I've wondered if the various varieties of "Yiddish" back in, oh, say, 1600 were actually mutually intelligible, if a Y-speaker in Germany would be able to understand a Y-speaker in Ukraine, in the unlikely event that they should happen to meet.
--- On Fri, 7/18/08, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Not that I'm any sort of an expert on this, but I
> understand that the origin of Yiddish is not a matter of
> consensus among linguists, including whether it is a
> dialect of German as opposed to a creole or something like
> that with a lot of German mixed in along with Slavic
> languages and who knows what.
>
> It varied a lot. I recall my late MiL, who grew up in a
> Yiddish-speaking household originally from Ukraine and
> Galicia, remarking after she attended a Yiddish-language
> revival of a play from her childhood, They spoke beautiful
> Warsaw Yiddish. I didn't understand one word in ten.
>
> (Btw my great-aunt was a successful Yiddish and mainstream
> theater and film actress from the 1920s through the 19809s.
> She played The Jazz Singer's mother on B-way in 1923,
> when she was herself about 30! She also understudied for
> Lillian Gish in Arsenic and Old Lace in 1940. But she also
> played Yiddish theater as long as it existed.)
>
>