(no subject)

My Yiddish teacher recommended Dovid Katz's Words On Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish so often this past year that I called for it at the library as soon as the class ended. Linguistic history makes for slow but fascinating reading; I knew the vague outlines of a lot of what was in the book, but not all of it and certainly not all the details.

The thing about Yiddish that's -- probably not unique? but certainly unusual -- is that it's a language developed and used by a diasporic people, which is to say a minority language, never a national one; and on top of that, it's a daily spoken language among a people who are almost universally literate, but are supposed to be reading and writing in Hebrew and Aramaic, not Yiddish at all. The linguistic politics are a MESS. A fascinating mess! The wars about whether it's even appropriate to write books in Yiddish at all span centuries; at first it's considered shady and potentially impious to write anything meaningful in Yiddish rather than Hebrew, and then once everyone's gotten used to the idea of secular literature there's the Jewish Enlightenment and a whole new generation of Jewish intellectuals who think everyone should be writing in proper enlightened languages like German and French rather than giving weight to lowly Jewish 'zhargon,' and then the Zionist movement happens and it's the fight between Yiddish and Hebrew all over again. (I knew Israel was not particularly pro-Yiddish but I had not realized there were actual ANGRY GANGS of intense Hebraists beating up people who tried to promote the Yiddish language in the early state of Israel? A COMMON THING, APPARENTLY. )

( Cut for feelings about language, Diaspora, Judaism, etc. )