Tat, as I understand was the Iranian substrate of Azerbaijani and is spoken as a relic in mountainous regions of Iranian Azerbaijan and the Republic of Azerbaijan as well as neighboring regions where Azeribaijani is also spoken. Tat is also spoken by Muslim and small Christian communities in those area. I've met Tat'speaing Christians from Iran --next door neighbors.
For the expression 'pray (Jews)' contemporary Eastern Yiddish uses the term dav(e)nen; most Western Yiddish dialects use o(:)rn, except those of Germany and Bohemia which have both terms.310 The term o(:)rn is from OIt orare or OFr o(u)rer (13th c) < Lat orāre 'pray' (though the term is very rare in Judeo-French texts). The source of dav(e)nen is
disputed, but several etymologies have been proposed: (a) Germanic,311 (b) "Oriental", perhaps Iranian,312 (c) Lithuanian,313 (d) Greek,314 and (e) Latin.315 The Iranian hypothesis is attractive on geographical and linguistic grounds. If we follow Max Weinreich and derive Y dav(e)nen from Iranian, then the ultimate etymon would be Ar duwa 'prayer (as a concept rather than as a ritual)'. The fact that dav(e)nen only refers to praying by Jews (for non-Jews, Yiddish uses, inter alia, moljen zix, etc. < Slavic) makes a specifically Jewish source highly likely. The Arabic root is widespread in Islamic languages and, via Ottoman Turkish, has spread to Balkan languages, see e.g. Pers doa, Ottoman Tu dua ~ duva, Cappadocian Gk dová, tová,316 SeCr dòva.317 An Arabic component could have spread to Turkic and Iranian languages only after the 7th century; the Iranian (or Khazar?) Arabism might have reached Yiddish through a Judeo-Slavic intermediary. If our
analysis is correct, then Yiddish would be the only West European language to have inherited the Arabism through a non-Ottoman Turkish channel of diffusion. The earliest known attestation of Y dav(e)nen on Slavic territory comes from a Yiddish text from Tykocin, Poland (near Białystok) dated 1550;318 on non-Slavic territory, the term is first encountered in 15th century North Italian Yiddish (glossed by Kosover as 'sing').319 The Italian Yiddish source suggests that the term was used in adjoining Bavarian Yiddish - unless we are dealing with an Eastern Yiddish writer who settled in the Ashkenazic community of Northern Italy.
Added support for an Asian origin for dav(e)nen comes from the Eastern Yiddish expression daven-šul 'synagogue', literally 'pray' + 'synagogue'; šul is derived from Judeo-Romance,
though the semantic innovation of using 'school' in the meaning of 'synagogue' probably first developed in Judeo-Greek (eg. sxole: in Acts 19:9 seems to be the first example of the new meaning).320 The use of the root 'pray' to designate 'synagogue' was typical of Judeo-Latin and Judeo-Greek (at least up to the 7th century AD), and is still attested in a great many African and Asian Jewish languages, e.g. JGk euxei~on (Egypt, 113 AD), oikos proseuxe:s (Septuagint, Isaiah 60:7, Alexandria, 3rd c BC; literally 'place of prayer'); proseukte:rion (Egypt, writings of Philo, c. 1st c AD), proseuxe: (Egypt, 3rd c BC; Greece, c. 100 BC, literally 'prayer'), JLat proseucha (Juvenal,
b.60?-d.140?, Satires 3:296; synagogue inscription, Osijek, Yugoslavia, 3rd c AD),321 Moroccan, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic şļā,322 (J)Geo salocavi (literally 'place of prayer'), JChinese lĭ-baì-sì (Kaifeng, Henan Province, 1489, literally 'prayer temple').323 The ultimate model for all these expressions is He be:t tfillāh (Isaiah 56:7), literally 'house of prayer', which occasionally appears in the written Hebrew of speakers of Jewish languages, e.g. Crimean Karaite Hebrew.324 The use of 'pray' to denote 'synagogue' is occasionally attested in non-Jewish languages, e.g. Arm town agathich.325 In counterdistinction to the Jewish languages, the customary term for 'synagogue' in written Hebrew is be:t knεsεt, literally 'house of gathering', which has become the most common pattern of expression in the non-Jewish languages, e.g. Gk synagoge:, Lat synagoga, conventiculum, ClArm žoģovaran; Ar knīs, Pers kenéšt, konéšt, känis(ə) continue the cognate
JAram be:(t) knīštā`.326 Among Greek-speaking Jews, synagoge: usually denoted the 'Jewish community'.327 Among non-Jewish languages, Persian seems to be unique in regularly using the root 'pray' to denote a native house of worship, e.g. 'mosque', as in nämazgah (< nämaz 'obligatory Muslim prayer' + -gah marker of place), nämazxané 'prayer house' (< 'prayer' + xané 'house, building'); Ar muşallan 'place of prayer' could designate both Muslim and non-Muslim edifices. For further discussion of terms for 'synagogue' and 'church' < 'pray' in Jewish and Slavic languages, see sections 5.141-5.1412 below.
