Yiddish is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones Date Process Result July 15, 2006 Featured article candidate Not promoted

This   level-4 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Judaism High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Judaism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Judaism-related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.JudaismWikipedia:WikiProject JudaismTemplate:WikiProject JudaismJudaism articles High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. Jewish history High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Jewish history, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Jewish history on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Jewish historyWikipedia:WikiProject Jewish historyTemplate:WikiProject Jewish historyJewish history-related articles High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. Jewish culture Top‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Jewish culture, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Jewish culture on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Jewish cultureWikipedia:WikiProject Jewish cultureTemplate:WikiProject Jewish cultureJewish culture articles Top This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale. Israel High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Israel, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Israel on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.IsraelWikipedia:WikiProject IsraelTemplate:WikiProject IsraelIsrael-related articles High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. Project Israel To Do: history watch purge Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Assess : Rate the Unassessed Israel-related articles and Unknown-importance Israel-related articles. Categorization : Diffuse articles from Category:Companies of Israel. Cleanup : Cleanup listing for this project is available. See also the list by category and the tool's wiki page. Collaborate : Participate in WikiProject Israel Palestine Collaboration. Copyedit : Timeline of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 2005 Deletion sorting : Participate in discussions at WikiProject Deletion sorting/Israel. Expand : Ayala Procaccia, Diamond industry in Israel, Edna Arbel, Levin Kipnis, Rami Kleinstein, Sephardic Haredim, Zman Tel Aviv, Nachum Heiman, Public Defence (Israel), Prisoner of Zion, Trial of Benjamin Netanyahu, Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran, Pre-Modern Aliyah See also Articles needing translation from Hebrew Wikipedia. Geographical coordinates : Add geographic coordinates to Israel articles missing geocoordinate data. Infobox : Add infoboxes to Israel articles needing infoboxes. Maintain : See Israel articles needing attention. Map : See discussion at Module:Location map/data/Israel. Add maps to articles in Wikipedia requested maps in Israel. NPOV : Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries Photo : Add pictures to articles in Wikipedia requested photographs in Israel. Stubs : See Israel stubs. Update : Basic Law proposal: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People Other : Translate to Hebrew : David Bar-Hayim, Guy Bavli, and Guy Oseary. Merge Nahal Rafiah ( draft, heb) into Nahal as requested by Wikipedia authority Languages High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Languages, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of languages on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LanguagesWikipedia:WikiProject LanguagesTemplate:WikiProject Languageslanguage articles High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. Russia: Language & literature / Demographics & ethnography Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Russia, a WikiProject dedicated to coverage of Russia on Wikipedia. To participate: Feel free to edit the article attached to this page, join up at the project page, or contribute to the project discussion.RussiaWikipedia:WikiProject RussiaTemplate:WikiProject RussiaRussia articles Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. This article is supported by the language and literature of Russia task force. This article is supported by the demographics and ethnography of Russia task force.

Archives

2004 – 2005 2006 – 2009 2010 – 2019 2020 - ...

This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 2 sections are present.

In the "Language examples" section, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is shown in Yiddish and compared with other languages. I noticed though that the official German version sounds a lot more different than the Yiddish than need be, simply because it's using different wordings. (German is a rich language, so lots of different wordings are possible.) So I thought it would be helpful if, for the German comparison, in addition to the official German version, another version in German were shown, written as closely as possible (while still being German) in wording and construction to the Yiddish, so as to have more of a direct "apples to apples" comparison. This is what I came up with:

"Jeder Mensch wird geboren, frei und gleich in Ehre und Recht. Jeder wird beschenkt, mit Verstand und Gewissen; Jeder soll sich führen, miteinander im Gemüt von Bruderschaft."

This version then only has two words - "Ehre" and the "einander" part of "miteinander" - which are fundamentally different than the Yiddish. The construction isn't exactly typical of modern German prose. It sounds a bit "poetic," one might say, but it would be fully comprehensible to a (monolingual) German speaker.

I'm thinking it would make sense to place this version between the transliterated Yiddish and the official German version. Not sure exactly how it should be labeled, but maybe something like "Yiddish-equivalent German translation"? - 2003:CA:8717:D29F:5D79:AC58:31B7:2264 ( talk) 00:50, 13 February 2024 (UTC) reply

Update: Since it'd been a couple weeks and nobody objected, I went ahead and edited to add the new German version, in addition to the official German one. As I said, I think this makes sense, as this gives more of an "apples to apples" comparison. German has a lot of synonyms, so simply wording things differently can give a misleading impression of more difference than there actually is. - 2003:CA:8717:D226:D00E:5FF3:6984:AEB6 ( talk) 12:39, 1 March 2024 (UTC) reply

I don’t know if there’s a formal policy about it but if the cited translations of Article 1 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are intended to serve a uniform purpose in articles about languages, only the sanctioned translations should appear in the section bearing the UDHR heading. The point about the proximity of Yiddish to German is already made with abundant clarity in the article. The personal rewording of a sourced text to make that point yet again resembles (if not constitutes) personal research. The added text is a really good translation and does support "apples to apples" comparison. However, this is an article about Yiddish, not German, and care needs to be taken to avoid any hint of editorial treatment of the one somehow being less an autonomous language than is the other. -- Futhark| Talk 08:07, 2 March 2024 (UTC) reply

Thanks for your feedback. My intention here certainly wasn't to "editorialize," but simply to provide more of an "apples to apples" comparison. Like I said, with German or any other complex language with lots of synonyms, there are a multitude of potential ways of wording the same basic idea. So the problem that I see is that an English-speaking reader who's not proficient in either Yiddish or German would read the Yiddish and German texts and come to the conclusion that the languages are very different, when most of the difference here simply comes from differences in wording choices. I would say that making the sentence structures and word choices as close as possible, it better highlights the words which actually are different.....Of course sometimes these words are rather important keywords in certain sentences - for things like "dream" and "moon," which can make it difficult for German speakers to understand certain Yiddish sentences, even if they understand a large majority of the constituent words.

I'm not sure what the ideal solution is. I know some other articles about languages here have used the Lord's Prayer as a basis for comparison, and these translations typically use fairly similar wordings, especially if it's showing comparisons between different Romance languages, which all directly translated from the same Latin text....It'd be kind of odd though to use a Christian prayer as the basis of comparison for an article about a Jewish language. But perhaps one of the Psalms or some other verse from the Jewish Bible/Old Testament?

For now, it seems that adding a rewording of the German UDHR close to the Yiddish version works fairly well, but I'd say that even this isn't quite ideal, since the Yiddish transliteration uses more English type phonetics, whereas the German versions (both official and the more Yiddish-similar rewording) both use the official German standards....So an English speaker who's not very familiar with German likely wouldn't know that the German J is pronounced like an English Y, that the German W is pronounced like an English V, that the German V is pronounced like an English F, that the (single) German S is pronounced like an English Z, or that German speakers often pronounce the D at the end of a word like a T (hence native German-speakers often conflating "seit" (meaning "since") with "seid" (the informal 2nd person plural conjugation of "to be")). So the unofficial German version is actually even closer to the Yiddish than most monolingual English speakers would realize. I suppose there could be a "transliterated" version of the German, with more English phonetics, but then the table would become more cluttered. - 2003:CA:8717:D288:8565:38CB:D2FF:D0F1 ( talk) 15:38, 4 March 2024 (UTC) reply