Why Do Jews Make Their Own Languages?
Posted by Nathan in Uncategorized, tags: Judaism, LinguisticsThere once was a man from Belarus who decided to reinvent a language. This man, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, invented Modern Hebrew. Yeah that is pretty much it. He invented it. Some might say resurrect.
But see, while this is FREAKING amazing, it seems to be a not-too-uncommon practice amongst Jews. There are some 20+ recognized synergistic Judeo-X languages. Like Judeo-Spanish is Ladino and Judea-German is Yiddish.
Again, I ask why? The reason given in common parlance is that isolated Jewish ghettos would introduce Herew words into the local dialect to describe unique Jewish thoughts and ideas, then slowly over time, this combination would take on a form of its own.
I don’t know Yiddish, but my German is ok, and I would call Yiddish lazy simplified German, ie German with a lot of the complexities of conjugation and declension removed. So this idea of a slow progression of integration could be mostly plausible.
But I think something else is afoot here. If this occurred once or twice it might make sense, but why over and over again in Jewish populations that at best saw 10 people a year interchange?
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What do you mean by “10 people a year interchange”?
meaning the idea of creating a synergistic language didn’t move from group to group as they were isolated and movement over large distance was tough. The creation of judeo languages is something inherently organic and occurs without outside influences.