Positing an Asian provenience for Y dav(e)nen implies diffusion of a lexical item from east to west, while the general movement of Yiddish speakers is from Germany to the east; contemporaneous westward migrations of Yiddish speakers are also attested throughout the area but on a much smaller scale (see discussion in section 6.1 below). The contradiction between the general direction of German Yiddish migrations and a putative westward diffusion for dav(e)nen can be resolved by assuming that the term might have been first acquired by Yiddish on Judeo-West Slavic territory, and then diffused eastward by Yiddish after the 12th-13th centuries. Asian components in Yiddish which clearly diffused from east to west are usually the names of imported cultural artifacts, are not taken from a Jewish language, and never reach beyond the Yiddish dialects of Eastern Poland. An example is Tu paça 'jellied meat dish made from the leg of an animal; leg' found, as a
food term only, in the Balkan languages, e.g. Balkan Jud pača, Rum piţea. From Rumanian, the term spread to coterritorial Yiddish dialects (in the forms peča[j], pecé) but never spread further west than the Northwest Belorussian lands.328 For other Turkic examples, see sections 5.4-5.42 below. Finally, we have to posit a much later chronology for terms like Y pečaj, etc. than for dav(e)nen.
303 Shevelov 1965:614-617. For the suggestion that Ossete influenced the lenition of CSl *g in East Slavic dialects, see Abaev 1964a (with critique in Wexler 1977a:98). See also Abaev 1964b for a putative Ossete-East Slavic grammatical isogloss, and Vasmer's suggestion of a Judeo-Tat-East Slavic contact (cited below in section 3.31). See also section 6.7 below. Fischer regards Russian as the source of a common Russian-Ossete expression of perfectivization by means of verbal prefixation (1977:219, 222).
304 Loewenthal 1952:62.
305 Baron 1957:208.
306 See Golb and Pritsak 1982:102, 104, 106-107, 114-115.
307 E. N. Adler 1930:7-8.
308 For discussion of Iranian graffitti in the local synagogue, see Schmitt 1980:197-198.
309 Golden l980:21; Golb and Pritsak l982:30, 103.
310 The eastern limit of o(:)rn in colloquial Yiddish is impossible to determine since Western Yiddish literary norms predominated in Eastern Yiddish circles until the early 19th century. Hence, attestation of the Judeo-Romance component in a Kraków Yiddish text from 1579 (Shmeruk 1981b:34) might not reflect the situation in spoken Yiddish of the time. The LCAAJ, ##229013, 229019 records o(:)rn as far east as Silesia, e.g. at Bytom and Piła. For Western Yiddish, see Beranek 1965, map #92; Lowenstein 1969. The LCAAJ, #229018 records dav(e)nen at points quite far to the west, e.g. in the Rhineland and in Luxembourg.
311 Kosover derives dav(e)nen from an older dojnen ~ MHG doenen 'resound, play, sing' (1964:365-362). On epenthetic v in dialects of Eastern Yiddish and Judeo-East Slavic, see section 3.342 below. The oldest use of Y dojnen is from a North Italian manuscript from the beginning of the 15th century (ibid. 367). See also Lowenstein 1969:27-28, map #7.
312 M. Weinreich 1956:626; 3:1973:85-87.
313 Jofe 1959:89-90; Copeland and Süsskind 1976:190-191.
314 Mieses suggests Gk deō 'want, ask for' (1924:238).
315 Lat divināre 'prophesy' was suggested by Willer 1915:398 (who translated the term as, inter alia, 'turn towards God, pray' [sic!]). See also M. Fraenkel 1961. For a critique of these etymologies, see M. Weinreich 3:1973:85-87.
316 Dawkins 1916:674.
317 Škaljić 1966.
318 M. Weinreich 1956:626; 3:1973:85.
319 Kosover 1964; Lowenstein 1969:27, fn. 13. Hence, Beranek's claim that dav(e)nen in Western Yiddish was due to the migration of Eastern Yiddish speakers after the Xmel'nyc'kyj uprising, in 1648 is to be rejected (1956:37-39).
