I'm glad to see the forum is up and running again. It's unfortunate that all our posts got deleted but we'll just have to start anew, right? It's nice to have a fresh start in a way.

Allow me to introduce myself properly. I'm from Ontario, Canada. I'm a student (hence Talib) of political science who loves languages as a means of learning about other cultures. I have studied a handful of them and gained basic fluency in a few.

To which I say: !أهلاً! ברוך הבא Bienvenue! Witaj! Välkommen! Let me know if you have any questions about any of these languages and I will do my best to answer them.

Hey, welcome!! Glad to see you here.

Ok, I just have questions about the identity of two of the languages.

1.) Is the first language Hebrew or Yiddish? I used to be able to read the Hebrew alphabet, but I lost it...

2.) What's the 4th language (i.e. "witaj")?

[EDIT:] Welcome by the way

It could be either. Yiddish-speakers use the same expression spelled the same way (except in Russia), they just pronounce it differently. It's like writing 歡迎 in Chinese.

Really!? I didn't know that...

In this context it's Hebrew. I don't know Yiddish myself.

Witaj is Polish.

The general rule for official YIVO orthography (and most other conventions for writing Yiddish in Hebrew script) is that borrowings from Hebrew and Aramaic are written exactly as they would be in those languages. Official practice in the Soviet Union, however, was to respell these according to the modern Ashkenazi pronunciation of these words. (For "Welcome", this should yield something like "באָרכהאַבע", although that particular spelling doesn't garner any hits.)

That says borkhhabe*, not borukhhabe.

That's the "standard" pronunciation, at least when used as a noun. The stress falls on the penult and the compound is syncopated. I tried several variant spellings and didn't get any hits off those either.

kita kom!

greet person-PL

Hello people!