>Middle German is not = vague Germanic
Indeed. "Your" Przeworsk is (perhaps) Germanic, vague Germanic. It
isn't Middle German. Right?
>And relevant to the origin of their language.
What is relevant to the origin of their language? The ... haplotypes?
(I was talking of them. You replied this to that.)
>Linguists think language change makes a difference. You rarely do it >without trace.
In what kind of a context do you put these sentences? "Difference"
in which respect? I mean in connection with what I had written. In
this context, what kind of a difference would be between the Yiddish
spoken by a native-speaker Sephard of the 1st generation or of the
5th generation and the Yiddish spoken by a native-speaker Ashkenaz
in the 10th or 20th generation?
>My words exactly.
By using a single word, "tyske", I made no assertion whatsoever re-
ferring to the Danish language (i.e. to its position amongst all
Germanic languages). So, I don't get it: why do you insist on
something which didn't happen, didn't exist. :-)
>I wish you wouldn't mix religion into it.
I didn't mix anything whatsoever. It was the simplest question;
namely whether you think that that person <name concealed> "visited"
the Przeworsk culture area. <fullstop>
>I assume Odin was a person (as Snorri and Saxo claim)
Now this is an answer, thank you.
>and the same as Ariovistus and Harigasti (the one with the helmet).
Correct me if I misunderstood this sentence: so, you think that
Ariovistus = Harigasti = Odin.
If so, I'd have only one (marginal) question: is it a fact that the
Odin cult was not older than Ariovistus/Harigasti's epoch? (I ask
this question only for my "Allgemeinbildung", that's all.)
>There was a significnt Jewish presence in the Bosporan Kingdom.
That Jewry was a different one, not the same as the Ashkenazic Jewry.
The Ashkenazim got admigrations chiefly only as... rabbis from
the Byzantine Empire and from the Caliphate (after the 8th-9th
centuries). You have to have this in mind. Prior to those centuries,
in Eastern Europe and Asia there were no "Israels". The one that
existed for some centuries, was later on, roughly betw. the 8th and
10th centuries, "Khazaria". On the other hand, with the exception
of that kind of euro-asian Jewish state, everywhere else the
abrahamite religion was spread only in forms of Christian faith,
and after starting with the 7th century via the religion of the
"Ishmaelites". The Jewish "clusterettes" of colonies scattered in
the former Roman Empire played no role (after all, despite the
existence of some conversions in the history of the Jewish world,
one of the main characteristics of the Jewish religion has been up
to day the lack of the ... "mission": unlike Christianity and the
Islam, Moses's religion doesn't want proselytes). So, mere "mechanic" building lists and strings of elements without relevant links and "copulas" between them is to no avail (and misleading at that).
>Yes.
How can you retort "yes"? How can you neglect the enormous time
gap of transformation of Germanic languages, between 60 BCE and
1200-1300? How can you imagine a language with characteristics and
features post-1300 to be derived from something at the level in
Caesar's epoch (even Jordanes's Gothic was six hundred years
"younger"!) and look like most of the dialects of the German
language, as though the linguistic transformations from "your"
unknown stage and type of Germanic in Przeworsk until Yiddish in
Poland during Hmielnitzky's time happened decade after decade,
century after century as a "twin"-like evolution, as thow they
had been "clones"! And even if this fantastic tale were true: where
is the evidence? Why didn't that "Przeworsk" Yiddish became something
closer to Danish or to the Icelandic language or to Dutch in Vriesland
or in Limburg or to Letzebuerger Düütsch? Why is it so similar to
those German Mundarten spoken in the territories that are the
next-door neighbors to the Ashkenazic area and in various state
configurations *comprised* the Asheknazic areas? Why was (and after
all still) are the capitals of the cultural Jiddischkeit Vienna,
Berlin, Zürich, Strasbourg (and was the older Prague, when it was
quite German)? Because from the position of the Yiddish subdialects
there is the "Hochsprache" spoken, namely their "Mamme-Loschn".
And not in Amsterdam, London, Kopenhagen, Malmö, Oslo, where the
vernaculars are also Germanic -- but not Süddeutsch. (At least in
Antwerpen, Amsterdam, Luxemburg, Zürich, Bern some kind of adaptation
is indeed easier, i.e. between Yiddish and the Germanic idioms
spoken there. But in Plattdeutsch-Germany and Scandza it is almost
impossible. Why? Because Yiddish is a Southern Germanic language,
that came into existence after all the relevant transformations
in the South.)
