Origins of Yiddish Dialects 0198739311, 9780198739319
This book traces the origins of modern varieties of Yiddish and presents evidence for the claim that, contrary to most a
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/10/2015, SPi
Origins of Yiddish Dialects
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/10/2015, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/10/2015, SPi
Origins of Yiddish Dialects Alexander Beider
1
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Alexander Beider The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN –––– Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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To Alexis Manaster Ramer
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Copyright Disclaimer Certain elements of the text in this book have been included in published articles. The author thanks the respective publishers for their kind permission to re-use similar materials in this book. The Birth of Yiddish and the Paradigm of the Rhenish Origin of Ashkenazic Jews. Revue des études juives, (), –, pp. –. (In this book, parts of sections . and ...) Yiddish Proto-vowels and German Dialects. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, . (), pp. –. (In this book, parts of sections ., ., .., and ..–...) Unity of the Hebrew Component of Western and Eastern Yiddish, Yiddish – A Jewish National Language at // Jews and Slavs, () (ed. by Wolf Moskovich and Leonid Finberg). Kyiv: Dukh i litera, pp. –. (In this book, parts of sections .–..) Eastern Yiddish Toponyms of German Origin Leket: Yiddish Studies Today (ed. by Marion Aptroot, Efrat GalEd, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg). Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, , pp. –. (In this book, large parts of section . and Appendix B.) Czech Lands as the Cradle of Eastern Yiddish. Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background: Proceedings of a conference held in Prague on October –, (ed. by Ondřej Bláha, Robert Dittmann, and Lenka Ulicˇ ná). Prague: Academia, , pp. –. (In this book, parts of sections . and ..) Reapplying the Language Tree Model to the History of Yiddish. Journal of Jewish Languages, (), pp. –. (In this book, a large part of section ..) Unity of the German Component of Yiddish: Myth or Reality? Jewish Language Contact (ed. Ghil’ad Zuckermann), Special Issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, (). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. –. (In this book, parts of sections . and ..) Onomastic Analysis of the Origins of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. The Knaanites: Jews in the Medieval Slavic World // Jews and Slavs, () (ed. by Wolf Moskovich, Mikhail Chlenov, and Abram Torpusman). Jerusalem: Gesharim – Moscow: Mosty Kul’tury, pp. –. (In this book, large parts of sections .., ., and ..) Romance elements in Yiddish. Revue des études juives, (), –, pp. –. (In this book, a large part of Chapter .)
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Contents Preface xii Acknowledgments xx Abbreviations xxi Introduction xxx
Main concepts and classifications .
Schemes of the development of Yiddish .. The Rhine hypothesis .. ..
.
.
.
.
The Danube hypothesis Suggested general scheme
Definitions of the term YIDDISH .. ..
General aspects Germanistic approach
.. ..
Jewish-oriented approach: terminological issues Jewish-oriented approach: fusion character of Yiddish
.. ..
Jewish-oriented approach: classification of Jewish languages Suggested approach
Classifications of Yiddish elements .. ..
Principal classification used in this book Classification methodology
.. ..
Comparison between competing hypotheses Classification by components
Special domains of application of the principal classification .. ..
Orthography Toponyms
.. ..
Given names Surnames
Classifications of Yiddish dialects .. ..
Previous classifications Suggested classification
.
.. Classification schemes Yiddish proto-vowels
.
Monogenesis versus polygenesis
.
Terminological and substantive issues
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Contents The German component . .
.
.
Main issues Consonants
..
Changes of /p/, /k/, and /t/
.. ..
Changes of /d/, /g/, and /b/ Changes between [b], [w], [v], and [f]
.. ..
Changes between [s], [š], and [z] Changes related to nasals
..
Forms with or without /d/
.. ..
Changes of /h/ and /x/ Miscellaneous German phenomena
.. Yiddish innovations Stressed vowels
Basic rules
.. ..
Unrounding, rounding, and lowering Shortening and lengthening
.. Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts Unstressed vowels
.
Morphology and grammar Lexicon and semantics Orthography
.
Given names .. Pan-Ashkenazic names
. .
..
.. ..
. .
.
Names restricted to Central and Eastern Europe Phonological peculiarities
Yiddish toponyms of German origin in Slavic countries
.. ..
Previous studies Toponyms in the Czech lands
.. ..
Poland in the medieval period Poland in the modern era
..
Reasons for the German origin of toponyms in Eastern Europe
Selectivity in the German component Synthesis
.. ..
Early Ashkenazic sources and German dialects Modern Yiddish varieties and German dialects
..
Age of Yiddish according to its German component
..
Classification of Yiddish varieties according to their German component
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Contents
The Hebrew Component . .
. .
. .
Main issues Channels of transmission of Hebrew ..
Antiquity
.. ..
Early Middle Ages High/Late Middle Ages and modern times
. .
.
..
Heth
.. ..
Sibilants Tav and daleth
.. ..
Yod with dagesh Veth and vav
..
Other consonants
Middle Ages Main modern Yiddish patterns
Stressed vowels
Non-Ashkenazic vocalic systems Stress position
.. ..
Main reflexes in modern Yiddish Schemes for ancient Yiddish
.. ..
E-EFFECT Exceptions: pataḥ , ḥ at.ef-pataḥ , and qameṣ
.. ..
Exceptions: segol, ṣ ere, and shewa Exceptions: shureq and ḥ olem
..
Other exceptional reflexes
Vowels in unstressed syllables Non-phonological features .. ..
Lexical and semantic peculiarities Morphological and grammatical peculiarities
..
Hybrid Hebrew-German words and expressions
Semitic and Greek given names .. BNEY HES / BNEY KHES and their legacy .. ..
.
Whole Hebrew and merged Hebrew Consonants
.. .. .
Hebrew and oriental names of EAST CANAANITES Ashkenazic innovations
Age of the Hebrew component
.. ..
Hebraisms in early Ashkenazic texts Direct references in non-Jewish sources
.. ..
Indirect methods Dynamics of the size of the Hebrew component
ix
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Contents .
Hebrew of EAST CANAANITES
.
Synthesis .. Unity of modern Yiddish varieties ..
.
Links between Ashkenazic and Zarfatic Jews .. ..
Oral tradition and theory by Güdemann Cultural links
.. Pronunciation of Hebrew Romance onomastic items .. ..
BNEY HES and BNEY KHES
Romance elements . Main issues .
Given names Toponyms
.
Romance lexical elements in Yiddish
. .
Romance morphological elements in Yiddish Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts and Romance elements
.
Synthesis .. French connection
Romance elements and modern Yiddish varieties
..
The term “Romance component”
Slavic elements
Main issues
. .
Methodology West Canaanites
.. ..
Given names Toponyms
..
Words
East Canaanites .. Given names .. ..
.
..
.
.
Vernacular language of Lithuanian Jews Words
Early Jewish communities in Poland .. ..
EY elements borrowed from Old Polish Vernacular language of Polish Jews
. .
Slavisms outside of EY Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts and Slavic elements
.
Synthesis: status of Slavic elements in Yiddish
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Contents
Sound changes and dialects . .
Main issues Vocalic changes ..
Reality of basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts
.. ..
Derivation of vowels in EY Derivation of vowels in WY
.. ..
Derivation of vowels in CzY, EGY, and DuY Status of proto-dialects and proto-vowels
.
Consonantal changes
. .
Borders between EY subdialects Synthesis: classification of Yiddish dialects .. ..
General classification Transitional and mixed dialects
Conclusion
Appendix A:
Yiddish dialect of PhilogLottus
Appendix B:
Germans and German language in Poland
Appendix C:
Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry
C.
Main Issues
C.
Rhenish Jews C.. Romance migrants
C. C. C.
EAST CANAANITES Ashkenazic Jews in Central and Eastern Europe
C.
Composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry
Approaches Arguments revealing cultural and administrative western influences
C.. C..
Historical arguments Arguments from demography
C..
Arguments from genetics
C.. C..
Arguments based on given names Arguments based on surnames
C.. Linguistic arguments Synthesis
Index of discussed linguistic features General index
C.. C..
Main sources for Yiddish words, toponyms, and given names References
C.. Franconia and eastern Swabia WEST CANAANITES
C. Glossary
xi
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Preface MAJOR INFLUENCES
Contrary to what fashionable philosophers of science claim, I believe that scholarship is largely cumulative, and that one tends to underestimate the extent to which even “revolutionary” discoveries and shifts in “paradigm” are rooted in the theories and practices of the scholars who came before. The general ideas of Thomas Samuel Kuhn and Willard Van Orman Quine are correct, but the role of these authors’ discoveries is often greatly exaggerated. Surely, the development of linguistics, like that of any intellectual domain, is not linear; certain important results may not be used for decades, but on a large chronological scale, progress—based on the ideas of previous researchers—becomes more and more apparent. This book would certainly be totally different or even never have been written without the detailed study of the works of my predecessors in the domain of Yiddish historical linguistics. I am particularly indebted to four authors: Max Weinreich, Jechiel Bin-Nun (Fischer), Dovid Katz, and Erika Timm (see Figure .). Weinreich’s magnum opus (WG) represents a history of Yiddish of encyclopedic proportions, a unique example of a work covering so a large number of aspects concerning the inception and the development of this language. It provides a general framework for other studies in the domain, introduces numerous fundamental concepts and tools. But for a few exceptions, any topic I chose to cover in this book was already in some way addressed by Weinreich. As a result, my own analysis very often would take his ideas as a starting point. Moreover, Weinreich was of paramount importance for my general development as a scholar. Indeed, I read for the first time WG at the end of the s when I was working on my first large scholarly project, a book about the etymologies of Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire. The reading in question made a great impression on me. I was educated in the field of mathematics and theoretical physics, preparing at that time a PhD thesis on a topic related to my education, and it was precisely thanks to WG that I understood for the first time that one could successfully do truly scientific research not only in mathematics and natural sciences but also in the humanities. For many reasons, both scholarly and emotional, WG became my “bedside book” for many a long year. The work was not technical, all
Bin-Nun
Weinreich
(BN)
(WG)
Manaster Ramer (MRPC)
Timm (TG, TS)
This book
FIGURE .
