gnat writes ""Perl is Yiddish" draws an amusing parallel between Yiddish and our favourite programming language."
I'm sure the linguists will have conniptions. The pressing question is, of course: what are Java, C#, Python, and ML?
Re:Looks like I wasn't the first...
vsergu on 2002-06-20T21:49:17
Eichin used it in a Usenet sig as early as 1991.
Ah yes, the old "Yiddish has no grammar" meme, recycled yet again. It's nonsense, of course. Yiddish is just another point on the HighGerman<->Dutch dialect continuum. As far as I can tell, there's little that's inherently interesting about Yiddish; it's merely that many people associate it with cosy things, like nice old people. Associations are important, but they're still just associations. I don't see anything particularly innovative in Yiddish except for having more Hebrew and Slavic loanwords than the current "national standard" dialect of German does. But if cross-family loans are what are interesting, then Romanian is far more "interesting" by that criterion.
The relationship of Perl to its parent languages involves more innovation than I see in Yiddish to its parent dialects of German. I think a better simile is that Perl is to its parent language(s) and Haitian is to its parent language(s) -- a lexicon of mostly French words but with highly altered phonetics and phonology, a grosso modo French-like syntax, but with some fundamental changes to basic syntactic categories and constructions (tense, aspect, clause, interrogation, definite articles, etc.) along lines that are possibly African, and definitely unlike anything in any other European language.
Re:Yiddish
Yiddish on 2002-12-05T10:02:41
It's not nonsence at all. Syntax of our language closely resembles Slavic languages, wich means much more freedom in the word order. This is why some Germans say that "Yiddish has no grammar", but for my Russian students (I'm teaching Yiddish in Russian) the grammar is usually quite clear and already familiar. A Polish girl at the Columbia University Yiddish program said once that "Yiddish is just like Polish", while a Dutch student, a fluent German speaker, couldn't understand "this crazy syntax". Nothing was "twisted" or "abandoned", but Yiddish is highly slavicized. There are some verbal aspects completely foreign to any other Germanic languages, but very common in Slavic. The tense system is a little different, closer to Polish or Ukrainian. There is a number of possibly Hebrew syntactic elements, though they could be derived from some Slavic dialects as well. Of course, about 30 percent of the vocabulary in average speach is also Slavic and Hebrew, phonology is just Slavic, most German roots sound differently, especially in South-Ukrainian dialect of Yiddish, there are some strange Romance (Old French of Italian) inflections, Slavic morphemes, Slavic prepositions etc., but the point is that Yiddish word order is much looser than in any other Germanic languages and can be easily reversed in all different ways.
For example:
Ot na nokh eyne aza shrayfele a kleynitshke, gib a kuk tsi se'tsakh arayndreyen. Yener, zogstu, i'geven tsi groys, nit arayn? Nu, tu a pruv oto-dem-ot, efsher se gut.
(Standart Yiddish)
Ot na nokh eyne aza shrayfele a kleynitshke, gib a kik tsi se'tsekh arayndreyen. Yener, zugsti, i'geveyn tsi groys, nit arayn? Nu, ti a priv oto-dem-ot, efsher se git.
(Ukrainian dialect)
(Here is some another tiny a little screw, take a look, if it would fit in. You said, the first one was too big, it didn't go? So try this one, mayby it's good)
This was a typical Yiddish sentence. Ask a German or Dutch guy, to what part of their continuum it belongs.:-) I think, the Yiddish freely reversed word order does resemble the difference between C and Perl. Maybe Haitian as well, since Yiddish is also a creolized language, like Haitian.
Here are a few links some can find interesting:
