>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.
Nope. Those Germans were mere colonists (Bauern und Handwerker).
On many occasions invited by east-european kings. And there were
whole lotta Germans always emigrating (one of the reasons was
the German habit/law pertaining to the inheritance of a farm:
one of several brethren had the right to inherit, the rest had
the right to buzz off). Of German domination in some areas, one
can talk only in the case of territories conquered/owned by the
Teutonic Order and in such regions where Germans were granted
some status of regional administrative autonomy (under the
aegis of the king of that country).
>The Jews became so infatuated with them that they all decided to
>communicate in a German dialect
In some regions of E-Eur, esp. Poland-Lithuania merchant & al.
traders of Jewish faith got in some kind of relationship with
the newcomers (incl. Jews from German lands). Look yourself for
details. That was the epoch where an E-Eur J. population got in
touch with the Mittelhochdeutsch and with the Frühneuhochdeutsch.
(Jiddisch is a too recent dialect - it's obvious to any non-
linguist who's in command of South-German - in contrast with
other German dialects that started to be spoken in E-Eur in the
12th/13th c., such as those in Hungary: in what's today Slovakia
and Romania's central region Transylvania, where local dialects
are continuators of variants of the 12th/13th c. Mosel-Fränkisch
and still are (after 800 years) pretty close to Kölsch, Letze-
buergesch (of Luxembourg) & the like and share various features,
incl. pre-last sound shift elements - in contrast with Yiddish,
which is rather Bavarian and Franconian-"oriented"). You might
also look into the history of such places of medieval Jewry as
... Prague (& al. similar ones).
>even if they were hundreds of miles away from any German,
>thus suddenly rendering communication impossible with
>their neighbors, the Slavs.
Not at all: AFAIK, Jews were always in command of the language
of the region where they lived. And the Yiddish "losh'n" itself
illustrates this by its Slavic vocabulary (incl. such lexems as
nebbich and shmok).
>That's a superseded scenario, as the sources you quoted stated, >whereas you maintained the opposite. Nor does Wexler agree.
Anyone is entitled to have an opinion. (If I ain't wrong, Wechsler
goes as far as saying Yiddish were actually a slavic idiom in a
German overcoat. That's worth investigating, Briederchen, nee? :))
>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
Of course it was. There is enough text material from the last few
centuries before Odowakar's chasing Romulus Augustulus. Texts that
show new diverging language aspects; and there are grafittos. (Un-
fortunately, I don't have any list with the adequate bibliography.)
St. Jerome's (Hieronymus's) Bible translation (around AD 400) is
also a kind of Vulgata text:
http://www.speedbible.com/vulgate/
>as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences
Yeah (no problem with that). The standard Hochdeutsch is also sort
of an... artificial language ("papierenes Deutsch"): the over-
whelming majority of the G. native-speakers use everyday's variants
of G. that differ from HG from sligtly to immensely (esp. the
variants of LG so). Or take standard Italian vs. Italian dialects.
(One might be tempted to change taxonomy and get rid of the
"official" listing of Romance languages "French", "Italian",
"Spanish" etc. or of Germanic taxonomy, by replacing "German"
with Alemanian, Suebian, Bavarian, Ripuarian Frankish, Main-
Frankish, Saxon etc. :-))
>I can't infer any conclusion regarding possibilities and >plausibilities from the fact that I compare completely different >historic epochs...? Is this English?
No, it's Tagalog. But you, a linguist, have no deciphering problem
there.
>I think you got that wrong. R1a, R1b and J1 are the *non*-Jewish
>haplotypes.
They say:
<<Haplogroup J2 is found in the highest concentrations in the the
Caucasus and the Fertile Crescent and is found throughout the
Mediterranean (including the Italian, Anatolian and Iberian
peninsulas and North Africa)[20].>>
It is reasonable to assume that Moses, Akharon, David, Solomon
also belonged to a populace where the J2 incidence was pretty
high. But when you see that modern so-called Ashkenazic Jewry
has less of it, while R1(a+b) much higher and I tending to nil,
then this can be seen as fitting the linguistic and historic
finds (that lead to the "Ashkunaz" = Saka = Scythian ancestry,
i.e. to the Ukrainian-Russian plains, to the Caspian, Aral,
Baikal areas, to the Ural region etc). (BTW, it seems that
Abraham and his crowd belonged to some Habiru population with
roots in the same... Kurdistan + Armenia area where Moses's
and his brother's Y chromosme seems to be frequent. :))
>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.
Look at the percentage tables yourself.