--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "t0lgsoo1" <guestuser9357@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> >If so, I'm sure you can find facts which show it didn't
> >happen. What are they?
>
> Yiddish starts within Middle High German (or even something
> post-MHG). Period.
I don't know where you guys get it from.
Paul Wexler
Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics
page v
'"The phenomenon of Jewish language creation in various parts of the world is one of the most interesting topics in the study of Jewish and general culture. It is the task of the linguist and the social scientist to delineate the common features in the various Jewish languages."
(U. Weinreich, College Yiddish, New York 1949, p. 144).
"... it must be borne in mind that the significance of the subject [history of the Jews in Eastern and Central Europe] is out of all proportion to the limited extent of the factual record... That there were Jews there in [the Dark Ages] is not unlikely. But in fact we know nothing whatsoever of them, other than a couple of later and improbable legends, a vague reference to Jewish slave dealers in the region (in 1085), and an unsubstantiated report of the presence of Jews in [Gniezno]. All this illustrates the difficulty of building up a consistent picture of Jewish origins in medieval Europe, even in those areas where their presence was later so significant."
(C. Roth, The early Jewish settlements in Central and Eastern Europe 1, General setting. In C. Roth and I. H. Levine, eds., The world history of the Jewish people 11. The Dark Ages. Jews in Christian Europe 711-1096, New Brunswick 1966, p. 304).'
You were saying?
> I.e., after (not prior to) all transformations, sound shifts
> and lexical innovations, peculiarities, that prompts analysts
> to deem Middle and Southern ("Ober") German as such, and not
> as OHG or Frisian or Old Norse or else. Without this history
> of the German language, there ain't no Yiddish. (Two thousand
> years ago Jews spoke Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew.)
And possibly a Turkic language (Karaite).
Your definition is a bit fuzzy, so I'll improve it to: Yiddish is a MHG dialect and as such its separation from the other MHG dialects can not have happened later than at the transition from OHG to MHG, which is appr. 1050 CE. I therefore have to show that OHG might have been spoken
1) in the Przworsk area,
and from its demise
2) in the same area until appr. 1050 CE.
Let's suppose the developments which characterize OHG against all the other Germanic languages (the 2LV, second Lautverschiebung) had taken place already in Bastarnian (GoÅÄ
b assumes the existence of loans between Bastarnian and Slavic,
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/59262
but his example doesn't involve the 2LV).
In 89 BCE, according to Appian, Mithridathes threatens war against Rome with his allies, including the Cimbri (and since the Cimbri we usually think of had perished at Vercellae in 101 BCE, these must be the stay-at-homes in Przeworsk (a more westerly location would have rendered them useless as allies)) and the Bastarnae. In the same year in a publicly delivered speech, according to Justin, he declares that Italy at that moment is being flooded from Germany by Cimbri. A few decades later all traces of the Bastarnae in PoieneÅti-LukaÅ¡evka disappear, according to CriÅan because they are driven out by Burebista towards the north, ie. towards their old relatives, the Sciri/Cimbri in Przeworsk; they later appear (exist synchronously, declares Hachmann mysteriously) in Central Germany, from where Ariovistus launched his campaign which ended in Alsace, according to Polish archaeologists, at the same time laying waste Swabia and Bavaria. From an unspecified time until the destruction of the Khazar Kaganate (968-969) the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite
ran a trade network spanning France, Germany and Khazaria, thus passing the old Przeworsk land, now (almost) empty of German-speakers.
'Historically, Jewish communities used letters of credit to transport large quantities of money without the risk of theft from at least classical times. This system was developed and put into force on an unprecedented scale by medieval Jewish merchants such as the Radhanites; if so, they may be counted among the precursors to the banks that arose during the late Middle Ages and early modern period.'
Letters of credit imply the existence of someone on the road of the trader, at a waystation, who would honor them.
'In addition, they may have helped establish Jewish communities at various points along their trade routes, and were probably involved in the early Jewish settlement of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, China and India.'
Or, in my opinion, those communities had existed all the way back to Bastarnian times
Torsten