From: Rick McCallister
Message: 67111
Date: 2011-01-17
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "t0lgsoo1" <guestuser9357@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> >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).
>
> Yes of course. But Yiddish is ***one*** of them. And as such
> it is a certain type of Deutsch from certain periods of time.
> No earlier than the 13th century/14th century because of
> the tremendous sound and semantic shifts that made MHG out
> of OHG. And Weinreich doesn't mention Yiddish, but he says
> "in the various Jewish languages".
Yes. I know. And?
> Even the Yiddish term Yiddish (or in German spelling Jiddisch)
> is a recent German word, having ü > i which is typical of
> Bavarian, Suebian and some Eastern German dialects. The noun
> is even more so: a Jid [yid], and diminutivally (Yiddish is
> fond of diminutives) a Jidl [yidl] have typical Bavarian,
> Franconian, Suebian phonetics. In contrast, where are the
> finds or references that these words were the same in
> earlier times, say Charlemagne's or Clovis's or Ermanarich's
> or Arminius's?
>
> Jewish is not Yiddish, but it means *any* language spoken
> by Jews as native-speakers. Such a Jewish language is also
> the Spanish variant/dialect called Ladino. It is Spanish,
> not Yiddish.
****R Ladino is an odd duck in that it's something that coalesced from various Ibero-Romance languages, including Portuguese. The result is that it looks more like a co-dialect of Spanish (in the sense of the relationship of Galician and Portuguese, of Urdu and Hindi, of Croatian and Serbian). It's over 90% mutually understandable but the odd Arabic and Turkish word through Spanish speakers for a loop. At times it sounds like Portuguese imitated by a Spanish speaker given that when it diverged from Spanish, some Spanish sounds were closer to Portuguese. Some of the vocabulary sounds excessively elevated while other words sound just off the farm.
I know. And?
> >"... 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.
>
> Of course. But small communities.
A small community is a community. If a small community exist, a community exists.
> Even in Spain (S'farad).
> The immense majority lived in Russia and Ucraine and the
> Caucasus lands, and were *late* Jews, after the conversion
> under Bulan-khan, and "Yiddishized" centuries later on in
> Poland while co-existing there with the German craftspeople
> and tradespeople as well as with learned Jewish people from
> the "Holy Empire" (chiefly coming from within the South).
> Yiddish is a... simplified south-east German dialect full
> of Hebraisms and Slavisms (and here and there words of
> Latin extraction: benditsch'n < bene dicare, perhaps via
> Ladino).
***R I don't know about "immense majority" --Jews were a relatively large percentage of the Spanish population and I've read in popular sources that at the end of the Roman Empire that 90% of all Jews lived in Spain. There is an idea that persecution by the Visigoths caused the majority to leave. But even in 1492, Jews were still somewhere between 10-30% of the Spanish population.
****R Benditshen could be from Ladino --if it uses a non-standard form. The standard forms for "blessed" are bendecido and bendito < bendecir. Ladino, or a dialect there of, could have re-formed the word based on dicho < decir.
Yes, that is the standard theory, and I understood it the first time I read about it.
> Most Jewish authors are reluctant to underline that the
> vast majority of the European Jewry has always been made of
> Ashkenazim, and not of Sephardim or of the "Romanyiotes"
> in the Byzantine Empire. Yet the mainstream keeps the
> thesis Ashkenazim were German Jews from the Rhine (only
> that linguists showed in the 20th century Yiddish is no
> Rhineland German).
I see that you have come round to accept the point of view which you argued against a few threads ago.
> >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)
>
> This doesn't matter.
The fact that we know nothing whatsoever of them, other than a couple of later and improbable legends etc doesn't matter?
> What matters is the Yiddish language:
> "since when", "where" and why". Yiddish is not "any kind of
> language in any period of time", it is only one language,
> a dialect of the German language after from the 13th-14th
> century until today.
This must be the 27th time you say this, I've never claimed otherwise, why do you keep repeating this fact over and over (and again you're not hearing what I'm saying; in the next posting you will restate this with even more text)?
> >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,
>
> You see? He talks of "Jewish origins", not of "origins
> of the Yiddish language"!
Of course the difficulty of building up a consistent picture of Jewish origins in medieval Europe causes difficulties for building up a consistent picture of the origin of Yiddish. What are you talking about?