Katz (1980–1995)
Wexler (1991, 2002)
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ideas by its author were easy to follow, and from a stylistic point of view it is an extraordinary achievement: for me, it was like reading a captivating novel. It is difficult to say how many times I read some of its chapters, but clearly the book in question was my introduction to the domain of historical linguistics. One aspect of the approach by Weinreich was particularly appealing to my own aspirations. He often used linguistic factors as a tool for addressing more general questions concerning those aspects of the history of Ashkenazic Jews that were of particular interest to me: the history of settlement and migrations. I dedicated to the memory of Weinreich my dictionary of Ashkenazic given names (), writing in its preface: His scholarly honesty and the absence of any ideological or political aspects in his discussion were exemplary. In contrast to some other authors, he never tried to imply any sensational fashionable theory from his results. The main ambition of this giant of Jewish philology concerned the search for truth. I spent my childhood and youth in the USSR, a country in which various aspects of everyday life were heavily related to the communist ideology. As a result, even in , only the political aspects of various ideologies were manifest to me. It was a few years later, when I had already started to work on some issues related to the history of Yiddish, that I realized that my previous understanding of what an “ideology” is was quite narrow. Gradually, I understood that ideology was of paramount importance for Weinreich’s theoretical constructions in linguistics. He was a brilliant representative of a “nationalist” school in Jewish studies that focused on the cultural aspects internal to Jewish communities, often disregarding external influences or, at least, placing them in a subordinate position with respect to internal Jewish developments. Weinreich was one of the most important contributors to what is called the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH to the history of Yiddish in this book. To make matters clear, for me terms like “nationalist” and “Jewish-oriented” when used in this context are neutral and do not give rise to any kind of moral judgment. They merely indicate the ideological preferences of an author that influenced his way of thinking and writing. For example, today I will still agree with all that I wrote in about Weinreich if I withdraw from the quote given above the passage “any ideological or.” I still admire his contribution: he was a pioneer in the domain of Yiddish studies, the first person to address numerous major issues. The state in which he left this scholarly domain is incomparable to that in which it was before the publication of his writings. His influence on all those scholars who worked in the same field after him was enormous. However, partly because I do not share the same ideology, a number of the most general aspects of the history of Yiddish are addressed in this book from fundamentally different methodological positions and consequently certain results are quite different from those obtained by Weinreich. General concepts necessarily influence the analysis of particular phenomena related to some specific systems of the language: lexicon, phonology, and grammar. As a result, it is no surprise that in the present study I had to revise numerous details of the analysis by Weinreich. He is the author most criticized in this book. However, the reader should not be misled by this fact. This work is not an example of intellectual “parricide” and there is no need to search for any late manifestation of an Oedipus complex by its author. Firstly, this criticism is only partly related to the difference in our methodological approaches. Weinreich simply was the person who wrote more than others on topics discussed in this book. Moreover, as already mentioned, numerous ideas of mine appeared when I was thinking about what he wrote on the subject. His knowledge and understanding are so deep that even ideas that are wrong or at least questionable are worth being discussed. I also believe that I would have overlooked numerous elements if they had not been addressed by him. I never forgot that WG was published posthumously. As a result, a number of positions revised in this book (and especially those that appear in his comments) may correspond to ideas that Weinreich did not have time to double-check. Secondly, it is precisely the differences between us that are emphasized here. The number of elements on which we agree (or, to put it more accurately, I just follow what
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Weinreich suggested) is significantly larger, while this agreement is mainly not indicated explicitly. His global vision of Ashkenazic history is not revised in this book. Quite on the contrary, his idea of the existence of three independent medieval Jewish cultural centers (Rhineland, WEST CANAAN, and EAST CANAAN) that contributed to the formation of modern Ashkenazic Jewry was one of my principal guidelines. During my study I found a large number of corroborations for this idea. The importance of the medieval Rhenish communities for the development of Ashkenazic culture in general and Yiddish in particular also received corroboration in this book, especially in the scheme of development of the Hebrew component and the propagation of given names. The structure of this book, with separate chapters for elements of Germanic, Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic origin, is directly due to Weinreich. Numerous pages of this book deal with the system of “proto-vowels” initially elaborated by the same scholar. The exemplary study of Yiddish by Jechiel Bin-Nun was prepared—under his original name Fischer—in Nazi Germany in the mid-s. Its first, historical part was published as a PhD thesis at Heidelberg University in . The second part, with the detailed phonetic analysis, was completed as a manuscript before World War II and was not published until . For various reasons, his work never received the attention it really deserved while it appears, in my opinion, to be the best analysis of the phonetic aspects of Yiddish ever written. I read his book after my first attempt to construct schemes of stressed vowels of Proto-WY and Proto-EY and discovered that in a number of respects our results, obtained independently, are similar. During the years that followed, I regularly consulted Bin-Nun’s work, finding numerous profound ideas he proposed and additional similarities in our approaches to the study of Yiddish. In the history of Yiddish studies, there are two PhD works that I cannot cease to admire because of their level of scholarship and the volume of innovative ideas: those by Bin-Nun and Dovid Katz (). Scholarly texts written by Dovid Katz were of particular importance for the preparation of this study. The entire Chapter was written as an attempt to challenge a number of his innovative views about the development of the Hebrew component of Yiddish. His emphasis on the importance of independent consideration of the contribution of two originally independent medieval Jewish groups in non-Mediterranean Europe, those of BNEY HES and BNEY KHES, was particularly fruitful. As I do for Max Weinreich’s positions, in this book I criticize the opinion by Dovid Katz on various topics. Nevertheless, this criticism is often due to the mere fact that he discussed a large number of fundamental questions on the history of Yiddish, regularly suggesting new and original solutions. I am sure that without having read his papers I would simply not have paid attention to numerous topics that today appear to me as major. His ideas have always been particularly thought-stimulating for me. I am greatly indebted to Erika Timm. Her various works on Yiddish history and especially her fundamental books covering the history of Yiddish phonology and orthography (TG), semantics and partly also lexicon and morphology (TS) were particularly helpful for the crystallization of numerous of my own ideas. Chapter dealing with the German component and in many respects central to the book would have been unthinkable without my detailed studies of her books and articles. In certain respects, Timm succeeded in combining the best achievements of the Germanistic school with those obtained by Weinreich and other representatives of the JEWISH-ORIENTED approach to Yiddish studies. During the years of preparing this book, she offered me all the texts she had published in this domain and shared with me a number of other works needed for my study and unavailable in Paris. My home library of different sources related to Yiddish studies, the regular use of which was extremely helpful in compiling this book, is mainly due to her gifts and loans. She was also regularly patient in answering my various questions. Erika Timm also read large portions of Chapter of this book and made numerous useful comments. In this work, I rarely appear as an opponent of either Timm or Bin-Nun. The views of these two scholars are particularly close to mine: I accept their general approaches and most of their particular
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results. Both wrote works that—to my mind—are among studies focused on purely linguistic questions that they try to cover in a particularly objective way. As indicated in the outline given earlier, Alexis Manaster Ramer is the fifth scholar whose ideas were of paramount importance for this book. However, unlike the four aforementioned linguists, in his case the influence was primarily due not to his publications but to my personal (electronic) contact with him. In , I was finishing writing my first paper about Yiddish (a). That text included no concrete linguistic results properly speaking: it only addressed major epistemological issues related to Yiddish studies. When the first draft was compiled, I discovered two papers by Alexis that dealt with topics very close to those discussed in my own paper. These works, together with my e-mail discussions with him about problems of common interest, were extremely stimulating. As a result, one section was totally rewritten by me, several important aspects of the initial text were changed, and two new sections introduced. We planned to prepare joint papers or even a book, with additional, specifically linguistic, sections written by Alexis. Unfortunately, serious health problems did not allow him to complete the project. During the period between and he was my linguistic mentor, with exchanges on a daily basis. Alexis shared with me a dozen unpublished papers written by him about various major aspects of the history of Yiddish. We often discussed topics covered by the texts in question. During the years that followed he continued to regularly share with me his new ideas. In total, since I have read hundreds of e-mail messages and unpublished pages written by Alexis. Before getting acquainted with him, I was rather reluctant to write on purely linguistic topics. All the studies I had published in previous years were focused only on onomastics, a field rather neglected by serious scholars and for that reason my background in the “hard” sciences only was not a serious handicap: the domain was almost unexplored. The situation in historical linguistics was totally different. A number of high level studies have been published by professional linguists. It was Alexis who directly encouraged me to overcome my “timidity,” recommending that I read a number of studies in general historical linguistics to compensate for my lack of training in the domain in question. It was also he who suggested that I focus my attention on Western Yiddish the existence of which I was simply unaware of ten years ago. He provided me with a detailed bibliography concerning Western Yiddish and sent me numerous scanned published texts. It was Alexis who suggested that I study in depth the book by Bin-Nun, the author he particularly appreciated. My understanding of the ideological aspects of the theories suggested by Weinreich is also due to a great extent to the influence of Alexis. His influence was particularly strong in Chapters and of the present book. He also suggested a number of fruitful ideas for Chapters and .1 As a result of our close contact over many years, it is difficult to me to tell my own ideas (often inspired by my correspondence with Alexis) from those directly suggested by him. In the book I tried to indicate explicitly by the abbreviation MRPC (personal communication with Manaster Ramer) his main ideas as used by me. However, their list is certainly not exhaustive. When I shared this concern with him, he suggested to me a solution saying: “It is easier to indicate explicitly what is not due to me.” The joke is to a large extent true. The reading of a number of works of other Yiddishists was particularly helpful when preparing this book. Among my favorite readings are Birnbaum , U. Weinreich a, , Herzog , , Leibel , and Jacobs . Yet, as explicitly indicated in the earlier outline, this book mainly ignores various texts published by Paul Wexler, starting with . The reason is simple: I read these writings and consider that their scholarly quality is so low and their
1 Our understanding of the history of Yiddish is fundamentally different in the context of the German component (covered by Chapter of this book).
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methodological drawbacks so striking that they do not deserve serious discussion by authors adhering to the realistic approach to science. For this reason, in this book readers will find my detailed discussion of the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES of the origins of Yiddish but no page dealing with the putative “Sorbian” or “Kievo-Polessian” origins of that language. Some results of this book should not be erroneously taken as corroboration of ideas by Wexler. For example, I stress the importance for the formation of modern Ashkenazic Jewry of two medieval Jewish centers: one in Central Europe (WEST CANAANITES) and one in Eastern Europe (EAST CANAANITES). To some degree, they remind one of Wexler’s Sorbs and Khazars in the territory of modern Ukraine. However, this similarity is merely superficial. My ideas represent here a direct continuation of those of Max Weinreich who (i) wrote about Jewish communities in Czech (and not Sorbian), and western Belarusian and western Ukrainian (and not Kievo-Polessian) territories; (ii) never claimed (unlike Wexler) that these communities mainly consisted of converts to Judaism; and moreover (iii) emphasized (unlike Wexler) the importance of Rhenish Jewry. A somewhat similar situation characterizes the notion of the polygenesis of Yiddish as a whole, with Eastern Yiddish (EY) and Western Yiddish (WY) initially belonging to different branches of the LANGUAGE TREE, one of the most important positions of the present book. This idea reflects theoretical constructions made in certain other studies. For example, the main aim for the book by Simon () was to show that EY and WY are different languages. Here again the similarity with results obtained in the present book is superficial. I consider that arguments advanced by Simon to corroborate her ideas are linguistically untenable, while her general understanding of the history of Yiddish is inadequate.
SCOPE AND METHODS
Table . lists the central topics addressed by this book and indicates major studies by other authors that also deal with the same topics.
TABLE . Topics addressed by various Yiddish studies Authors
History of Yiddish components German
Hebrew
Romance
Slavic
M. Weinreich (WG)
X
X
X
X
Birnbaum (, )
X
X
X
Bin-Nun (BN)
X
X
X
ProtoYiddish
History of settlement
X
X
U. Weinreich (a), Jacobs ()
X
Herzog (, )
X
X
X
X
Katz (–)
X
Timm (TG, TS)
X
X
X
This book
X
X
X
X X
X
X
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TABLE . Language parts addressed by various Yiddish studies Authors
Phonology
Morphology
Lexicon
Orthography
M. Weinreich (WG)
X
X
X
Bin-Nun (BN)
X
U. Weinreich (a), Jacobs ()
X
Herzog (, )
X
Katz (–)
X
Timm (TG, TS)
X
X
X
X
This book
X
X
X
X
X
Beyond the scope of this book are: • numerous sociolinguistic aspects of the history of Yiddish (amply addressed in WG, Birnbaum , Harshav , Fishman and , Katz , and Jacobs ); • synchronic linguistics of modern Yiddish, with a particular emphasis on its grammar (see a detailed coverage in Birnbaum , Katz b, Jacobs ; see also Krogh ); • contemporary history and future of the language (see a detailed popular coverage of these topics in Katz ; see also Krogh ). Table . lists parts of the Yiddish language addressed in this book and major studies by my predecessors. Beyond the scope of this book are: • the historical semantics of Yiddish, a domain that received its detailed coverage in TS; • the historical syntax of Yiddish, a domain that still awaits a detailed exploration.2 When addressing questions related to the history of various components and parts of the Yiddish language (with, as can be seen from Table ., a particular focus on phonology), several methods can be used. One corresponds to internal reconstruction: an analysis of the linguistic past of an item of a language from its characteristics at a later date. Comparative reconstruction represents another method. When applied to Yiddish, it consists of a comparison of its elements to their cognates in languages that were determinant for its components: German, Hebrew, various Romance and Slavic idioms. Both these methods are purely theoretical. The method of the analysis of early sources is more empirical though, of course, it also contains its theoretical element. This method was put forward in Germany in the s and received a particularly strong development at Trier University, with works written and edited by Erika Timm, Walter Röll, Simon Neuberg, and their colleagues. Table . indicates methods used in major Yiddish studies and the present book.
2
Certain elements were already covered by Santorini (, ).
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TABLE . Methods used in various Yiddish studies Authors
Internal reconstruction
Comparative reconstruction
Analysis of early sources
M. Weinreich (WG), Bin-Nun (BN)
X
X
U. Weinreich (a), Jacobs (), Herzog (, ), Katz (–)
X
Timm (TG, TS)
X
X
X
This book
X
X
X
Globally speaking, this book deals with the linguistic history of the inception and development of Yiddish dialects, as well as the conclusions that may be drawn about the history of Ashkenazic settlement and migrations based on this information. In its linguistic section (Chapters –), I deliberately tried to (i) ignore extra-linguistic aspects (including ideological, sociological, and psychological ones) that I see as being subjective, and (ii) render my analysis as objective as possible. In other words, a conscious attempt was made to be as neutral as possible in my attitude to the topics under analysis. For the formation of this approach, my background in mathematics and natural sciences was certainly of particular importance. It was also during my studies in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology that I followed, and particularly appreciated, an optional course on the epistemology of science. These few lectures focused on objective knowledge made a great impression on me and initiated my general profound interest in the domain of epistemology for scientific research. Later, I discovered studies by Popper who eventually became my favorite philosopher. These certainly provided a number of fundamental guidelines for my own studies. Evidently, explicit intentions to be neutral cannot guarantee actual neutrality. For example, I observed that I was getting irritated when reading Wexler’s conclusions based on his postmodernist constructions (which often can appear to a lay reader as extremely erudite and highly professional without realizing that “the emperor has no clothes”), Jerold Frakes’ () ideological attacks on the Germanistic school and realism in science,3 Shlomo Sand’s overt militant activism against any textbook history of the Jewish people and his selective way of quoting, or various kinds of conspiracy theories applied to the domain of Judaica.4 This irritation means that I was not neutral: these authors certainly touched on something psychologically important for me as a person, not just for me as a “neutral” scientist. Yet, fortunately, a consideration of several points shows that the possibility of being neutral is not utopian but can (to some extent) be real. Firstly, one can observe that texts causing a psychological effect (as those enumerated here) do not belong to the domain of historical linguistics properly speaking but rather to generalizations made in historiography and epistemology that are peripheral for this study. The center of gravity of this book
3
On the other hand, I particularly appreciate the remarkable compilations of Yiddish sources and Yiddish studies edited by the same author (EYT, Frakes ). 4 I never got irritated when reading the two authors who are the most criticized in this book: Max Weinreich and Dovid Katz. The existence of certain substantial differences in our approaches and the numerous results obtained by them that I revised here come within a domain that is psychologically neutral, that of normal scientific discussion aimed at finding arguments that are the most cogent from a logical point of view. Yet, no such discussion is possible in principle with Wexler or Sand: for these authors, the search for the objective truth is clearly secondary with respect to ideologies they follow. As a result, their analysis is profoundly biased.
