Verse:Irta/Judeo-Mandarin/Literature

• Older history is analogous to that of our Yiddish. Much of the literature during this period is produced by or for women, who couldn't read Hebrew. giem 'I beseech you' is an example of an archaism that's attested from this period.
  • צאנה וּראינה Țeno Üreno (Biblical commentary for women written in Ăn Yidiș)
  • Tchinăs (individual non-liturgical prayers often meant to be said by women)
• The Judeo-Gaelic Enlightenment (Ăn Yidiș אן לעאראקוס (קֿעל'אך) ăn Learăgis (Ghełăch), Heb. ההשכּלה הקאלית ha-Haskålå haq-Qålith) was focused on discovering and consciously borrowing from an older Gentile Goidelic literary tradition and seeking out older Goidelic and other Celtic sources for new Ăn Yidiș words, mainly "cognatizations" or hypothetical Ăn Yidiș descendants and cognates of words in Old Irish and other Celtic languages. This helped Jews become literate in the Celtic literature that was part of the Gentile literary canon. The publication of an Old Irish grammar in Hebrew, as well as Torah and siddur translations into Classical Irish, created a boom of Gaelic-inspired literary activity in this period. Learăgis writers even rederived hypothetical synthetic verb forms and noun cases which were long since lost in Judeo-Gaelic, to streamline their Ăn Yidiș poetry and to consciously imitate older Gaelic, though these forms never caught on in common speech; this register is called ăn Fhilichdiș, after the Classical Irish word for poetry (lost in Ăn Yidiș), filidheacht.
  • Among the best-known Ăn Yidiș works from this phase is ___ by Mănachăm mac Ățieni, a very long satirical filichd (a genre of poetry modeled after Irish bardic poems) about society (both religious-Jewish and Gentile) at the time.
• Post-Learăgis writers, as well as traditionally religious Gaelic Jews, criticized the new Gaelic loans and other Filichdiș features as not being authentically Ăn Yidiș.
  • Best known is Nă hOacosăn ag ___, a cycle of quasi-Lovecraftian sci-fi works (which nevertheless allude to many Jewish legends and texts); it uses flowery exaggerated Learăgüsiș for effect and uses Old Irish- and otherwise Celtic-inspired gibberish for names of eldritch gods. (The subtext is that Jews shouldn't stray from Orthodox Jewish religion and that pure human rationality is deeply flawed as a life path.)
  • Something secular and more directly anti-nationalist or anti-religious
• Modern Ăn Yidiș literature is produced by both secular and Haredi Jewish communities.