Joseph Witriol

MUMME LOOHSHEN An Anatomy Of Yiddish Joseph Witriol

My father wrote this unpublished manuscript in 1975 and stated then that "this was the first linguistically oriented book on the Yiddish language as a whole, as opposed to monographs on specific aspects of Yiddish linguistics, to be written in English." As for the title (usually spelt mamaloshen or mama loshen) he said 'the restriction of the Yiddish recorded in this book to the "Yiddish my mother taught me" strengthens some of the contentions advanced in it'. Thus, in stressing the importance of the Hebrew elements in Yiddish, the author only uses the Hebrew words and phrases he recalled actually hearing from his mother. The book seeks to analyse the various strands: German, Hebrew-Aramaic, Polish-Russian, that have gone into the making of Yiddish. It tries to bring out the strength of the Hebrew element and to show that the German element is not bad or corrupt German, but normal Middle High German. Whatever can be said about the Yiddish recorded in these pages, the reader can rest assured that it is not factitious. The writer would claim it to be normal, authentic (not Standard) Yiddish. "Standard" Yiddish was laid down by Yivo, the Yiddish Scientific Institute of New York, too late, alas; after the Holocaust. The slaughter of millions of virtually unilingual Yiddish speakers, together with the loss by natural causes of millions of Jews in the USA and the (then) USSR who spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, meant that those who could have been expected to adopt a "Standard" Yiddish were a fraction of those who had spoken it for generations previously without benefit of "standards".