Second
Language of these children. If the Yeshiva is in London OR New York, their
dominant language -- the one they actually use to talk to each other on all
subjects other than religion -- is English. If in Israel, the dominant
language will tend to be Hebrew or English. Elsewhere, whatever the
reigning local language is -- French, Spanish, Danish, whatever.
There is also a small community of academic scholars -- young and middle
aged teachers of Yiddish in Universities -- some of them not even Jewish.
In every case they speak a stilted, highly unnatural form of "textbook
Yiddish" of a kind which it is painful for a native speaker of Yiddish like
myself to listen to. I recently met one such scholar in Oxford who has a
PhD in Yiddish studies and is a teacher of Yiddish. His Yiddish was
reasonably fluent, but highly influenced by German which he had studied
before Yiddish -- and totally UNNATURAL. The question was not that he
speaks Yiddish with a slightly odd non-native accent, rhythm and intonation
-- in fact his Yiddish is quite clear and except for an occasional lapse in
syntax or morphology is basically correct and essentially complete. The
problem is that it is fatally obvious that he acquired his Yiddish without
benefit of exposure to a cohesive Yiddish speech community. It therefore
lacks the most important qualities that make the language a living organism
--- spontaneity and natural flow -- and the mindset internal to the speech
community where it was used -- a quality of language which manifests itself
not only in the words and phrases chosen by the speaker to convey a
particular thought -- but moreover -- the way the words sound -- the music
of the language.
Listening to one of these academic speakers of Yiddish speak is like
listening to somebody singing An Entire Opera Off Key -- It soon becomes
tiring, even annoying to the ears of the true native speaker. The words are
more or less right, but The Flow Of The Words is wrong, the music is wrong
-- or totally lacking -- Therefore, the overall impression is disconcerting
linguistically, and emotionally alienating.
I recently found myself involved in an extended conversation with another
enthusiastic and very capable speaker of academic Yiddish -- and although I
myself was literally hungry to have someone to exchange ideas with in
Yiddish --- at some point I realized that I was NOT ENJOYING the experience
-- that the linguistic (on an emotional level, for language is by definition
emotional) feedback I was getting was less than satisfying -- that it was in
fact disturbing and affecting my own Yiddish negatively in a kind of
subconscious application of Gresham's law to the linguistic domain -- bad
money tends to drive the good money out -- unnatural Yiddish tends to derail
the mindset of the speaker of natural Yiddish. At some point I simply
bailed out and switched to English, because it was just too tiring -- too
much of a strain, and too alienating -- to continue the conversation in
Yiddish.
This, may it be noted, is in stark contrast to a conversation of any
length, and of whatever banality -- with a true native speaker of Yiddish
-- which in my case these days invariably occurs only with somebody older
than myself. When speaking with a true native speaker of the language there
is an immediate sense of relaxation -- a sense that you are going to have a
good time just slinging the words around -- no matter what the topic of
conversation. It is always refreshing for me to talk Yiddish with real
native speakers -- it's like returning to childhood and playing --
Vocalizing for the sheer joy of vocalising -- the way birds chirp together
or crickets crick. Something very, very primitive.
(I do not, incidentally, ever get the same charge out of using English --
which indicates to me that English is emotionally secondary to Yiddish, in
my deep psycho-linguistic structure)
The fact that the next generation of potential Yiddish speakers are being
taught the language by teachers who themselves speak it in a way that is
OUT-OF-TUNE means that even the few students who manage to attain some
competence, will, nevertheless, never attain natural sounding Yiddish,
because they have no natural speech community against which to bring their
own Yiddish into tune. One can therefore discount the effect of University
Yiddish as a force for "bringing the language back to life" -- (except in the
form of an artificial monstrosity) --
I have visited such university classes. What they are producing is a few
people who can grope their way through some of the Yiddish classics with
about the same appreciation of the underlying culture as students who today
study Latin have of the culture of ancient Rome. The majority of these
students will never learn Yiddish -- they will merely learn to flail abut in
Yiddish.
The "fluent" Yiddish of today's yeshiva bukhirim is a special case. The
form of Yiddish that is being preserved in these religious institutions is
indeed a "form of Yiddish" -- but what form? -- and to what extent can this be
called a whole language if a whole language, such as English, Japanese or
Eskimo, is the expression of a whole culture. In fact, Yeshiva Yiddish is
not the expression of a whole culture -- it is the expression of a very
limited, totally religion oriented, Fundamentalist SUB-culture within Jewish
culture, which does not come anywhere near expressing the whole of Jewish
culture. To do so it would have to be able to discuss, e.g., non religious
works by secular Jewish writers like Barshevis Singer, Sholem Asch and
Philip Roth, among others. But such works are taboo among the religious.
As are things like films, TV and most other secular activities and sources
of general information.
