Linguistic outcomes of a Hasidic renewal: The case of Skver (original) (raw)
Phonetic Contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish Vowels: Language Contact, Variation, and Change
2021
This study analyzes the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) peripheral vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/, and compares them across four generations of native speakers for evidence of change over time. HY vowel tokens are also compared to English vowels produced by the New York-born speakers to investigate the influence of language contact on observed changes. Additionally, the degree to which individual speakers orient towards or away from the Hasidic community is quantified via an ethnographically informed survey to examine its correlation with /u/-fronting, a sound change that is widespread in the non-Hasidic English-speaking community. The data for this study consist of audio segments extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with fifty-seven New York-born speakers representing three generations; and from recordings of Holocaust testimonies by thirteen survivors from the Transcarpathian region of Eastern Europe, the ancestral homeland of most contem...
Outcomes of language contact in New York Hasidic Yiddish
2021
Hasidic Yiddish (HY), brought to the U.S. by post-Holocaust immigrants, is<br> currently the native language of five generations of bilingual speakers in New York.<br> In this new contact setting, a unified variety is emerging, which has diverged from<br> its Eastern European Yiddish parent dialect(s). The present study is a bilingual<br> comparison whose aim is to examine, for a subset of HY and English vowels, how early<br> HY-English bilinguals organize their phonetic system(s), and to explore the degree<br> and direction of cross-linguistic influence. To that end, 24 early HY-English<br> bilinguals, eight per generation (starting with Gen2, the children of immigrants), were<br> recorded reading monosyllabic HY and English CVC words containing the vowels<br> /i, ɪ, u, ʊ, a/ (approximately 100 tokens per speaker, ten of each vowel). Pillai scores<br> were calculated for each vowel category by generational group to measure...
Chapter 3 Outcomes of language contact in New York Hasidic Yiddish
2021
Hasidic Yiddish (HY), brought to the U.S. by post-Holocaust immigrants, is currently the native language of five generations of bilingual speakers in New York. In this new contact setting, a unified variety is emerging, which has diverged from its Eastern European Yiddish parent dialect(s). The present study is a bilingual comparison whose aim is to examine, for a subset of HY and English vowels, how early HY-English bilinguals organize their phonetic system(s), and to explore the degree and direction of cross-linguistic influence. To that end, 24 early HY-English bilinguals, eight per generation (starting with Gen2, the children of immigrants), were recorded reading monosyllabic HY and English CVC words containing the vowels /i, ɪ, u, ʊ, a/ (approximately 100 tokens per speaker, ten of each vowel). Pillai scores were calculated for each vowel category by generational group to measure the extent of overlap in the category by language. For /u/, Pillai scores were calculated separatel...
Innovations in the Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish pronominal system
Innovations in the Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish pronominal system, 2021
Although under existential threat in the secular world, Yiddish continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (Hasidic and other strictly Orthodox) communities, with Hasidic speakers comprising the vast majority of these. Historical and demographic shifts, specifically in the post-War period, in the population of speakers have led to rapid changes in the language itself. These developments are so far-reaching and pervasive that we consider the variety spoken by today’s Haredi speakers to be distinct, referring to it as Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. This chapter presents a study involving 29 native Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish speakers, and demonstrates that significant changes have occurred in the personal pronoun, possessive, and demonstrative systems. Specifically, the personal pronoun system has undergone significant levelling in terms of case and gender marking, but a distinct paradigm of weak pronominal forms exists, independent possessives have lost case and grammatical gender distinctions completely, and a new demonstrative pronoun has emerged which exhibits a novel case distinction.
Second Thoughts: Unknown Yiddish Texts and New Perspectives on the Study of Hasidism
This study explores an important Hasidic manuscript rediscovered among the papers of Abraham Joshua Heschel at Duke University. The text, first noted by Heschel in the 1950s, is a collection of sermons by the famed tzaddik Judah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger (d. 1905). These homilies are significant because they were transcribed by one of his disciples, in many cases capturing them in the original Yiddish. Comparing this alternative witness to Alter's own Hebrew version (called Sefat emet), printed shortly after his death, reveals substantive differences in the sermons' development, structure, and themes. But the manuscript's importance extends beyond a critical new perspective on Alter's teachings. It offers a snapshot of the processes behind the formation of Hasidic books, and calls for scholars to consider the unavoidable divergences between Hebrew and Yiddish, between orality and textuality, and the transmission of ideas from a teacher to his disciples, vectors of change that inhabit all Hasidic literature.
