>Arthur Koestler was mentioned earlier in this thread, and as >everybody knows, his views are obsolete
*His* views are not "obsolete", but of no relevance -- since he only
showed what others have said. Of relevance is what some of the
scholars had said, who had made sci.research before the fifties.
Hence he cites some of them, and thus it is easier to get in a few
seconds info on them. And of course those people were among the
first from those who ever have dealt with the problem scientifically,
with good scientific conclusions, and not merely polluting the
environment with heaps of useless conjectures, wishful-thinking,
tales and bunkum.
So, you'd better pay attention to what people like that baron Kuc^era,
and then Mieses, Poliakov, Dunlop and various other people after
them have had to say, based on no-nonsense research, if your tyske
Kenntnisse don't suffice as to prompt you realize yourself, without the
help of linguist's evaluations, where the place of di jiddische Losch'n is
within the frame of the daitsche Sproch.
>Told you so.
You gotta be kiddin'.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
I know that this is one of your hobbyhorses.
>I figured I might as well place the origin of Yiddish there, which >would resolve all the contrdictions in the material you quote.
Yiddish's origin is not there. There the Ashkenazim only performed
a switch: from Turkish (in general) to Süddeutsch. And, because
there was no Kultusministerium and no Duden-Gesellschaft to
standardize their Süddeutsch, Yiddish is as it is (a simplified sort
of "lingua franca" or "latina vulgata").
Because of some pronunciation peculiarities, i.e. differences from
the "Reich"'s South German, at the first glance, one might be
prompted to deem Yiddish as a Germanic language very distant
to German. Moreover: note that Yiddish always has been written
with Hebrew letters, and as anyone knows, vowels are scarce (al-
though more in use for Yiddish than Ivrit texts). Hence no wonder
that some "weird" pronunciations evolved. No wonder that such
frequent names as Halperin/Halpern, Schapira are so different from
that what they actually are: Heilbronn, Speyer -- the consonants
are the same: HLPRN, SHPR. Dreyfuss/Dreifuss is closer to the
original (the sense "tripod" is only popular etymology): Drefes/Drefes,
Trefes/Drefes, dialectal variants of the place name... Trier
(Augusta Treverorum).
That would entail that the first Yiddish-speakers arrived in Bavaria with the Bavarians, speaking Bavarian, with Ariovistus or his
You were given the explanation: the language was brought to them
(to the population spread in those centuries chiefly in Eastern
Europe, inter alia in Poland and Lithuania) but important contingents
of *Germans* and by smaller numbers of German *Jews* who emigrated
coming chiefly from regions of the "Holy Empire" where South-
German dialects have been spoken, that is German language
variants after the great soundshift. And this is important, since
Yiddish has all characteristics of a South and post-shift German
dialect. Period.
If you get the geballte information, it is ludicrous to ponder "what
if those medieval Jews were given Goethe-Institute and Berlitz
school crash-courses in Vienna, Prague, Munich, Nuremberg,
Innsbruck and Zurich?" :-)
immediate successors (which in turn would entail that the proto-forms of the Oberdeutsch, Mitteldeutsch and Niederdeutsch dialects started as sociolects in Prezeworsk, with Oberdeutsch socially on top, as it is today).
The protoforms of German evolved and differentiated from one
another very late, especially in the Mittelhochdeutsch epoch,
that is way after 1000-1200. So Przeworsk couldn't have played
any role whatsoever, even if it had been deadsure that the
German language's cradle would've been in the environment of
the Przeworsk culture. Already in the 4th-7th-8th centuries the
Germanic dialects were so mixed and dispersed and remixed and
changed places in a "tohuwabohu" way, that makes no difference.
But if the German language (especially those recent dialects of
people whose ancestors lived for a while before and during the
migrations epoch in the territories that are relevant to what
fascinates you) was influenced from a "substrate" or another
(be it Przeworsk or be it something else), then this happened many
centuries before the ancestors of the East-European Jewry learnt
German, and many cventuries before the relevant populations for
the conversion to Judaism became Jewish, and many cenzuries
before this Judaized population gradually left (I mean most of it,
not all, since not everybody left the older country) the territories
around the Caucasus mountains (cf. the notion "chufut dag"), the
territories East and North East of the Black Sea, those around the
"Khazar" (Caspic) Sea, moving to the NW, to what became Lithuania
and Poland.
And: history shows us that the German element came back to Poland
many centuries afterwards, as colonists, under the rule of Polish
kings. AFAIK, there was no German continuity from the time of those
Germanic ancestors of the Suebians, Bavarians, Langobards,
Alemanians etc. who once lived near Vistula & al. places, and
those times when the colonists emigrated from the West (from the
"reich", i.e. "the Holy Empire of German Nation", after the 11th-12th
century) and spoke genuine German (i.e. no longer undifferentiated
proto-Germanic dialects, when the König was Kuning(az) and when
the local village "odin" mumbled "ben zi bena, lid zi geliden" (well,
this is also about 4-5-6 centuries later, but it fits somehow as a
figura rhaetorica, since there is pretty much difference as compared
with today's forms of the same words, either in German and in
Yiddish).
If I were interested in Przeworsk things connected with German(ic)
occurrences, I wouldn't neglect the elements sketched above. But
to me, "Odin" and "Przeworsk" is anyway nebbich. (Nebbich not
in the English nebbish sense, but in the German sense.)
George