I was a bit astonished to see Yiddish and Ladino described as variations of Hebrew
My understanding is that Yiddish is pretty close to German, which is why I can understand the jist. It is, I believe, unusual in Israel.
Ladino is the Spanish equivalent, but since the Jews were expelled from Spain for getting on with the Moors, it seems odd that the Sephardis kept it alive - in Holland (?) maybe in North Africa.
From memory, formal Hebrew was a liturgical language until about 1890, when an old boy refused to speak to his family in anything apart from our equivalent of Latin.
It then caught on as the language of Zion.
The absence of vowels is a bit spurious, there are, as in Arabic loads of dots and dashes that act as modifiers (I am assured of this by one of my ex-clients for whose employer I wrote systems using a character set that I pixel designed for them)
One of the interesting things I have noticed is that prominent amongst ‘borrowed’ words in current Israeli Hebrew are ‘bitte’ and ‘prosha’
you are welcome - in German
please - in Polish (and probably other languages)
Funny that …
The interesting thing is that when (as I frequently do) ask if there are variations in accent, Israelis always /vehemently/ deny it.
I didn’t say they are variants of Hebrew. I said they were hybrids of Hebrew and a local language. My point was that if Jews wanted a language to use strictly amongst themselves, you would have thought that Hebrew is a natural, but rather than use “the Holy Language” for mundane purposes, they Judaized a local language instead.
Yiddish and Ladino are languages that were created when German-Hebrew and Spanish-Hebrew were creolized. Kind of like Middle English (French-English).
Depends on the neighborhood. In places like Mea Shearim, you’re likely to hear Yiddish. In a Yemeni development town, not so much.
They’re called “nekudot,” which means “dots” or “points” (sorry; somebody’s still asleep in the room where my Hebrew dictionary is). They appear in printed religious texts in order to avoid confusion.
The misplacement of diacriticals can lead to mistranslation (especially since they’re about the size of flyspecks), and moreso when multiple languages are involved. One example of this that’s asserted (sorry, no cite this morning) is GML, a root that means “camel” or “rope” depending on the vowel points. What was it you can’t get through the eye of a needle again?
But these languages basically arose from the languages shared by Jews and Gentiles. Ladino is, grammatically, basically the Spanish spoken at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. There are substantial amounts of borrowing from Hebrew, but largely the vocabulary comes from Spanish and the grammar does pretty much exclusively. Back when the Sephardic Jews still lived in Spain, Ladino didn’t separate them from other Spaniards. I’d guess it probably wasn’t all that much different from the situation of stereotypical Jewish English in New York - identifiable, but no real obstacle to communication with Gentiles. It’s only a completely different language now because it was retained by Jews who fled Spain for other places and thus started on its own evolutionary trajectory at that point; back in the 15th century it was just one particular flavor of Spanish.
Of course, Ladino (like Yiddish, if I remember right) is written with the Hebrew writing system nowadays; I’m not sure if that’s always been true - if it was, then Ladino writings probably were something like a secret code.
I would guess that Hebrew was confined to liturgical use just because no one really thought about using it for anything else. It would have been as odd as, say, Catholics (before Vatican II) reviving Latin for conversation amongst themselves. Not because it was holy and thus only meant for holy use, but because it wasn’t a language people used for conversation (and most people probably weren’t conversant in it as a conversational language, even if they knew it well for religious uses.) The strange part was its revival as a language for ordinary, mundane uses; I don’t think any explanation is really necessary for the fact that it wasn’t used for that previously.