My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in linguistics. While I'm no expert on Yiddish, nor on German, I remember learning that linguistically, Yiddish is actually a dialect of High German. A dialect as opposed to a separate language is defined by mutual intelligibility. The orthography is generally not a deciding factor. Of course, there are a lot of other factors (cultural, political, religious, etc.) that play into deciding whether something is a language or a dialect as well, and linguists don't get the deciding vote! And people continue to speak what they speak, regardless of what we decide to call it.
Anyway, based on the general guidelines, Judeo-German (German written in Hebrew characters) is German... but then again, so is Yiddish. Thank you for an interesting discussion! Margo Gutstein Technical Services Librarian Simon Wiesenthal Center [email protected] --- Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [email protected] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
