Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.065 July 23, 1995 1) Origins of Yiddish (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 23 Jul 95 01:14 EDT From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu Subject: Origins of Yiddish 1. Ellen Prince asks about Elye Bokher. As I recall, Elye Bokher was born after the middle of the 15th century (1460-1470, or thereabouts), in Ipsheim/Uepscheim, near Nuremberg, lived off and on in Padua, Germany, and Venice, published the _Bovo-bukh_ and other works in Isny/Isna? in 1541. The _Bovo-bukh_ had been completed several decades before it was published. Uniquely, it includes a glossary of several dozen (Judeo-?)Italian words, in Yiddish letters, (including, as I recall, _matrats_'a bet oys vol gemakht', _putana_ 'a zoyne', etc.). Judah Joffe's introduction to the facsimile edition of the _Bovo- bukh_ which YIVO published, implies that the author suffered the vicissitudes of the Jewish communities of the towns in which he lived, albeit enjoying protection from some of the big boys whom he instructed in Hebrew. Max Weinreich may say more about him in his Shtaplen article on the 16th century (Dovid Goldberg, please!), and there may be still more in Tsinberg's _Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn_. 2. On Jews and German in Italy, and the age of Yiddish: Weinreich posits a direct connection between Jews in Northern Italy and the Rhineland ("Loter") as early as the 8th century. Ellen's suggestion that German was being spoken in Northern Italy even then, as it still is today, may be right on the mark. As for later, we know that whole communities of Jews had moved from Germany to Italy during the period of the Black Death-- Yiddish speaking, I would say, not German-speaking--and 16th century Italy was the center of what's been called "the blossoming of Yiddish literature". But even the earlier contact between Jews from Northern Italy and Loter needn't have provided the setting for the first contact between the Jews and German. Ellen speaks of Yiddish "predating" the arrival of the Jews in Germany. It surely depends on what we consider the latter date to have been. Jews came to Germany, if not before then at least as early as the Romans in Old High German times, with what consequences for the history of Yiddish, we scarcely know. With some, possibly! They disappear from the German record, if not from Germany, together with the Romans, in the middle of the 5th century. Weinreich doesn't bring them *to* Germany from Romance lands; he brings them *back to* Germany from Northern France and Northern Italy about 400 years later at which time he posits the confluence of necessary conditions for the emergence of Yiddish. I've always been inclined to look to earlier periods on the assumption that Ellen now shares that Jews weren't mute the day before they began to speak Yiddish. If the posited historical facts are not at issue, once the Jews do reemerge on German territory, we certainly have conditions ripe for the admixture of Semitic, Germanic, and Romance components we call Yiddish which, like every language, must be understood as having behind it an infinite series of earlier and earlier stages (Who am I quoting?). The decision to give the language a distinct name at a particular time surely has more to do with socio-cultural factors than linguistic ones. Once we do so name it, we incorporate into its history all those underlying earlier and earlier stages, _evne_ if some of those stages function equally in the history of a related language. I wonder if Weinreich wasn't more interested in establishing the necessary "sociolinguistic" conditions for the emergence of the language, than anything too much more precise? In any event, he relied on more than the "s"-plural and on the well-known listable handful of Romance-origin words in Yiddish. The Romance evidence he adduces includes the Romance place-names in Jewish documents with which Jews designated the Rhine and the Rhineland towns: Rhinus, Ashpira, Magentsa, Germaize, Treves and not Rhine, Speyer, Mainz, Worms, Trier; and a number of proper names that go beyond the (in)famous _yentl/yente_: Shneyer, Fayvush, Faytl. Still, the corpus is small, to be sure. 3. On trying to understand the errors of Weinreich's ways: During the past 15 years or so, the Young Turks who have challenged the received Weinreichian view have added some excitemen to life in our little _shtibl_/_klayzl_. Bob King and Alice Faber's "Bavarian hypothesis", Dovid Katz's "Aramaic hypothesis" and, yes, Paul Wexler's "Sorbian hypothesis". Each hypothesis is advanced with considerable confidence in its truth value. Can all of them be true? Concerning the Bavarian hypothesis, would Alice or Bob venture an opinion as to how Max Weinreich could have been so wrong? Didn't he know German dialectology? He did! Did he simply ignore the linguistic features that Yiddish can so easily be shown to share with Bavarian German? Shall we assume that he was wearing ideological blinders? For what it's worth in this context, in working on Volume III of the Yiddish Atlas, I'm increasingly impressed by the surprising connections that have emerged between features of Yiddish in Alsace (the French Southeast/German Southwest) and Yiddish in the Carpathians and the Ukraine, and sometimes neighboring Austria to the West, in contrast to the large intervening area. Are there any parallel connections on the German map? I'm relatively ignorant of the details of German dialectology. Does Bavarian German share features with German in the southwest German lands? Does Yiddish share any of these features with them? What features does Yiddish share exclusively with Bavarian German? Do we have evidence for the geographic distribution of these features in German at earlier times? Do the answers to these questions concern you? 4. On Reading Weinreich's "History": If you've only read the English translation of Weinreich's _History of the Yiddish Language_, hear this: Weinreich's _Geshikhte_ is a four-volume work. Two volumes of text which have been translated and published; and two volumes of parallel notes, explications and bibliography which have been translated but not published. The latter are indispensible to any serious researcher, but the prospect that they will ever be published is very slim indeed. During his lifetime, Weinreich would not permit the publication of the text alone. He insisted that the only ones who "needed" his work, "needed" the notes and bibliography. His wishes were adhered to. Had the question of an English translation arisen, he would surely have insisted on the same conditions. Unfortunately, it did not. There is a solution: The chief advantage of the English translation is the excellent index prepared by Dr.Bella Haas Weinberg. (The Yiddish original lacks an index.) One of its weaknesses, however, is that the paragraph numbering in the translation does not correspond to the paragraph numbering in the original. It is therefore impossible for a reader to move easily between the English text and the Yiddish notes. I know that someone (his name escapes me) did prepare a table of paragraph number correspondences between the Yiddish and English editions. With this in hand one _could_ move easily between the two. From the English Index to the appropriate paragraph number to the corresponding paragraph in the Yiddish "Notes". Perhaps YIVO could be induced to release this table. On line? Zachary? Mikhl Herzog ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.065