definition essay
"She has a lot of chutzpah to talk like that!" Chutzpah is Yiddish for nerve. Yiddish came about between the ninth and twelfth centuries in southwestern Germany as an alteration of Middle High German dialects to the special needs of Jews. To the original German were added those Hebrew words that pertained to Jewish religious life. When the majority of European Jewry moved eastward into areas occupied mainly by Slavic-Speaking people, some Slavic influences were attained. The vocabulary of the Yiddish spoken in Eastern Europe during recent times consisted of about eighty-five percent German, ten percent Hebrew and about five percent Slavic. In the beginning of the twentieth century Yiddish was spoken by about eleven million people that were mainly living in Eastern Europe and some in the United States. The extermination of six million Jews and others throughout Europe during Wor
It is predicted that the Yiddish language will become extinct in the year 2040. Because only the elders of my family speak Yiddish and they refuse to teach it to the children, we will never learn how to speak it in full. In my vocabulary I have many Yiddish words that I speak, but I don't realize that they have become part of my every-day vocabulary. This is a perfect example of how a language can die over generations. They only spoke it to each other if they did not want the kids to understand what they were talking about. Yiddish theater in New York is but one of the few remaining areas in America that still speaks the language. Today, Yiddish is dying rapidly. None of the children or parents knows how to speak Yiddish in full, but can understand bits and pieces of it. Today, as a Jew, I have never heard a full Yiddish sentence, only a few words here and there, and even then I'm unsure of their true meanings. At the family get-togethers all of the elders speak Yiddish at the table to have a "private adult" conversation. ld War II who spoke this language led to the decline of the language and its usage. Another important factor that also contributed to the decline of its usage was the adaptation by Jews to the main languages in the United States and in the Soviet Union. This brings up the question can a language become extinct if it is not passed down through generations? I believe Yiddish is becoming extinct. In the 1950s, parents use to speak Yiddish often, but not to the children. Although Yiddish is not a national language, today it is spoken by about four million Jews all over the world, especially in Argentina, Canada, France, Israel, Mexico, Romania and the United States.
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Acceptance Essays