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lies in historical linguistics, a field whose issues are rather technical, though the more technical a field is, the better the chances are of approaching it objectively. Secondly, I am not a speaker of Yiddish, just a reader. From my childhood, I remember only a dozen words (mainly highly idiomatic and emotional) used by my grandmother in certain contexts. My involvement in the domain of Yiddish studies results from a combination of factors related to my past. An interest in the etymologies of Jewish surnames (chronologically the first domain of my scholarly interest in humanities) represents a continuation of my main interests at secondary school: etymologies of toponyms and history (Jewish and Eastern European). Since numerous surnames are derived from given names, it was during my work on the etymology of surnames that I got interested in the etymology of given names. It was during the preparation of a dictionary of Ashkenazic given names () that I became interested in the history of Yiddish: the phonetic development of given names is parallel to that of words from the general lexicon. As a result, for me, topics related to Yiddish are primarily because of intellectual curiosity and are therefore psychologically neutral. Moreover, the mere fact that I was never trained in the domains of Judaica and linguistics in general, or Yiddish studies in particular, provided a certain distance between me and these domains. It allowed me to avoid the creation of a potential bias that is possible for students whose teachers adhere to a particular school that follows one specific paradigm. Thirdly, a major change of opinion that occurs in the course of a study may serve as a good measure of the absence of ideological bias. Indeed, if such a bias is strong, an author facing some factors that contradict his/her theory will often search for ad hoc subterfuges to save the theory in question. One example is the change of my attitude to the ideological aspects found in Max Weinreich’s writings and the abandonment—as a direct result of the recognition of his ideology— of a number of positions central to his approach. Another example corresponds to my attitude to the question of the monogenesis or polygenesis of Yiddish. When I wrote the paper published in I still believed in monogenesis though I would admit that no cogent arguments had been suggested to corroborate that idea. In my paper published in , I had already assumed the polygenesis of Yiddish. That position became even stronger in this book. The paper of suggested in turn a scenario according to which EY proto-vowels E and O merged with E and O, respectively, all as long monophthongs, at an early period of the development of EY. During the compilation of this book, I found a number of arguments showing that such a scenario is somewhat implausible. As a result, the idea of early merging was abandoned. In , I was still thinking about the possibility that Polish was never used as a first language by Jews who lived in medieval Poland. In this book, this possibility is seen as quite real.
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Acknowledgments I am grateful for the support and expert help of a number of people. As mentioned, I am particularly indebted to Alexis Manaster Ramer and Erika Timm. Andrey Rozenberg and Gary Mokotoff read large portions of the manuscript and made many important suggestions for its improvement. Sarah Benor and Marion Aptroot made numerous very useful comments concerning section . and shared with me materials written by them. Meyer Wolf took an active part in our electronic correspondence with Alexis Manaster Ramer during the period from to . Among other people who shared their competence by answering my electronic inquiries are Simon Neuberg (who also provided me with a number of materials related to Yiddish), Shaul Stampfer, Dovid Katz, Wolf Moskovich, Cyril Aslanov, Moshe Taube, Alexander Kulik, Jürg Fleischer, and Steffen Krogh. Mark Kiwitt supplied me with a bibliography concerning Old French. Ewa Geller shared with me a number of papers written by her and answered a number of questions relating to them. Jits van Straten submitted various materials concerning the Ashkenazic community of Amsterdam and discussed with me at length topics of mutual interest. Several people helped me to obtain copies of materials needed for this study that were unavailable in Paris: Olga Prigoniker (who offered me the book by Žirmunskij that I used extensively when writing Chapter ), Peter Brod, and Edward Luft. It goes without saying that any infelicitous statements made in this book (even if they appear in my quotes from personal communications with others) are solely the responsibility of the author.
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Abbreviations LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF YIDDISH AND/OR GERMAN
In Chapters and , various linguistic elements discussed receive an abbreviated code placed in braces in bold face. Examples: {C}, {L}, {v}. These codes start with a letter representing an abbreviation of the part of the language concerned. This letter also identifies the exact section where the element in question is discussed: • • • • • •
C (section .) and c (section .) = consonants V (section .) and v (section .) = stressed vowels U (section .) and u (section .) = unstressed vowels M (section .) and m (section ..) = morphology and grammar L (section .) and l (section ..) = lexicon G (section .) = orthography
Generally speaking, upper-case letters correspond to Chapter and lower-case letters refer to Chapter . The codes end with the sequence number of the element within the corresponding section. They are introduced to simplify making references to these elements. They are extensively used, especially in synthetic sections . and ..
EARLY ASHKENAZIC SOURCES
APf: Sefer masa u-merivah by Alexander ben Isaac Pfaffenhofen, a manuscript written in . The full text, written partly in Hebrew, partly in the vernacular German-based language of the author, appears in Turniansky . The author was born in Alsace and lived in the community of Treis, on the Moselle River. Aug: A translation of Torah, Haftarot (selections from the book of Prophets), and Megillot (the Five Scrolls) printed in Augsburg in . Numerous quotes appear in TS (referred to as A). See also Staerk and Leitzmann :–. BB: Bovo-bukh (, first printing in ), a chivalric verse romance by Elia Levita (–), the famous Jewish polymath (EYT –). Born in Ipsheim (Middle Franconia), he spent a large part of his life in northern Italy. Certain aspects of the language of this book are discussed in TG, Timm and Gehlen , TS (referred to as BB). On this author and his works see Weinreich :–. Be: A manuscript containing a glossary for several biblical books, kept in Berlin (Staatsbibliothek, Ms. or. quart ). It is assigned to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries (see Röll .:–, –, referred to as be). The information about Be was taken from Röll where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed. BM: Be’er Moshe ‘The Book of the Well of Moses’ by Moses ben Issachar Sertels (Prague, – ), a printed glossary of words found in Torah and Megillot (EYT –). A number of references to this glossary appear in TS (referred to as BM). Br: Brantshpigel ‘The Burning Mirror,’ written by Moses Henochs Altschul-Jeruschalmi of Prague for a female audience (first printing in Kraków, ) (EYT –). Certain aspects of this work
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Abbreviations
are discussed in TS (referred to as Br). The whole text appears in a Germanized transcription in Riedel , with the list of all Hebraisms (pp. XXIX–XLI) and a glossary of unusual words from the German component (pp. XLI–XLV). BZR, BZV, BZP: Three versions of Beria ve-Zimra, an anonymous Jewish tale (EYT –). The first one is a manuscript written during the s by Isaac bar Judah Reutlingen (whose place of residence and native town are both unknown). The two others are printed editions from Prague due to the Bak family ( and circa , respectively). Their whole texts, a detailed linguistic analysis, and the list of all Hebraisms appear in TG where they are referred to as R, V, and P, respectively. CC: A collection of eight manuscript documents—mainly poems—from the Cairo genizah kept in the Cambridge University Library (T.-S. . K.), often called Cambridge Codex (EYT –). In principle, the whole document is not necessarily the work of a single author: it could be due to one (or several) scribe(s) who copied poems by different authors. One of these texts displays the date of , while the year according to the Jewish calendar noted in another text points to /. Various aspects of this collection are often discussed in TS (where it is referred to as CH) and TG (where one of its poems is referred to as DH); see also Ganz :–, Neumann . The index of all words and rhymes can be found in Hakkarainen . DB: Sefer Dani’el, also called Daniel-bukh in Yiddish philology, a poem based on the narrative of the biblical Book of Daniel, first printing in in Basel (EYT –). The information is mainly extracted from the edition by Dreeßen and Müller , with a facsimile of the edition of (vol. ), phonetic transcription, and a glossary of all words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin (vol. ). A few features are also discussed in TS (referred to as Db). FF: Translation by Jacob Koppelmann of “Fox Fables” written in Hebrew by Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, a French-English Jewish author of the twefth century (EYT –). The translation was first printed in in Freiburg im Breisgau. In addition to fables translated from Hebrew, it includes thirty-one texts based on fables by German Christian authors (numbers –, –, and –). The translator originated from Brześć Kujawski, Poland. During the writing of this book (/) he was living in Prague. The whole original text together with its transcription in Latin characters, an analysis of its numerous aspects (including the linguistic ones), several indices, and a glossary appears in Schumacher . Fl: A manuscript glossary for the Book of Job from a collection held in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea, Plut. XI Cod. ), copied during the sixteenth century in northern Italy (Röll .:–, –, referred to as fl). The information on this source was taken from Röll where all glosses are indexed and some are discussed. GH: Memoirs/diaries of Glückel of Hameln, written in Hamburg in – and originally intended for her descendants (EYT –). The author (–) was born in Hamburg where she lived until . Landau , Klayman-Cohen , and Timm deal with various aspects of the language of that text. Numerous references are also found in TS (referred to as GlH). Gump: A manuscript with two poems written in in Venice by Gumprecht, a teacher from Szczebrzeszyn (southeastern Poland) (EYT –). The whole text appears in Stern . Several references to this work appear in TS (referred to as Gu) and TG. H: A manuscript translation of Psalms and Proverbs written in by Eliezer ben Israel from Prague and kept in Hamburg (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. ). References are taken from TS (referred to as Hbg). See also Staerk and Leitzmann :–. H: A manuscript with a glossary kept in Hamburg (Cod. hebr. ), compiled around . Large excerpts and an analysis of its language appear in Röll . The document presents translations of
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Hebrew words into the vernacular language of the compiler, mainly transcribed in Latin characters, a feature unique in early Ashkenazic sources. Only a few words are given in Hebrew letters (see Röll :, , ). The author was an expert neither in Hebrew nor in German spelling traditions. For this reason, the spelling of numerous Hebrew words does not fit the TIBERIAN tradition, while in his Latin transcriptions numerous unusual graphemes are present. Among the examples are: “ffff ” (beschaffffan, waffffen, scheffffer), “eùÿ” (eùÿer, heùÿser), dash over the final unstressed vowel (amtmā, lebandigē), “scht” and “schp” (schtarger, schtel, schprachen), “stt” (fenstter, megistter, manstter), and “gg” (enggil, jùngge, auggen, fingger). This absence of written expertise of the author represents an important advantage for Yiddish studies. We may consider that his spelling mainly follows his pronunciation (compare Röll :–). H: A manuscript with a biblical glossary kept in Hamburg (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. ), compiled between and . References are taken from Heide :– (referred to as Hmb), Heide (as Hmb.), TG (as HJ), and Staerk and Leitzmann :–. H: A manuscript biblical glossary from a collection held in Hamburg (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. ), copied most likely during the second half of the sixteenth century (Röll .:–, –, referred to as h). The information about H was taken from Röll where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed. HEZ: A poem entitled ‘A Beautiful New Song: What Happened in Hamburg’ by Ezekiel ben Zechariah (printed in Amsterdam in ). The whole text is given in Matut :–. HiP: A manuscript paraphrase of the biblical Book of Job written in by Abraham ben Samuel Pikartei in the neighborhood of Frankfurt. The author originated from the Mainz area. The original text and the phonetic transcription appear in Brünnel, Fuchs, and Röll , with its language discussed on pp. XXIII–XXIX. Numerous quotes appear in TS (referred to as HiP). KO: Kina al gezero takehilot di-k”k Okraine ‘Lament on the Ukrainian Massacre’ (Prague, ) (EYT –, with the complete text) by Joseph ben Eleazer Lipman Ashkenazi, the sequence of poems describing the massacres of Jews by Ukrainian Cossacks led by Bogdan Chmielnicki. The author of the Yiddish text was from the Moravian town of Kremsier (Kroměříž in Czech). Certain linguistic features of this text are discussed in Joffe :. Kr: Ayola sheluḥ a by Naphtali ben Asher Altschuller (Kraków, –), a printed biblical glossary (Röll .:–, –) where it is referred to as kr. The information about Kr was taken from Röll where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed. KrJO: A manuscript written at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Kraków presenting rules established in for regulating Jewish community activities. Its whole text appears in Bałaban . KrL: A manuscript translation of the holiday prayer book from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries kept in London (British Library, Add. MS ) (EYT –). It was compiled by Isaac ben Mordecai ha-Kohen of Kraków. LBr: A translation of the Torah and abridged Rashi’s commentary by Löb Bresch printed in Cremona in (EYT –; see also TG and a few references in TS where this source is referred to as LBr). A large part of this work represents a reprint of Aug. However, the rhymed preface is original. Le: A manuscript with a biblical glossary kept in Leipzig (Universitätbibliothek, Cod. ), most likely compiled at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Röll .:–, –,
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Abbreviations
referred to as Le). The information on Le was mainly taken from Röll where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed. Additional references were also found in Heide , TS (in both these works, referred to as L), Heide (as L.), TG (as LJ), Banitt . LekY: Leket yosher, a collection of notes by Joseph ben Moses (–) compiled during –. Born in Swabia, the author studied under Jacob Weil in Augsburg before moving to Austria where he was a pupil of Israel Isserlin (–) whose teachings he mainly exposes in the manuscript in question. The whole text is written in Hebrew. Only a few glosses correspond to the vernacular language of the author. Information on these glosses is taken in this book from TG and TS. M: A manuscript from the second half of the fifteenth century kept in Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. ) (EYT –). It contains an anonymous rhymed translation of the work Ben ha-melekh ve-ha-nazir ‘The Prince and the Hermit’ by Abraham ben Samuel ha-Levi ibn Ḥ asdai, which in turn represents a Hebrew version of an original Hindu tale (in the Christian tradition, it corresponds to the legend Barlaam and Josaphat). On this work see Dreeßen . Several dozen references appear in TG (referred to as Ben ha-melech) and TS (referred to as Bar). M: A manuscript with a biblical glossary (covering Isaiah and Twelve Minor Prophets) kept in Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. ), most likely compiled during the first half of the fifteenth century. References are taken from Heide :– (referred to as Chm), Heide (referred to as Chm.), TG (as MJ), TS (as Mün), and Grünbaum :–. M: A manuscript of Mayse-bukh ‘Book of Tales’ written in Rovere (northern Italy), circa , kept in Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. ). On this source see Timm (with the transcription of the first tale). References to this work also appear in TS (referred to a MR). Mel: Sefer melokhim ‘The Book of Kings,’ generally called Melokhim-bukh in Yiddish philology, is an epic poem first printed in in Augsburg (EYT –). The information is mainly extracted from Fuks with a facsimile of the edition of and a glossary. A number of features are also discussed in TS (referred to as Mel). An electronic version of the whole transcribed text was made available to me by Simon Neuberg. Mid: Sefer midot ‘The book of Virtues,’ an anonymous book on Jewish ethics, first printed in in Isny (EYT –). It is dedicated to a female medical practitioner in the town of Günzburg (Swabia). MinP: Minhagim ‘Customs,’ an anonymous manuscript held in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, Hebrew manuscripts, ; EYT –). It describes the religious customs following the order of the yearly cycle. It was compiled, most likely, in northern Italy during the fifteenth century (Turniansky and Timm :, Timm and Beckmann :). A number of features are discussed in Kosover (sometimes using modernized Yiddish spelling), TG, and TS (referred to as Minhagim Paris ). MM: Mirkevet ha-mishne ‘The Second Chariot’ by Rabbi Asher Anshel (Kraków, circa ; EYT –) represents a printed concordance of biblical words with their translation into the vernacular German-based language of its author. Numerous quotes from it appear in TS; some specific aspects are discussed in Heide , and TG (in all these studies, this source is referred to as MM). MOld: Seder nashim nida ḥ ala hadlaqat haner ‘Woman’s Commandments,’ a manuscript kept in Cambridge University Library () (EYT –). The author (or the scribe) is Menahem Oldendorf from Frankfurt.
