So, everybody, tell me in which way these facts:
Neal Ascherson
Black Sea
pp. 8-9
'At the outset of his famous book Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, the Russian scholar Mikhail Rostovtzeff wrote: 'I take as my starting-point the unity of the region which we call South Russia: the intersection of influences in that vast tract of country - Oriental and southern influences arriving by way of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, Greek influences spreading along the sea routes, and Western influences passing down the great Danubian route; and the consequent formation, from time to time, of mixed civilisations, very curious and very interesting.'
But it was not only around the northern fringes of the Black Sea, and not only in the classical period, that these 'very curious and very interesting' communities appeared. The city of Byzantium (to become Constantinople and finally Istanbul) was such a society through the Middle Ages and up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century. So was the Grand Comnenian Empire of Trebizond (on the south coast of the Sea) during the mediaeval period, and so was nineteenth-century Constanţa near the Danube delta, and the city of Odessa on the Ukrainian coast which was founded only in 1794. So, too, on a smaller scale, were towns like Sukhum and Poti and Batumi on the coast of what was once Colchis, which began as Greek colonies and survived until the end of the Soviet period as sites where peoples of many different languages, religions, trades and descents lived together.
They were 'curious' because power in those places was not concentrated. Instead it was dissolved, like oxygen in the warm upper layers of the Sea, among many communities. The title of supreme ruler might belong to a man or a woman whose family origins were among pastoral steppe nomads, Turkic or Iranian or Mongol. Local government and regulations of the economy might be left to Greek, Jewish, Italian or Armenian merchants. The soldiery, usually a hired force, could be Scythian or Sarmatian, Caucasian or Gothic, Viking or Anglo-Saxon, French or German. The craftsmen, often local people who had adopted Greek language and customs, had their own rights. Only the slaves - for most of these places kept and traded in slaves during most of their existence - were powerless.'
Wexler
Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics
p. 12
'The evidence for Judeo-Greek and Asian substrata in European Jewish languages comes from a number of sources:
(a) close parallels in the liturgy of the Czech and Byzantine Jews and in the folklore of the Czech Jews and the Byzantine Greeks;
(b) possible Judeo-Greek influÂences on East Slavic Judaizers;
(c) Judeo-Greek elements in the Slavic languages, Old Bavarian German and a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus;
(d) Judeo-Greek elements in Yiddish, Judezmo, Judeo-West Slavic and Karaite;
(e) Judeo-Greek influence in the Jewish onomastics of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe;
(f) Yiddish terms of Iranian origin;
(g) Yiddish inclusion in an onomasiological isogloss connecting Asian and African Jewish languages and earlier stages of Judeo-Greek and Judeo-Latin;
(h) Jewish anthroponyms of probably Asian origin in use in the Slavic and German lands;
(i) non-Yiddish proÂnunciation of Hebrew anthroponyms in the Slavic lands;
(j) Hebrew loans in Slavic and languages of the Caucasus which cannot be ascribed to a Yiddish intermediary;
(k) a possible colloquial Judeo-Aramaic substratum in European Jewish languages other than Greek and Latin (e.g. Yiddish and Khazar).'
p. 14
'European Judeo-Greek inscriptions are found in the following locales:
...
Germany (Regensburg magical formulas, 3rd cenÂtury; Badenweiler, Greek and Latin words in Greek characters, n.d.).12
...
12 Perdrizet 1928:82; Frey 1:1936, ##673-674. Mieses postulated that Byzantine Jews could have emigrated as far west as Bavaria but gives no supporting evidence (1924:300). See discussion in Aronius 1902, #157. On a possible Jewish presence in the Rhineland in the late 3rd-early 4th centuries, see Asaria 1959:35. See also Rubštejn 1922, mentioned in section 1, fn. 5 above.
p. 15
'In all territories except Greece and Istanbul, Judeo-Greek dialects were eventually replaced by new Jewish languages which owed their genesis in part to a Judeo-Greek substratum acting upon the newly acÂquired non-Jewish language. The Jewish successor languages to Judeo-Greek include many, if not all the Judeo-Romance languages, Judeo-Slavic and possibly Yiddish (in Bavaria), North African Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Tat and Judeo-Cuman (i.e. Karaite, KrymÄak and possibly Judeo-Khazar); presently we lack studies of the Judeo-Greek components in most of these languages.16
16 M. Weinreich 1973, passim; Bunis 1981:37; Wexler 1985b. Not all Grecisms in these languages need be from a Jewish dialect.
pp. 17-19
'3.12 Judeo-Greek loans in European non-Jewish languages.
