My dad’s book is now published on Amazon in paperback and Kindle format. Hence, I have now password protected this WordPress version.
In 1975, when he wrote it, he said that it was the first linguistically oriented book on the Yiddish language as a whole to be written in English. He also noted that restricting the Yiddish recorded in the book to the “Yiddish my mother taught me” strengthened some of its contentions. Thus, in stressing the importance of the Hebrew elements in Yiddish, the author only uses the Hebrew words and phrases he recalled actually hearing from his mother.
The book seeks to analyse the various strands: German, Hebrew-Aramaic, Polish-Russian, that have gone into the making of Yiddish. It tries to bring out the strength of the Hebrew element and to show that the German element is not bad or corrupt German, but normal Middle High German.