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MPW: Many Pious Women, the second section of a manuscript compiled during the first half of the sixteenth century in northern Italy (most likely, in Venice). Samuel Levi the Scribe was either the name of its author or that of the copyist of the source text. The document purports to retell the lives of biblical women in the context of contemporaneous women. The whole original text, its translation into English, and numerous comments appear in Fox and Lewis . The same authors gave the name for that document whose title page was lost. MY: Melits yosher, a Torah commentary by Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi from Janów (Poland). Earliest printings are: Lublin and Prague / (Neuberg :). Certain linguistic aspects of this work are discussed in Neuberg . NH: Sefer safa berura ‘The Book of Pure Speech’ by Nathan Nota ben Moses Hanover (Prague, ) represents a quadrilingual printed Hebrew–“Ashkenazic”–(the vernacular language of the author)– Italian–Latin glossary (EYT –, Weinreich :–). The author came to Prague from Ukraine during the Cossack wars; he also lived in northern Italy. Ox: A manuscript biblical glossary held in Oxford (Bodleian Library, MS Opp. Add. ) was written in Piacenza (northern Italy) in / (Röll .:–, –, referred to as ox). The information about Ox was taken from Röll where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed. Par: An anonymous manuscript compiled in / in the Italian towns of Brescia and Mantua and currently held in Parma (Biblioteca Palatina, Cod. ). It contains a translation of Psalms and several other texts. Several references to this work appear in TG and TS (referred to as Parmaer Hs. and Par, respectively). PB: A collection of fifty-five private letters (of which four are in Hebrew with others written in a vernacular idiom) sent in from members of the Jewish community of Prague to those living in Vienna (EYT –). Their whole text (original and transcribed in Latin characters) appears in Landau and Wachstein . The same book also includes (pp. XXXIV–XLIX) an analysis by Landau of various aspects of the language of these letters and their glossary. Numerous references are also found in TG and TS (referred to as PB in both studies). PBK: A collection of five private letters (four sent from Tymbark near Kraków to Prague and one from Prague to Kraków) and two letters addressed to Jewish officials (both dealing with the community of Kraków, one sent to the town of Olkusz), all written in (EYT –, letter #). Their whole original text is included in Weinryb . Pr: Lekaḥ tov by Moses ben Issachar Sertels (Prague, ), a printed glossary of words found in the biblical books of Prophets and the hagiography (Röll .:–, –; EYT –). The same author also compiled BM. The information on Pr was taken from Röll where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source (referred to as pr) are indexed and some are discussed. Several references to this glossary appear also in TS (referred to as Lt). PuV: Pariz un’ Viene (circa , published anonymously in Verona in ), a chivalric verse romance (EYT –). It is mostly agreed that Elia Levita (see details about him in the description of BB) was the author of this book. The strongest arguments appear in Timm and Gehlen :– and Timm :CXXXVI–CXLV. Shmeruk () advocated, however, a theory on the authorship by one of Elia Levita’s pupils. The whole text is included in Timm (with several glossaries) and Shmeruk . Numerous aspects of the language of this book are discussed in Timm and Gehlen . Some features are also mentioned in TS (referred to as PuV). R: This biblical glossary from the collection by Johann Reuchlin (–) (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Reuchlin VIII) is considered to be compiled at the start of the fifteenth century (Röll .:–, –, referred to as R). The information on R was taken
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Abbreviations
from Röll , where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed. R: This biblical glossary from the collection by Johann Reuchlin (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Reuchlin IX) is generally assigned to the end of the fourteenth century. The information on R was mainly taken from Röll , where all glosses for the Book of Job appearing in that source are indexed and some are discussed (referred to as R). Additional references were also found in: Heide (referred to as R), TG (as KJ), Heide (as R.), and TS (as R). SAB: The Short Arukh, a manuscript from Bern (EYT –), represents a Hebrew–Aramaic dictionary whose Germanic glosses appear in their totality in Timm . Many of them are discussed there. This manuscript was compiled in the Cologne area in . SD: Shemot devarim //Nomenclatura hebraica (Isny, ), a printed dictionary by Elia Levita (see details about him in the description of BB) of his German-based vernacular language together with the Hebrew translations to which the editor Paul Fagius added the German and Latin equivalents (EYT –). SDEH: Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥ ayyim (printed in ), an anonymous medical manual by a Polish Jewish author. Quotes are taken from Geller and Geller . ShB: Shmuel-bukh, an epic poem first printed in in Augsburg (EYT –). The information is mainly extracted from Falk and Fuks with a facsimile of the edition of . A number of features are also discussed in TG and TS (referred to as SB and Sb respectively) and Simon :– . An electronic version of the whole transcribed text was made available to me by Simon Neuberg. ShBLR: a manuscript of Shmuel-bukh (see previous entry) compiled during the first half of the sixteenth century by Löw of Regensburg. Several references to this work appear in TG. ShL: Shvedesh lid, an anonymous poem (, Prague) describing the siege of Prague by the Swedes during the Thirty Years War (EYT –). The whole text and its linguistic comment appear in Neuberg . ShY: an anonymous translation printed in Kraków () of Shevet Yehudah ‘Sceptre of Judah’ by Solomon ibn Verga, a Sephardic historian (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) (EYT –). SSC: A literary source in Jewish vernacular language written on both sides of a slate shingle found in Cologne (thirty-eight lines). Timm () presents the reconstruction of the text and provides its linguistic and historical analysis. She assigns it to the period before . Teh: Sefer tehilim (Venice, ), a printed translation of Psalms by Elia Levita (see details about him in the description of BB) (EYT –). Tish: Sefer tishbi (Isny, ), by Elia Levita (see details about him in the description of BB) (EYT –), an alphabetically arranged printed glossary of terms from Rabbinical Hebrew. Non-Semitic words appearing in that source are discussed in Grünbaum :–. Witz: A poem entitled ‘A Fine Tale of King Arthur’s Court’ by Yozl (Joseph) ben Alexander Witzenhausen (printed in Amsterdam in ) (EYT –). The whole text, in its original version and the German transcription, is included in Wagenseil :–. The author was himself a printer in Amsterdam. ZuR: Tsenerene, a paraphrase of the whole Bible (EYT –) by Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi from Janów (Poland). Its first available printed version (, Basel) makes reference to earlier editions from Lublin and Kraków (with no date indicated). Numerous linguistic aspects of this work are discussed in Neuberg . Some additional features are mentioned in TS (referred to as ZuR).
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OTHER ABBREVIATIONS
Alem: Alemannic German AlsY: Alsatian Yiddish Bav: Bavarian German Boh: Bohemian German CB: Central Bavarian German CF: Central Franconian German CG: Central German CzY: Czech Yiddish DuY: Dutch Yiddish ECG: East Central German EF: East Franconian German EGY: Yiddish in eastern Germany EY Eastern Yiddish (subdivided into LitY, PolY, and UkrY) FrY: Franconian Yiddish HA: High Alemannic German Hes: Hessian German HG: High German LA: Low Alemannic German LitY: Lithuanian Yiddish MF: Moselle Franconian German MHG: Middle High German NB: North Bavarian German NHG: New High German OHG: Old High German PG: Palatinate German PolY: Polish Yiddish RF: Rhine Franconian German Rip: Ripuarian German SB: South Bavarian German Sil: Silesian German StY: Standard Yiddish Swab: Swabian German SwY: Swiss Yiddish SWY: Southwestern Yiddish (subdivided into AlsY, SwY, and FrY). Th: Thuringian German UG: Upper German UkrY: Ukrainian Yiddish UpS: Upper Saxonian German WCG: West Central German WY: Western Yiddish (SWY and WphY are its parts). WphY: Westphalian Yiddish. All the above abbreviations that include just one upper-case letter (namely Alem, Bav, Boh, Hes, Sil, Swab, and Th) are only used in the last column of the tables of Chapter . In the same column, the abbreviations for dialects are sometimes preceded by one of the following letters: e (eastern), n (northern), s (southern), w (western). For example, nHes (the northern part of Hessian German), swMF (the southwestern part of Moselle Franconian German). Table . enumerates High German (Hochdeutsch) dialects that are often mentioned in this book and shows their subdivisions.
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Abbreviations
TABLE . High German dialects English name
Abbreviation
German name
Modern country (cities)
. Central German
CG
Mitteldeutsch
. West Central German
WCG
Westmitteldeutsch
.. Central Franconian
CF
Mittelfränkisch
... Ripuarian
Rip
Ripuarisch
Germany (Cologne)
... Moselle Franconian
MF
Moselfränkisch
Germany (Trier)
.. Rhine Franconian
RF
Rheinfränkisch
... Palatinate German
PG
Pfälzisch
Germany (Speyer, Worms, Mainz)
... Hessian
Hes
Hessisch
Germany (Frankfurt, Fulda)
. East Central German
ECG
Ostmitteldeutsch
.. Thuringian
Th
Thüringisch
Germany (Erfurt)
.. Upper Saxonian
UpS
Obersächsisch
Germany (Leipzig, Dresden)
.. Silesian
Sil
Schlesisch
Poland (Wrocław)
. Upper German
UG
Oberdeutsch
. Bavarian
Bav
Bairisch
.. North Bavarian
NB
Nordbairisch
Germany (Regensburg)
.. Central Bavarian
CB
Mittelbairisch
Germany (Munich), Austria (Vienna)
.. South Bavarian
SB
Südbairisch
Austria (Innsbruck, Lienz)
. Alemannic
Alem
Alemannisch
.. Swabian
Swab
Schwäbisch
Germany (Stuttgart, Ulm, Augsburg)
.. Low Alemannic / Alsatian
LA
Niederalemannisch / Elsässisch
France (Strasbourg)5
5 Formally speaking, Low Alemannic covers () the main (northern) part of Alsace, and () areas near Lake Constance belonging to Germany (Ravensburg) and Austria (Bregenz). The southern end of Alsace belongs to High Alemannic. For the specific purposes of this book these nuances are of no importance.
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Abbreviations
xxix
TABLE . Continued .. High Alemannic / Swiss
HA
Hochalemannisch / Schweizerisch
Switzerland (Zürich, Bern)
. East Franconian6
EF
Ostfränkisch
Germany (Würzburg, Bamberg)
. Bohemian
Boh
Böhmisch
Czech Republic (Prague, Brno)
. Intermediate dialects
Baltic Sea
North Sea
Hamburg
Low Germ
an
Cologne
Th
Hes
Rip
Breslau
UpS
Si
le
s ia n
Frankfurt
MF PG LA
HA
EF Swab
Prague
Nürnberg
Bohemian
NB
Vienna
MB
SB
MAP . Dialects of German German dialects from Table ..
Map . shows the area of the German dialects listed in Table .. Unless specified explicitly, the information on realizations found in different German dialects was taken directly from their corresponding dictionaries.7
6 In certain works on German dialectology, East Franconian is formally considered to be one of the Upper German dialects rather than as a dialect intermediate between Upper and Central German (as is the case in this book). Sometimes, South Franconian (Südfränkish) is considered to be a separate dialect, transitional between EF and Swabian. It covers the areas around Karlsruhe and Heilbronn. The dialect in the city of Nürnberg is generally considered to be intermediate between EF and NB. 7 BaWB, BohWB, ElsWB, RhWB, ObSWB, PfWB, SchlesWB, SchwäbWB, and SchweizId. The main source for EF was Heilig .