>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
What does it (can) have in common with our topic? How can the
Yiddish language fit to that? Up to the 8th century those who
became Jews (Caraites + Talmud Jews) North-East of the Black Sea
and around the Caspian Sea had spoken and still spoke after the
conversion dialects of Iranian and especially some Northern
dialect of Turkish. And they lived many hundreds of kilometeres
to the South-East away from the Przeworsk area. And during those
centuries (60 BCE - 780 CE) the Przeworsk area had been for a
looong time "depleted" by Germanic tribes, who moved away to the
... "Schengen territory" of their times, namely in the Roman
Empire, that declined and was smashed (its Western part) in the
3rd-4th-5th centuries (South Germany, Austria, Switzerland had,
until the 3rd-4th-5th centuries no Germanic inhabitants; the
colonization, the Germanization was massive in the 6th esp. the
7th centuries. For example, in the territory of the German Bavarian
dialect (i.e. Bavaria, Franconia, Austria) the relevant *Deutsche*
history, the beginning, was roughly in the 7th century. And the
conversion to Christianity happened quite in those times (so, a bit
later on than in the Frankish realm), Irish monks having played
a role). Where the heck are all missing phases of transformation
necessary in order to "achieve" a Yiddish language, as an
alternating "cradle" for it, in Eastern Europe without the contri-
bution of (A) Christian Germans from Germany, and (B) Jewish
Germans from the same Germany (by Germany I also mean today's
Austria = "Caranthania" and Bohemia)?
>'In general terms the individual's racial type is Caucasian and >belongs to the Berber sub-group of Aegean type (aB)
The "Berber" features are (where there are) because of Sephardic
ancestry, i.e. from Berber-like populations from what is called
"Maghrib" (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and the isles). But the "bulk"
of the east-European Jews consists of chiefly the R1a type of
Euro-Asian white populations that spoke dialects of Iranian, and
later on got more and more Turkicized. As is shown even in Wikipedia,
the results up to now illustrate that genetic components/markers
typical for people in the area around Egypt, Israel, Arabia (e.g.
Yemen), are quite rare in the Ashkenazic population. Even the
Y chromosome of the founders of the sacerdotal "caste" (cohanites
and levites), namely the brethren Moyshe and Akharon, is much less
extant in east-European Jewry yet more frequent in the Kurds (who
speak an Iranian language) and Georgian and other neighboring
populaces in Eastern Turkey and Caucasian countries. So, we shouldn't
expect genes to always and automatically confirm the spreading of a
language/dialect and that of a faith/religion.
>(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.
Why do you cite this? Very numerous east-Europan Jews have other
physiognomic characteristics. Many are blond, red-haired, blue-eyed;
but also there are many with Turkish and/or "Georgian", "Armenian" and
"Persian" looks. Keep in mind: the Ashkenazim branch of Jewry consist
at least of over 10-12 million people; the Sephardim are a tiny
group in comparison.
>At present, as in the past, this physical type is in general >associated with Mediterranean area and in particular with its >southern shores.
This is of no help for your assumption. Your Przeworsk hypothesis,
i.e. a link to Yiddish-speaking populations of Poland, Baltic
countries, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary, would
be worth investigating hadn't been this language: Yiddish. Which
you acknowledge as a mittelhochdaitsche Sproch, don't you. :)
Insisting on the Jewish adstratum of the Mediterranean kind is to
no avail, of no help -- unlike the fact that so many Ashkenazim
have "north-European" features (namely of people who should rather
be careful to expose their skin for too long to sunrays :)).
(Although, it's true, neither do the Berber and other bedouin-like
people, who cover themselves and laugh when they see the European
and American "kafirs" sunbathing.)
>The presence of this type in the territory of present-day Poland >offers proof of migration from the South.'
This is "proof" to you? Only the fact that a "conglomerate" once
built a culture/civilization in a territory, and in the same
territory another "conglomerate" was present 1,000-1,800 years
later on? While not caring what happened in the meantime, what and
how many migrations, mixings and conversions and whatever again and
again kept taking place? Is this what you deem a scientific approach?
