Yeshivish
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Yeshivish is spoken mainly by English-speaking Orthodox Jews who attend or have attended a yeshiva, and is the working language of those schools. Yeshivish is the primary vehicle of communication in major American and British yeshivot. At present, only one serious study of Yeshivish has been made, the "Frumspeak" Yeshivish dictionary by Chaim Weiser. Weiser maintains that Yeshivish is not a jargon, pidgin, creole, or an independent language. He refers to it instead, with tongue-in-cheek, as a shprach, a Yeshivish word meaning "language" or "communication", derived from Yiddish, and from the German Sprache.
Linguist and Yiddishist Dovid Katz describes it as a "new dialect of English," which is "taking over as the vernacular in everyday life in some ... circles in America and elsewhere."
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Comparison with Yiddish
Yiddish use developed among German-speaking Jews in the Middle Ages with the addition of words from other languages known to them; the same goes for Yeshivish and Jewish speakers of English. Yiddish and Yeshivish each have native lexical and grammatical features not found in the languages they draw upon.
Yiddish evolved into an independent language; thus far Yeshivish has not. Speakers of Yiddish may not understand German (modern or Middle High); speakers of Yeshivish invariably understand English. (The reverse, however, is simply not the case.)
Yiddish has a pedigree of more than ten centuries; Yeshivish, perhaps a few decades. Written Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet; written Yeshivish almost exclusively uses the English alphabet, although words of Aramaic, Hebrew or Yiddish origin are usually written in Hebrew characters.
Yeshivish may develop to the point that it would be considered analogous to the historical precedents of Judeo-hybrid languages like Yiddish, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic. The Judeo languages were spoken dialects which mixed elements of the local vernacular, Hebrew, Aramaic and Jewish religious idioms. As Yiddish was to Middle High German, Yeshivish may be to Standard American English.
Interestingly enough, ultra orthodox Israelis have not developed any language or dialect comparable to Yeshivish. They generally speak proper modern hebrew or proper Yiddish.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Yeshivish is drawn primarily from English, although it includes terms from other languages, especially Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic. In some cases, words are used in different ways than they are used in their language of origin. For example, "Lichora, the hava amina of the Rosh is kneged Tosfos" (trans. "Apparently, the initial assumption of the Rosh was contrary to the view of Tosafot"). "Hava mina" is a noun in Yeshivish, despite being a verb phrase (as "hava amina") in Aramaic, and the only sense of "keneged" meaning "in opposition" as exists in Yeshivish, differs from classical Hebrew where it can also mean "concerning." Similarly, the preposition "by" can be used in Yeshivish where "at," "among," "beside," and "with" would be required in English, as in "I ate by my brother last night." This use of "by" is simply a transference of the meaning of the Yiddish and German word "bei" to the Yeshivish context in English.
Grammar
In general, the grammar of Yeshivish is English grammar. Thus, a non-Yeshivish English-speaker who hears a Yeshivish sentence will perceive a normal English sentence with unknown vocabulary words as the most important words in the sentence. The English is used to set the sentence structure with the Yiddish, Hebrew, or Aramaic words used to fill in the blanks.
This often leads to words of non-English origin being given plurals and verb tenses inconsistent with their language of origin. Most often, the singular form of a Yeshivish noun becomes a plural by adding an "s" to it, as in English, even when the base word is not an English one. Thus, the plural of "yeshiva" is "yeshivas," not "yeshivos" or "yeshivot." Verbs in past tense ("I already davened mincha.") or present ("Quiet, I'm davening.") are commonly used, even though these verbs (daven = "to pray") are not of English origin.
Some verbs, particularly those of Hebrew origin, are often treated as participles, and inflected by English auxilary verbs. Thus, for example:
- "He was moide that he was wrong."
- "He was" puts "moide" -- "to admit" -- into the third-person singular past tense, creating the present meaning of "He admitted that he was wrong."
- "We'll always be soimech on Rav Plony's p'sak that the eruv is mutar."
- "We'll always be" puts "soimech" -- "to rely" -- into the first-person plural future tense, creating the present meaning of "We'll always rely upon Rabbi So-and-So's ruling that the eruv is permitted."
For a more in-depth discussion of Yeshivish grammar, consult the explanation "The Grammar of Yeshivish," found at the start of Weiser's dictionary (see reference below).
References
- Weiser, Chaim M (1995). Frumspeak: The first dictionary of Yeshivish. Northvale: Aronson. ISBN 1-56821-614-9.