Re: Demotic/Koine/Prakit

And Rosta wrote:
>
> John Cowan:
> > (The Yiddish of Germany went extinct in the late 19th or early 20th
> > centuries; by the time of the Holocaust, essentially all German Jews
> > spoke standard or regional German.)
>
> What about the Yiddish of elsewhere in Eastern Europe? Had that died out
> too? If it survived in some countries, did it survive more in cities or
> in the countryside, and more in higher social strata or lower?
>
I'm not sure about in cities, but in the small Jewish shtetls (villages)
of Poland it survived until the Holocaust when the shtetls themselvs
were eliminated.

> Is the Yiddish spoken in America a survival from earlier immigration, or
> is it a language revival/resuscitation?
>
Mainly from earlier immigration, from my experience, although I can't be
sure of this. When the Jews came to America, they spoke many different
languages, but rarely English, and used Yiddish in newspapers and such
to find eachother and form Jewish communities.

> ObConlang: Part of my reason for asking is I'm wondering what the Jewish
> community in Livagia speak/spoke (immigrated in the 1930s; some migrated
> to Israel after the war, and the rest have assimilated, except for the
> very elderly).
>
Don't know about this.

Hope this helps,
        Robert