> >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).'
>
> The probability is that early East-European Jews spoke
> either Greek (and were literates in Hebrew and Aramaic)
> or they spoke a Turkish dialect, of the Oghuric kind,
> as did Proto-Bulgarians and Proto-Hungarians, and Huns
> and Avars perhaps as well (the R-branch of Turkic languages,
> in contrast with the Z-branch, e.g. Anatolia Turks and
> Azeris). All of them having an Iranic substratum. Some
> fragments of Jewish written relics with Hebrew alphabet
> characters contain Turkic words.
Yes, that is the standard theory. I know. The problem is that these researchers were not aware of the presence of a possibly Germanic Bastarnian language so didn't consider that in their theories.
> >And possibly a Turkic language (Karaite).
>
> This of course! Karaites are Jews who do not acknowledge
> the Talmud. But I guess it is difficult or impossible
> to delimit what is Khazar and what is Cuman/Tatar
> in the Crimeean karaite Turkish language.
As I understand it, Talmudic Judaism is the result of the loss of the temple in 70 CE. One could argue that the Karaites were those Jews in the Bosporan Kingdom who didn't want to join that new development (and the Karaites in Lithuania would have arrived there with the Bastarnians arriving in Przeworsk).
> >Your definition is a bit fuzzy,
>
> It is not mine: it has already been studied and fixed.
> What I, as a German-speaker living in South-Germany, can
> say is that those scholars are right. Of course, Yiddish
> is akin to any other Germanic language (English included),
> but the closest dialects are not those in Dover, Amsterdam,
> Aarhus, Malmö, Maastricht, Luxemburg, Cologne, Hannover,
> Hamburg, Stettin, but those in Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna,
> Prague, Brünn/Brno, Breslau/Wroclaw, and until 1945 in
> Lemberg/Lviv, Tschernowitz/Tchernivtsy.
For the 28th time: I never said or believed otherwise. If you think I did, point it out.
> I'm talking of this language all the time; not of the
> origin of the *people* who've been in command of it
> (they may have various origins, Slavic, Turkic, Sephardic,
> Byzantine Jewish, Iranian Jewish, Alexandria-Egyptian
> Jewish, it doesn't matter).
So am I.
> >so I'll improve it to: Yiddish is a MHG dialect
> >and as such its separation from the other MHG
> >dialects
> It has *never* separated of them!
Separated in the linguistic sense. If it hadn't, it would be a separate dialect.
> Esp. in the case of
> all Jewish shtetls who were in territories occupied by
> Prussia and Hapsburgic Austria. But even all other
> communities *have always deemed* Hochdeutsch spoken and
> written in Austria, Germany and Switzerland as the
> standard/literary counterpart of their own dialect.
> No wonder that lots of literature, philosophy etc.
> luminaries of Jewish faith and Ashkenazic extraction
> from East-Europe became famous *within the German-
> language* literature and philosophy.
I know. This of course presupposes physical contact with other German-speakers.
> On the other hand, it is not satisfactory to simply
> say "MHG", because Yiddish, in all its variants, is
> extremely close to today's neighboring dialects. In
> fact, it can be deemed as New High German.
Yes, it has separated from the other MHG dialects.
> The difficulty in understanding its subdialects is
> caused by the peculiar phonetics, which differs from
> those of neighboring dialects; and because of numerous
> words from Hebrew, which one has to learn (e.g. Loschn
> = Sprache, Ponim = Gesicht, Haser/Hasir = Schwein);
> some such words are, in addition, distorted according
> to Yiddish phonetics, so they differ from the genuine
> Hebrew or Aramaic pronuntiation.
>
> Weren't these two aspects, you wouldn't doubt anything,
> as you don't doubt that Schwitzer Düütsch, Letzebuerger
> Düütsch, Plattdüütsch/Niderseksesch, Schlesisch, Boarisch,
> Fränkisch, Ripoarisch, Schwäbisch-Alemannisch are Dialekts
> of Deutsch.
For the 29th time: I am not doubting that Yiddish is a dialect separating from Central or High German in MHG times.
> >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.
>
> This is something else. It doesn't matter where Ashkenazic
> Jews changed their language preferring "Proto"-Yiddish.
You haven't been paying attention, it seems. In the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
area is what I meant. I thought that would be clear from the context.