The only parallel to Yeshiva Yiddish I can imagine is of necessity
hypothetical. Imagine that the English language here has been completely
replaced by Japanese -- (and has long since died out everywhere else where
it has been systematically replaced by Chinese) in all walks of life -- for
two generations. There are only a small number of aged people left who
still remember English from their childhood years. However, there is one
place where English is still used regularly -- and this is the only domain
of the society in which it is still used -- the born-again, fundamentalist
Christian church. Moreover, the only subject that the disciples of Christ
ever use English for is to preach about the New Testament. This and this
alone. All their other affairs are conducted in Japanese. Could this
special, religiously focused subset of English be said to represent the
whole English language, when Shakespeare, baseball, cricket, TV, movies, the
news of the world, every other domain of life is never referred to except in
Japanese? -- I think not. At that point I would be tempted to regard English
as a dead language and the "Christianese" variant of it as a extremely
limited liturgical descendant -- something like Coptic in Egypt. Even
now, the Yiddish used in the Yeshiva is a rather distant relative of my own
ordinary, secular Yiddish, and I can barely follow a yeshiva discussion in
Yiddish.
Since almost all of the hopes for the survival of Yiddish are now pinned on
the extremely religious orthodox community with their yeshiva system of
education, and since it is highly unlikely that there will ever be any
resurrection of the general secular Yiddish speech community outside of this
most narrow religious sector -- I see no realistic hope for the survival of
Yiddish as a full language in the sense elucidated above. Though it may
persist in a highly specific variant offshoot form, that form will
eventually have about as much in common with the universal Yiddish of, let
us say, the Yiddish newspapers of 1939 as new Testament Greek has with
modern Greek or Cicero's Latin with modern Italian.
London, 30 September, 1997
by Chaim Pevner
Speaking as a native speaker of Yiddish, one who grew up in a community
where everybody spoke Yiddish, where all business and all everyday
activities were conducted in Yiddish, where the people around me lived their
entire life in Yiddish, twenty four hours a day, awake and asleep, in health
and in sickness, in hope and despair -- there is now absolutely no doubt
left in my mind that I am one of the last thoroughly fluent carriers of a
dying language.
The reason that this is true is quite simple -- the Yiddish speaking
community no longer exists. Because of the social nature of language, once
the community is dead the language is essentially dead. True, there are
still hundreds -- perhaps a few thousand fully fluent speakers of Yiddish
scattered about the world -- and there are perhaps a few households here and
there -- in Israel -- New York --a very few here and there -- where Yiddish
is still the dominant language of the home -- but very few. And there is no
outside community of Yiddish speakers on the street to backup this home use
of Yiddish. In the next generation Yiddish will be effaced. One sign that
the language is just about dead is that there are quite probably NO
monolingual speakers of Yiddish left -- in fact very few even whose dominant
language is Yiddish. I actually know several but, they are all very
advanced in years. Once they are gone it's all over -- a matter of ten,
possibly fifteen years.
Of course there will be a fairly large number of Hassidim who will continue
to use Yiddish as a religious language. It is the current practice still,
in many yeshivas to explain and discuss the mishnaic Torah commentaries in
Yiddish. Therefore, there are still young boys and teenagers who continue
to maintain a certain competence in Yiddish. However ;(1) this is a very
special, limited kind of religious Yiddish, which bears little resemblance
to the full secular language, and (2) Yiddish is unquestionably the Second
Language of these children. If the Yeshiva is in London OR New York, their
dominant language -- the one they actually use to talk to each other on all
subjects other than religion -- is English. If in Israel, the dominant
language will tend to be Hebrew or English. Elsewhere, whatever the
reigning local language is -- French, Spanish, Danish, whatever.
There is also a small community of academic scholars -- young and middle
aged teachers of Yiddish in Universities -- some of them not even Jewish.
In every case they speak a stilted, highly unnatural form of "textbook
Yiddish" of a kind which it is painful for a native speaker of Yiddish like
myself to listen to. I recently met one such scholar in Oxford who has a
PhD in Yiddish studies and is a teacher of Yiddish. His Yiddish was
reasonably fluent, but highly influenced by German which he had studied
before Yiddish -- and totally UNNATURAL. The question was not that he
speaks Yiddish with a slightly odd non-native accent, rhythm and intonation
-- in fact his Yiddish is quite clear and except for an occasional lapse in
syntax or morphology is basically correct and essentially complete. The
problem is that it is fatally obvious that he acquired his Yiddish without
benefit of exposure to a cohesive Yiddish speech community. It therefore
lacks the most important qualities that make the language a living organism
--- spontaneity and natural flow -- and the mindset internal to the speech
community where it was used -- a quality of language which manifests itself
not only in the words and phrases chosen by the speaker to convey a
particular thought -- but moreover -- the way the words sound -- the music
of the language.
Listening to one of these academic speakers of Yiddish speak is like
listening to somebody singing An Entire Opera Off Key -- It soon becomes
tiring, even annoying to the ears of the true native speaker. The words are
more or less right, but The Flow Of The Words is wrong, the music is wrong
-- or totally lacking -- Therefore, the overall impression is disconcerting
linguistically, and emotionally alienating.
