Ber Borochov

“ But life has undone the endeavors of the folk-hating zealots. Modern Greek, Serbian, and other folk languages are liberating themselves more and more from cultural enslavement and are progressing rapidly on the road toward national creativity. It is beneath the dignity of a scientifically trained philologist to engage in dispute with the anti-Yiddish arguments enumerated above. Whoever has the vaguest notion of linguistic science knows very well that any language spoken and understood by millions of people must have an internal order and a systematic structure. ”

“ The paramount tasks of Yiddish philology can be formulated as the nationalization and humanization of the language. Nationalizing Yiddish entails purifying the language thoroughly and enriching it extensively, to the point where it can express all aspects of Jewish creativity. Humanizing Yiddish entails turning it into a means for incorporating into the Jewish nation all the cultural values of modern panhuman development. Our great writers saw the need to enrich and to cultivate the common folk language without even having recourse to the methods of scientific philology. ”

“ Of all the sciences, philology plays the greatest role in the national revival of oppressed peoples. Philology is not a hollow theory for scholars and sedentary academics but a practical guide for the people. It does encompass certain theoretical and historical components such as the history of the language and culture with which it is concerned and the general principles of language development. ”

“ A sweeping task of our philology entails the enrichment of the Yiddish language. The problem is not that Yiddish is poor. On the contrary, this language must be very rich in expressive capability, because it is fused from three exceedingly rich language families. This wealth, increased by the liveliness of Jewish temperament, in continually manifest in Yiddish. The poverty from which it suffers results from social and psychological causes. Wandering about on the streets for generations, dragging along at fairs, it was not privileged to be bred in chancelleries and refined in universities. ”

“ They are remote from life and do not strive toward practical educational goals. The field of cultural education is handled for us by the daily press, which ponders over the question of whether Yiddish is a folk language, a national language, an ugly jargon or a cultural medium worthy or our use. The majority of the authors who deal with Yiddish are assimilationists, alien to the Jewish nation. In their scientific writings they continually seek to demonstrate that Yiddish is a bona fide German dialect and that the Jews are the bearers of German culture in the Slavic lands. ”

“ The cultural value of a language is wholly independent of whether its grammar has yet been written. Every living language of a living people is a living organism, a free individuality with its own laws and caprices. Simple and lucid as the structure of a language may be, it is at the same time inexhaustible. ”

“ The first objective of every awakening people is the mastery of its own language in order that it be used all the more productively in its national creativity. As long as a people remain illiterate in its own language there can be no national culture. National culture comprises not only the poetic works of literary masters but primarily and foremostly the skill to correctly speak and write the mother tongue. ”

“ Let science too have a part in its heritage. Mendele discovered the language, so let us explore it. Peretz brought it new nations, so let us create an order among them. Philology must excavate the homeless layers of folk creativity by searching out the treasures of our national creativeness scattered across the libraries of Western Europe. Old Yiddish literature had its classical works such as the Shmuel-bukh, the Mayse-buke, and the Seyfer Mides, which served as models for long generations and were even translated into other languages. ”

“ Cultural revivals begin almost universally with the establishment of literary, philological, and ethnographic institutions. One need only take note of the esteem in which literary and philological societies are held by the Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Flemings, Catalans, Ukrainians, and other awakening peoples. The few exceptions consist of the Jews and several other small and luckless nations. It is one of the signs of our national impoverishment that amongst us Jews there are still no institutions dedicated to national philology. ”

“ No scientifically trained person will boast that he knows the entirety of a language. Yiddish has a straightforward structure, and yet the task of Yiddish philology is infinitely broad and endlessly deep because Yiddish, too, is a unique living organism, unbound in its creative freedom.
The Yiddish philologist encounters great difficulty in consequence of Yiddish belonging to the category of mixed languages. A truly pure language does not exist. Hebrew has many Aramaic, Greek, and Persian elements and Russian includes numerous Turkish and Finnish words. ”

“ The ideas and relations of life are generally derived from German. The phenomena that arose in the realm of intimate Jewish existence are for the most part derived from Hebrew, while the forms and feelings of daily life in the narrow family environment, as well as many uncouth personal characterizations, are Slavic in origin. A single concept may acquire divergent nuances depending on the genetic descent of the word used to express it. Let us take, as an example, three of the words for "God" in Yiddish. ”

“ Each nation counts amongst its national heroes not only political freedom-fighters and great poets and thinkers, but also those philologists who laid the first stones in the foundation of a national linguistic science. ”

“ We do not know for sure the age of the Yiddish language, but Yiddish is no exception; it is impossible to determine with assuredness when any language is born. In any event, Yiddish is probably no younger than 600 or 700 years. ”