[bszupnick]

Thanks for sharing!

With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though. Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic (the language Maimonides wrote a lot of literature in), and Ladino were victims of the centralization of Hebrew as the common language for Jews.

Yiddish is a German dialect, Judeo-Arabic an Arabic dialect, and Ladino is a Spanish dialect and are all dying/dead languages with attempted revival movements in their own right, but nothing with too much steam and this article lays out a potential reason why; aside from traditional, historic, or cultural reasons, there's no real societal reason for these languages in today's world.

[null_deref]

I partially disagree with you, yes Ladino and Judeo-Arabic are dying, but that's not true for Yiddish. Many Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and outside of it, are using it for their day to day activities, and reserve Hebrew for religious purposes only.

[Mediterraneo10]

The Yiddish used today by the Haredim is fundamentally different from the Yiddish used before World War II. Yiddish used to be the language of a vibrant secular arts and culture scene: some fantastic literature, theatre plays and films, along with journalism on all kinds of issues and political debate from all sides of the spectrum. However, in Europe that world largely perished in the Holocaust or through emigration to Israel, and through assimilation in North America. So yes, today the Haredim continue to use Yiddish, but for a far more limited range of topics, because they are an austere religious movement that has intentionally limited the range of topics in their lives.

(As an apt parallel, albeit perhaps obscure to many here, saying Yiddish is not dead because the Haredim use it is like saying that Sogdian is not dead because it survives as Yaghnobi. But the Yaghnobi language used by some impoverished people in an isolated valley is a pale shadow of the cosmopolitan Sogdian language that was used before.)

[bluGill]

The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago. English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500, but go back to 1400 and it starts to become a different language.

Talk to a linguist if you want the very messy and complex details I just summarized to the point of butchering the truth.

[veddox]

> The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago.

How do you mean that? Of course there were different styles of speaking (especially in polite speech), but it‘s perfectly intelligible either way. In fact, even Martin Luther‘s German still sounds colloquial today (although the spelling was vastly different).

> English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500

That‘s a hundred years before Shakespeare. Who is decently understandable with some practice, but not what I would call „close“ to modern English.

[cambalache]

> The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago.

This is an amazing piece of information, even more incredible it is the fact the modern speakers can read Nietzsche with no problem at all, what a fantastic coincidence.

I mean, what native German speaker could even begin to understand this Schiller poem, it is 200! years old!! It could be very well be written in proto-Germanic:

An den Frühling

Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!

Du Wonne der Natur!

Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen

Willkommen auf der Flur!

Denkst auch noch an mein Mädchen?

Ei, Lieber, denke doch!

Dort liebte mich das Mädchen

Und’s Mädchen liebt mich noch!

Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!

Du Wonne der Natur!

Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen

Willkommen auf der Flur!

[bluGill]

Written German of them past has little in common with the spoken language.

In practice natives had trouble understanding each other if they traveled just a few villages over

[veddox]

Irony doesn‘t come over very well online...

[cambalache]

Thanks god this is sarcasm

[hackissimo123]

To add to this, "endangered" languages aren't necessarily those with few speakers, and languages with few speakers aren't necessarily endangered. What matters is how many children are being raised to speak the language; some languages are rare but are in no danger of dying out (at least not within the next generation) while others are more common but the speakers are disproportionately old and few children are learning it.

I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."

[amitport]

Yiddish really isn't going anywhere and there are still plenty of children raised to speak it. So it is (perhaps surprisingly) in the latter category (only among (ultra?)orthodox Jews, but they're not endangered).

[xyzelement]

//With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though

I grew up hearing my grandmother speaking Yiddish sometimes, my wife's dad is fluent and I love hearing Chabad rabbis break into it.

But.

The Yiddish and the other languages you listed are languages of the diaspora. They came to be because our people did not have a home and ended up speaking the dialects of their neighbors. It's incredibly empowering that there's now a country where our "real" (non-diaspor) language thrives.

Of course, there's a tremendous body of work written in those languages that is valuable and must be preserved but the fact that Hebrew is people's native language nowadays should only be celebrated.

[29athrowaway]

This is a song in Ladino. Ask any person fluent in Spanish if they can understand it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2NYMTs_20

To me, a fluent Spanish speaker, it sounds like a Spanish person with a foreign accent.

The pronunciation and grammar sounds a little bit off (with respect to Spanish), but otherwise I can understand this 100%.

[pjmlp]

Same here, and if you speak German, the same applies to Yiddish.

[yorwba]

LibriVox has recordings of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" translated into many languages, including various Germanic ones. https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-p...

As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows:

Swedish: understood just a few words

Dutch: understood some entire phrases

Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)

[kettro]

Importantly, there is a difference between comprehension and production. Just because you can mostly understand a language, doesn't mean that it isn't a language in its own right. Yiddish, as an example, has many syntactic differences from German, in addition to its differing vocabulary.

Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.

[29athrowaway]

Yes, it's true. There are unique words in Ladino that a Spanish speaker won't be able to identify, but my main takeaway is that modern Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible.

[coldtea]

>With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though. Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic (the language Maimonides wrote a lot of literature in), and Ladino were victims of the centralization of Hebrew as the common language for Jews.

As if they would have survived in the 20th/21st century without the respective communities being isolated (as it was the case when they existed).

They'd be forgotten aside from token phrases and liturgical uses maybe, like Yiddish were in the US in a couple of generations...