Dear all,
The German Section at Newcastle University would like to invite you to a research paper on Yiddish, that much-neglected Germanic language, which will take place tomorrow.
Dr Ian Biddle (International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University) is going to speak in the context of the School of Modern Languages' research seminar series. His talk is entitled:
Embracing the vernacular: representing the Yiddish language in Israeli and Soviet language policy after the Second World War
Location: Newcastle University, Old Library Building, Research Beehive 2.21
Time/Date: 29th April 2010, 16:00 - 17:00
After the dissolution of the British mandate in Palestine and the founding of the modern state of Israel, language policy in Israel towards the Yiddish language, the language spoken by some 20,000,000 Jews in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, was marked by tensions between Yiddishist and Hebraist linguists. Zionism, the philosophical root of modern Israeli political life, had long tended to figure Yiddish as a language hopelessly embroiled with German and marked by hundreds of years of oppression, a mame loshn of the poor and lowly. The Bourgeois origins of Zionism ensured that the status of Yiddish as a vernacular also held it an anxious subaltern state to Modern Hebrew. In the Soviet Union, conversely, Yiddish was embraced by the Jewish left as the working class Jewish idiom and was officially recognised in the setting up of the 'secular Zion' of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (yidishe avtonome gegnt) in 1934, still the only state to have Yiddish as its official language. This presentation looks at some of the differences in language policy towards Yiddish and will explain some of the unique linguistic characteristics of Yiddish.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/about/seminars/item/embracing-the-vernacular-representing-the-yiddish-language-in-israeli-and-soviet-language-policy-after-the-second-world-war
ALL WELCOME!!
Best wishes,
Beate
Dr Beate Müller
School of Modern Languages
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU
Tel.: 0191/2227512
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