LL-L "Language varieties" 2008.09.12 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 12 September 2008 - Volume 04
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Folks,

I just learned about a short-lived language variety and looked it up in the
Wikipedia which provides this information:
"Scots-Yiddish"

Scots Yiddish is the name given to a
Jewish<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew>hybrid vernacular between
Lowland
Scots <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language> and
Yiddish<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish>which had a brief
currency in the Lowlands of
Scotland <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland> in the first half of the
20th century. The Scottish literary historian David
Daiches<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daiches>describes it in his
autobiographical account of his Edinburgh Jewish
childhood, *Two Worlds*:

"Recently I received a letter from the son of the man who was stationmaster
at one of the small railway stations where the earliest trebblers [Yiddish
pronunciation of travellers, i.e. Jewish travelling salesmen] would alight;
he told me how, at the very beginning of this century, these Jewish
immigrants, not yet knowing any English, would converse with his father,
they talking in Yiddish and he in broad Scots, with perfectly adequate
mutual intelligibility. Scots-Yiddish as a working language must have been
developing rapidly in the years immediately preceding the first World War.
It must have been one of the most short-lived languages in the world. I
should guess that 1912 to 1914 was the period of its flourishing. The
younger generation, who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, of course did not
speak it, though they knew Yiddish; and while there is an occasional old man
in Edinburgh who speaks it today, one has to seek it out in order to find
it, and in another decade it will be gone for ever. 'Aye man, ich hob'
getrebbelt mit de five o'clock train,' one trebbler would say to another.
'Vot time's yer barmitzvie, laddie?' I was once asked. 'Ye'll hae a drap o'
bamfen (whisky). It's Dzon Beck. Ye ken: "Nem a schmeck fun Dzon Beck."'
('Take a peg of John Begg', the advertising slogan of John
Begg<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Begg>whisky.)
[10] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots-Yiddish#cite_note-9>

Daiches explores the social stratification of Edinburgh Jewish society in
the interwar period, noting what is effectively a class divide between two
parts of the community, on the one hand a highly educated and
well-integrated group who sought a synthesis of Orthodox Rabbinical and
Modern Secular thinking, on the other a Yiddish-speaking group most
comfortable maintaining the lifestyle of the Eastern European ghetto. The
Yiddish population grew up in Scotland in the 19th century, but by the late
20th century had mostly switched to using English. The
creolisation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language>of
Yiddish <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish> with
Scots<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots>was therefore a phenomenon of
the middle part of this period.

The Glaswegian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow> Jewish poet A. C.
Jacobs<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A._C._Jacobs&action=edit&redlink=1>also
refers to his language as Scots-Yiddish.


Fascinating!

Reinhard/Ron

•

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