> What's important: *for which epoch* is it warranted to
> speak of a Yiddish language. And knowing its typology
> and approximate chronology, it is also relevant what
> kind of Germans, from which regions, were relevant for
> this. History knows of which groups of Germans and in
> which circumstances and when migrated to Eastern Europe.
> (Mostly after the 11th-12th-13th centuries.)
Yes, that is the standard theory. I know. The reason I propose something else is not that I didn't understand the standard theory, but that I think I have a better one.
> Keep in mind that in the relevant times prior to the
> 13th century, Hungary had massive German imigrations
> (called by Hungarian kings). But AFAIK nobody maintains
> that Jews got Germanized linguistically by those Germans
> settled in various Hungarian provinces, especially in
> Transylvania, Slovakia (in thise two provinces since
> the 70s-80s-90s of the 13th c.), Pannonia. And in
> Eastern Transylvania, in the 1st half of the 13th
> century there ruled the Teutonic Knights until the
> Hungarian king drove them out, because they would have
> built their own state there. Massive German migrations
> to the Polish-Lithuanian East were a bit later, AFAIK.
> Ashkenazic Jewry of Eastern-Europe is relevant from the
> point of view of the Yiddish Language only for those
> western and eastern Slavic areas, but not for Hungary
> (incl. Croatia) and Serbia. Let alone Bulgaria. The
> Sephardic adstratum came later on, after 1492, but
> for a while chiefly to Greece, i.e. the Ottoman Empire.
Erh, okay. Off-topic.
> So whether Przeworsk or not, the German-Yiddish link
> hasn't gotten too many speculation possibilities.
I don't understand you. You expound the standard theory, and then you conclude from that there couldn't be any other ones?
> >Let's suppose the developments which characterize OHG against
> >all the other Germanic languages (the 2LV, second
> >Lautverschiebung) had taken place already in Bastarnian
> >(Gołąb assumes the existence of loans between Bastarnian
>
> When was the last mentioning of the Bastarnian population?
> AFAIK during Attila's period. Afterwards it must be
> assimilated into other Germanic or German populations.
I was being imprecise. The Bastarnians in Poieneşti-Lukaševka who disappear in mid-1st century BCE according to Crişan were the northern tribes (Atmoni and Sidoni in Strabo)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastarnae
The southern Peucini stayed on longer, as you mention.
> But a Germanic population of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century
> to go exactly through the same linguistic transformation
> as those Germanic idioms that turned German, yet in
> the absence of permanent links with the future German
> (diutisk) populations from the 3rd or 5th century until
> the 11th century? Methinks this would have been impossible.
By that time, the Atmoni and Sidoni would have either been in Germanic-speaking Przeworsk-land
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
or have left with Ariovistus to invade the land of the Helvetii in what later became southern Germany, ie Swabia and Bavaria.
> It would have been possible, say, in Austria, where the
> Frankish Empire extended its dominance (temporary even
> in Western Hungary); or in Lombardy, but where in the
> relevant centuries the Germanic population (presumably
> of the Suebian kind) was assimilated linguistically by
> the Italians, so Germanized Jews wouldn't have the
> possibility to preserve their future Yiddish in
> "Welschenland", i.e., South of the Alps.
>
> > 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.
>
> But between the 4th and 12th centuries virtually all
> Germanic populations that once populated Poland,
> the Baltic areas, much of Russia and Ukraine disappeared
> there, moved to South-West Europe and Northern Africa.
> To a great extent because of the Turkic-Alanic migration
> waves. The only exception being the Scandinavian "Rus" (Varangians)
> in the 9th-10th centuries, with their "Gardarike", a
> network of strongholds throughout Russia and the Ukraine,
> between the Baltic and the Black seas, across the territories
> of former Turkic kaganates in a time when the last significant
> one, Khazaria became so weak, that the Skandinavian warriors-
> traders did what they wish, exactly as did their contemporaries,
> Protohungarians and Petchenegs (both groups de iure underlings
> of the Khazarian king).