320 See (J)It scuola (1153), (J)Fr escole (1183), (J)Cat scola (1391). Within Judeo-Romance, the term is unknown only in Judezmo and Judeo-Portuguese which use reflexes of (J-?)Gk synagoge:, e.g. JPt esnoga (see section 3.127 above). Contemporaneous Christian Latin documents also use the term, e.g. Austrian Latin 1204, English Latin 12th-13th centuries (see Blondheim 1925:106-110, 115-119; Wexler 1981c-125) In Latin documents prior to the 12th century, 'synagogue' is designated by synagoga (see e.g. the German Latin texts from the 5th-9th centuries cited in Berg and Steur 1976).
321 Eventov 1971:31-32; Lifshitz 1975, #678a. Outside of Greece proper, proseuxe: is attested in Judeo-Greek inscriptions across a wide territory extending from Southern Spain to the Black Sea littoral.
322 Şalla 'pray' and şalā 'prayer' are common to both Jewish and non-Jewish dialects, while şļā is unknown in Muslim Arabic, though şalā 'synagogue' is occasionally found in written Arabic (see discussion in section 5.1511 below).
323 See Wexler 1981c:115, 117-118; 1985b for a comparative discussion.
324 Mann 2:1935:451 vs. Trakai Kar 'church' (ibid. 829, fn. 354a). See also Belgrade Jud bed tefilá 'church' (1862). On the association of WY beis tefillo 'church' with tifle 'church' (literally 'abomination'), see Beem 1967:132.
325 See Wexler 1981:117. O, MHG betahüs, bete-, literally 'house of prayer', denoted 'church' and possibly also 'synagogue', but there is no parallel form in German Yiddish (Wexler 1981c:135, fn. 33).
326 Wexler 1981c:117, 127ff.
327 Lat synagoga was used in the meaning of 'church' up to the 5th century (Blondheim 1927:41). See the Judeo-Iberian reflexes discussed in fn. 320 above.
328 The Turkish term is even found in the Judeo-Portuguese of the Dutch Marranos - probably due to the impact of Balkan Judezmo (see Wexler 1982b:88-89). Compare also the diffusion of Rumanianisms into Polish (see Nandriş 1934-1935), Belorussian and Ukrainian (see Dzendzelivs'kyj 1958-1960); some of these terms are also found in coterritorial Yiddish.
Acts 19:9 (King James Version)
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2019:9&version=KJV
'But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he [Paul] departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus.'
The original Greek for 'school' was connected with learning as a passtime, in your free time, cf
Prellwitz
Etymologisches Wörterbuch der griechischen Sprache
'σχoλή Muße (eigl. das Anhalten), Beschäftigung in Mußestunden, Vorlesung, Schule (Aesch. Pind.),
σχoλáζω zaudere,
`aσχoλίa Beschäftigung,
σχoλαι̃ος gemächlich: `έχω;
vgl. σχέδην.'
and Ernout-Meillet
'schola (scola), -ae f. : école (sens abstrait ou concret), exercice d'école, etc. Emprunt au gr. σχoλή, d'abord rendu par lūdus, et dont le sens est ainsi défini par Festus, 470,14, scholae dictae sunt non ab otio ac uacatione omni, sed quod, ceteris rebus omissis, uacare liberalibus studiis pueri debent. Le sens de "repos, lieu de repos" est conservé dans une expression technique; schola labri aluei qui désigne une sorte de salle d'attente ou de repos dans les bains, cf. Rich, s.u., et dans Octauiae scholae "galerie d'Octavie" (Plin. 36, 29).
Représenté en roman par des formes savantes, M.L.7703. (Irl. scol, britt. yscol; germ.: ags. scol, etc.).
Dérivés latins:
scholāris (époq. imp.), M.L.7704;
antescholārius (Pétr., CIL VI 14672,9),
antescholānus (Gloss.).
Les autres dérivés: scholasticus, etc., sont des calques du grec.'