Don't you ask yourself: if the "Przeworsk" people were predominantly
Germanic and if an important part of them stayed put for at least
1,000 years, what kind of signs, traces and written evidence is
there for their Germanic-ness in the Slavic-Sorabic-Polish environ-
ment as well as for the non-"contamination" with... German influence
by colonists that came (in medieval times) from Niedersachsen,
Netherlands, Rheinland, Hessen, Franconia, Switzerland, Austria?
But in the 12th-13th centuries especially from the vicinity of the
Lower Rhine)?
Even from the simple fact that the Polish and Baltic regions got
contingents and generations of settlers coming from the West
(Netherlands, Vallonie and the German "lands") cannot sustain your
hypothesis that a fictitious Germanic Przeworsk could have had the
chance to preserve their Germanic-ness unslavicized, and without
contacts with the newcomers from the West, and being then able to
pass on their Germanic idiom to the Eastern Jews so that Yiddish
can utter "wus is'n dus?" and "Sei mir gesind!", as though "your"
Przeworsk would have been a colony of the Germanized Alpine region. :)
>And a reconstruction of her face:
>http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/files/reconstruction.jpg
What does this have to do with discussing the linguistic typology
of the jkiddische Sproch in the family of the dialects of the
daitsche Sproch?!
(BTW, this kind of Gesicht, or Ponim, as Jews would say, is typical
of Armenia, Eastern Turkey, Iran. And to a high extend of... Greece.
Such and similar kinda people are as hundreds of thousands as
immigrants in Germany, especially from 3 main national groups (whatch
the order): Turks, Kurds, Greek. (To a much lesser extent from
Albania, Dalmatia and Yougoslavia. Yet to a significant extent from
among the Roma (Gypsies) coming to central and Western Europe from
Rumania, former Yugoslavia, Slovakia, the Czech republic, Hungary.)
Not to mention those of Maghrib and Arab as well as Persian +
Afghan extraction. There ain't no day that I don't see people of
similar looks in the streets. Yet among the Ashkenazim = East-
European Jewry, this kind of face is not the predominant, it is
rather in the minority. My 2c. :-))
>No, the above is a new addendum to my theory of the origin of >Germanic.
Do I misunderstand this (the lastest) part? I assume that your
hypothesis re. the origin of the Germanic languages has nothing
to do with those "Berberic" or Mediterranean kind of physiognomies,
or has it?!?
>That statement is in direct contradiction to what the text says. >Please offer evidence to back it up.
No, it isn't. It's only because you can't set up some links from
that you know, as well as because you need some additional knowledge
of German and its dialects (+ the movements of them in the last
500-1,000 years).
>That is exactly what it does.
Don't you understand what it means to write only with consonants,
and then to "re-invent" the missing vowels? This has no longer any-
thing to do with the dialects kinship and taxonomy, this is an
"extra-curricular" linguistic field: it's ... "scrabble", "rebus",
"cross-word puzzle". The fact that such things as Schapir- and
Halperin and Lifschitz evolved as replacements for Speyer [Spai&r],
Heilbronn, Löbschütz (which in turn is something distorted in
German out of something Slavic) DOES NOT show us any "normal" and
"logical" DEVELOPMENT (a > b > c), but it shows us a... WHIM, a
*graphical* whim, based on the ancient Near East (Middle East)-
based custom not to write vowels. And because of this (IMHO stupid)
idea, you get weird "solutions". Because of this, we neither now
the name of God: is it Yahve? Is it Yehova?
In order to make a statement as the one you repeated above, you
should have procured the list of Rhineland German words assembled
by that Ballas 100 years ago and you should have verified to con-
clude if that guy was right, if the vocabulary list indeed doesn't
contained or did contain "jiddische" words or features that are at
home in, say, Luxembourg, Cologne, Bonn, Aachen & the like or in
the cities of Speyer, Trier, Heilbronn (whose reflexes are the
East-European second names as Schapiro, Dreyufuss, Halperin).
>'No' does not mean 'rare'.
Over 90% (or 99% :)) of the relevant onomastics (with the exception
of the one with Sephardic extraction!) is East-European (whenever
based on toponyms, hydronyms, oronyms --> in this category for
example Horowitz, Hurwitz, Gurwitz, Gurevich) or they are common
German names (trade names, epithetons etc.) usually with linguistic
peculiarities typical of "Ober" and "Mittel"-German dialects, as
well as folk-etymologizing reflexes of Biblical names in a German
way, especially in a South-German way. For example, Aberle, which
looks like a Suebian name is a diminutival form for Abraham. The
same is valid for Berlin (it has nothing to do, except for the
thought of... Volksetymologie, with the city of Berlin, which in
turn has nothing to do with the "bear", but is a Slavic place
name, something with the meaning of "marshes", if I remember OK).
