I don't like this proverb
But it does seem to fit both.

I have no experience myself but my father was very fluent in both Swiss German and Yiddish. The Yiddish he brought from his Shtetl definitely helped him integrate!

Yiddush is written using the Hebrew alphabet.

When written with German spelling instead of english-like, German speakers could understand them. Yiddish/Jiddisch can be full of loans from slavic languages in the east, or still very close to German. Depends where the community originates from. During and after the WW2, Jews from divers geographic origins met in their new countries, but with the common high-German grammar and the hebraic vocab, Yiddish still kept a good common base all over. Not difficult to learn/understand for German speakers. One notice that Entrundung (unrounding of vowels) is a general phenomenon in Yiddish, like in many dialects of German (lower Alemanic, some Bavarian, some palatinian...)

A nar git, a kluger nemt.
==A fool gives, a wise man takes
A Narr git, a kluger nemmt.

A goldener shlisl efent ale tirn.
A golden key will open every lock (door).
A goldener Schlissel effent alle Tiren

Nit dos iz sheyn, vos iz sheyn, nor dos, vos es gefelt.
==Beautiful is not what is beautiful, but what one likes
Niet dos is scheen, wos is scheen, nur dos, wos es gefällt.

Vos lenger ein blinder leybt, dos mehr seht er.
==The longer a blind man lives, the more he sees.
Wos länger ein blinder leebt, dos mehr seht er.

Ainer iz a ligen, tsvai iz ligens, drei iz politik.
==One lie is a lie, two lies are lies, but three is politics!
Einer is a Ligen, zwei is Ligens, drei is Politik.

He translated the Bible from Latin to German in a language that people spoke so they could understand the Bible at all.

As far as know, the Swiss German dialects are varieties of the German language spoken from the late Middle Ages until the middle of the 17th century. These varieties are usually referred to as Middle High German (Mittelhochdeutsch) and as in all languages, there are words taken from other languages, which includes Yiddish for sure because of the long Jewish history in Europe.

Without much effort because it's transliterated. One's not really reading Yiddish unless one reads it as it's written, in Hebrew characters. :-)

Some Yiddish is written in Latin alphabet - for example, this Q&A about the Swine flu: http://paratiyparami.com/bin/contenido.cgi?ID=205&q=3;

In my travels across Germany and Austria I've found that in the south and in Vienna, I can understand whole, simple sentences people were saying nearby at restaurants or on their "handys"--they were identical in structure to Yiddish sentences with only the vowels being slightly different. When I meet Swiss people, their German is much harder for me to follow.

Some linguists of Yiddish argue that Yiddish and Bavarian have more in common with each other than other Germanic languages. (Are Bavarian and Swiss German close linguistically?) The standard understanding of the development of Yiddish (Weinrich et al.) is that it started in the Rhineland with Jews from France (hence the small substratum of French and Latin in Yiddish). There's been a huge project at Columbia University charting in many volumes the morphology of Yiddish in Europe. I haven't seen any articles about definitive answers as to where in Europe Yiddish actually started.

This article claims that linguistically Bavarian and Yddish are the closest:
http://sciwrite.org/glj/articles.yiddish.html

Absolutely false. Yiddish is never written in the Latin alphabet. If it is, it is a transliteration, which s not the same thing. Yiddish is only written in Hebrew characters.

I think 'schmuck' has different meanings in modern Yiddish and German.

I have some letters that my grandmother's sister wrote to her when she first arrived in the US - so these are from 1921 - 1925 or so. Most of them are written in Hebrew script, although one of them is written in Latin. It is possible that the one written in Latin is German, but I'm not sure. THe writing is very difficult to read in the latin one, I can't read Hebrew at all. My grandmother moved easily between Yiddish to Polish to Russian to Hebrew to German, and grew up between Brody and Warsaw.

My husband is Dutch, and when my father was alive, they would compare Dutch-Yiddish words and there was some similarity in words and pronunciation (G's), also found in Swiss German, I think.

Reminds me though that I need to look for the letters and scan them in before they disintegrate.

And yes, when I first moved here and saw the word "schmuck" I thought it had a totally different meaning...

האק נישט א טשייניק

So if Yiddish is written in Chinese alphabet it's not Chinese any more ?

"A Raisel by any other name would smell as sweet".

Look at this thread, and they say Yiddish is a dying language. A Feig !

My aunt in Ukraine also wrote letters in Yiddish using the Latin alphabet, but she was transliterating. She was not writing Yiddish. She was a farm girl, uneducated, and did not know Herbew script and therefore couldn't write Yiddish. What she did was reproduce with the Latin alphabet what Yiddish sounded like to her. these letters were hard for my Yiddish reading father to decipher.

You're confusing translation with transliteration.

While it's true Yiddish is written in Hebrew script it's not nearly as cut and dried as that. Hebrew script is native to Hebrew, so at some point spoken Yiddish was written down using an unrelated alphabet. Linguistically it's no more suited (probably less so) that it is to a Latin script. Much like Turkish a hundred odd years ago was written in Arabic, and linguistaically that was totally unsuitable.

i would say:
same same but very different!!![QUOTE=olygirl;655425]How much can a Yiddish speaker understand Swiss German (and vice-versa)?

They are quite similar due to the old German roots.

http://www.yiddishlibrary.com/
http://www.bubbygram.com/yiddishglossary.htm
http://www.villagedwellers.com/yiddish.htm

A fascinating topic for linguistics.[/QUOTE]

I'd suggest looking at Charles Lewinsky's novel Melnitz; there is a lot of Yiddish in it and useful glossary at the back. It's a historical novel about Jews in and around Baden, and while written in German, it has a lot of examples where Yiddish is used in sentences the same way it is among English-speakers in the U.S. Like in English, some terms have entered the German vocabulary (tacheles reden, for example), though many haven't.

I read it. Here is the answer.

Most important: Jidisch is polymorphic. There is not ONE jidisch, there are many kinds. Vocab can vary immensely from western to eastern jidisch, the Amsterdam-jidisch was difficult to understand by Lithuanian jews. The level of literacy also varied and impacted the language of jidisch spreakers. The better their German was, the less mixed with non-Germanic vocab it was too - and the better they knew hebrew, the better hebrew vocab was integrated into their jidisch.

Not only it is the case in low Alemanic too, but the consonants lost their original aspirations too. This is not exclusively bavarian.
The apocope of -e is very common throughout German area. Baseldeutsch for Gasse is also Goss, like Jidisch. Nothing exclusively bavarian either. The final postulate is unfortunately just the author's assertion. Furthermore, medieval anything is not a linguistical concept. It is either oldhigh-something, early middlehigh-something, middlehigh-something, late middlehight-something or early newhigh-something. Replace something by the dialect you wish.

Interesting discussion. I recently saw "a serious man" by the Coen Brothers, and the movie starts with about 15 minutes of Yiddish and I too was amazed by its similarities with Swiss German (at least on the matter of prononciation). Speaking of which, as a native Dutch speaker I can confirm that Swiss German has a lot of the same sounds as we use in Dutch. Even the speech rythm is so alike that I sometimes think I hear people speak Dutch when in the end it's just plain Swiss German.