Re: Schoeffe I

> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastarnae
> >'inhabited the region between the eastern Carpathian mountains and
> >the Dnieper river (corresponding to the modern Republic of Moldova
> >and western part of southern Ukraine)'.
>
> I know. We had this in school, when Wikipedia's father (Jimbo)
> was 3 or 4 years old.

Jimbo didn't write that.

>
> >That means they controlled the land up river from the Greek Black
> >Sea cities. Some of them would have moved there, settled and
> >learned the Bastarnian / Old High German language.
>
> Yeah, sure: they learned a kind of Deutsch that evolved 1,100 to
> 1,500 years later on. :)

Proto High German. Sorry.

> >Compare the standard explanation:
> >
> >Jews lived in Eastern Europe, having adopted Slavic as their
> >language. Suddenly Germans arrived from Germany on a rampage,
> >subjugating the natives. The Jews became so infatuated with
> >them that they all decided to communicate in a German dialect,
> >even if they were hundreds of miles away from any German,
> >thus suddenly rendering communication impossible with
> >their neighbors, the Slavs.
> >
> >Which do you prefer?
>
> I prefer the most plausible story. And this one is the story of
> the German colonisation with peasants and "BÃ¼rger" in Eastern
> Europe. That's where Ashkenazic Jews (who chiefly spoke Crimean
> Turkic, and then Slavic as a 2nd language) got in touch with the
> German language towards the middle of the 2nd millenium CE. They
> learnt it as a "lingua franca" of the medieval Eastern Europe,
> spoken by German traders & farmers, as well as by Jews immigrated
> from the "Reich" (which is also onomastically shown: Dreyfus =
> from Trier, Schapira/Schapiro = from Speyer, Halperin = from
> Heilbronn, Ginsburg = from GÃ¼nzburg, Lifschitz/Lipshitz = from
> LÃ¶bschÃ¼tz etc.) Remember: Yiddish is a German variant that
> already went through all sound shifts. The only German in the
> same area, that missed some shifts is the one spoken by the
> German minority of Romania called the Transylvanian Saxons, whose
> ancestors moved from the Trier and Luxemburg area and is a kind
> of Low and Middle German mixture - after 1700 heavily influenced
> in the vocabulary by Austrian Bavarian, since between circa 1700
> and 1918 Transylvania was an Austrian province, along with
> Moldova's northern part called Bucovina, since the 1730s. Although
> influenced by this South-German Oberdeutsch, Transylvanian
> Saxons' dialects have kept their numerous features that show
> their provenance from a MHG kind of German, in contrast with
> Yiddish: Yiddish is always called "a Mittelhochdeutsch" idiom,
> but in reality it has all features of a... "Neuhochdeutsch" as
> the rest of today's German dialects south of Frankfurt. A linguist
> to ignore such major elements is... Well, no wonder that your
> imagination trys establishing such impossible nexuses, and that
> you aren't bothered by such enormous chronological gaps between
> different epochs.).

Okay, so you prefer the version in which
Jews lived in Eastern Europe, having adopted Slavic as their
language. Suddenly Germans arrived from Germany on a rampage,
subjugating the natives. The Jews became so infatuated with
them that they all decided to communicate in a German dialect,
even if they were hundreds of miles away from any German,
thus suddenly rendering communication impossible with
their neighbors, the Slavs.

That's a superseded scenario, as the sources you quoted stated, whereas you maintained the opposite. Nor does Wexler agree.

> >See above!!!
>
> Come on, don't kid me, in those Bosporan kingdom times there
> were no Deutsche-Sprache-speaking people and no Jiddische-
> Sprache-speaking people. In those times, there were no Romanian-
> speaking people, and nobody was parlando la lingua italiana,
> nor was able to parle franÃ§ais. These modern languages were
> in their proto-proto-inception as early as in the 8th-9th-10th
> centuries, whereas the events you always try to put in connections
> with them occurred 8 to 11 centuries earlier (in the case of
> the Jiddische Losch'n even 14-15 centuries earlier).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Vulgar_Latin
'To some scholars, this suggests that the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire ( from the end of 1st century BC ), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language.'

> >BTW, you shouldn't talk that way of the
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosporan_kingdom
> >the other George liked it very much.
>
> Your (and only your) problem is that you won't and can't infer
> any conclusion regarding possibilities and plausibilities from
> the fact that you compare completely different historic epochs,
> you neglect the obstacles of linguistic history (exactly those
> sound shift "laws" you invoke in other contexts), and that
> no vivid popular language can stay virtually unchanged thousand
> years, even if there is a "French Academy" to pay attention how
> the vulgus talks and writes. :)

I can't infer any conclusion regarding possibilities and plausibilities from the fact that I compare completely different historic epochs...? Is this English?

> To talk of Deutsche Sprache in the era of the Bastarnians and
> of the Romanian language having its inception in the 1st
> century BCE means... blunder for anyone, let alone for a linguist
> and a historian. By the same "1st c. BCE" token, why is not
> the inception of the Romanian language ab urbe condita or in
> the PIE era when PIE peoples moved around the Caucasus ranges
> and around the Caspian and Black seas? Why not even earlier,
> in the era soon after "outa Africa"? :)

Since I think these things happened in the 1st century BCE, why don't I think they happened at some other time?
Erh...

> >>This cult wasn't a Caananite one, but a PIE one. At that,
> >>a ... mounted one!
> >
> >Yes, and? Any worse than a golden calf?
>
> If you're not able to see what fits and what doesn't...

Well they weren't.

> >>Ashkenazi Jews's origins are Scythian, Balto-Slavic,
> >>Turkic (Tatar) and Iranian.
> >
> >Oh, you are one of those who believe that ...
>
> I don't believe, I learn and take into consideration presentations
> and hypotheses that tend to be plausible (whose "markers" and
> proofs are OK, not mere ... tales).

Interesting. Let's look at that.

>
> >Well, genetics say different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#Y-DNA_of_Ashkenazi_Jews

>
> Rad carefully the whole stuff there and have an attentive look
> at the diagrams and tables. You'll see even there, in the
> wikipedia articles (look up those about the R1a, R1b and J1
> haploids), that the "typical (?)" Middle East haploids values
> show a pretty scarce frequency in the Ashkenasic population,
> whereas the common heritage of the east-European PIE peoples
> is almost as much there as in any other neighboring non-Jewish
> population. And you'll also see that the so-called Y chromosome
> of the Moses-Aaron brethren is highly there in the Kurdish
> and adjacent populations in and around Eastern Anatolia (Kurdistan).

I think you got that wrong. R1a, R1b and J1 are the *non*-Jewish haplotypes.

> Genetic studies rather confirm linguistics and history, namely
> that Eastern European Jews are by and large continuators of
> Cimmerian, Scythian (Iranian), Tocharian, Uralic-language speakers,
> Turkic-language speakers (esp. Oguric) and East-Slavic-language
> speakers from among populations that converted to the Mozaic
> faith after the 8th century (when the Khazar dynasty from
> among the "royal" Dulo clan decided so). (Also possible that
> some Crimean Gothic and Scandinavian Varangian individuals
> were assimilated too in the east-Eur. Jewry - plausible.)

Those studies show that the admixture of surrounding European peoples is about 10-20%, the rest being eastern Mediterranean, thus exactly the opposite of what you claim.

Torsten