Introduction

Litany of Tarski · Dos litanye fun Tarski · דאָס ליטאַניע פֿון טאַרסקי

נעם דאָס קעסטל האָט אַ דיאַמאַנט.
װינטש זאָל איך גלײבן ציט [דאָס קעסטל האָט אַ דיאַמאַנט] אױס. אױס.
נעם דאָס קעסטל האָט קײן דיאַמאַנט.
װינטש זאָל איך גלײבן ציט [דאָס קעסטל האָט קײן דיאַמאַנט] אױס. אױס.
װינטש זאָל איך זיך ניט צו גלײבונגען צוקלעפּן װאָס איך אפשר ניט װיל האָבן.

Latin reading

Nem dos kestl hot a diamant.
Vintsh zol ikh gleybn tsit [dos kestl hot a diamant] oys. Oys.
Nem dos kestl hot keyn diamant.
Vintsh zol ikh gleybn tsit [dos kestl hot keyn diamant] oys. Oys.
Vintsh zol ikh zikh nit tsu gleybungen tsuklepn vos ikh efsher nit vil hobn.

Yuddish / יודיש is a constructed language inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Bayesianism, and Less Wrong (LessWrong), built from Yiddish vocabulary. Its name combines Yiddish and Yudkowsky. The experiment is to make credence, evidence, and belief revision audible in everyday grammar: a factual assertion normally requires a numerical epistemic auxiliary and an evidential clitic, while a question, wish, quotation, definition, or command declares its own kind of act.

The epigraph adapts the diamond-in-a-box Litany from Yudkowsky's “The Meditation on Curiosity”, named for Alfred Tarski. Its sense is: if the box has a diamond, may I believe that it has one; if it has none, may I believe that it has none; may I avoid attachment to beliefs I might not want. Nem supplies each supposition and vintsh expresses the desired belief. The Litany makes no empirical claim about the box and therefore needs no invented EF credence. The final relative clause remains inside the wish; efsher means “perhaps.”

The language keeps room for affection, grief, humor, and ordinary conversation. Its grammatical machinery distinguishes describing a feeling from expressing one, and wanting an outcome from predicting it. For example, Es ef⁺²=zog morgn regenen / עס עף⁺²=זאָג מאָרגן רעגענען means “It will rain tomorrow, at 4:1 odds, based on a report.” The number concerns the event; the clitic identifies the speaker's evidence route. A listener can question either.

Yuddish simplifies the inherited language wherever those distinctions do not help this project. It has no grammatical gender and no case inflection. The former neuter forms supply its defaults, including invariant dos “the” and general singular es. Personal zey now covers a singular human or sentient referent as well as its inherited plural use; verb agreement distinguishes one from several. Numerals use short Yiddish-derived digits and regular place-value composition: twenty is literally “two ten.” Person and number agreement in verbs remains, as does the finite log-odds system. These choices give the language a Yiddish foundation and a deliberately engineered grammar.

Whether speaking this way improves reasoning is an open empirical question. Useful tests would measure clarity of disagreement, forecast calibration, and recognition of dependent evidence. Core marks adopted rules; Proposed marks candidate extensions; Inherited identifies source-language material. The reference, phrasebook, vocabulary, and translations describe Yuddish Version 0, the language’s release standard. The numerical credences in the translations reconstruct the respective speaking voices; the short examples here demonstrate the same grammar.

Version 0 includes speaker-owned reconstructed credence, quantified modals, personal and backward-reference pronouns, paragraph scope with extended blocks, layered word formation, and automatic question closure. Sections 14.6 and 14.7 summarize these conventions.