Here is the Arabic word Wexler wants to derive 'daven' from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dua
but that seems not to go well together with the original Greek semantics of 'school', but better with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawah
But that would mean that the Judaism which adapted this word was proselytizing, like the one we meet in the quote from Valerius Maximus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabazios#Jewish_connection
I also suspect that Wexler's timing is wrong. One would expect the word for such a central concept to have arrived with the institution itself. Linguistically it seems to belong to a Greek-speaking Jewish culture. That of the Greek-speaking cities of the Black Sea would match. It would also, since it was in contact with Thracians, match that putative proselytizing Jewish culture accused of promoting a cult of Jupiter Sabazius. Another thing is the presence of o(:)rn in Western Yiddish; if the border on the Elbe between Eastern and Western Yiddish stems from the temporary inclusion of Germania west of the Elbe into the Rome in the period up to the Clades Variana in 9 CE, that word would have arrived from contact with the Romans shortly after the arrival of Ariovistus' Germani, competing with the word they imported.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/66774
The question is then how Arabic 'dawah' "proselytize" came to be Yiddish 'daven' "pray".
I think one should take a clue from the development of 'šul' in 'daven-šul' "synagogue". The Greek behind 'school' at first meant 'a place for studying in one's free time'. It doesn't mean "house", so the various words meaning "prayer-house" are not related linguistically, thus not necessarily conceptually. In other words, the 'daven-šul' might have been a plce of proselytization. With the development of Judaism into a non-proselytizing religion, the 'daven-šul' became a prayer-house and 'daven' followed that change in sense to mean only "pray".
Now if that opens the question of the context in which the Bosporan Jews borrowed the Arab term 'dawah' for prozelytizing.
As far as I know, the closest Arab-speakers would have been the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataeans
but I know nothing of the pre-Islamic use of the word 'dawah'. Perhaps Ishinan can inform us?
As for commercial realations between the two peoples, here's one consideration:
In 64 BCE, Pompey was in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontus
with a mandate to wage war on Mithridates the Great, with whom Rome had been at war, on and off, for twenty five years. Mithridates took refuge in Armenia. At that time Pompey chose, instead of going north after Mithridates, to go south. He conquered Syria, and then Iudaea. And as he was mopping up operations in Iudaea, news came that Mithridates, who had fled to the former Bosporan Kingdom in Crimea, had commited suicide after facing a rebellion by his army. Rome's war with Mithridates, who had been invincible for so long, had ended.
Why? On the face of it it doesn't make much sense.
We will have to assume that the choice Pompey made in 64 BCE of going south was a rational one; it obviously payed off. What could the strategic goal have been?
We know that Mithridates was well off financially, he had treasuries all over the Black Sea, several are mentioned by Appian. If no one supported him for idealistic reasons, he would have gotten that money by export. Now, what did he have to export? Slaves. One of his earliest conquests was the Bosporan Kingdom with its capital
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panticapaeum
with its huge slave market.
In other words, I suspect the economic foundation of Mithridates' empire was the slave trade from Panticapaeum and other Greek cities of the northern Black Sea coast (harvesting the steppe) into the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Pompey knew, so he disrupted that trade, and Mithridates' empire got into financial difficulties (as reflected in accounts of his heavy taxation and the rebellions that followed) and perished.
Now if 'daven' was originally 'instruct or 'proselytize', what was the nature of the religion or philosophy that was transmitted that way?
It must have taken place in the Greek-speaking cities of the Northern Black Sea shore, so the 'religion' was most likely the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypsistarian
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07611a.htm
religion/philosophy. If my theory is correct that the present speakers of High German dialects originate from Bastarnae, mixed with groups from the Bosporan Kingdom, cf.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/66387
we should expect some reflex of Hypsistarianism in early Germanic groups. Two facts point in that direction:
1. Caesar DBG 6.21
http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.6.6.html
'The Germans differ much from these usages, for they have neither Druids to preside over sacred offices, nor do they pay great regard to sacrifices. They rank in the number of the gods those alone whom they behold, and by whose instrumentality they are obviously benefited, namely, the sun, fire, and the moon; they have not heard of the other deities even by report.'
2. Jordanes, Getica, XI, 69
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/jordgeti.html
'By demonstrating theoretical knowledge he [Decineus] urged them [the Goths/Getae] to contemplate the twelve signs and the courses of the planets passing through them, and the whole of astronomy. He told them how the disc of the moon gains increase or suffers loss, and showed them how much the fiery globe of the sun exceeds in size our earthly planet. He explained the names of the three hundred and forty-six stars and told through what signs in the arching vault of the heavens they glide swiftly from their rising to their setting.'
(Yes, I know that Decineus' Getae weren't the Goths, but it seems, at least, that the religion of the two groups, who BTW lived in the same territory, some centuries apart, were not different enough for Jordanes to conclude that they were different peoples.)
Torsten