Re: Yiddish and German

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Steg Belsky wrote:

> It depends how you distinguish between "dialects" and "languages".
> They have major differences in phonemes, for instance Yiddish has no
> front rounded vowels, no "ich-Laut", and from a grammatical point of
> view, Yiddish has only a compound past tense.
But these are relatively straightforward matters which are also true
in many a German dialect, especially the last point: the plain past tense
has come to be almost exclusively used in writing.

No, fundamentally what makes Yiddish different is not its phonology or
its Jewish-specific vocabulary, but its *distinct syntax*.

Of course, if you take the Weinreich attitude ("a language is a dialect
with an army and a navy"), Yiddish can't be a language.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter