Yiddish · a thirty-second question

Which Yiddish did your family speak?

גוט שבת was gut shabes in Vilna and git shabes in Warsaw: same letters, different vowels. Tell me where each side came from and any word you remember, and I will tell you which Yiddish they most likely spoke and how it sounded.

1. Where did each side of the family come from?

One side is enough. The town helps where a country had more than one Yiddish.

Mother’s side
Father’s side

2. Any word you remember them saying?

Skip any you are not sure of. Each is spelled the same everywhere; only the sound changes.

How did they say “good”, as in good Shabbos? גוט שבת
How did they say the name Moses? משה
How did they say “small”? קליין
How did they say “to say”? זאָגן

Where this comes from

The map is the usual division of Yiddish into Northeastern (Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus), Central (Poland and Galicia), Southeastern (Ukraine, Bessarabia, Romania) and Western Yiddish, as laid out in Uriel Weinreich’s Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (ed. Marvin Herzog et al.), Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language and Neil G. Jacobs’s Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. The four words test the four vowel differences those works agree on. Borders between areas were not lines, and Hungarian Yiddish of the Unterland sits between two of them.