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Introduction Today both general and linguistic literature agree that Yiddish is a separate language. Indeed, it was the vernacular language of a population group counting millions of speakers and even today several hundred thousand Jews use it as their mother tongue. It is an idiom with rich literary traditions of its own. Its vocabulary encompasses tens of thousands of items many of which are unknown outside of Yiddish. As is the case for numerous other languages with a long history, one can distinguish the standard literary language and a number of regional varieties (dialects) that are mainly spoken but also can be written. During the last one hundred years, detailed dictionaries of Yiddish have been published, allowing native speakers of many other languages to find Yiddish equivalents to words of interest. If the average lay person is questioned about what Yiddish is, the general answer will be that it is the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe, from where migration waves throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought the language to the Americas, Palestine/ Israel, Western Europe, South Africa, and Australia. The original Yiddishland is seen in the territories that now belong to Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, and Russia, that is, globally speaking those areas that during the second half of the nineteenth century were the western parts of the Russian Empire and the eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some more knowledgeable laymen will, perhaps, enlarge Yiddishland to cover (at least, partly) modern Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary, perhaps the Czech Republic too, and discuss the limited role of Russia properly speaking. General expressions like Yiddish culture, Yiddish literature, Yiddish music, or Yiddish humor invariably refer to Jews from the above regions or their descendants. Yet, for scholars specialized in Jewish studies there is no consensus on a number of major questions concerning Yiddish, its modern status, and its history, from its inception to the present day. The first series of controversial questions are “horizontal” for the history of Yiddish. They address the unity of all Yiddish varieties known in modern times in Europe. More specifically, they concern the status of the language of Ashkenazic Jews who from the end of the eighteenth century have lived in certain regions of modern Germany, France (Alsace), Switzerland, and the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and have spoken, at least among themselves, an idiom that is different from that of the surrounding Christian majority. Laymen are generally unaware of this fact about the recent cultural history of Western Europe. Linguists interested in the topic are not unanimous. Some of them, those whose opinion currently dominates this scholarly domain, speak about Western Yiddish (WY) and distinguish it from Eastern Yiddish (EY) that is specific to Eastern Europe. Some areas of Central Europe (typically Czech lands, Eastern Germany, parts of Hungary and Slovakia) are either viewed as zones of Yiddish dialects transitional between WY and EY or are merely assigned to WY. Other linguists, today just a small minority, consider the elements of Jewish vernacular in Western Europe as belonging to a separate language having no common ancestor with the Jewish idiom in Eastern Europe. Linguists from this group mainly use another terminology. To what the first group calls “EY” and “WY,” they often apply the terms “Yiddish” and “Judeo-German,” respectively. With the introduction of this terminology, one avoids possible confusion and makes the term “Yiddish” in many respects similar to the way laymen use it. Actually, here, one aspect of the difference between the two groups of scholars is purely terminological. The answer depends on the exact definition of the word “Yiddish.” However, some aspects of the “horizontal” issue in question are substantive.
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Introduction
xxxi
Another group of questions (also almost unknown to the general public) where the opinions of various linguists may differ substantially are “vertical” for the history of Yiddish. They concern the vernacular language(s) spoken by Jews in non-Mediterranean Europe from the Middle Ages until modern times and of which numerous written sources survive. Here the controversial topics address the links between, on the one hand, the language(s) in question and, on the other, either (i) modern varieties of Yiddish, or (ii) vernacular languages of non-Ashkenazic Jews, or (iii) various dialects spoken by German Christians. There is no consensus among scholars on any of these three aspects. For comparisons of the first group, answers vary in a continuum between “all related in some way to modern Yiddish” and “old documents from Western Europe have nothing to do with modern Yiddish.” For comparisons of the second group, scholars mainly try to establish links with Jews from France, Italy, the Slavic countries, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Attempts at comparisons of the third group involve using different geographical limitations (for example, the Rhineland and Bavaria) and/or chronological frameworks, mainly Middle High German (MHG) but also New High German (NHG) or Old High German (OHG). Providing reliable answers to these “vertical” questions allows us to evaluate the age of Yiddish. These answers also appear mandatory if one wishes to approach systematically the “horizontal” questions cited in the previous paragraph. The principal aim of this book is to sugggest cogent arguments for shedding more light on these controversial issues related to the inception of modern Yiddish dialects. Its main conclusions are as follows: • The consideration of Yiddish as primarily a “fusion” language rather than an idiom having a common ancestor with modern German is more ideological than linguistic. • If we take into account purely linguistic criteria, it appears that the age of Yiddish is often overestimated. It is worth speaking about Yiddish as a separate language only from the fifteenth century onward. Any placement of the “birth” of Yiddish in a period before the Black Death is speculative. • According to their main system-level linguistic features, modern EY and WY do not have a common Jewish ancestor. For this reason, in a purist linguistic approach, it would be more appropriate either to apply the term “Yiddish” only to the former or to call both of them Yiddish languages, not Yiddish dialects. The notions of “Proto-Yiddish” and Yiddish proto-vowels may be instrumental in a simplified description of the development of vocalic charts for the different Yiddish varieties. Yet, these notions do not correspond to any synchronic reality. • WY is mainly related to the East Franconian dialect of German. Vocalic charts of WY subdialects look as if they were derived from the same proto-chart but in reality their unity results from a gradual (unconscious) renorming. The “Proto-WY” has never existed. • EY has a Bohemian German basis. During its development, it underwent the significant influence of the Silesian dialect of German spoken by German colonists in medieval Polish towns. EY and Yiddish in Central Europe (the Czech lands, eastern Germany) have the same ancestor. • Yiddish in the Netherlands is a mixed dialect, with its original layer related to WY and its new system-level changes due to the influence of EY. • The partial unity of the German components of EY and WY is mainly related to close links between the German dialects underlying these varieties of Yiddish and extensive contacts between the people who have spoken EY and WY since the Middle Ages, as well as migrations between the corresponding areas. • A large part of the pan-Yiddish particularities that came into being as a result of internal Jewish developments first appeared in western Germany. The biblical translations extensively studied
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xxxii
• • • • • • •
•
•
•
Introduction
by boys in Jewish elementary schools represent the main channel through which these lexical, semantic, and morphologic idiosyncrasies became widespread in Ashkenazic communities in various corners of Europe.8 Texts written in the vernacular language(s) spoken by Ashkenazic Jews before the sixteenth century are generally closely related to the German dialects used by the Christian majority in the areas where the Jewish authors in question originated. The Hebrew components of both EY and WY have common origins. A similar unity was already globally valid in the Middle Ages for various Jewish communities speaking a vernacular German-based language. The correlation between the openness of the stressed syllable and the length of its vowel observed in the Hebrew component of Yiddish is independent of the medieval lengthening of short vowels in open syllables in High German dialects. The modern Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew has a basis that is related not to the TIBERIAN but to a PALESTINIAN-like system. For Ashkenazic Jews, the passage to a system looking as if it were based on the TIBERIAN system took several centuries. The vocalic chart of the German component of the Ashkenazic vernacular speech was a decisive factor in this passage. Numerous idiosyncrasies of the modern Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew spread from Western Europe to Central and Eastern Europe. Often they are due to the oral tradition that already existed in the Middle Ages. Yet, a number of fundamental new norms came into effect in the Danubian area earlier than in the Rhenish communities. WY has a small Old French substratum. Its existence is due to the important role played in Rhenish communities by those Jewish speakers who gradually shifted from the Jewish ethnolect of French to the Jewish ethnolect of German that represents the ancestor of WY. Yet, in a purist linguistic approach, it is inappropriate to speak of a Romance component in modern Yiddish. The elements of Romance origin play a very limited role in the lexicon of WY (and, because of contacts between western and eastern Jewish communities, in EY too) and had no influence on the phonology, morphology, or syntax of modern varieties of Yiddish. EY (as a whole) has a small Old Czech substratum. Its existence is due to the important role played in the formation or development of communities in Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (i) by Slavic-speaking Jews (WEST CANAANITES) in the formation of the medieval Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia, and later, (ii) by Jewish immigrants from the Czech lands. The communities in Bohemia and Moravia gradually shifted from the Jewish ethnolect of Old Czech to the Jewish ethnolect of German that represents the ancestor of EY, in many systemic aspects different from the German dialect of their Rhenish coreligionists. However, structurally speaking, this Old Czech layer is marginal for the Slavic component of modern EY. As a whole, the rich Slavic component, responsible for a significant part of EY vocabulary and having strong influences on other subsystems of EY (including morphology and syntax) is due to close contacts between EY and the vernacular languages of the surrounding Slavic Christian population in the territories of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Slavic component of EY results from an extensive borrowing from three Slavic languages: Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. The eastern part of EY has a tiny substratum that is due to the legacy of the medieval Jewish communities that lived in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus and would use East Slavic languages in their everyday life (EAST CANAANITES). These Jews gradually shifted to EY, merging with their Yiddish-speaking coreligionists coming from the West.
8 Contrary to the other conclusions of this list, the results here are taken directly from TS. As far as this specific topic is concerned, the present book does not make any additional contribution.
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Introduction
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All the topics in the aforementioned list correspond to the domain of (historical) linguistics. Yet, the history of Ashkenazic Jewry is closely related to the history of Yiddish, the language that for centuries was used in the everyday life of Jews in the communities identified as ASHKENAZIC. As a result, it is natural for linguistic literature on Yiddish to address the history of Jewish settlement in Europe. Here the opinions of linguists who have written on these subjects since the s often deviate dramatically from the general paradigm that currently dominates the historiography, namely the concept that from the Middle Ages until the mid-seventeenth century the settlements were primarily related to the migrations of Ashkenazic Jews from west to east. A number of these opinions are rather controversial. This book (and, more precisely, its Appendix C) addresses these important questions. Here are its main conclusions: • Modern Ashkenazic Jews mainly descend from the merger of three principal groups of Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in non-Mediterranean Europe, namely () those from the Rhineland (ASHKENAZIC Jews properly speaking), () those from the Czech lands (WEST CANAANITES), and () those from the territory of modern Ukraine and Belarus (EAST CANAANITES). No information in our possession allows us to state that any of these three groups was formed by migrants belonging to another group. • Migrants from northern France played an important role in the formation of medieval Rhenish communities. On the other hand, no linguistic data corroborates any hypothesis about the active participation of Jews from Italy in the same process. Migrations of Italian Jews to the Rhineland may be limited to a few individual families. • Medieval Danubian Jewish communities in Austria and the Bavarian city of Regensburg are unlikely to have been originally formed by Rhenish Jews. They were closely related to medieval WEST CANAANITES who populated a large area of Central Europe covering eastern Germany (Saxony, Brandenburg) and western Poland. • In the Middle Ages, Franconia was mainly populated by Rhenish Jews rather than by those from the Danube area. • EAST CANAANITES were important for the Jewish settlement in southeastern regions of the Polish Kingdom (Red Ruthenia) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. These communities were joined by WEST CANAANITES and later by Ashkenazic Jews also. As a result, Jews who in modern times lived in Eastern Europe and spoke EY have heterogeneous roots. In this region, the contribution of the Rhenish communities was not simply cultural, carried through religious books of western origin and a handful of highly influential rabbis from western Germany. Yiddish given names represent the most important argument corroborating the route (with a number of intermediary steps) from the medieval Rhineland to Eastern Europe. This book contains six chapters and three appendices. Chapter discusses the major methodological aspects of the search for Yiddish origins and presents the main general outlines of the development of Yiddish. Detailed discussion of their principal elements follows in other chapters. Chapter deals with the German component, by far the most important in Yiddish. Chapter considers the Hebrew component. Chapter discusses the history of the Romance elements in Yiddish. Chapter approaches the most important aspects of the history of the Slavic component. Chapter covers phonetic developments in Yiddish dialects. Their analysis is necessary in order to classify these dialects. Appendix A discusses the dialect of Yiddish described in one source from the eighteenth century that is important for the history of WY. Its analysis is required to be able to use this source as evidence for the existence of certain specific WY features. Appendix B covers historical details—rarely found in modern studies— concerning the presence of German colonists in medieval Polish towns. Their dialect played an important role in the development of EY. Appendix C addresses the question of the origins of Ashkenazic Jews and the way linguistic data can be used to shed light on this controversial topic.
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1 Main concepts and classifications .
SCHEMES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF YIDDISH
.. The Rhine hypothesis Classical monographs about Yiddish written by Max Weinreich (WG), Solomon Birnbaum (), and Jechiel Bin-Nun (BN) all support the idea of the Rhenish origin of those Jews who in vernacular spoke the language that later gave rise to modern Yiddish. This theory of the history of Yiddish and Ashkenazic Jewry—later labeled the RHINE HYPOTHESIS—includes the following main positions: • The first speakers of Yiddish lived in the Middle Ages in the Rhine-Moselle valley. This region is symbolically designated as the “cradle” of Ashkenazic Jewry. • The Jewish population of the Rhineland was mainly due to migrants from northern France and, perhaps, Italy. • Migrants from the Rhineland were mainly responsible for the creation of Jewish medieval settlements in other German provinces. • When Yiddish-speaking migrants from western Germany moved eastward to the Slavic territories, they merged there with local pre-Ashkenazic Slavic-speaking Jews. • The German component of Yiddish results from the merger of linguistic elements of various High German dialects. Among the three authors in question, Weinreich presents the most detailed coverage of these topics. Figure . presents in a synthetic way his theory about the inception and the development of Yiddish.1 Weinreich distinguishes four major periods in Yiddish history. The first of them, EARLY YIDDISH (from which no written documents survive) starts in the ninth century with the genesis of the fusion language in Jewish communities in one part of the Rhineland created by immigrants from France and Italy and marked by multilingualism. In medieval Hebrew documents written by Jews from France and western Germany, the area in question is usually referenced as LOTHER (לותיר, לותר, לותיירa).2 Several stock languages participated in this genesis (at the top of Figure . they have the subscript S that comes from the word “stock”): () Vernacular Judeo-Romance languages of the two groups of Jewish immigrants (RS in the scheme, where “R” is an abbreviation of “Romance”). Medieval Jewish literature uses the term ( ַלַעזLaaz), literally ‘foreign language’ in Hebrew, to designate Romance languages (and Rashi clearly applies it to Old French), while in the Mishnah this word denotes the Greek language. In the Bible (Psalms :), another word having the same root is found: ( ל ֵֹעזLoez). Weinreich reuses it and coins new terms to designate the above spoken languages: WESTERN LOEZ (Judeo-French) and SOUTHERN LOEZ (Judeo-Italian). 1 This scheme does not appear in his writings. However, it can be constructed based on explicit statements presented in various texts compiled by him, with the most synthetic discussion appearing in WG :–. Weinreich does not himself introduce the numerous abbreviations that appear in this scheme and whose explanations appear below in this section. 2 See details in Gross :, WG :, :.
