Thanks for the additional info, George.
01-11-03 14:33, tolgs001 wrote:
> I'd rather say it's kind of Oberdeutsch with Mitteldeutsch
> influences, and with almost none from Niederdeutsch. (Typical
> of Bavarian Oberdeutsch are <gwen> [gve:n], still strong in
> use both in Bavaria and Austria, for <gewesen>, and <enk>
> for <euch> and <ets> for <ihr>, which are virtually forgotten
> in Bavaria and Austria (except for a relic of <ets> linked
> as a pseudo-suffix to the verb: <Seids ihr fertig?>).)
The East Central German features are rather few: the monophthongal
realisation of MHG ie, üe and uo, and the absence of affrication in
Germanic *p (<epl>, <kop> for Standard German <Apfel>, <Kopf>); the
vowel in <be-> and <ge-> is a shared retention, so it's hardly
probative. On the other hand, a long list of structural features shared
with Bavarian can be compiled, including such characteristic things as
the graded diminutive pattern (<-l>, <-ele>). What's really interesting
is that other German dialects (and in particular those of Rhineland,
against all expectations based on the early history of German Jewry) did
not influence Yiddish during its formative stage.
> The forever mentioning of the Mittelhochdeutsch thing is
> quite misleading:
Well, the formation of Yiddish must have taken place between ca. AD 1000
and 1400, and that's the Middle German period. Of course the Jews did
not move far enough to lose contact with the German dialectal network
(and Yiddish was not the only dialect of German exported to the east),
so diffusion from German to Yiddish has always been easy. As for the
demographic question, it's clear that the Ashkenazic Jewry of Eastern
Europe must have absorbed a lot of people from non-Western sources;
however, there are hardly any linguistic traces of the process.
Piotr