Languages in contact with Judeo-Greek can be expected to provide clues to the reconstruction of Judeo-Greek. In the Slavic area, candidates for Bludy include (a) the six Jewish languages which may have replaced Judeo-Greek, i.e. Judeo-Slavic, Yiddish, Judezmo, and possibly Judeo-Tat, KrymÄak and Karaite,31 and (b) non-Jewish languages such as the Slavic languages, German and languages spoken in the Caucasus. In the first group, we may speak of a Judeo-Greek sub- and adstratum; in the second group, of a Judeo-Greek adstratum alone. The Jewish and non-Jewish target languages have very few Judeo-Grecisms in common. The Jewish languages themselves differ widely in their Judeo-Greek corpus; Judeo-Slavic offers few examples, while Yiddish is relatively rich in Judeo-Grecisms.32 The Judeo-Greek corpus of Judezmo, Judeo-Tat, KrymÄak and Karaite has yet to be studied systematically.33 German (especially the Bavarian dialect), may also have a minor corpus of Judeo-Grecisms. The number of Judeo-Greek terms in the Slavic languages is very small; they are clustered mainly in the East and South Slavic languages, but rarely have Jewish associations. Traditionally, students of the Greek elements in the non-Jewish target languages have explored such parameters as the chronology and geography of the contact (e.g. Byzantine, Middle, Modern Greek; Crimea, Northern Italy, Greece), channels of diffusion and stylistic integration (e.g. direct versus indirect borrowing through an intermediary such as Latin, Church Slavic; literary vs. slang).34 Yet hardly any scholar has suggested contact with Judeo-Greek as the source for Judeo-Grecisms in any non-Jewish language.35 Thus, a number of Greek terms in Slavic, German and in diverse languages spoken in the Caucasus have traditionally been ascribÂed to Greek ecclesiastical influence; while not rejecting such a derivation, I would like to propose that contact with a colloquial, specifically Judeo-Greek, dialect might also be a likely source for some of the data, especialÂly when the Greek terms have blatant Jewish associations.
It is significant that Judeo-Grecisms attested in Bavarian German dialects and in Slavic rarely appear in Yiddish (see the possible excepÂtions of 'Yom Kippur' in section 3.121 and 'bird's milk' in section 3.15 below). The lack of overlap in the corpus of Judeo-Grecisms in Jewish and non-Jewish languages could mean either that Yiddish spread to Southeast Germany after the local Judeo-Greek had been largely abanÂdoned in favor of Judeo-West Slavic, or that Yiddish speakers had little contact with Judeo-Greek speakers and/or chose not to adopt Judeo-Greek terms. Unfortunately, the sparse Judeo-Slavic glosses give little indication of whether this language shared a Judeo-Greek corpus with Slavic languages themselves.
...
31 For a discussion of whether Karaite should be defined as a "Jewish" language, see Wexler 1983b. In theory, Judeo-Khazar might also have incorporated a Judeo-Greek substratum, but almost no examples of this language survive (see Golden 1970; Golb and Pritsak 1982).
32 For discussion of Grecisms in Yiddish, see sections 3.13-3.163 below.
33 The study of comparative "Judeo-Cuman" linguistics, comprising Karaite, KrymÄak and possibly Khazar, is still in its infancy. Even the concept of a "Judeo-Cuman" linguistic grouping is not widely accepted (the term is found only in Sevortjan 1967:111). For a bibliography of Karaite linguistics, see Baskakov et al 1974. It is inÂteresting that the Khazar phrase in the Khazar Hebrew document from c.930 is written in runic and not in Hebrew script. On Judeo-Turkic, see also sections 3.32-3.323 below.
34 See, for example, Vasmer 1909, 1912; Budziszewska 1969:305, 309; Bondaletov 1973:82; Wexler 1985b.
35 See Dieterich 1931 in section 3.15 below. A unique suggestion that Ottoman Jews were responsible for the diffusion of Judezmo terms from Greek to Russian is made by Vasmer 1909:53, fn.l. On the possibility of Greek being a carrier of Judezmo proverbs to Bulgarian, see KanÄev 1979:67. On the spread of Christianity via the Jews, see discusÂsion in section 3.122, fn. 80 below. On Jewish missionaries, called Brutaxi, living north of the Cuman territory along the Black and Caspian Seas during the 13th century, see the remarks of the contemporary Italian traveler, Giovanni de Piano Carpini (Sevortjan 1967:101-102).
p. 28
'3.13 Judeo-Greek loans in European Jewish languages.