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Main concepts and classifications GS
HS
RS (Loez) Early Yiddish A
Early Yiddish
HE
GE
Early Yiddish B
Old Yiddish
9th
1100
1250
Old Yiddish GO
HO + RO+ SO 1500
Middle Yiddish Middle EY
Middle WY GMW + HMW
IM
GME +HME +SME
Middle Yiddish
New Yiddish
1750
FIGURE . Origins of Yiddish according to Weinreich
() Hebrew as the common language of culture for both Jewish groups in question (HS in the scheme, with “H” for “Hebrew”). () Local WCG dialects (GS in the scheme, with “G” for “German”). Weinreich does not declare explicitly any of the above stock languages to be significantly more important than any others for the inception of Yiddish because for him this language is a fusion idiom par excellence.3 However, he places a particular emphasis on the first source, that is, the two Judeo-Romance languages, because contrary to the two other sources, these, exactly like Yiddish, (i) were spoken in everyday life only by Jews and (ii) themselves represented fusion languages. Weinreich also distinguishes two sub-periods: EARLY YIDDISH A (before circa ) and EARLY YIDDISH B (from to ). During the first sub-period, the Yiddish language is limited to communities from one compact area of the Rhineland. At the end of this period, a fusion of Romance, Hebrew, and German elements is completed. Within the German component, Weinreich speaks about the partial fusion of items coming from the opposite corners of WCG: northern (Cologne) and southern (Mainz, Worms, and Speyer). Yiddish becomes the only vernacular language of local Jews. During the second sub-period, the Ashkenazic vernacular idiom expands its area southward and eastward into territories adjacent to the Main, Upper Rhine, and Upper Danube where local Christians were using such dialects of German as Alemannic, East Franconian, and Bavarian. As a result of contacts between Jewish migrants and these Christians, a partial adaptation to the coterritorial dialects would take place within the German component. Only parts of the WCG items were replaced with corresponding items from dialects spoken by the Christian majority in new places. Weinreich conventionally calls this the LAW OF REPLACEABILITY. In Figure ., these new German influences are presented as the arrow GE (where the subscript E comes from the first letter of the expression EARLY YIDDISH). He postulates a fusion between various German dialectal elements
3 Using the terminology of Thomason and Kaufman (:), such languages with several ancestors can be called “non-genetic.” They cannot be properly classified following a traditional LANGUAGE TREE model.
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Schemes of the development of Yiddish
and assumes that the cardinal difference between the German component of Yiddish and the coterritorial regional variants of German came into being as early as the EARLY YIDDISH B period. Though Weinreich does not explicitly write about this, one can, nevertheless, deduce from his general ideas that during the same period Yiddish continued to borrow from Hebrew additional elements (the arrow HE in the scheme). Toward the end of this period, in both German and Hebrew components the systemization in many aspects similar to the modern one was completed. The second period according to Weinreich’s classification is called OLD YIDDISH. It lasts from the mid-thirteenth century until circa . It is distinguished from other periods by several linguistic and extra-linguistic peculiarities. At the beginning of this period, because of the geographic expansion of Ashkenazic settlements, Yiddish already became coterritorial with all High German dialects. These dialects continued to exert some influence on Yiddish (arrow GO in Figure ., with the subscript being the first letter in the word “Old”). During this period, Yiddish was established in northern Italy (RO in Figure . corresponds to the influence of Italian) and came into contact with several Slavic languages (SO). Important changes occurred in the phonology of the Hebrew component. Almost all written sources correspond to Jewish authors from Western Europe. During the MIDDLE YIDDISH period one can speak about two major subdivisions: WY and EY, with marked differences between them. For this reason, in Figure ., all languages mentioned during this period have the second subscript, either W or E, respectively, while their first subscript M comes from the word “Middle.” The whole period (that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century) is that of “bicentricity”: the western and the eastern branches were almost equally important for the development of the language. WY continued its expansion. Covering Silesia, Bohemia-Moravia, Austria, and Hungary from earlier times, during the sixteenth century it was established in the Netherlands and reestablished in Alsace and Switzerland (with the return of Jews to those areas) coming to Hamburg during the following century. It was during this period that the EAST CANAANITES were completely absorbed and numerous new settlements appeared in Eastern Europe. Thanks to contacts between WY and EY, internal to Ashkenazic Jews (arrow IM, with “I” as in “Internal”), certain elements of WY penetrated EY and vice versa. At the beginning of NEW YIDDISH period, differentiation in EY subdialects was completed. This period is characterized, on the one hand, by the decline of WY and by the large geographic expansion of EY. Almost all literature is due to writers of EY. The approach by Birnbaum (), though significantly less detailed in this specific theoretical domain in comparison to that by Weinreich, has many important features in common with it (p.). One difference in comparison to Weinreich is purely terminological: instead of WESTERN LOEZ, Birnbaum uses his own term, ZARPHATIC, to designate Judeo-French. Another difference is substantive: he excludes Judeo-Italian (ITALKIAN, according to his own terminology, p. ) from the list of the stock languages that contributed to the genesis of Yiddish. Like Weinreich, Bin-Nun (BN –) also suggests considering several periods in the history of Yiddish. His classification, included in his thesis published in (under his original name Fischer), presents a global picture that in many respects is similar to that by Weinreich (see Figure .). A number of differences can be seen as terminological rather than substantive. According to Bin-Nun, initially German Jews spoke a language that was different from that used by their Christian neighbors only by the presence of a few specifically Jewish words.4 Bin-Nun conventionally labels this language as JEWS’ GERMAN (Judendeutsch). Gradually, the number of these specifically Jewish elements became larger. These innovations, internal to Jewish communities in
4 He does not say this explicitly, but for this initial stage, one can imagine that he mainly means those of Hebrew origin.
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Main concepts and classifications High German
H
Jews’ German
Jewish German
Proto-Yiddish
Proto
13th14th
Yiddish Proto-WY
Proto-EY
1750
FIGURE . Origins of Yiddish according to Bin-Nun (Fischer)
Germany, corresponded to words of German origin as well as some Germanized Romance elements taken from Church Latin (BN –). During the period of JEWISH GERMAN (Jüdischdeutsch) the number of such items was already significant. Still this language followed all shifts within the German language. Only during the next period (the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries) did a specifically Jewish language arise (PROTO-YIDDISH), autonomous from German in its development. As can be seen from the above exposal, the most important difference between Weinreich and BinNun consists in their concepts of what is medieval YIDDISH. For the former scholar, Jews in Germany spoke a fusion language from the very beginning, and for this reason he uses the term YIDDISH even when referring to the language spoken by Rhenish Jews during the ninth–tenth centuries. For the latter, during the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE Jews in western Germany spoke German.5 Contrary to Weinreich who, when speaking about the development of Yiddish refuses to give priority to the influence of any particular German dialect, Bin-Nun (BN ) mentions three main sources: Franconian and Alemannic (whose traces in modern times are almost lost), Bavarian (most important for the development of WY), and East Central German (with particularly large impact on EY). In her general approach, Timm (TG, TS) adheres to the main theoretical constructions of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS by Weinreich and Birnbaum. The same is true for Herzog () and Gold (). The position of Manaster Ramer () is in many aspects close to the same group of scholars. He also speaks about the unity of WY and EY and relates Yiddish to medieval Jewish communities from western Germany. On the other hand, he questions the current definition of borders between WY and EY considering that the actual separating isogloss should be placed internally to the area of modern WY. Globally speaking, the above opinions describe a monogenesis of Yiddish. The only element to question this “elegant” picture is the existence of the community of Regensburg known already
5
We will review this distinction in more detail in section ...
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Schemes of the development of Yiddish
during the tenth century, that is, during the EARLY YIDDISH A period according to Weinreich’s classification. This town is situated in northern Bavaria, a long distance from LOTHER/the Rhineland. Weinreich regularly mentions this fact (WG :, :). In order to avoid the necessity of speaking about a polygenesis, he conjectures, without providing any argument, that the first Jewish settlers in Regensburg came there from the Rhineland (WG :–). A totally different solution of the Regensburg issue yielded the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS.
.. The Danube hypothesis The partly linguistic, partly historical positions of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS agree with the claims of the dominating paradigm in Jewish historiography. Yet, if papers and books written by specialists in Yiddish linguistics published during the last twenty years of the twentieth century (with the notable exception of TG) are studied, it will become clear that the situation in modern Yiddish linguistics is different from that in historiography. Almost all these linguistic works dealing with the origins of Yiddish contradict the earlier analysis. The first paper to start this series of studies opposing the views of Weinreich was an article by Faber and King (). In the following years additional contributions by Katz (, a, b, a, b), King (, ), Eggers (), and several other linguists, created a new viewpoint that is usually called the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS. The theory partly represents the development of the ideas, both linguistic and historical, formulated by Mieses (). This author postulated the Austro-Bavarian origins of Yiddish and suggested that modern Ashkenazic Jews are not related to those who lived in the Middle Ages in northern France and in the Rhineland, but are mainly related to medieval Jewish communities in Austria (primarily, Carinthia and Styria) and Bavaria.6 According to the linguistic part of this theory, modern Yiddish and German dialects spoken in the Rhineland have virtually no common aspects, while there are a certain number of similarities between Yiddish and the dialect spoken by Gentiles in Bavaria and Austria (normally called Bavarian, or Austro-Bavarian). Consequently, Yiddish originated in Bavaria with the town of Regensburg designated as its symbolic cradle. On the other hand, the language spoken by Jews in the Rhineland during the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE had no influence on Yiddish. Figure . presents a summary of concepts exposed in papers written by Katz. From writings of Jewish authors from the fifteenth century, we know about the existence of two groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews: BNEY HES and BNEY KHES and the fact that differences existed between their respective religious rites and their pronunciation of Hebrew.7 Katz asserts that these two groups were linguistically independent. For the genesis of the vernacular language of BNEY HES, he globally accepts the theory suggested by Weinreich for the inception of EARLY YIDDISH. Yet, for the language of BNEY KHES he proposes totally different sources: another vernacular language spoken by Jews (Judeo-Aramaic, with Hebrew elements incorporated in it, instead of LOEZ) and another kind of German (dialects spoken by the Christian population in the territories adjacent to the Danube
6 He searched the sources of these communities in Italy, Hungary, and Byzantine Balkans. Mieses (:–) also writes about other medieval communities in the territories of modern Ukraine (of Byzantine and Persian origins) and Jews expelled from England who, according to him, settled in northern Germany. 7 The detailed discussion of these terms appears in sections .., .., and ... In this book, these expressions are transcribed the way they are rendered in modern Yiddish. Though this approach is anachronistic and does not conform to the way medieval German Jews would pronounce them, it has the advantage of using the same terms as those that appear in the works of Katz, that is, the author who among Yiddish linguists wrote more than any other on this subject. Among other transcriptions used are: Het-Leute and Chet-Leute (Güdemann :), bene ̇ He ̇ss and bene ̇ Ḥ e ̇ss (TG ).
