YIDDISH LANGUAGE. Yiddish. the Englishized form of German Iiiditch (Jewish), is one of the names applied to the various Ger man dialects spoken by the Jews of German origin in the diaspora, in Russia. Rumania, Poland and Austria-Hungary, and in England. America, and South Africa, whither Russian and Rumanian Jews have been emigrating in the last 30 years. In Russia it is known under the name of Jargon, while philologically it is gen erally spoken of as Judeo-German.
No literary documents of any consequence bear upon the condition of this group of dia lects previous to the 16th century, and even in the printed works up to a hundred years ago the literary norm seems to have attempted an approach to the literary German, though even then the deviation was considerable and fairly uniform. In the last century the spoken dia lects have been asserting themselves in the lit erary productions, so that the uniformity no longer exists, each author writing in the varia tion familiar to him from childhood.
It seems that at first, in the Middle Ages, the German Jews employed the language of their Christian neighborhood without any change whatever; in their intercommunication with their coreligionists they transcribed this Ger man with Hebrew characters and introduced, Germanizing them, such Hebrew words as were necessitated by the observances of the Mosaic faith. When the German Jews, in the 14th and 15th centuries, settled in Poland, they were cut off from the rest of the German nation, and so their native dialects perpetuated themselves in the form in which they were brought from their homes. They were subjected, however, to the double influence of their Slavic neighborhood and the language of the Bible and the Talmud, to which the Jews devoted themselves with un wonted zeal. In vocabulary, the Yiddish is pre dominantly German, less than one-third having been derived from Slavic, Rumanian and He brew sources In pronunciation, the influence of Russian and Polish is doubtful or less trans parent, while Hebrew, instead of affecting it, was itself affected by the current pronunciation of Yiddish. In syntax and idiom, both the Slavic and the Hebrew have considerably modi fed the native German, without, however, alit ( rating the original German basis. At present. three chief varieties may be distinguished in the Yiddish of Russia, the Lithuanian, the 1%.lith, and the Southern; the dialects in Austria and Hungary arc more nearly related to the two latter, while the Rumanian is more akin to the Polish variety In America all three varieties may be heard, but they are strongly influenced in vocabulary by the English, and in the periodic press the Lithuanian variety, affected byliterary German, seems to supersede all other dialects. lects. 'The three varieties correspond to their places of origin in Germany, the Lithu anian issuing from a Middle-German the other two from various Upper-German localities.
The precise provenience has not yet been ascer tained. as the linguistic study of Yiddish has heretofore been greatly neglected.
The chief differences between Yiddish and the modern German are these: Phonetically, Yiddish represents a mcdizval stage of German when, for example, i and ei were still carefully distinguished. while a before a nasal had not yet changed into o; on the other hand, the con sonantism, especially the treatment of pi, seems to correspond to a later stage. The vocabulary of Yiddish is rich in words only sporadically found in German dialects and common to the Middle-High-German literary language. The words from the Hebrew arc phonetically treated as Yiddish words, while those from Russian and Polish, to some extent, underwent the changes due to the peculiarity of Yiddish, and present some interesting data to the Slavic scholar. In grammar, Yiddish has developed certain peculiarities which are common to va rious German dialects. Most prominent are the disappearance of final unaccented e, of the genitive case in the declension of the noun, of the imperfect tense in the verb. In syntactic structure, Yiddish resembles English, rather than German, and in English-speaking countries naturally adopts some of the English idioms. But, on the whole, Yiddish is an important group of German dialects, well worthy of a thorough study by the Germanic philologist Bibliography.-- There arc no good gram mars of Yiddish; for dictionaries one may use the Russo-Yiddish ones by Liischiz and 1)rei•tn, and the Yiddish-English and English-Yiddish ones by A. Harkavy. To the student of phi loloo. the following works and articles will prove of value: Landau, A., 'Bibliographic des Judisch-deutschen,' in 1)eutsche Jfundarten, Zeitschrift (sir Brarbcitung des niundartlichen 21laten'als herausgegcben von Dr. Johann Nagl, Vienna lft96, Heft pp. 135 132) ; Landau, A., 'I)as [)cminutivum der gall 7isch-jtidischen Mundart, Ein Kapitel aus der judischen Grammatik' (lb, Vol. 1, pp. 46-58); Cerzon, Jak. 'Die jtidisch-deutsche Sprache, Fine grarnmatisch-lexikalische L'ntersuchung ihrcs dentschen Grundbestandes' (Frankfurt a. M. 1%2); Loewe, Richard, review of Gerron's work, in Anzeiger fir indogermanische .1'prach und Alterturns-Kunde (Vol. XVI, 1q04, pp. 41 50); Sainean, L., 'Escai stir le judio-allemand et specialement sir le dialecte park en Valachie) ('I...I-traits des Memoirts de la Societe' de Lis guistigiee de Peru)), (Vol. XII, premiire partie. Paris 19(12); Landau, A , review of Ger zon's and Sainean's works, in Zeitschrift fur deutsche Phitologie (Vol. XXXVI, 19(11); and valuable bibliography of scattered articles by Frankel, in Laterattortqatt hie and roma/niche Philuloyte (Vol. X XII, pp 3.`46 391) I.s.o l'rolessot of .S'hrtne 1.anguages and Literatures, I art.ord 1 ',lire. cety ying'Ise', a noted sea port in Manchuria. See N Ili-CH UA NG.