Dear Log,
So I'm trying to get my foot in the door of the Germanic languages by learning Yiddish -- learning to read it at least. Since almost everything written in Yiddish is written not in Latin script, but in Hebrew script, this mean I have to learn the Hebrew alphabet. It's absolutely maddening -- the letters simply look too much alike, even worse than Burmese. As much as I look at the alphabet charts and lists of common words, it all just looks like long rows of ]|]N"]'|]']N to me. "Hm, and which of the seven letters that looks like ] is that supposed to be?"
... that to a non-speaker it looks valid upside-down, too! In fact, it looks better, because the horizontal lines at the top of each character look like a baseline.
I used Menahem Mansoor's Biblical Hebrew Step by Step, which had extensive exercises in the first lesson to help you learn to distinguish similar characters. Nearly every letter was paired with nearly every other letter, it seemed.
It's not too bad, once you get the hang of it, though. I'm completely out of practice but can still distinguish the characters.
Three cheers for scripts!
citizenx on 2002-07-02T13:38:29
Hebrew's the only language I know that doesn't use the Latin character set (Latin-1, if we can be computer geeks here). I have had little trouble in my life with this, however, since I've been dealing with it since I was a wee lad. Of course, I knew the block (print) lettering back then, and I remember the problems that came up when learning cursive (written) Hebrew.
I can imagine that non-speakers (or more to the point, illiterates) of quite a few scripts could have trouble knowing the correct orientation of the characters. Maybe that should be "pretty much any", but I'm not sure if some are obvious to me because of the knowledge I possess or because they really are obvious.
What I really enjoyed about this post is how much that actually looks like blocky written Hebrew, Torg. (Although ] being the closest analogue for both khaf and nun would make that difficult to decipher.)
I'd be glad to help in any way I could, but this book jdavidb mentioned (or others) are probably a better route for you.
Enjoy!
Any good introductory text will have a few chapters on learning the alphabet. It's actually reasonably simple to learn the Hebrew alphabet, because it's all phonetic. There are only a few exceptions to the pronunciation in [Sephardic] Hebrew. Also, spelling is very regular and almost algebraic enough to be mechanical in some cases, without losing a sense of poetry. Modern Hebrew is also comprised of many small, regularly formed words. Biblical Hebrew on the other hand uses lots of long-strings-of-characters-with-unknown-derivation.
Yiddish is interesting for more of the socio-cultural reasons. Once you've got the hang of the Hebrew alphabet, then it's easier to pick up the phonemes that differ in Yiddish. (It's basically applying the Germanic pronunciation to certain instances of non-Hebraic lexemes.)
Re:Learn Hebrew First
TorgoX on 2002-07-03T08:49:46
I think it's easier to learn Hebrew first. Learning Yiddish first is like learning calculus by skipping algebra altogether.But learning Hebrew in order to learn Yiddish sounds really the long way around. I mean, Yiddish borrows a lot of nouns from Hebrew, but I don't see how one would have to know all the scary details of the Hebrew's morphology and syntax, to say nothing of its kooky vowel-marking system.
Re:Learn Hebrew First
ziggy on 2002-07-03T10:47:41
I believe that Yiddish does use Hebrew vowels. It also adds some vowels of its own I think (using Hebrew consonants to mimic the Germanic spelling or something).I don't see how one would have to know all the scary details of the Hebrew's morphology and syntax, to say nothing of its kooky vowel-marking system.The usage of vowels is so regular in Hebrew that it's possible to ignore (once you know what vowels are typically used where), and the redundancy tends not to be necessary once you've got a firm grasp of the language.
So, you could learn Yiddish without learning the Hebrew vowel system, and that might appear to be shorter, except that you'd be ignoring the sign that says bwr f fllng rcks nd thr hdch csng hzrds. :-)
Re:Learn Hebrew First
TorgoX on 2002-07-04T07:16:56
I believe that Yiddish does use Hebrew vowelsIn fact, the only vowel pointing in the system is the squiggle under the alef to distinguish it from a silent (word-initial) alef. YIVO says to use one squiggle to show it's an /o/ and another to show it's a /a/, but apparently some people don't distinguish those vowels at all. (Incidentally, merging those two vowels is actually relatively common in Germanic languages, I think.)
Re:Learn Hebrew First
ziggy on 2002-07-04T13:40:10
Cool. Guess it is simpler than I had thought. It's been a while since I attempted to read Yiddish, and I thought I saw some more vowels than just the kametz and patach under the Aleph. Typically, the letter vav is used as a pseudo-silent letter to produce the vowels "oh" and "oo", but it is really one of the letters that is used for a "v" consonant. Interesting that Yiddish switches this to emphasize the common use. (This explains why written Modern Hebrew (without vowels) uses the double-vov to indicate "V" instead of the single-vov, which generally indicates "oh".)Some of the letter combinations involving "shin" still look strange to me. I thought there were more letter combinations all together than the seven listed here. Then again, I never expected to see that long bar over the Vet or Fey to emphasize the difference between Bet and Pey.
Still, if you think most of the letters look similar (the serif between bet and kof is significant, as it is between daled and resh), then perhaps the best thing you can do is find a good introductory Hebrew text in a used book store. The first chapter or two should have a few phonetic exercises at the beginning to learn the aleph bet. Unfortunately, there is a strong emphasis on the Hebrew vowel system, which won't matter much to you in learning Yiddish, but the consonants should be demystified. :-) It's also important to remember the difference between shin and sin. The shin is more commonly used (since there are so many other ways to express "s" as a consonant), but the sin does appear occasionally. I've forgotten the reason why, though. (There are a few words, probably from Biblical Hebrew, where both dots are on the shin. Pronounciation? "Sho"; it's a shin with a dot at the top left, indicating an "oh" vowel in Hebrew...)
There are a few important differences between Yiddish (Ashkenazi pronunciation) and Hebrew (Sephardic pronunciation). Sephardic is considered the "better" pronunciation for Hebrew, although some of the over-80 immigrant crowd still use Ashkenazi pronunciation for their Hebrew. The main difference is that the kametz and patach vowels are voiced identically in Sephardic, but differently in Askenazi pronunciation. And the letter tof is always proununced as a "t" in Sephardic, but pronounced as an "s" (sof) in Askenazi when the dot is missing from the middle (no dagesh, IIRC).
