Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.042 June 22, 1993 1) Yiddish, the 15th Slavic Language (Bob Hoberman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 22 17:26:39 1993 From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Yiddish, the 15th Slavic Language I've been holding off on commenting on Paul Wexler's proposals because I too have not yet read his more recent publications. However, I did read his 1990 book "The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past", and heard him give a lecture on the same at the 1990 meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics. Let me assure everyone that this kind of topic is not what we call theoretical linguistics. Many people who heard the talk wondered why Wexler was allowed to speak on that subject at that meeting. I think I was the only one there who took his ideas at all seriously; coin- cidentally (NOT), I think I was the only one there who understood what he was saying. Before getting into the details, I want to react to some comments of some of the Mendelnikes who've been discussing this. It's not precisely the case that Wexler is "a highly regarded linguist" (Zachary Baker). Most linguists who've heard of him RECENTLY must think he's a crackpot. I agree with everything Ellen Prince and Khayim Bochner have said about how typically Semitic Israeli Hebrew is (roughly as Semitic as modern Aramaic, Amharic, etc.) and how typically Germanic Yiddish is (more so than English), and with Khayim's comment: Wexler's notion that Hebrew is Yiddish and Yiddish is Sorbian etc. "sounds too implausible to be interesting". We all have so much to read that we're forced to triage. I have a feeling, though, that Wexler's article and book probably really are more interesting than they sound. Wexler is extremely knowledgeable about Hebrew, Yiddish, Slavic, and lots of other topics related to Jewish languages. His article "Jewish Inter- linguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework" in the journal LANGUAGE 57:99-149 (1981) displays total mastery and is as much a starting-place for further research in the field as the works of Max Weinreich, though in a different way. It's his more recent activities that appear to have gone off the deep end. Those who want to look into the Pavlo Slobodjans'kyj incident that Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky mentioned can look in LANGUAGE 64 (1988):761- 766 (Slobodjans'kyj's review of the volume Origins of the Yiddish Language ed. by Dovid Katz), the editor's "Correction" in LANGUAGE 65:921 (1989), and the editor's final "Apology", 67:114 (1991). Editors concluded that Wexler had written the review and passed it off as the work of the non-existent Slobodjans'kyj. Wexler would not normally have been allowed to review the book because he wrote one of the articles in it: "Reconceptualizing the Genesis of Yiddish in the Light of its Non-Native Components". If he wrote the review pseudonymously, that's cheating. And if he risked alienating the editors of LANGUAGE, that's dumb. As I see it, Wexler's idea as of 1990 was a matter of definition, and not really empirical at all. It's a matter of what happened when Yiddish speakers created modern Hebrew. He thinks there was a continuum between normal everyday Yiddish with its Hebrew component, the Yiddish of scholars with a much greater proportion of Hebrew, the highly Yiddish-influenced Hebrew that such scholars used on occasion, 19th-century literary Hebrew, and Israeli Hebrew. In other words, the shift from Hebrew-influenced Yiddish to Yiddish-influenced Hebrew was in his opinion not sudden and sharp but rather gradual. Another way of look at it is to compare the shift from Yiddish to Hebrew with the shift from Yiddish to English in America. Yiddish-speakers were so heavily outnumbered by native English speakers that their children ended up speaking essentially the same English as everyone else. But in the case of Hebrew, there were no native speakers of Hebrew for the first generations of former Yiddish speakers to merge with. So Wexler says that what happened is different: they replaced the elements of their Yiddish, the words, grammatical structures, etc., PIECE BY PIECE with Hebrew elements: relexified and regrammaticized their Yiddish. Not all the elements, just the vast, overwhelming majority! So Israeli Hebrew is "really" Yiddish, says Wexler. And likewise Yiddish is Slavic. It's all a matter of terminology. Even if ALL the elements had been replaced, and Israeli Hebrew were entirely made up of pre-existing Hebrew bits and pieces with no Yiddish influence WHATSOEVER, it would make no difference to his claim. The discernable Yiddish elements in Israeli Hebrew are just icing on the cake. Wexler is not the first to point to "Yiddish Influences on Israeli Hebrew"; there is an excellent, perceptive article of that title by Haim Blanc in one of the early Field of Yiddish volumes. Though Wexler's thesis (Hebrew=Yiddish=Sorbian) itself was not especially important, he says a lot of very interesting things (in his 1990 book) about the actual processes of language shift and language planning that created Israeli Hebrew, and about which surprisingly little good work has been done. A real history of Israeli Hebrew has not yet been written. Philologos and the discussion on Mendele suggest that Wexler has now moved on to a claim that really is factual: that most of the Eastern European Jews and their culture came from the southeast, not the west. I have no idea whether this has merit. As Reyzl showed us, there is an awful lot to learn about cultural history. But Reyzl: is your name Kalifowicz (from the Arabic khali:fa 'Caliph'?) evidence for Wexler's thesis?! On other topics: Philologos: es past shoyn nisht. If you're reading MENDELE, tell us who you are -- we're among friends. You don't have to reveal yourself in the Forward. Don't just lurk here eavesdropping when we talk about you. RE: Yoshke pandres. I always prefered my family's folk etymology: Pandora's. Where all the tsores came from. Bob Hoberman ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.042