I recently found myself involved in an extended conversation with another
enthusiastic and very capable speaker of academic Yiddish -- and although I
myself was literally hungry to have someone to exchange ideas with in
Yiddish --- at some point I realized that I was NOT ENJOYING the experience
-- that the linguistic (on an emotional level, for language is by definition
emotional) feedback I was getting was less than satisfying -- that it was in
fact disturbing and affecting my own Yiddish negatively in a kind of
subconscious application of Gresham's law to the linguistic domain -- bad
money tends to drive the good money out -- unnatural Yiddish tends to derail
the mindset of the speaker of natural Yiddish. At some point I simply
bailed out and switched to English, because it was just too tiring -- too
much of a strain, and too alienating -- to continue the conversation in
Yiddish.
This, may it be noted, is in stark contrast to a conversation of any
length, and of whatever banality -- with a true native speaker of Yiddish
-- which in my case these days invariably occurs only with somebody older
than myself. When speaking with a true native speaker of the language there
is an immediate sense of relaxation -- a sense that you are going to have a
good time just slinging the words around -- no matter what the topic of
conversation. It is always refreshing for me to talk Yiddish with real
native speakers -- it's like returning to childhood and playing --
Vocalizing for the sheer joy of vocalising -- the way birds chirp together
or crickets crick. Something very, very primitive.
(I do not, incidentally, ever get the same charge out of using English --
which indicates to me that English is emotionally secondary to Yiddish, in
my deep psycho-linguistic structure)
The fact that the next generation of potential Yiddish speakers are being
taught the language by teachers who themselves speak it in a way that is
OUT-OF-TUNE means that even the few students who manage to attain some
competence, will, nevertheless, never attain natural sounding Yiddish,
because they have no natural speech community against which to bring their
own Yiddish into tune. One can therefore discount the effect of University
Yiddish as a force for "bringing the language back to life" -- (except in the
form of an artificial monstrosity) --
I have visited such university classes. What they are producing is a few
people who can grope their way through some of the Yiddish classics with
about the same appreciation of the underlying culture as students who today
study Latin have of the culture of ancient Rome. The majority of these
students will never learn Yiddish -- they will merely learn to flail abut in
Yiddish.
The "fluent" Yiddish of today's yeshiva bukhirim is a special case. The
form of Yiddish that is being preserved in these religious institutions is
indeed a "form of Yiddish" -- but what form? -- and to what extent can this be
called a whole language if a whole language, such as English, Japanese or
Eskimo, is the expression of a whole culture. In fact, Yeshiva Yiddish is
not the expression of a whole culture -- it is the expression of a very
limited, totally religion oriented, Fundamentalist SUB-culture within Jewish
culture, which does not come anywhere near expressing the whole of Jewish
culture. To do so it would have to be able to discuss, e.g., non religious
works by secular Jewish writers like Barshevis Singer, Sholem Asch and
Philip Roth, among others. But such works are taboo among the religious.
As are things like films, TV and most other secular activities and sources
of general information.
The only parallel to Yeshiva Yiddish I can imagine is of necessity
hypothetical. Imagine that the English language here has been completely
replaced by Japanese -- (and has long since died out everywhere else where
it has been systematically replaced by Chinese) in all walks of life -- for
two generations. There are only a small number of aged people left who
still remember English from their childhood years. However, there is one
place where English is still used regularly -- and this is the only domain
of the society in which it is still used -- the born-again, fundamentalist
Christian church. Moreover, the only subject that the disciples of Christ
ever use English for is to preach about the New Testament. This and this
alone. All their other affairs are conducted in Japanese. Could this
special, religiously focused subset of English be said to represent the
whole English language, when Shakespeare, baseball, cricket, TV, movies, the
news of the world, every other domain of life is never referred to except in
Japanese? -- I think not. At that point I would be tempted to regard English
as a dead language and the "Christianese" variant of it as a extremely
limited liturgical descendant -- something like Coptic in Egypt. Even
now, the Yiddish used in the Yeshiva is a rather distant relative of my own
ordinary, secular Yiddish, and I can barely follow a yeshiva discussion in
Yiddish.
Since almost all of the hopes for the survival of Yiddish are now pinned on
the extremely religious orthodox community with their yeshiva system of
education, and since it is highly unlikely that there will ever be any
resurrection of the general secular Yiddish speech community outside of this
most narrow religious sector -- I see no realistic hope for the survival of
Yiddish as a full language in the sense elucidated above. Though it may
persist in a highly specific variant offshoot form, that form will
eventually have about as much in common with the universal Yiddish of, let
us say, the Yiddish newspapers of 1939 as new Testament Greek has with
modern Greek or Cicero's Latin with modern Italian.
London, 30 September, 1997
1 comment:
Such a nice discussion on Yiddish. It was the 1st tongue of my grandparents and mother---and being born in the States I only got it in brief. Such a shame it's dying out--such a rich, full language and a rich full culture
Post a Comment