-lin is another variant for the diminutival southern sufix -lein,
and is much more spread (and typical) in Suebia (Baden-Württemberg)
than in Brandenburg, Sachsen-Anhalt and Sachsen (cf. Suebian names
such as Sütterlin, Ensslin; I give only 2 examples of celebrities.)
Lots of Schmidt, Bauer, Metzger, Fleischmann, Fleischer, Miller,
Milner, Berger, Bergmann, Lehrer, Schuller/Schüler, Holzmann and
myriads of others which reflects common *modern* German language.
A rapid scrutinizing of E-Eur Jewish names show you that their
Germanness is more recent, i.e. showing less "distorsions" than
those in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which in more cases
show older stages (of sound changes). This is another very important
feature, which should prompt you, as a linguist, to exclaim "heureka".
Besides, even such names that are very typical in Eastern Europe
for Jews as Gold, Goldmann, Goldberg, Süss, Süsskind, Fleischmann,
Morgenstern, are by no means unusual in the villages of Austria,
Bavaria, Suebia, Switzerland, as well as the in the lands of the
linguistic "belt" North of them where the Mitteldeutsche dialects
are spoken (the easternmost of which are those of Thuringia, Saxony
and Silezia -- I mean on the territory of the former empire, since
the really easternmost Mitteldeutsche dialects are spoken in
Rumania, by the so-called Transylvanian Saxons, that are no genuine
Saxons, but linguistically Mosel-Franks, and their dialects are
close to Luxemburg and Trier German despite the 800 year long
separation; and I assure you: any Yiddish-speaking East-European
Jew is constrained to use Hochdeutsch in order to be able to
communicate with a Transylvanian Saxon in German, so big are the
differences because Yiddish is closer to South-German dialects; in
contrast with the other German group in Romania: the so-called
Banat Suebians, a group consisting of Suebians, Bavarians, Austrians,
Swiss, Alsatians and Franconians: these speak variants of South-
German dialects that are closer to Yiddish; i.e. the communication
in German needn't a complete switch to the standard "Hochdeutsch"
for the sake of mutual understanding.).
>>Or why Streisand
>>and not Streusand.
>
>IIRC, Schiller and his contemporaries rhymed -ü- with -i- and -eu-
>with -ei-, and they were hardly Bavarians.
You're completely unaware of these things. Those words (and names)
that you see with -eu- [oj] (including deutsch, Deutschland) in
the standard language and other dialects, are in South-German and
especially in the Bavarian dialect always [ai]. A southerner in
his/her dialect will never say [doitS], but always [daitS]. So,
Streisand [Straisant, Straizant] is common pronunciation in a vast
southern region of the "Reich", and this peculiarity is shared by
those Yiddish-speakers in the shtetls, which is confirmed by the
spelling of the name of the movie celebrity (who was born and raised
in Queens, New York). Host mi? :-)
(As for Schiller, as a by the way and for your Allgemeinbildung:
it means "cross-eyed", it is a variant -a graphical whim- of ...
Schieler or even more "correct" Schielender = derjenige, der schielt.
A Schielender = Schiller is somebody having the ophtalmologic
phenomenon called strabismus (convergens or divergens). Another
variant of this name is Scheel, that got some popularity due to the
west-german liberal politician Walter Scheel. Semi-dialectally and
even in Hochdeutsch, the adjective and adverb schiel can be re-
placed by the variant scheel [$e:l].) (As you can see, this has
nothing, but nothing to do with the peculiarity I mentioned in the
contest Streu- and Häuser, written (because of the dialectal
southern pronunciation) Strei- and Heiser.)
>Yes, they agree with me! Obviously something must be wrong with them.
Yeah, there's the Berlin saying that goes "de sind mit der Muffe
jepufft, wa!" :^)
>>>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'
OK, then... Hopfen und Malz sind bei Dir verloren, Kumpel. Nix für
ungut. :-)
>Because your standard theory
This is not +++mine+++ theory, it is the theory of learned, profes-
sional fellas and it is accepted by everybody representing the
mainstream.