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2020
The recent turn to "big data" from social media corpora has enabled sociolinguists to investigate patterns of language variation and change at unprecedented scales. However, research in this paradigm has been slow to address variable phenomena in minority languages, where data scarcity and the absence of computational tools (e.g., taggers, parsers) often present significant barriers to entry. This article analyzes socio-syntactic variation in one minority language variety, Hasidic Yiddish, focusing on a variable for which tokens can be identified in raw text using purely morphological criteria. In non-finite particle verbs, the overt tense marker tsu (cf. English to, German zu) is variably realized either between the preverbal particle and verb (e.g., oyf-tsu-es-n up-to-eat-INF 'to eat up'; the conservative variant) or before both elements (tsu oyf-es-n to up-eat-INF; the innovative variant). Nearly 38,000 tokens of non-finite particle verbs were extracted from the popular Hasidic Yiddish discussion forum Kave Shtiebel (the 'coffee room'; kaveshtiebel.com). A mixed-effects regression analysis reveals that despite a forum-wide favoring effect for the innovative variant, users favor the conservative variant the longer their accounts remain open and active. This process of rapid implicit standardization is supported by ethnographic evidence highlighting the spread of language norms among Hasidic writers on the internet, most of whom did not have the opportunity to express themselves in written Yiddish prior to the advent of social media.
Language & Communication, 2011
Yiddish (to borrow from Chaim Weizmann's famous quip) is just like other languages, only more so. Indeed, the woes that beset many of the world's minority or stateless languages and cultures -a dwindling and aging population of speakers, intense pressure to assimilate to a dominant culture and language, forced relocation, persecution (sometimes descending into mass murder), and the conviction that something precious and irreplaceable is about to be lost forever -all these and more are writ large in the modern history of Yiddish and its speakers. It may seem a bleak picture, but it is one from which author Jeffrey Shandler has distilled a fascinating and surprisingly upbeat story. His book should appeal to a varied audience, including Yiddishists and students of contemporary Jewish culture, as well as those interested in language attitudes or concerned about the fate of endangered languages generally. The ostensible subject matter of the book is Yiddish in the post-Holocaust era, and as the title suggests, the author's emphasis is on what has happened to the language in communities where it no longer serves as the medium of daily communication (although the he does have a good bit to say about Yiddish among the khareydim -ultra-Orthodox Jews whose self-segregated communities may represent several hundred thousand native speakers). Leading up to these last six decades, however, are developments spanning the preceding two centuries and more, which he discusses in some detail. Adventures in Yiddishland begins with an opening chapter that defines and explores the concept of postvernacularity, followed by six numbered chapters: The opening ''Introduction" provides the key to Shandler's notion of the postvernacular: the distinction between the language's primary mode of signification, that is, its instrumental role in communicating information, and the secondary or meta-level, where symbolic significance is invested in the language apart from the semantic content of utterances. Thus he states, by way of definition, that the ''privileging of the secondary level of signification of Yiddish over its primary level constitutes a distinctive mode of engagement with the language that I term postvernacular." A rather startling aspect of this definition is that it says nothing explicitly about fluency. One can participate in a postvernacular Yiddish community, then, without having any actual command of the language. On the other hand, Shandler seems to suggest that the postvernacular is also manifested in a community of native speakers when the meta-level predominates. (This seems to be part of the significance of the anecdote later in the book about Boro Park hasidim who refused to respond in Yiddish to members of secular Yiddish advocacy group Yugntruf.) Of course, there is a meta-level sociolinguistic message (involving identity or allegiance in terms of ethnicity, class, etc.) in virtually all language use, but I suspect that Shandler is less interested in drawing a precise border between vernacular and postvernacular language than he is in pointing out interesting and significant examples of the later. Chapter 1 (''Imagining Yiddishland") introduces the idea of Yiddishland, a realm of the imagination that often seems to be a universe parallel to Ashkenaz, the historic Yiddish homeland that is a real geographical location (albeit one that had fluid and discontinuous geographical contours and never showed up on maps). Sometimes this connection is overt, as in the yisker-bikher (memorial books) for lost European communities, actual tours of such sites, or imagined shtetelekh (whether physically or virtually realized). Less directly, Yiddishland is evoked as an imagined community whenever there is an engagement with the language.