Unlikely Linguistic First Cousins

​Some 40 years ago I purchased a book called The Concise Dictionary of Twenty-Six Languages in Simultaneous Translations (Avenel,1981), compiled by Peter M. Bergman. Now although my doctoral field was 19th-Century American literature, I started learning languages other than English at age eight. And speaking of eight, I claim that nowadays, at 83, I can get into trouble in 12 languages and back out in eight. Anyway, language learning/using is my hobby and at this point in life, the dike I continue building against memory loss or worse...

As I periodically go through this unusual dictionary, which features all the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages as well as Finnish, Turkish, Indonesian, Esperanto, modern Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, Japanese, and Swahili—all, helpfully, in Roman letters—I have noticed some interesting and in one case strange connections. Specifically, many of the 1,000 Yiddish (European Jewish) words are either exact copies of the standard modern German equivalents (41.7%) or near copies (33.5%). When we add both categories together, 75.2%, or three-quarters of the 1,000 terms are either exact or close copies. Now I knew that Yiddish was basically a German dialect, but I never expected this kind of close relationship. Then I remembered that in some languages what we call civil [!] war is referred to as a cousins’ war. In Indonesian, for example, that term is perang saudara, based on the Hindu epic The Mahabharata, which describes the cosmic conflict between two cousins and their extended families. Of course, if humanity is one global family as is often claimed, we always find ourselves in conflicts between or among our relatives. At the moment, think about the war in Ukraine, truly a cousins’ war where both adversaries can easily communicate in a shared language. So if the Yiddish-German connection comes to 75.2%, what about the other 24.8%? As it happens, 6.5% are indigenous terms with no similarities in the dictionary’s other 25 languages. The rest all stem from the languages of countries where European Jews have lived. To wit, 6.4% are from Polish, 6.3% from Hebrew, 4.3% from a diversity of other languages, and 1.4% from Russian. Of those other languages, moreover, 12 Yiddish terms are similar to their Dutch equivalents, nine to English ones, seven to Scandinavian, five to Italian, three each to French and Hungarian, two to Czech, and one each to the following: Spanish, Portuguese, modern Greek, Arabic, and (from another dictionary) Latin (!).
           
​Moses Mendelssohn (died 1786) was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian who tried to conform Judaism with the thought of the Enlightenment, with his writings leading to so-called Reform (or liberal) Judaism. He was also the grandfather of the musician siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelsohn. Some Orthodox Jewish rabbis consider that the Holocaust originated in Germany precisely because the Reform heresy, as they considered it, started in that country. In any event, there is an irony in the fact that German and its Jewish dialect are so close. By the same token, all Jews in diaspora who were not driven out of Spain are called Ashkenazim, a term that means Germans. There are even claims that Hitler himself was part-Jewish. Given all that, the most I can say as a Jewish-Christian who has lived and flourished in Germany is OY! 

Yiddish—mainly German but written with Hebrew characters!