Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.035 June 15, 1993 1) Yiddish -- The Fifteenth Slavic Language? (Ellen Prince) 2) Yiddish -- The Fifteenth Slavic Language? (Khaim Bochner) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 15 09:31:35 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Re: Yiddish -- The Fifteenth Slavic Language? zachary baker writes of paul wexler's claim that yiddish is (relexified) slavic and wonders why the professional linguists here haven't commented on it. first, i think there was some discussion way back--but that may just be a bad dream. second, when i see some content to his claims, i'll take them as worthy of scholarly debate. ellen prince 2---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 15 13:07:25 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: Re: Yiddish -- The Fifteenth Slavic Language? Zachary Baker writes in Mendele Vol 3.034 > speakers of what Wexler refers to as > Judeo-Sorbian also adopted a form of German -- or, as Prof. Neil > Jacobs put it to me, their Slavic language became "relexified" -- > while retaining underlying features of their earlier language. These > views, summarized by Philologos and further abstracted here, were > given their most extensive treatment in a special issue of the > International Journal of the Sociology of Language (1991). (I have > not yet seen that issue.) .... > Needless to say, such views -- expressed by a highly regarded > linguist -- are very controversial. I am surprised that none of the > professional linguists who contribute to this forum have not > commented on it. (Hint, hint...) I seem to remember Ellen Prince being eloquent on this subject some time ago, but perhaps that wasn't on Mendele. In any case, I'll take a stab at it. Disclaimer: I haven't read Wexler's work, and it's possible that the second and third hand reports I've heard haven't given me a fair impression. But the reason I haven't bothered looking up the original work is that it sounds too implausible to be interesting. Why? Well, let's consider briefly a real case of the scenario being proposed, like Albanian. As I understand it, when historical linguists first looked at Albanian, they thought it was a Romance language, because there were Latin etymologies for most of the vocabulary. But the grammatical patterns were very different from any other Romance language. And then they noticed that they couldn't find Latin etymologies for many of the words least likely to be borrowed: everyday nouns, common irregular verbs, etc. A closer look revealed that those words did have Indo-European etymologies, but could not have come from Latin. (It turns out that Albanian is a separate branch of Indo-European, with massive numbers of Romance loan words dating back to the period of the Roman empire.) And the point is that Yiddish doesn't resemble this at all. Basic vocabulary is overwhelmingly Germanic. Pronouns and irregular verbs are exclusively Germanic. The syntax is fundamentally Germanic. The morphology is primarily Germanic. Yiddish simply is not a Slavic language. In fact, it's a pretty typical Germanic language, more typical than English, I'd say. That doesn't mean that there couldn't have been some group of Jews who spoke a Slavic language, and later switched to a Germanic language, as Wexler suggests. But if so, the switch was too complete to call the result a Slavic language. (Something like this did in fact happen to the Romance predecessor of Yiddish, the source of words like bentshn & cholnt.) And I don't deny that there are subtle and interesting influences on Yiddish from Slavic. I'd like to learn more about them. But they all seem to be the sorts of things that can be borrowed readily under circumstances of extensive bi-lingualism, which we know we had. Frankly, Wexler's claims sound too much like the lunatic fringe (a regretably large part of Linguistics :-() for me to think that I would learn much from his work. Once while browsing the "history of Hebrew" shelves in the library. I came across a respectable looking book entitled "Hebrew is Greek". I didn't bother reading that one either ... So much for the hard-core skeptic position: anyone for the defense? -- Khaim ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.035