People & Culture: Yiddish is a 1000-year old language of the European Jews, and it is spoken by Jews today in several countries including in the United States and Israel. The basic grammar and vocabulary of Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, is Germanic. However, Yiddish is not a Germanic dialect but instead a language which is part of the family of Western Germanic languages. The Holocaust contributed to the endangerment of the Yiddish language; while 11 million Jews spoke Yiddish prior to World War II (2 out of 3 Jews spoke Yiddish), the U.N. estimates that only about 1 million people worldwide speak Yiddish today. Although the U.N. still classifies Yiddish as an endangered language, some argue that currently there is a Yiddish revival (http://languagesoftheworld.info/geolinguistics/endangered-languages/yiddish-revival.html).
Sources: http://www.germanic.ucla.edu/yiddish, http://www.yivoinstitute.org/yiddish/yiddish_fr.htm
Why save Yiddish?: Yiddish is a rich language, full of unique words and phrases. The richness of the language is expressed through a variety of mediums including poetry. An example of such a poem is "Gracious Angel" by Arthur Esselin.
Poem (translated into English from Yiddish): http://www.esselin.com/poetry.htm#graciousangel
Image: http://i1.squidoocdn.com/resize/squidoo_images/590/draft_lens8331701module71802611photo_1259595862over-under.jpg
The above picture shows a Yiddish proverb both in the original Yiddish and in English. Although translated into English, some of the richness of the Yiddish language is 'lost in translation.' If the Yiddish language is lost completely, many Yiddish texts and proverbs will be 'lost in translation.'
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