*Mine* is only the *empiric* observation, namely that by comparing
myself any kind of South-German and Jiddisch text excerpts I must
conclude: "those researchers are darned right". That's all.
>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
And they had that chance. (Pls. understand that the entire
east-European Jewish intelligentsia went to the citadels of
Hochdeutsch, such as Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Zurich, Frankfurt
etc. as does any provincial and peasant to the capital of his
country? To the Yiddish-speaker people Vienna and Berlin were
the natural capitals with their school system and culture
institutions and newspapers. And lacking Vienna, Czernowicz did
it too, a province capital of an Austrian province (Bucovina).
To any Yiddish-language speaker the natural standard equivalent
of it was Hochdeutsch. This is why such authors like Freud,
Roth, Ausländer, Celan, Hilsenrath, but older ones such as
Lassalle (the founder of German social-democracy) and many-many
other Jews form the shtetls belong to the pan-German literature
as well. So, leaving aside the religion and the national
"founding mythology", the Ashkenazic Jews (along with those
Sephards that were assimilated into the Yiddishkeit) also belonged
and still belong to the linguistic-cultural German nation.
Hadn't the Shoah happened, even today would any Eastern European
Jew tell you s/he is concomittantly Deutsch.)
>BTW, IIRC in a late novel by I. B. Singer he lets the Jews have >arrived in Poland already in antiquity.
Which is a tale = crap. So do some say of today's Romania's territory:
only because according to some Roman sources some Roman legions or
other military units were moved from some spots in Palestine to
Dacia there must have been Jews with them; but experts who really
dealt with the stuff scientifically say this claim has no support.
>Yes, if you are afflicted with an irritable and suspicious
>temperament, the resulting mental agitation can put a strain on your
>nervous system.
Are you taking me seriously or you're kiddin'? :)
>Erh, what? That must have made them very Germanic.
Until approx. the 2nd-3rd centuries, that what's today's Germany
West and South of the Roman limes line (roughly from Regensburg,
Bavaria, to the border Germany-Netherlands, where the Rhine flows
to the "left" into the Netherlands, well, that "Germania" territory
was rather Celtic; the gradual Germanization occurred gradually
in the centuries after Rome lost all territories North of the
Alps.
>Are you arguing aginst the timing of the High German >Lautverschiebung here or something else?
Yiddish is a German idiom after all soundshifts; your Przeworsk
hypothesis would mean a Germanic idiom even 3-4 centuries older
than Wulfila's bible translation. Wie passen die 2 zusammen? (Wie
die Faust aufs Aug'. :))
Of what "High German" can we talk in the 3rd c. CE? Or in the 1st
c. BCE?? Perhaps during Caesar's time the "Danish" spoken in Aarhus
was identical with the "German" spoken by the ancestors of those
who speak the Bavarian variant in Grinzing, Vienna, Austria.
If a simple "ben zi bena, lid zi geliden" is not intelligible to
a modern-German speker, then I expect any Germanic idiom
other 900 years earlier than the "Frankish" ben zi bena to have
been even "remoter" as compared with the German dialects of the
last 5-8 hundred years (since many sentences by Walter von der
Vogelweide and large parts of the 1200 written version of Nibelungen-
lied I can understand without the help of the dictionary that
translates older German into newer German). But you insist on
the idea that a 1st c. BCE unknown Germanic idiom gives birth to
a South-German dialect called Jiddische Sproch or Jiddische Loschn
without the participation of the German language - namely via
unknown evolution in a time span from, say, 50 BCE and, say, 1250
(i.e. 9-10 years after the Mongolian invasion of Eastern and
central Europe)!
>Possibly influenced by the Jewish element in the Bosporan Kingdom
But that element (provided that such a thing/configuration would
have worked) spoke any kind of language, but no Germanic, let alone
Deutsch.
>That was 'cupa', as you would know if you had read my last posting.
To you a single word that doesn't fit a pattern has much more weight
than train and shiploads weighint zillion tons? (I remember that
on this list some participants dealt, for instance, with old
Italic/Latin words that, because of the evident fact they didn't
fit certain patterns typical of Latin, it was assumed they could
have been loanwords. But I never saw anybody insisting that because
of such "inconsistencies" Latin wasn't Latin or that because of
a strong substratum of a different kind Germanic languages are not
Germanic.
George