Those wacky Yids.

Yiddish is a mish-mash of a bunch of languages, but it's mostly from German and Hebrew (which means it sounds like German, but the Aleph-beis looks like the tracks left by a bunch of pigs running through a muddy field). The thing is, the Aleph-beis has all the regular Yiddish letters, plus a bunch of them that are only used for Loshn-koydesh (words direct from the Hebrew - Biblical names (like my mom's), religious and moral sayings, etc), which brings the sum to 44 dig-dang letters to memorize in type and script. Don't get me started.

The thing is, you never know what is going to show up in Loshn-koydesh (the "holy language" as opposed to Yiddish, which is the Mame-loshn...the "mother tongue" or women's language). Most recently I've learned the Loshn-koydesh word in response to the query "How are you?": *nishkoshe*.

Which means, in the holy language, so-so.

That's right, the Jews have a holy word for "meh."

I do love my people.