>
> Note that for the relevant centuries, in the areas where
> you assume an unknown Germanic (Cimbric+Bastarnic) presence,
> became thoroughly Slavicized, which can be seen up to day:
> the entire east-German territory shows that Slavic presence,
> incl. toponyms such as Lübeck, Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz,
> Pommern as well as Markt Redwitz and Pegnitz in Northern
> Bavaria. This is namely a vast territory which was
> populated by Germanic tribes prior to the great "Völker-
> wanderung" of the saga people such as "Dietrich von Bern",
> "Hildebrandt", "Hadubrandt" etc. The Germanization of a
> great deal of those territories was a re-Germanization,
> later on, esp. in the 2nd millennium, those Germanic people
> being this time Germans (Deutsche) and to a lesser extent
> Dutch (in some areas in Mecklenburg).
I know. But I think the Harudes who left with Ariovistus were the Croatians and that they were the douloi of Ariovistus' Suevi, their serfs or slaves. Further I think the Przeworsk culture was mixed Germanic-Slavic, Germanic ruler, Slavic farmer, exactly on the old k.u.k. Donaumonarchie model. You'll have to give up the old
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Kossinna
model of areas as solid-block monolingual.
> > 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 Poieneşti-Lukaševka disappear, according to Crişan
> > because they are driven out by Burebista towards the north, ie.
>
> Yes, but after Caesar and Burebista, there passed other
> four centuries until Bastarnae disappeared from there.
No, the Northern Bastarnae there were gone for good.
> And another long period of approx. eight centuries of
> quasi no Germanic presence there until Deutsche Siedler
> came along; or 5-6 centuries until the Vikings crissed-
> crossed territories East of Poland.
How about this then
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilamovian_language
a German dialect, also sprung from MHG. How can we be sure this is the result of German Ostsiedlung and not an old language island? There was no particular Ostsiedlung in that area, AFAIK.
> How could have stayed there a Przeworsk Germanic-turning-
> German population in complete isolation from Germany from
> the 4th century until the era of the Teutonic Knights
> wheeling-dealing in the East? Only if they had had
> "corridors" such as that between the "Reich" and Danzig
> after the WW1 or those West-Berlin had to the Federal
> Republic via three autobahns. :-)
But that's exactly what the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite
network would have provided. A trade autobahn. That would have provided the regular linguistic update from the (new) motherland.
> > 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.
>
> Aha. And how could they, until the 10th c., preserve their
> Germanic idiom *and* transform it into Deutsch in *the same
> way* as all other Rhine-Weser-Ems-Main-Danube Germans could
> do with their own idiom(s)?! Why exactly turned their
> Germanic vernacular into Deutsch and not, say, into something
> closer to those Varangians' Scandinavian Germanic dialects
> or closer to Dutch?
As I said, because the Radhanite network would have made it into one linguistic community.
> Are there history sources attesting that German colonists
> arriving there from medieval Germany encountered a Germanic
> speaking population which then eagerly adapted their idiom
> to the one imported by the Deutsche newcomers??
Not AFAIK. Good point. But since the Radhanite network was Jewish, most German speakers they met, if any, would have been too. And BTW, why is Polish nobility called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szlachta ,
with German *sl- > Å¡l-?
'"Szlachta" derives from the Old German word "slahta" (now "(Adels) Geschlecht", "(noble) family"), much as many other Polish words pertaining to the nobility derive from German words â€" e.g., the Polish "rycerz" ("knight", cognate of the German "Ritter") and the Polish "herb" ("coat of arms", from the German "Erbe", "heritage"). Poles of the 17th century assumed that "szlachta" was from the German "schlachten" ("to slaughter" or "to butcher"); also suggestive is the German "Schlacht" ("battle"). Early Polish historians thought the term may have derived from the name of the legendary proto-Polish chief, Lech, mentioned in Polish and Czech writings.'
If those words are from German, they've undergone a strange semantic development. Perhaps they are from Bastarnian words?
And why
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folwark ?
What did Germans have to do with that?
> >Or, in my opinion, those communities had existed all the
> >way back to Bastarnian times
>
> So, the next step would be to declare Yiddish is a continuation
> of the Bastarnian language. :)
>
No, to declare High German, and by consequence Yiddish, to be a continuation of the Bastarnian language. :) That would mean the Germans are bastards, so I expect many interesting discussions, since the Germans always wondered why the other Germanic peoples don't see them as their natural cousins. BTW, Tarantino won't explain the provenance of the 'e' in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglorious_basterds ,
which, however, occurs also in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastarnae
so I suspect he had been reading Wikipedia too and is considering the same theory. Perhaps an easter egg for the audience?
Torsten