It’s OK if you laugh, but this is the missing piece: Yiddish! Ridiculous I know, but also brilliant! So many reasons why, so just a few....Yiddish came out of cultural and linguistic mixing (like many Elvish and Mannish tongues), it is a language of humor (like the Elvish languages—elves are funny, right?), it was a persecuted language like Quenya (in Israel, —Yiddish, not Quenya—look it up) and it is a language of deep culture (like the Elvish tongues). Nu, let’s talk about it!—Elwin
Idea for Germanic Philology Course
- Thread starter Elwin
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Jim Deutch
Well-Known Member
In the households of both my parents, while they were growing up, Yiddish was primarily used by the adults for discussing things they didn't want the children to hear: gossip, sex, stuff like that. The language was not passed down to their generation here in the US. This probably doesn't apply at all to Elvish languages, since the Elvish childhood is so brief compared to the Elvish lifespan. . .
I have my own private theory for my last name "Deutch". It is a fairly common Jewish name, very often spelled this way (without the "s" that appears in the German word for "German", "Deutsch"). I have no evidence to back it up, but it seems reasonable to me that their neighbors (in east European countries such as Hungary and Poland) heard them speaking Yiddish, mistook it for German, and thought that they were German.
I have my own private theory for my last name "Deutch". It is a fairly common Jewish name, very often spelled this way (without the "s" that appears in the German word for "German", "Deutsch"). I have no evidence to back it up, but it seems reasonable to me that their neighbors (in east European countries such as Hungary and Poland) heard them speaking Yiddish, mistook it for German, and thought that they were German.