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Main concepts and classifications Rhenish German
Danubian German
Loez
Language of Bney Hes
Judeo-Aramaic
1 000 years ago
Language of Bney Khes = Proto-Yiddish
WY
EY
FIGURE . Origins of Yiddish according to Katz (–)
instead of those from the Rhineland). Here, contrary to King, Katz (a:) does not advocate the Bavarian source properly speaking. Instead he refers to the general area southeast of the Rhineland, encompassing such communities as Regensburg, Prague, Vienna, Nürnberg, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Like Weinreich, Katz (:) posits the genesis of this language, PROTO-YIDDISH, to the period when Jews arrived in the area (“, years ago,” to use his own words). During the time of their co-existence, the languages of the two Ashkenazic groups had some influence on each other (see the upper double-pointed dashed arrow in Figure .). Gradually, at the end of the Middle Ages, the language of BNEY HES died out, while that of BNEY KHES represents the common ancestor for WY and EY. The disappearance of the Western Jewish language was due to the vicissitudes of history such as Jewish massacres perpetrated between and and, in Katz’ own words (a:–), following the “meteoric rise of Regensburg and the East within the Ashkenazic cultural panorama” which resulted in the gradual adoption of Yiddish by surviving Westerners.8 Historical assertions by the proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS are principally derived from the linguistic ones. Due to the close link between Yiddish and Ashkenazic Jews, their theory would suggest that the majority of the Ashkenazic Jews in the world today are related to the communities from the Danube area. Faber and King () use population data to show that the medieval Jewish population of the Rhine-Moselle valley could not explain the large number of Jewish inhabitants in various medieval German provinces and especially that—several centuries later—in Eastern Europe. The principal conclusions of the proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS are: • The communities from the Rhine and the Danube regions were independent, the latter being mainly due to migrations from northern Italy, Slavic countries, the Balkans, and the Middle East.9
8 This idea is closely related to the concept by Mieses (:) who writes that after the Black Death the destroyed western communities were repopulated by Jews from Bavaria who brought their German dialect to Western Germany (including Frankfurt). 9 Only Wexler () suggests that Jews in southern Germany appeared not after migrations but following the conversion of local non-Jews, namely Sorbian pagans. His justification for this bold conjecture is extremely weak. In some aspects, his linguistic theory of the origins of Yiddish (, ) is close to the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS: he also views Rhenish and Danubian Jews as distinct historically and linguistically. However, his original linguistic arguments
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Schemes of the development of Yiddish
• The communities from Franconia were mainly due to migrants from the south, that is, from Bavaria. For example, Katz (a:) notes that at one point the Jewish religious rites practiced in Regensburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and Nürnberg (the two latter localities historically belonging to Franconia) were different from the WEST EUROPEAN rites peculiar to the Rhineland. On the other hand, they were close or even identical to that of Bohemia and Austria, called the EAST EUROPEAN rite. These assertions imply that the role of Rhenish Jews in the settlement of Eastern Europe, dominated by Yiddish, was minimal and their influence was mainly cultural. As a result, the medieval communities from the Rhine-Moselle valley represent an isolated branch on the genealogical tree of European Jewry—the branch that was at some time submerged by the numerically larger southern German Jewish population. Eggers () suggests a later development of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS enlarging the “cradle” area of Yiddish to include Bohemia. According to him (pp. –, , –), Yiddish was born during the twelfth–thirteenth centuries in the area that encompasses Bavaria and Bohemia. In the thirteenth– fourteenth centuries, Jewish migrants from that area came to Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His general concepts also include the idea of two layers in the history of Yiddish. During the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries the first, Bavarian, layer of Yiddish underwent the influence of Central German that was of particular importance to the Yiddish dialect spoken in Poland and Ukraine. To draw such conclusions, Eggers: (a) discerns a number of phonetic and grammatical similarities between modern Yiddish and the Bavarian dialect of German; (b) notes that Bavarian was also spoken by Christians in a part of Bohemia; (c) shows that the most ancient Yiddish words of Slavic stock (that he considers adstratal and not substratal) are likely to be related to Old Czech; (d) discusses the close contacts that existed in the Middle Ages between the Jews from Prague and those from Bavaria. Jacobs (:–, ) also globally adheres to the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS. However, he does not consider it to be opposing the RHINE HYPOTHESIS but rather suggesting an adequate important improvement of the scenario conjectured by Weinreich. As a result, in various sections of his exposal of the history of Yiddish, Jacobs relies heavily upon concepts elaborated by Weinreich including both particular and general results. The latter include the periodization of this history that is directly taken from WG (compare pp. –).
.. Suggested general scheme Figure . presents the general outline of the Yiddish history as suggested in this book. In numerous aspects it represents a synthesis of theories by: • Weinreich (three originally independent Jewish groups that gradually merged to form Ashkenazic Jewry; substratal character of Romance elements); • Bin-Nun (High German ancestor of Yiddish instead of the “fusion” approach and, consequently, a relatively younger age of Yiddish in comparison to that suggested by other scholars; independent German dialects as primary sources for WY and EY); • Katz (the language of medieval Rhenish Jews not being the ancestor of EY). possess striking methodological issues and, exactly like his totally biased historical concepts, are not worth discussing here.
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Main concepts and classifications Old French
MHG GR
GW
R (+H)
Old Czech
GE H+R
I
« Proto-WY »
G+H+R
9th
East Slavic
PreYiddish
S (+H) Proto-EY
15th
G+H+S
I
S (+H) G+H
WY
EY I
S+H
FIGURE . Origins of Yiddish suggested in this book
It also has major differences in comparison to all theories considered in the two previous sections, primarily, because of its polygenesis approach, with WY and EY having no common Jewish ancestor (see details in section .). The scheme in Figure . uses conventional symbols and abbreviations of which an important number were used in Figure .: • Vertical arrows ( ) show the LANGUAGE TREE relationships between Jewish idioms (these idioms are represented by light-colored rectangles). • Vertical dashed arrows ( ) show links with non-Jewish idioms (dark-colored rectangles). • Combinations of two arrows ( ) show branching of Jewish idioms into dialects. • Horizontal simple arrows ( ) correspond to borrowings. • Horizontal double arrows ( ) correspond to shifts of Jewish groups from one German dialect to another. • Horizontal triple arrows ( ) correspond to shifts of Jewish groups to other languages. • Horizontal double-pointed dashed arrows ( ) designate mutual borrowings between idioms of various groups of Ashkenazic Jews. • Upper-case letters represent abbreviations of the following: German (G), Hebrew (H), Romance (R), Slavic (S), and internal contacts between Ashkenazic Jews (I). The scheme indicates the existence of several periods in the history of Yiddish. During the PREYIDDISH period, Jewish communities (whose members were ancestors of modern Ashkenazic Jews) lived in three geographically separate areas and were using in their vernacular life languages that were different from those of their Gentile neighbors only by the presence of some Jewish lexical (and onomastic) items. The Jews in question were: (i) those from western Germany, (ii) WEST CANAANITES from the Czech lands, and (iii) EAST CANAANITES from East Slavic (Ukrainian and Belarusian) territories. The first group mainly shifted from the Jewish ethnolect of Old French to German dialects of the Rhineland (GR in the scheme) upon immigration to German lands from northern France.
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Schemes of the development of Yiddish
(It is possible that these Jews merged with a small group of German-speaking coreligionists who had lived in these territories since Roman times.) During the following centuries, various Ashkenazic groups that principally descended from these Rhenish communities and migrated into other German territories would shift their idioms to the German dialects spoken in the new territories (GW in Figure .). German-speaking Jews were still in contact with their French-speaking coreligionists. For this reason, they would borrow additional Romance elements. Hebrew elements in the vernacular Jewish speech of that period came from two sources. Some of them were initially brought by migrants from northern France before they shifted to German. Others were incorporated into the everyday idiom from the holy language of Judaism that, though not vernacular, was actively used on different occasions. At some moment, a new language, Proto-WY,10 was created whose development was already independent of that of German dialects used by Christian neighbors. In this specifically Jewish language, an original synthesis of several High German dialects took place, with East Franconian being the most important donor. The odds are high that communities of EAST CANAANITES were of heterogeneous origins and therefore there is no reason to ask the question about the language they spoke before shifting to East Slavic, the common ancestor of the modern Ukrainian or Belarusian languages. We do not know what language was spoken before Old Czech by ancestors of WEST CANAANITES. In any case, these communities shifted during the fourteenth century from Old Czech, with small Hebrew admixtures, to the Bohemian German dialect (GE in Figure .). Due to developments internal to these communities and their contacts with their western coreligionists (one part of whom after migrations to Czech lands shifted to Bohemian German), the vernacular German-based language of the Jews of BohemiaMoravia separated from its Christian mother-dialect. Proto-EY was created when this idiom was brought to Poland. During the following period (covering approximately the second half of the fifteeth century and the sixteenth century), WY and EY continued their independent development, with certain internal shifts specific to one of these two subdivisions of Yiddish: (i) a weak Romance (and, more precisely, northern Italian) interference for WY, (ii) a medium interference of Polish for EY, (iii) influences of western German dialects for WY and Silesian for EY in Polish territories. Moreover, it was during that period that due to the shift of EAST CANAANITES to EY additional (East) Slavic and Hebrew elements could be brought in Ukraine and Belorussia to local varieties of EY. Because of internal Jewish influences, numerous elements from WY penetrated EY, and a few EY items appeared in WY. Due to geographic expansion of both Jewish idioms, in certain border areas they came into immediate contact: subdialects in certain respects transitional between WY and EY came to life. During the following period (which ended during the first half of the eighteenth century), the dialectal internal subdivisions of WY and EY gradually became stabilized. Both major Yiddish varieties would continue their borrowings from the holy language. EY lost almost all contact with German dialects but was subjected to the strong influence of, depending on region, Polish, Ukrainian, or Belarusian. WY was under the strong influence of surrounding German dialects. The nature of contacts between WY and EY changed dramatically. The influence of WY on EY became practically non-existent. Yet, borrowings from EY became commonplace in WY because of migrations of numerous refugees from the East immediately after the Cossack massacres of the mid-seventeenth century, and the high prestige of Polish-Lithuanian rabbinical schools (where western students would go to study) and individual rabbis (who migrated westward).
10 In Figure ., this expression appears in double quote marks in order to emphasize that this notion results from an idealization, especially in the domain of consonantism (see details in section ..).
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Main concepts and classifications
The information presented in the following sections and chapters gives detailed arguments corroborating the main elements of Figure . and showing the weakness of positions that, on the one hand, are parts of other schemes, and, on the other hand, are incompatible with Figure ..
.
DEFINITIONS OF THE TERM YIDDISH
.. General aspects Various authors who have written about the history of Yiddish address the question of the age of this language. The answers they provide differ by several centuries. However, it appears that definitions of what they (mainly implicitly) mean by YIDDISH are not identical, this factor representing one of the main reasons for the controversy. As a result, methodological remarks are needed to make clear what tongue can be called YIDDISH when speaking about a time period many centuries ago.11 One part of the definition is shared by all authors: this designation can be applied to the vernacular Jewish language () in which the German component is quantitatively and structurally dominant; () that represents an ancestor of (at least some) modern Yiddish varieties; () that is distinct from local German dialects. The consideration of the last position represents the main source of the existing controversy in Yiddish linguistics. Here various scholars can be assigned to two major groups characterized by what can be conventionally called the GERMANISTIC and JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACHES.12 For the representatives of the first group, during a large period of time Jews in German territories spoke the same language as their Gentile neighbors but for the presence of a certain number of words specific to Jewish speech. For the representatives of the second group, Ashkenazic vernacular language was fundamentally different from that of the surrounding Christian majority from the beginning of the Jewish settlement in German lands. The main aim of section . consists in showing that the two approaches are not necessarily incompatible. Our understanding of the history of Yiddish can only succeed if the most important results of both groups of scholars are put together.
.. Germanistic approach The GERMANISTIC APPROACH is significantly more intuitive than the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH. For this reason, the former is much older than the latter. A global picture it presents corresponds to the opinion laymen even in our days generally have about Yiddish. In Jewish literature written in Hebrew before at least the seventeeth century, the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews is called 11 Since analysis within the framework of historical linguistics represents the primary aim of this study, it is appropriate to be focused on purely linguistic criteria and avoid sociological, psychological, and political criteria that, in principle, can be of interest in contexts that are outside of the scope of this book. Of course, in historical linguistics (as in humanities in general) such a purist approach can represent only an ideal epistemological guideline rather than a formal method that can be followed without any deviation. Certain considerations presented in this book clearly depart from the promise announced here; without resorting to extra-linguistic notions in these specific contexts no explanation seems to be possible. 12 Jacobs (:–) uses the terms, DIVERGENCE and CONVERGENCE APPROACHES, respectively. Frakes (:–) speaks in the same context about anti-Yiddish ASSIMILATIONISTS and pro-Yiddish NATIONALISTS and discusses at length the ideologies that, according to him, underlie the corresponding approaches.
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
either ( לשון אשכנזLOSHN ASHKENAZ, according to the Standard Yiddish (StY) pronunciation) or ל״א, its acronym. It is important to note that the same expression was applicable to the language of the Gentile majority. Consequently, the Jewish authors in question would consider that they themselves were speaking German in their everyday life and not a separate language.13 Early Christian scholars who studied Jewish languages (mainly within the framework of the Humanistic tradition) generally considered that in their linguistic development, the everyday language of Ashkenazic Jews deviated from “correct” German.14 For example, in Elias Schadäus writes that Jews “mutilate” the word und ‘and’ omitting its final “d.” He adds that they mix into their German some Hebrew words that are in common use among them (as also happens in German chanceries with Latin and French words). In , the grammarian Johann Buxtorf says that in his text he describes the German language as it is used by German Jews who write it using the Hebrew alphabet. He mentions “corrupt versions” of German that developed among Jews, especially in Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland. He also mentions that, generally speaking, Jews follow Hebrew originals in their translations to German, thereby creating expressions unknown in German. Buxtorf writes that German among Jews is never pure, but very often it intermingles Hebrew words. To this he adds that Jews corrupt their Hebrew words, turning them into German forms as the Germans do with Latin words. In his work published in , Johann Christof Wagenseil presents several rules directly related to our topic. Rule states that the word “und” is almost never written out correctly. Rule presents examples of words written by Jews “according to their corrupt pronunciation”: mir for wir ‘we,’ aso for also ‘thus,’ nicks for nichts ‘nothing,’ leien for lesen ‘to read.’ Johann Heinrich Callenberg (:) states that Jews corrupted numerous German words. Wilhelm Christian Just Chrysander (:–) provides a systematic list of different linguistic patterns according to which Jews “spoiled” German. The opinions of Jewish scholars from nineteenth-century Germany who were the most important representatives of the Enlightenment movement of “Science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums) were quite similar to the ideas of their Christian predecessors. The founder of this movement, Leopold Zunz (:–), considered that Jews spoke a pure German in medieval Germany, which they brought to Poland where it remained correct for about years. However, beginning with the sixteenth century and especially during the two following centuries, German spoken by Jews became corrupted (especially in Poland) because of the low cultural level of Jewish parents and teachers, as well as due to the introduction of words from Hebrew, Slavic, and other languages and the retaining of certain German archaisms.15 From the point of view of modern historical linguistics in general, and Germanistics in particular, both of which have progressed significantly since the second half of the nineteenth century, the general ideas described in the previous paragraph can be seen as naïve. Figure . presents a global picture of the approach in question. The authors cited earlier (and—as was pointed out at the beginning of this section—modern laymen too) roughly consider that German contemporary to them represents a direct continuation and the only “legitimate” heir to the German used in earlier times. Contemporary German represents the reference point for describing the development of Yiddish as a “corrupted” deviation from German. From a purely linguistic point of view, this approach is clearly erroneous. It is much more accurate to simply consider that both modern Yiddish and German had the same ancestor without
13 Marchand (:) gives two eloquent examples of references to Christian speakers of loshn ashkenaz: () a state official (RESPONSA from the first half of the fifteenth century) and () the German emperor (letter of the early sixteenth century). These two individuals certainly were not speaking Yiddish! 14 The following quotes come from the English translations of the original texts presented in Frakes : pp. (Schadäus), , , and (Buxtorf), and (Wagenseil). 15 For a more detailed description of these opinions, see Weinreich :–, –.
