General Requests

[Doc]

I would like to propose an addition of Yiddish to the RLE list, under the IG name "Redn" (רעדן) which is the infinitive of "To Speak" in Yiddish.

Right now, there is Yeudi, for the RLE of Hebrew, and as a Semitic language that has been largely revived in the late 19th century, but Yiddish is a Germanic language dating from the 10th Century and served Jewish populations for centuries while Hebrew had largely disappeared from daily conversation.  Yiddish is a complete language of its own with Germanic grammar that incorporated Germanic, Hebrew, Romance and Slavic vocabulary and cultural references.  Israel has like 200,000 Yiddish speakers, and the US has perhaps as many as 350,000 Yiddish speakers (all the Jews I grew up around, including my step father's family spoke some Yiddish along with their English, for example, and a lot of Jewish humor is based in Yiddish, so much so that I have to translate a lot of Blazing Saddles for my son, for example), and it was more widely spoken before the War in Europe.  I think there is a case for its inclusion.

I have been RPing Kalistani Yeudis as speaking Yiddish for a while now, and I think this would be a good addition for those who wish to play it.  I hope you will consider this request.

Is there any decision on this by moderation?

Thanks for bumping this. We've been discussing it and I have a couple of clarifying questions. Yiddish IRL was heavily influenced by German with influences from Hebrew and Jewish culture in the Pale and the surrounding Polish/Ukrainian/Lithuanian/Russian milieu. None of those cultures are particularly close to one another in game now or in history as far as we know, and no player has really played Yiddish previously (it's not in any CPs or on the original wiki except a couple of very sporadic references) - where was Redn meant to have emerged, and why does it make sense to exist at all in PT? We recognize that we don't have a perfect track record as a community on this sort of thing, and it doesn't always have to make perfect sense, but wouldn't it make more sense for Yeudis in Kalistan to speak a creole of Vrassan and Yeudish, that way we don't have to make up a post-hoc history for how a very niche Germanic Jewish language ended up spoken nowhere near either Terra's German or Jewish states?

We're open to the idea of letting Redn = Yiddish, I just hope you can help us square the circle on why Yiddish would exist at all here.

I think I was thinking about Artanian diaspora speakers who went via N&D into places like Dundorf and Kundrati. I know there are Yeudis there, culturally, and it would be possible then that a group of them, with a sort of Hebraic/Dundorfic creole, may have emigrated to northern seleya via Valruzia or more directly, at the same time that Kalistan was getting its Dundorfic (not Yeudi) stock.

It is true that nobody has played Yiddish speakers, and so this is kind of a novel request, I get that. And it would make more sense for Yeudis in Kalistan to just speak Luthorian/Vrassan and Egelian like the majority of the population, but I have recently been representing the Yeudi population as more or less moving their Yeudi diaspora identity to the front, to play off of Greek's Homeland Yeudi identity, and the language aspect would be another opportunity to make that cultural distinction.

And as a personal anecdote to further my case, as Kalistan is played as West Coast America, half of my family were jews from New York and Chicago. My step father, he and his family threw Yiddish into daily conversation, to the point where I used a lot of those words my own self, though I am not myself Jewish. I never heard Hebrew, except as Yiddish. If my family, where my mother was called a shiksa, (but not in a mean way), by my step father's family, and I am a goy but used to think that word was interchangeable with the term boy, because I heard it so often, is anyway similar to other American Jewish families, then we got Yiddish basically the same way as I am proposing Kalistan get Yiddish in this game.

I think it's reasonable, since the Yeudi diaspora itself is spread around the world and provides a new aspect to the culture.