Judeo-Greek elements are found in all the Jewish successor languages of Judeo-Greek - but nowhere more abundantly than in Judeo-Romance and YidÂdish. These Grecisms have been diffused to European Jewish languages in several ways. Taking Yiddish as an example we must delineate four distinct channels of diffusion: Greek words and patterns of discourse entered Palestinian Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic and passed through
(a) vernacular Judeo-Romance or
(b) Judeo-Slavic to Yiddish;
(c) entered Yiddish through direct contact with Greek speakers;
(d) were borrowed from written Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic at all times in the history of Yiddish.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has proposed the possibiliÂty of channels (b) or (c). Yet the Italian Jews who are believed to have settled in Bavaria in the 9th-10th centuries might also have been fluent in Greek as well - since large parts of Italy had been under Byzantine control through the 8th century. In actual practice, it is extremely difÂficult to distinguish Judeo-Grecisms in Yiddish which might have entered that language directly from Greek from Judeo-Grecisms that entered through Judeo-Slavic, since the phonological correspondences rarely perÂmit an unambiguous interpretation. Moreover, many of the Grecisms in Yiddish not found in Palestinian Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic or Judeo-Romance languages have surface cognates in a number of Slavic languages. Our ability to identify direct Judeo-Greek loans might imÂprove as our knowledge of Yiddish historical lexicology and the dialect geography of Yiddish Grecisms improves.'
p. 80
'3.4 Recapitulation.
This survey of Judeo-Greek impact on non-Jewish languages and of Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Iranian and possibly Judeo-Turkic and Judeo-Aramaic impact on Yiddish has important bearing for Judeo-Slavic linguisitics for two reasons. First, the difficulty of ascribing all Yiddish Grecisms to Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic or Judeo-Romance compels me to postulate the presence of a Judeo-Greek community in Northern Europe - e.g. in Bavaria and Bohemia - alongside the Judeo-West Slavic community which is known to have been in existence since the 900s (see section 4 below). A Greek presence in the area raises the possibility that the Judeo-West Slavic community itself was heavily Hellenized. Second, since no Turkic or Iranian Jewish community is known to have existed in the Yiddish homeland - i.e. in the Rhineland and Bavaria - I conÂclude that Yiddish must have received its few Asian elements from a third party. That third party could have been either a Judeo-Greek or Judeo-Slavic community from Western, Eastern or Southern Europe. Ample evidence of widespread Slavic-Yiddish linguistic contacts in the Eastern German lands prior to the 11th century will be presented in section 6 below. Another important finding is that Judeo-Grecisms may have entered German Yiddish (either directly of through a Judeo-Slavic inÂtermediary) before passing into Judeo-French (see Y trop). This developÂment has a non-Jewish parallel in the alleged spread of Grecisms from Rhineland German into French (e.g. JGk sambata > G Samstag > Fr samedi).'
minus Wexler's own proposal for the occurrence of Greek loans so far north, do not match my scenario in
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/67125
(improved), to wit:
The Sciri/Cimbri of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jastorf_culture
expanded east into the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistula_Veneti
of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusatian_culture ;
at the same time Slavs expanded west, the clash resulted in the mixed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarubintsy_culture .
The
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scirii
/Cimbri expanded southeast, forming the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastarnae
culture in PoieneÅti-LukaÅ¡evka (not in Wikipedia), situated appr. in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova
where they encounter the predominantly Jewish(?) trade network of the Greek-speaking cities of the Black Sea northern coast, among them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbia,_Ukraine
and the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosporan_kingdom ,
who then switch to the Proto-Hochdeutsch/Bastarnian language of their new trading partners. In 89 BCE the Sciri/Cimbri, Bastarnians and Sarmatians attack the Dacians en route to the Balkans on the instigation of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_VI_of_Pontus
but they encounter difficulties, Mithridates must come to their aid, and in 72 BCE they suffer catastrophic defeat at the hands of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burebista
and are forced to withdraw, with the people of the trading network, to the Cimbri/Sciri territory of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
where the Bastarnian-speakers form a new upper layer, speaking their Proto-Oberdeutsch in the Proto-Niederdeutsch speaking population. Part of this new population moves west into the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jastorf_culture
changing it into the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbe_Germanic
culture, another part of it, the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemetes ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vangiones and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboci
peoples continue under
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariovistus
and his
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suevi
with their
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charudes
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croat
douloi into
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsace
where they are defeated by Caesar in 58 BCE, who drives out the Suevi and Charudes across the Rhine, but lets the Nemetes, Vangiones and Triboci stay. After that Elbe Germanic groups begin migrating south to take over where Ariovistus started.
Torsten