A few months ago I figured I'd try to pick up Yiddish. I've grown much less ambitious in the past year or so, figured the language wouldn't be too hard for someone already familiar with German and Hebrew. In fact, I figured I'd skip some of the simple stuff by buying a Yiddish text in German. Saves time, right?
Salomo Birnbaum's Die Jiddische Sprache (1974) is a product of a nation grappling with the war. Much of the book concerns itself with linguistic questions that are essentially political in nature. "Was aber bedeutet Volksgeist?" is not the sort of thing you see in most grammars.
While I'm disappointed in Die Jiddische Sprache as a tool for teaching myself Yiddish, the digressions and ruminations are fascinating. In the introductory page on das Umschriftalphabet, justifying Birnbaum's unfortunate choice to transliterate Yiddish into Latin characters, he starts by answering a question that had never occured to me:
Yiddish is written with Hebrew letters. The fact that it is materially a Germanic (i.e. Indo-European) language does not imply that the Hebrew (i.e. Semitic) alphabet is unsuitable for the purpose — completely apart from the fact that the alphabets used for German and the majority of the Indo-European languages are from the same Semitic source.*
* Latin letters actually stand much closer to the paleo-semitic alphabet than do the Hebrew. In Hebrew, no one sign is identical to the paleo-semitic equivalent, but this is the case with almost half of the Latin alphabet. H, L, O, Q, and Z are the same; with A, E, K, and N only the direction is different; and with D, M, and T the difference is so small that the connection is evident at first sight.
(My translation. Original below the fold.)
Jiddisch wird mit hebräischen Buchstaben geschrieben. Daß es stofflich eine germanische, also indogermanische, Sprache ist, bedeutet nicht, daß das hebräische, also semitische, Alphabet für diesen Zweck ungeeignet ist — ganz abgesehen davon, daß der Ursprung der für die germanischen und die meisten indogermanischen Sprachen benutzten Alphabete ja auch semitisch ist.*