The “psychic function” of the Yiddish language was described before the Yale Linguistic Club here Wednesday night by Dr. Max Weinreich, Research Director of the Yiddish Scientific Institute which has its international headquarters at Vilna, Poland.
Although Yiddish linguistically springs from German, he said, it has become through the seven centuries of its development quite un-German in its “psychological overtones”, so that very often Yiddish words of German origin do not respond to the connotations of the same words in German.
Dr. Weinreich is one of the representatives of twelve cultures brought to Yale by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the impact of culture upon personality under the direction of Professor Edward Sapir, the noted anthropologist.
“The psychological causes for the overtones in the Yiddish language are obvious,” Dr. Weinreich said. “Yiddish certainly did arise out of the German linguistic soil. But it has been for at least seven centuries the medium for quite un-German patterns of acting and thinking. Traditional rabbinical Judaism is one of the comprehensive religions in the sense that it has given shape and color to every spot of life. Nothing has been so trivial as to escape religious regulation or restriction. The Jews thus forming a definitely separate community, it appears only natural that they, as early as in the 16th century, had formed in Germany herself a Jewish ‘over-dialect’, extending all over the scattered Jewish communities of the country and containing patterns of different German local dialects. The process of separation from German was enforced and accelerated by the invasion of hosts of Hebrew, Slavic, and to a minor degree, Romanic elements. All this material was taken, as it were, as crude ore, to be molded according to the needs of the Jewish social organization, and has been transformed into a new system.
“To be sure, ‘traditional Judaism’ which molded Jewish life and Jewish language, has been quite different from ancient Hebrew culture. As a matter of fact, the written Hebrew of numerous rabbinical writings is strongly influenced by Yiddish.
“Since the early 17th century, the center of gravity of Yiddish has been transferred from Western to Eastern Europe, Here the language underwent a highly remarkable development. According to the patterns of the times, most of the Yiddish language and literature was colored by religion, al-
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
