Yiddish!!

I'm at the Dental school today. I'm at work until noon or a bit before. I've been sniffly, slightly lazy and tired, as I had trouble getting to sleep, and my allergies are flaring up. So, as of a half hour ago, I was wading through jello being awake. I was bored, worried about class, and generally irritable. I was thinking alot about people who I don't like in the dental school. For instance, certain Dental assistants seem to think the world revolves around them, will call in things that need not be called in, and are of the opinion that whatever issue they notice should be highest priority. I hate to generalize, but these people are like clucking chickens, gossiping meanly, hating anyone in power over them, without any sort of big-picture view of the world.

I tend to lie to them when they give me these supposedly urgent tasks, telling them I will deal with it soon, and usually waiting upwards of 2 hours at least, or until another day. But that's not really the reason I'm posting. My petty dislikes of people are only slightly funny.

Even better was my experience with Yiddish today. I had to go to the 4th floor, the newest of the new the training grounds for the pre-clinical students. The lab uses many cameras, computer screens, ergonomic chairs, and is generally thought of as the Dean's gem. It gets shown off pretty often.

Today when I was up there it was in the process of being shown off. There were Dental professionals from all over the (mostly affluent) world. There was a lady from Dubai, a group of Russians, a woman from Belgium and a group of three people I immediately assumed were German. I came to this assumption because I heard many German words, but thought their accent was quite strange. Also, every sentence or two there was a word that felt distinctly not-german.

I took more time than I needed to changing out a machine part near them, and listened/looked upon their badges. They were from Israel. This came as a surprise to me because I had forgotten that Yiddish would be spoken at all in Israel. This is of course because of the official languages not including Yiddish. But how stupid to forget that many many Israelis are Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany who fled during the Holocaust (or if they were lucky, before) or after. The lingua franca of European Jews is Yiddish, and thusly it must be spoken in Israel as colloquial by some.

What this makes me wonder is, what sort of semantic shifts have their been in the Israeli Yiddish dialect. Would it be difficult for an Israeli Jew to speak Yiddish with a New-Yorker? How bout a Berliner? Hmmm