>'from' <- 'von'? I think you mean 'of'.
The intention was "among".
>>with good scientific conclusions,
>
>Personally I think they make better scientific conclusions in the field
>of genetics today than they did before the fifties, but to each his
>own.
Our topic was which kind of German is Yiddish, whether it is a
vague "Germanic" and Middle German relic or whether it is some
kind of South German dialect. In this respect, those few cited by
Köstler were important, since they seem to have been the first
generation of scholars who concluded this (a conclusion which is
still not shared by everybody).
Whether the Yiddish-language speakers have more haplotypes
typical of Georgians or Kurds or Turks or Slavs or Ugrians or of
Semite-Hamite people, is another thing. Or whether the Sephardic
adstratum in east-European Jewish communities was very important
or not. IMHO, of little relevance to linguistics (I think it makes no
difference to Yiddish if some Ladino-speaking people changed their
vernacular switching to Yiddish).
>I am sorry that I have polluted the environment that you created, >George. I am a sinner.
I wasn't referring to your Odin, Ariovist and Przeworsk things, but I
thought of some other theories dealing with Hebrew, Ashkenazic,
as well as with other neighboring populations.
>I tried translating your attempts at Danish and the Yiddish(?) glosses, >and it still doesn't make sense. Could you rephrase it, please?
What attempts at Danish?!? Only because I inserted the petty word
tyske? OMG! :-)
>Well, the whole thing started when I mentioned my nutty uncle's
>book on the travels of Odin which I didn't believe myself; the
>reaction to that made me suspicious that there might be something
>to it after all. And Odin's travels would have taken him through
>Przeworsk.
But you assume that Odin's "visit(s)" there happened in centuries
before the Christian era, don't you? And if so, that in Przeworsk
there were no Jewish population yet, nor those populations that
later on were converted to Judaism during Bulan khan's times and
during the times of his Jewish successors.
Or did you think of some linguistic elements passed on by those
Przeworsk people to east-european Jews without any German
intermediates "agents" from Germany?
>There wasn't? Dang, there goes my theory.
What's your theory? Until now, you haven't shown any theory
pertaining to Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim in connection with
Odin's Przeworsk. (Or you had done it before I subscribed to cybalist.)
>No! Surprise!
>You do realise of course that those volksetymologische derivations >are at variance with the sources you so adamantly insist I take as
>gospel truth, to wit:
>
> '<<*No linguistic components derived from the parts of Germany bordering on France are found in the Yiddish language. Not a single word from the entire list of specifically Moselle-Franconian origin* compiled by J. A. Ballas (/Beiträge zur Kenntnis der trierischen Volkssprache/, 1903, 28ff.)
Ballas's list must have contained vocabulary of the Mosel-Franconian
dialect. My examples Heilbronn, Speyer, Trier are "Eigennamen",
place names, rendered in a peculiar way, as soon as the consonants
get again vowels around them. IMHO, this doesn't contradict at all
the assertion "No linguistic components derived from the parts of
Germany bordering...".
On top of that, my examples are very rare as compared with the
majority of personal and place names that are concentrated in
Bohemia, Poland and the Ukraine (and to a lesser extent to Italy,
e.g. Lurie and Rappaport). But those names that are made of
German words, have very often South-German peculiarities. For
example Millner, that I already mentioned, has something to do
with Austria. You don't need the expertise of a linguist, it suffices
to have a vague idea of German dialects. Or why Streisand and
not Streusand. It's for the same reason why the manufacturer of
the Sennheiser microphones is Sennheiser and not Sennheuser or
Sennhäuser; and it has something to do with a certain characteristic
of German, that I hear day after day, but I don't insist on it, since
you know better and don't wish to be bothered with such "insignifi-
cant" nebbich stuff. :)
>(!!!)'
>
>Those exclamation signs are your own, George. I thought they meant
>you'd read the text.
I put the exclamation marks to underline my astonishment and awe
seeing that the conclusion of those authors are 1,000 times more
radical than they could have been if I had been the analyst and
author! I put my exclamation marks not because I'd disagree with
those people. Gelle? ;)
>It is nice theory which would explain the existence of Yiddish in the >area of contact with the Germans, but not outside it.
What do you mean by "outside it"? For example Birobidjan? Or
Brooklyn, New York? Or Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? If so, it is simple:
people... travel. The same way as, say, Sephardim took with them
the knowledge of the Spanish Jewish dialect to Salonika, Isaac
Bashevis Singer or Eli Wiesel took with them their knowledge of
Yiddish and were able to make use of it in New York and Paris.
Why not? ;)
>I don't think you should be talking to people who have such silly ides.
Is it dangerous? :)
>Wikepedia says 600 CE, and cites one word to back up that it >happened in situ at all.
600 CE is a bit late. The Germanization of the former Celtic-Roman
Germania was being Germanized. And on the banks of the Rhine
"flumen", the Frankish models of Siegfried and Kriemhild were already
dead. At the same time, in the East on the shores of the Black Sea,
the Khazars barely started flexing their muscles as rivals of the
Avars and of the remnants of the former Huns. They had to wait for
another 2-3-4 centuries until the Judaization of a part of their
realm (under Bulan's successor kings).
>That conclusion now hinges on the interpretation of one word.
I haven't dealt with Przeworsk, and I don't see (because of "Chronos"
and geography) any link of Ashkenazic Yiddish-speaking people to
Przeworsk and Odin (except for some Viking merchant-soldiers in
Gardarike/Russia who might have dealt with the Khazar kingdom,
when this kingdom was in its decline, and when Petchenegs, and
Kievan Rus and others grew more and more stronger. Yet at that
time, those new-fangled Jews didn't speak Yiddish, but Turkish;
and king Joseph gave the el-Andalus prime-minister Hasdai ibn-
Shaprut some significant details on all that.)
>Nonsense. There exists, as I've now said a couple of times, one word >in the sources supposed to reflect the pre-2ndLV stage (ie that of >Platt, Dutch, English) in an Oberdeutsch dialect.
And what is that? Mouse? House? Which are the same as their
south-German equivalents (Maus, Haus). Or the ending -ham, as
in Tottenham, and as in Bavaria and Austria (Baldham and many
other place names)? Or the fact that the "Anglo" says griin and
spells it green, and the South Bavarian says and writes grean
instead of grün? <hehe>
>I'm not fascinated by anything that happened in the course the great >migrations/Völkerwanderungen of the 3rd-6th centuries CE. But I'm >very interested in those of the 1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. CE.
Yes. But what relevance can be there for this period of time so
that you mentioned Yiddish? Which is a linguistic occurrence of
times roughly after the 13th-14th centuries? (Provided that nobody
made use of the shuttle services mentioned by Herbert George
Welles.)
>Yes, that is one prevailing theory.
By the way: do you incidentally take those "dark ages" theories
seriously? (e.g. that of Heribert Illig and Fomenko)
>Yes, that is the interesting part. If I am right, then the Yiddish-
>speakers were alone in maintaining this dialect, originally a high
>sociolect of Proto-Germanic, in Eastern Europe, after the departure >of the last other Germanic speakers with the arrival of Attila.
Mit Verlaub, sir, das ist aber, as they say on the Usenet, "Lötzinn"! :-)
Yiddish is a medieval German creation, not a Germanic one from
an epoch 1,000-1,300 years earlier. Or, put it in another way: it
is linked to Germanic idioms at the end of the 1st c. BCE and the
1st half of the 1st millennium CE only via the German language
(the German language, i.e. via Deutsch, and not via other Germanic
languages).