Re: Where and how developed die Jiddische Sproch

From: Torsten
Message: 66605
Date: 2010-09-15

> Our topic was which kind of German is Yiddish, whether it is a
> vague "Germanic" and Middle German relic

Middle German is not = vague Germanic

> 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.

And relevant to the origin of their language.

> 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).

Linguists think language change makes a difference. You rarely do it without trace.

...

> >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! :-)

My words exactly.

> >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?

I wish you wouldn't mix religion into it. I assume Odin was a person (as Snorri and Saxo claim) and the same as Ariovistus and Harigasti (the one with the helmet). If he was Caesar's age, he was born around 100 BCE and he died around 55 BCE.


> 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.

There was a significnt Jewish presence in the Bosporan Kingdom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosporan_Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/39ujdzz
and many worshippers of Theos Hypsistos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypsistarians
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07611a.htm
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/66533
which some have seen as a Judaizing religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaizers


> 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?

Yes.
The Przeworsk culture ca. 60 BCE experienced in influx of a people who took over the whole area and formed a homogenous elite over the heterogenous local elements, as seen in their graves, which are separated from those of the locals. There is an anthropological report of one of them in the bottom of
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/66387

'In general terms the individual's racial type is Caucasian and belongs to the Berber sub-group of Aegean type (aB) (according to Michalski-Hensel's typology). The face would have been oval and rather coarse-featured with a tawny or pinkish-brown complexion. The hair was dark brown, wavy and curly, pretty thick (bushy), the nose small, but broad with a high bridge profile and the eyes very dark with a Semitic type upper eye-lid, perceptible slight alveolar prognathism with full and fairly thick lips - for a Caucasian. The chin would have been
slightly protruding.

At present, as in the past, this physical type is in general associated with Mediterranean area and in particular with its southern shores. The presence of this type in the territory of present-day Poland offers proof of migration from the South.'

And a reconstruction of her face:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/files/reconstruction.jpg



> 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, the above is a new addendum to my theory of the origin of Germanic.

> >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.

That statement is in direct contradiction to what the text says. Please offer evidence to back it up.

> 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...".

That is exactly what it does.

> 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).

'No' does not mean 'rare'.


> 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.

IIRC, Schiller and his contemporaries rhymed -ü- with -i- and -eu- with -ei-, and they were hardly Bavarians.


> 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
> "insignificant" nebbich stuff. :)

I don't want to be bossed around and told to read stuff by someone who hasn't read it through himself.


> >(!!!)'
> >
> >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? ;)

Yes, they agree with me! Obviously something must be wrong with them.

> > It is a 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"?

I mean 'outside it'

> For example Birobidjan? Or Brooklyn, New York? Or Tel Aviv and
> Jerusalem?

Not really, no.

> 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? ;)

Because your standard theory would require the Sephardim to have lived concentrated in the area of contact with German colonists, changed language there and then dispersed, and the pattern of dialect distribution of Yiddish
http://tinyurl.com/35kmwl7
does not match that scenario.
BTW, IIRC in a late novel by I.B.Singer he lets the Jews have arrived in Poland already in antiquity.

> > I don't think you should be talking to people who have such silly
> > ideas.
>
> Is it dangerous? :)

Yes, if you are afflicted with an irritable and suspicious temperament, the resulting mental agitation can put a strain on your nervous system.

> > Wikipedia 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.

Erh, what? That must have made them very Germanic.

> And on the banks of the Rhine "flumen", the Frankish models of
> Siegfried and Kriemhild were already dead.

Are you arguing aginst the timing of the High German Lautverschiebung here or something else?

> 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).

Possibly influenced by the Jewish element in the Bosporan Kingdom

> > 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;

Accoirding to the standard theory, without actual incontrovertible evidence.

> and king Joseph gave the el-Andalus prime-minister Hasdai ibn-
> Shaprut some significant details on all that.)

Etc.

> > 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>

That was 'cupa', as you would know if you had read my last posting.

> > 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.)

See above.


> >Yes, that is one prevailing theory.
>
> By the way: do you incidentally take those "dark ages" theories
> seriously? (e.g. that of Heribert Illig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heribert_Illig
> and Fomenko
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)
> )

No.


> > 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).

That is the prevailing theory, yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khordadbeh
said of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanites
that
'These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, the Frank, Spanish, and Slav languages.'
'Frank' may be Germanic (Frankish)


Torsten