Alon Benach - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
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Thesis Chapters by Alon Benach
This paper is devoted to the study of Yiddish loanwords in contemporary English and specifically ... more This paper is devoted to the study of Yiddish loanwords in contemporary English and specifically to the ways in which they are applied in language by American Jews today. The purpose of the paper is to show the distinct pattern of use of loanwords by the Jewish community as a linguistic community and a sub-culture in the US. The work consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces and reviews theories of culture and language focusing on the ethnolinguistic approach, surveying, among others, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea of worldview, and the use of keywords and culture-specific words in the study of culture. The second chapter explores the Yiddish language from a diachronic perspective, examining the cultural-linguistic changes it sustained over about 700 years through social change and migration. The final chapter is devoted to the analysis of my questionnaire. Using the data gathered in it, this chapter sets to establish the extent to which a selected vocabulary is familiar to the respondents' demographics, while also examining the respondents' knowledge of the words' context(s) of use.
This paper is devoted to the study of Yiddish loanwords in contemporary English and specifically ... more This paper is devoted to the study of Yiddish loanwords in contemporary English and specifically to the ways in which they are applied in language by American Jews today. The purpose of the paper is to show the distinct pattern of use of loanwords by the Jewish community as a linguistic community and a sub-culture in the US. The work consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces and reviews theories of culture and language focusing on the ethnolinguistic approach, surveying, among others, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea of worldview, and the use of keywords and culture-specific words in the study of culture. The second chapter explores the Yiddish language from a diachronic perspective, examining the cultural-linguistic changes it sustained over about 700 years through social change and migration. The final chapter is devoted to the analysis of my questionnaire. Using the data gathered in it, this chapter sets to establish the extent to which a selected vocabulary is familiar to the respondents' demographics, while also examining the respondents' knowledge of the words' context(s) of use.