daytshmerish
Daytshmerish ({{Langx|yi|דײַטשמעריש|}}, defined as having a German character) is a Yiddish term for Germanized variant or orthography of Yiddish. Daytshmerish Yiddish is spelled and enunciated as {{Langx|yi|אידיש|idish|label=none}} instead of {{Langx|yi|יידיש|yidish|label=none}}.
History
File:Sholem Aleichem hammering Yiddish.png hammering the jargon language of Yiddish, into something of beauty. Published in Der Groyser Kundes newspaper.|400x400px]]The term was coined in the 19th century to describe the style of Yiddish spoken by some educated Eastern European Jews. Some educated Jews saw Yiddish as a lower-class slang ({{Langx|yi|זשאַרגאָן|zhargon|label=none}}) that could be 'improved' by inserting German terms. The many borrowings from German were intended to make users sound cultivated, but it sounded pompous and pretentious to those Yiddish speakers who had no sense of linguistic inferiority vis-à-vis German, thus it was often put to comic use by Yiddish playwrights and writers of fiction who parodied it.{{Cite web |date=2010-04-07 |title=Daytshmer Nightshmare |url=https://forward.com/culture/127096/daytshmer-nightshmare/ |access-date=2024-01-24 |website=The Forward |language=en}}
According to the Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz, "prejudices and misconceptions" concerning Yiddish were promulgated by both antisemites and well-meaning Jewish assimilationists during the 19th century, both of whom regarded Yiddish as a degenerated form of German. According to Katz, critics of Yiddish often highlighted the German, Slavic, and Hebrew syncretism of Yiddish to allege that the language was impure and corrupted.{{cite web |title=Ber Borokhov, Pioneer of Yiddish Linguistics |url=https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/1980-Ber%20Borokhov.pdf |accessdate=2023-05-13 |publisher=Dovid Katz}}
Sholem Aleichem is widely credited with elevating the prestige of Yiddish language as a cultured language in its own right.{{Citation |last=Aleykhem |first=Sholem |title=Vegn zhargon oysleygn [About Spelling Zhargon ( = Yiddish)] |work= Never Say Die! |date=2010-12-14 |pages=654–662 |url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110820805.654/html |access-date=2024-01-24 |publisher=De Gruyter Mouton |language=en |doi=10.1515/9783110820805.654 |isbn=978-3-11-082080-5|url-access=subscription }}