Again we the believers have a goal > to Love God and respect our fellow man, now not everyone is a true believer, so don't be shocked in this world.
Resources For Learning About The Jewish People and Judaism
- Thread starter mmatt9876
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Again we the believers have a goal > to Love God and respect our fellow man, now not everyone is a true believer, so don't be shocked in this world.
So don't bother what other people do , you serve God as Jesus teaches, that is all you can do.
Thank you. I appreciate the advice.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
What, exactly, do they identify as "Jewish language?" The citizens of the modern state of Israel speak a somewhat updated version of the ancient Hebrew language.
However, the Hassidic people--in Israel, the USA, and other countries where Hassidic communities have been established (even in Israel, although the Hassidic population there is quite small)--regard Hebrew as a sacred tongue, to be spoken only in the synagogue and other religious situations. In secular situations, they speak Yiddish, a dialect of medieval German that evolved in the Middle Ages--they even speak Yiddish at home! This explains whey there are so few of them in Israel: Nobody can understand them! They, of course, can understand modern Israeli Hebrew, even though they regard use of the "sacred tongue" as blasphemy outside of the synagogue or other religious settings.
I suppose this means that a policeman could accost a Hassidic Jew, speaking Hebrew, and the civilian would understand him. But it's very unlikely that the policeman could understand Yiddish. And, of course, while the Hassidic people can speak Hebrew fluently, no one would use it to speak to a policeman (or anyone else) in a non-religious context.
It looks like the Yale University Judaic Studies Program covers at least the modern Hebrew language. It looks like you can take up to three Hebrew language courses with the program if you want to but I do not know exactly what they cover.
I know I am an American with German, Polish, Irish, and Russian ancestry but I am not sure if I have English, Dutch, or Jewish ancestry too.
No.
Depend if you have someone to speak it might not be to difficult but if you don't than there is a bad problem,
Whatever you learn and don't practice you will forget fast, that is my experience. Read I can , there are many compound words were you can not translate directly.
I used to speak Hebrew, my parents still do.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
The difficulty with many foreign languages is the phonetics. That's not a problem with modern Hebrew (as opposed to the ancient dialect), which has only about two phonemes that we don't have in English, and which does not string three or four consonants together in a tongue-twister. The vowels are also quite familiar to English-speakers. Furthermore, the grammar and syntax are not terribly complicated--nothing like German or Russian.
It is good to know English speakers can learn modern Hebrew rather easily, minus two phenoms in modern Hebrew English speakers do not use. I have heard German is a tricky language for English speakers. German language variations can vary from region to region. I do not know much about the Russian language though.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Actually, running it though my brain, I think that there's only one phoneme in Hebrew that we don't have in English: the sound KH. And we're so accustomed to hearing that one in so many other languages (Spanish, German and Russian, for starters) that the vast majority of Anglophones are already able to pronounce it.
Sorry, I studied ancient Hebrew before I had any contact with the modern language. So I learned to pronounce sounds that are no longer used in conversation, except by scholars who want to make sure that they won't be lost to posterity.
I know I am a German, Polish, Irish, and Russian American but after doing some more research on my last name it looks like I may be English too.
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
There are websites that specialize in that. One of them asks you to smear some saliva on a little stick, then they'll analyze it and tell you where your ancestors came from.
And then there are others that will simply examine your family tree, looking up public records. Of course the two kinds of research give you two kinds of answers. The one will tell you where your family came from, going back quite a few generations, whereas the other will tell you who your more recent ancestors were and where they lived.
But with a lot of investigation, you can get both. My in-laws have a family tree that goes back to when the Romans abandoned what is now England, leaving it wide open for the Germanic tribes to conquer the original Celtic population. They turned the country into "Angle Land," named after the Angles, one of those German tribes. The in-laws even have the names of many of those ancient ancestors.
"England" and "English" are simply phonetic variations of "Angle Land" and "Anglisc," as the language twisted and turned over the centuries.
Thanks for the info!
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