From Declining Western to the Nascent Eastern Yiddish Standard: Concepts, Sources, and Strategies, 1985 (original) (raw)

A thousand years of Yiddish in the European arena

2009

Honoured delegates, guests, and hosts: We are gathered here to consider the fate of a language and culture that have survived a thousand years of European history. The history of Yiddish is somewhat exotic, as European languages go, and if contemporary meanings can be read into history, then Yiddish may just have something to say about the borderless and the displaced among the minority languages of Europe, and about minority languages in general. The history of Yiddish, and the dialectology of Yiddish, have tended to ignore the political boundaries and divides within Europe. For centuries, the Yiddish territory constituted a vast "linguistic empire" in Europe, albeit as a minority language everywhere, in power nowhere. From a linguistic point of view, Yiddish was left free to develop entirely according to the external vicissitudes of history and the internal laws of historical linguistics, without the usual apparatus of normative academies and government edicts. Yiddish was and remained a folk language in Western and Central Europe. It was only in its "second home" in the Slavonic and Baltic lands of Eastern Europe that it evolved into a highly nuanced medium suitable for sophisticated literature of international status. It is that modern, Eastern European Yiddish that was exported by emigrés to the satellite Yiddish centres of London, Paris, and Berlin, to other Western European cities, and overseas, early in our own century. West to east progressions from the folksy to the sophisticated are, as, we see from Yiddish, every bit as viable as those going the other way. Let us not be the ones to predict where the greatest European creations will come from in the next hundred years.

Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality

The article deals with the question of the unity of the German component of Yiddish. Before the 16th century, the languages used in works compiled by various Jewish authors from western German-speaking provinces show close similarities to dialects spoken by local Christians and do not represent texts written in a single specifically Jewish language. Texts dating from the 16th to 17th cen turies demonstrate the existence of two separate Jewish idioms: western and eastern. The former covers western Germany and northern Italy and is mainly based on East Franconian and Swabian. The latter characterizes works written in Bohemia and Poland. It is closely related to Bohemian colonial dialect of German. It is inappropriate to consider all varieties of modern Yiddish to be dialects of one single language. Indeed, the analysis shows that in many aspects, Southwestern Yiddish inherits features of East Franconian, while Eastern Yiddish is primary based on Bohemian. Its consonantal system was later adapted to the Silesian dialect spoken by German Christian urban population in Polish towns. These two Yiddish idioms inherit numerous features from the two languages, western and eastern, respectively, that existed during the 16th to 17th centuries. As a result, as a whole, Yiddish is not descending from any hypothetical Proto-Yiddish. 1 This article could not be written without Erika Timm. Firstly, her works represent a basis for numerous elements of the analysis presented here. Secondly, during the preparation of this text, she shared with me copies of numerous quite helpful sources and answered to many questions of mine.

Explorations in the history of the Semitic Component in Yiddish

1982

Yiddish arose in Central Europe. Nevertheless, the language includes a Semitic Component comprising thousands of lexical items that is synchronically fused with the Germanic Component within Yiddish. Theories from the sixteenth century to the present have contended that Semitisms entered a previously (nearly) wholly Germanic language from sacred Hebrew and. Aramaic texts used in the traditional Yiddish speaking civilization known as Ashkenaz. The thesis challenges the text theory. The alternative proposed is the continual transmission theory claiming that the Semitic Component entered Europe in the vernacular of the original settlers who were, retroactively speaking, the first Ashkenazim. Questions concerning the origin of the Semitic Component are also relevant to the determination of the relative age of Yiddish and to the contested status of the protolanguage within historical linguistics. The Semitic Component of all known Yiddish dialects is characterized by a system of long and...

The Birth of Yiddish and the Paradigm of the Rhenish Origin of Ashkenazic Jews

Revue Des Etudes Juives, 2004

This paper introduces a methodology to approach the question of the origins of Yiddish. It stresses the importance of the defining the exact geographical locations and time frames of various elements of Yiddish, distinguishing between those peculiar to that tongue as a whole and those of only regional significance. Also of interest is the distinction between elements unique to Yiddish and those shared with German and Slavic languages. These methodological principles are applied for several purposes: (1) to compare different theories of the origins of Yiddish; (2) to introduce formal definitions allowing to address the question of mono- or polygenesis of Yiddish; (3) to extract the onomastic layer of Proto-Yiddish. The paper shows that important differences between various Yiddish linguists are partly related to purely methodological aspects of their analysis: these authors use (implicitly or explicitly) distinct definitions for several key terms. Concerning the historical conclusions about the origins of Ashkenazic Jewry drawn by linguists from their theories about Yiddish, it is shown – using the analysis of personal names - that the descendants of Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in the Rhine-Moselle valley played an important role in the formation of the Ashkenazic communities in various German and Slavic countries. As a result, contrary to the claim of certain Yiddish linguists, the Rhenish paradigm of Ashkenazic history should not be rejected