Yiddish is Verbal Perl
Yiddish is the caring, authoritative inscrutability of your elders. It has rules, but they’re mainly inherited from the tributary languages. It’s inconsistent in a way that shows it doesn’t matter. It sounds like a beautiful mess (which, considering its mainly Germanic origins, is quite an achievement). Well, it sounds beautiful to me, anyway. Others think it’s just a mess - there’s a famous National Lampoon “Teach Yourself Yiddish” piece that recommends you make up vaguely German/Russian-sounding words that start with “sch” and just string them together.
Let’s talk a bit more about the make-up of Yiddish: it’s mainly German, that much is obvious, but the vocab is heavily twisted and most of the grammatical rules have been abandoned. There’s quite a bit of classical Hebrew and English in there too, probably some Russian, Slovak and Polish as well. It’s where it came from. And now, where Yiddish has ended up, it has given back: chutzpah, shlep, refusenik, nosh, etc. - all essential Yinglish.
As I said, the dialects vary heavily from region to region. My father’s mother says “nit” instead of “nisht”, something that has my mother recoiling in disgust. Still, either works. You can chop and change as much as you like, throw bits of your native language in when it works, etc. Sure, people do this with other second languages, but in this case it’s a core philosophy of the language.
In other words: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Or, as Perl hackers often say, TMTOWTDI.
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