>I wasn't blaming you, but that compiler of Mieses who I hope didn't >himself mix up facts that way.
It doesn't matter where Thuringian or Silezian or Alemanian stay
in the known taxonomies. What matters is: all middle and southern
dialects build a big family; they are in a way to such an extent
close to one another (as vocabulary, grammar, phonetics are
concerned) that they profoundly differ from the northern dialects
(north of a line drawn through cluster Aachen-Düsseldorf-Köln
and Berlin and Königsberg/Kaliningrad, the "Bernstorf-Linie".
Everything which is North of that is Niederdeutsch, with the
last soundshift "unfinished", and everything which is south of
that is "genuine" Deutsch; Althochdeutsch and Mittelhochdeutsch
were themselves variants of German spoken in southern provinces
of Germany!).
And scrutinizing Yiddish variants prompt anybody (within minutes)
to conclude it is also a dialect from this family. In addition to
the territories where these German dialects have developed, we
all know that there are further regions, outside the "reich",
namely in the medieval Hungary's territory (i.e. Slovakia,
Transylvania, Romanian Banat, Serbian Banat + Batchka, Western
Hungary, Bukovina, Poland and regions in the Ukraine and Russia,
where German-speaking colonists settled down in the 12th-13th
and then much later, in the 17th, esp. 18th-19th centuries --
most of them coming from the middle and southern dialectal regions
of the German language; those from the Northern & Low German
regions as well as from what's the Netherlands were also existent,
but in lesser numbers and settled in the middle ages chiefly in
what's today Eastern Germany and Poland. Yet again: Yiddish has
virtually no influence from Northern dialects, but its structure
is middle and southern German, with striking common features for
the German spoken in Suebia, Bavaria, Austria (and in the former
Sudeten-German provinces, and of course in Silezia, since Silezia
was, at that, for a timeperiod... Austrian; even in Transylvanian
"Saxons"' German there are major Austrian influences that mixed
with the typology of Mosel-Frankish, i.e. a middle-German dialect
that also has some Low German features, such as rests of -t and -k
instead of -s and -ch.)
So, all environments and possibilities for the evolvement of Yiddish
are known. Torsten's hypothesis isn't worth talking about if the
medieval colonists in Eastern Europe cannot be taken into considera-
tion.
>Yes. And irrelevant, since I was not referring to your opinions.
You refer all the time to things existing in your imagination only.
Namely to things that have virtually nothing to do with the
deutsche Sprache. And since you... acknowledge that Yiddish is also
deutsche Sprache, than do yourself and do me a favor: do not leave
German out of the discussion. Without German there is no Germanic
occurrence in Eastern Europe. There was only one: a rest of Gothic
spoken by a tiny population until roughly the 16th century in
Crimea. A thing that seems to be attested by some people who then
traveled from Germany to Crimea and talked with such locals. If
that was a lie or some misunderstanding, it doesn't matter. That's
the only Germanic language presence there after the Vikings and
prior to the German (deutsche) colonizations that are all known
and well documented.
George