Modern Hebrew in Yiddish

When Hebrew was revived by Eliezer ben-Yehuda at the end of the 19th century, he intended to recreate the biblical language that governed the lives of the Jews for thousands of years. He attempted to reject the shtetl lifestyle and start where ancient times had left off. However, the fact remains that his native language was Yiddish and this was the language he spoke for a significant portion of his life. As a result, much of the grammar, phonology, vocabulary, and idioms present in Modern Hebrew came from Yiddish.

Take, for example, the Hebrew לפרגן l'fargen: to celebrate in the success of others. Like many other super-modern verbs in Hebrew, this verb clearly does not have a 3-letter root like Ancient Hebrew verbs. Similar to להשתכנז l'hishtaknez, taken from the word אשכנזי Ashkenazi and meaning "to become Ashkenazi," this word was taken and forced into a Hebrew conjugation. In our case, לפרגן took the Yiddish verb פֿאַרגינען farginen and put it into בנין פיעל binyan pi'el, a common verb structure in Hebrew. Two more examples are להשפריץ l'hashpritz and להשװיץ l'hashvitz, which came from שפּריצן shpritsn and שװיצן shvitsn, respectively. And before you know it, it sounds like a natural Hebrew word. Amazing. I don't know if too many other languages exhibit this phenomenon of so easily assimilating and, yes, even conjugating words of foreign origin.

And how about this: שם קבור הכלב sham kavur hakelev, literally meaning "that's where the dog is buried," but carrying the idiomatic meaning of "that's where the problem is." This, too, was, consciously or otherwise, brought into Hebrew through native Yiddish-speakers and ultimately became accepted as a natural Hebrew idiom. In Yiddish, it is דאָ ליגט דער הונט באַגראָבן do ligt der hunt bagrobn. Actually, the classic Yiddish translation of Hamlet's famous "to-be-or-not-to-be" soliloquy starts with the lines זײַן אָדער נישט זײַן? דאָ ליגט דער הונט באַגראָבן zayn oder nisht zayn? Do ligt der hunt bagrobn.