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Main concepts and classifications old German
Yiddish
new German
FIGURE . Naïve Germanistic approach
MHG
Yiddish
NHG
FIGURE . Scholarly Germanistic approach
specifying which one of the two descendants is the “direct” continuation of the ancestor and which one is a “corrupted” variant (see Figure .). In historical linguistics, the notion of “corrupted” language makes no sense. Several factors explain the “naïve” consideration. Partly, this confusion is terminological rather than substantive. Indeed, if the ancestor of both modern Yiddish and German is also called GERMAN, that is, exactly like one of its contemporary descendants, it is natural to put modern German in a privileged position in comparison to Yiddish. A similar issue exists for East Slavic languages if the common ancestor of modern Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian is called OLD RUSSIAN (древнерусский язык, in Russian; давньоруська мова, in Ukrainian; старажытнаруская мова, in Belarusian). However, it suffices to introduce a term like OLD EAST SLAVIC instead and the confusion disappears. Similar amelioration of terminology is difficult to be found for German and Yiddish. Moreover, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians have the same ancestors according to factors that are extra-linguistic too. These three peoples are related ethnically. Moreover, they also share numerous elements of their cultural past, including their religious beliefs. For Ashkenazic Jews and German Gentiles the situation is dramatically different. One can establish a non-interrupted chain between modern Germans and those who spoke not only MHG but also earlier stages of the German language, namely OHG. For Jews, links of a similar kind would be inappropriate. It is clear that at some moment in Jewish history, a number of Jews shifted in their everyday life from their former, non-German, language(s) to that of their German Gentile neighbors. As a result, considering German history as a whole also contributes to the naïve opinion seeing in NHG a “legitimate” descendant of MHG and OHG, while Yiddish becomes a kind of “step-daughter” language in relationship to German. The fact that Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet while NHG uses Latin characters (exactly like MHG and OHG), reinforces the same opinion since, in the lay approach to the history of languages, the role of spelling is largely overestimated. Figure . shows that both Yiddish and NHG underwent significant changes in comparison to their MHG ancestor. For Yiddish, the validity of this statement is self-evident. For NHG, the
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
situation is more complicated. For scholars who wrote about these matters before the nineteenth century this position was far from clear. The same is true for lay people of our time. Yet, differences between NHG and MHG are significant. Some of them are due to internal shifts natural to the development of any language. Others correspond to another feature shared by NHG with numerous idioms: extensive borrowing from other languages with which German was in contact since the Middle Ages (primarily Latin and French, to a lesser extent Italian and West Slavic). Certain major differences are sociolinguistic: they are related to facts of German history. One of them is the publication in of the German translation of the Bible made by Martin Luther. The language of this work was in many respects based on Upper Saxonian, a subdialect of Central German. Moreover, its author introduced new spellings for a number of words that gradually became standard and also influenced pronunciation.16 Luther’s Bible translation played a significant role in the evolution of standardized written German. As a result, if we use the term “NHG” in its narrow sense, to cover modern literary German (STANDARD GERMAN) only, one can say that in many respects it has a Central German basis. A similar narrow sense also exists for the notion of “MHG” when one speaks about “classical MHG,” a supra-regional language of medieval poetry. Due to the prestige of the Hohenstaufen court, this literary language is based on Swabian, a subdialect of Upper German. It is clear that these narrow senses are inappropriate for Figure .. It uses both “MHG” and “NHG” in a much wider sense. Both these notions cover (in addition to literary German) the totality of High German spoken dialects. The distinction between (medieval) MHG and (modern) NHG concerns only the time period and not geographical regions. The scholarly Germanistic approach illustrated by Figure . has existed only since the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earliest publications are due to Sainéan, Landau, and Gerzon, all of whom explicitly relate Yiddish to medieval dialects of German. Sainéan (:–) states that there is no doubt that in the Middle Ages, Jews in German-speaking provinces were using in their everyday life the dialects of their Christian neighbors. He considers that this situation lasted until the mid-fifteenth century when due to mass expulsions numerous Jews were forced to migrate from Bavaria and Austria. Sainéan relates Yiddish spoken in Central and Eastern Europe primarily to the Bavarian dialect of German. Similar ideas were later developed, often making inappropriate extrapolations, by Mieses (:–). On the other hand, Gerzon (:) considers East Central German to represent the basis for Eastern Yiddish (EY). He was the author who established the first representative list of EY words that have significant differences from their NHG cognates (pp. –). Elements from this list were often later re-used by other Yiddish scholars. The first systematic analysis of the correspondences between MHG and EY in the domain of phonology was done by Sapir. This author (:) considers that Yiddish separated from other German dialects at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.17 The scholars mentioned in the previous paragraph caused a shift in research on the development of Yiddish from NHG to MHG. The essence of this approach is certainly appropriate, and for this reason it represents real progress for Yiddish studies. Nevertheless, the exact terms used inside of this paradigm are questionable. Indeed, in Germanistics, the formal criteria conventionally used to distinguish NHG from MHG are based on three changes in the domain of stressed vocalism that affected a large number of High German dialects and are also found in standardized literary German: (i) diphthongization of the former MHG long monophthongs î and û; (ii) monophthongization of the former MHG diphthongs ie and uo; and (iii) lengthening of short vowels in open syllables. All three
See details in Chapter , with a synthesis in section ... Gerzon and Sapir investigated subdialects from eastern Belorussia (Homel area) and Lithuania (Kovno/Kaunas area), respectively. 16 17
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Main concepts and classifications
of these shifts may be observed in Yiddish.18 Consequently, formally speaking, it would be more accurate to view not MHG but rather EARLY NHG (Frühneuhochdeutsch) as the common ancestor for both Yiddish and NHG. This term is generally applied in modern Germanistics to the period of the development of the German language between and . However, the association of Yiddish to EARLY NHG rather than to MHG is to a great extent a question of terminology and is therefore secondary. For the purely practical needs of the linguistic research aimed to answer substantive questions of the history of Yiddish, using MHG as a reference point provides a number of advantages in comparison to EARLY NHG: (a) comprehensive dictionaries do exist for MHG, and (b) Germanists established a standardized system of designation for MHG stressed vowels. These major elements allow one to make references using generally accepted MHG terms and this way avoid unnecessary ambiguity. Moreover, they avoid confusion between the similar terms EARLY NHG and NHG. As is well known in historical linguistics, a formal distinction between “two dialects of the same language” and “two languages” is impossible without introducing some extra-linguistic (mainly socio-political) criteria.19 This book generally speaks about German and Yiddish as two different languages. However, nothing formally precludes calling Yiddish a “(Jewish) dialect of German.” The substantive (and not terminological) part of the discussion ignores differences between dialects and languages. What is really important is the fact that Yiddish is an idiom structurally distinct from any known (non-Jewish) dialect of German. With this in mind, and within the framework of the GERMANISTIC APPROACH, it is important to establish criteria that allow one to describe the separation of Yiddish from German and thus to establish the age of Yiddish. Firstly, some might use the term YIDDISH at the moment in time when there is a large number of traits that distinguish the Jewish vernacular idiom from any dialect spoken by German Christians. This group encompasses the totality of elements of Hebrew, Slavic, and Romance origins, as well as a number of elements from the German component. This definition has to be partly arbitrary. Indeed, if Yiddish is distinguished from other tongues by the identification of elements which are specific to Yiddish, a problem occurs in the decision of what number of specific elements permits calling the language (PROTO-)YIDDISH and ceasing calling it (a dialect of) German. In one aspect, this problem is, however, not so important for the scientific analysis. If it is possible to discern the presence of elements of this kind in the vernacular language used by Jews, without paying particular attention to the exact term to be used (YIDDISH, or JUDEO-GERMAN, or something of the kind), it can at least be said that the language is from the same lineage as Yiddish (MRPC). It should also be stipulated that to establish the separation of the Jewish language from German, the non-German lexical and onomastic elements are the least important. Indeed, the introduction of new words or names does not create a new language. On the other hand, specifically Jewish phonetic shifts or new grammatical rules, or the use of non-German morphological elements in words with German roots (for instance, a pattern of using non-German endings for making the plural forms applied to a large set of lexical items), or any
18 This observation was also made by Blosen (:–). Weinreich also pays attention to this point. However, since he insists on the link between Yiddish and MHG and even postulates the existence of some (very controversial) features that could have been taken by Yiddish from OHG, he finds several ad hoc “excuses” in order to save his concept of the ancient origins of Yiddish (WG :–). Birnbaum (:) acknowledges that Yiddish has several important features in common with NHG, but he deliberately avoids linking Yiddish to it, suggesting that in the language spoken by Christians these developments began far back in MHG, while we do not know when they started in Yiddish. He does not recognize, nevertheless, that these very phenomena are formally taken in Germanistics as criteria to distinguish between NHG and MHG. 19 On this topic, see also Benor :–. A humorous expression of this concept cited by Max Weinreich states that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
other examples of the fusion character of the Jewish vernacular language, can serve as significantly less arbitrary criteria.20 One can suggest at least three other criteria all of which are more suitable than the first criterion for the formal aspects of the analysis of dating the beginning of Yiddish.21 According to the second criterion, the separation of Yiddish from German may be postulated as the moment when in some German-speaking region we discover inside the vernacular language used by Jews not only features of local German but also a set of traits peculiar to a German dialect from another area where Jews dwelled at an earlier period. In other words, it is appropriate to speak about YIDDISH when a fusion of several German dialects can be observed in the tongue spoken within Jewish communities. The third criterion involves YIDDISH from the moment that the Jewish vernacular language does not follow some phonetic or grammatical shift that takes place in the German dialect that exists in the same geographic area. The fourth criterion, an inverse of the third, involves YIDDISH when some internal change concerns the vernacular Jewish language but not that spoken by local German Christians. As a result of any of the above three processes, Jewish and German dialects spoken on the same territory can be characterized by the different pronunciation of cognate words and/or distinct grammatical rules. For Yiddish, all of them are system-level rather than surface-level. These criteria are not arbitrary, even if their application presents some methodological difficulties as well: in all these cases, a set of characteristics is needed to be established that can be considered diagnostic. The simplest approach consists in stipulating that just one system-level characteristic suffices to postulate that we are dealing with a separate idiom. The second criterion mainly deals with space. It is closely related to migrations: the diagnostic features point to another original geographic area. The third and the fourth ones are more linked to time: the diagnostic traits reveal archaic elements present in the speech of the same region. According to any of these criteria, the age of Yiddish will be less important than that deduced from the first approach. Indeed, if the Jewish vernacular language becomes independent of the development of the local Gentile dialect on a system level (that is, in grammar or phonology), it necessarily means that this Jewish tongue already possesses a very large number of surface-level features that distinguish it from the local dialect. Certain linguists characterized by the GERMANISTIC APPROACH combine some of the above four criteria. The application of similar approaches provides us with estimates of the age of Yiddish that are quite close. It is on a similar basis that Bin-Nun (BN –), one of the most eminent linguists characterized by the GERMANISTIC APPROACH, introduces his distinction between JEWS’ GERMAN, JEWISH GERMAN, and PROTO-YIDDISH and dates the PROTO-YIDDISH period to the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. The paper by Süsskind () represents the most detailed explanation of the methodological aspects of the definition of the word YIDDISH. Its author states that before the mid-fourteenth century, Jews in Germany spoke German (if we judge from its grammar and phonetics) with the addition of a certain number of words of Hebrew and Romance origin specific to Jewish speech. In every part of Germany, Jews used in their vernacular life the German dialect of their Christian neighbors. Only during the period from about – did a new language appear, OLD YIDDISH, with new syntactical, morphological, and phonological features. The development of this language no longer followed at least some of the new developments within German.22 Eggers (:, ) asserts that Yiddish arose during the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries in Bavaria and Bohemia. This time frame allows him to explain several phenomena, such as the absence of the pronouns ets, enk, and enker in the Yiddish of Lithuania, these words being absent 20 21 22
Compare Süsskind :–. They have been introduced in Beider a:–. See Süsskind :–.
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Main concepts and classifications
before the fourteenth century from Bavarian too.23 This factor, however, only confirms that the introduction of these pronouns was a regional innovation, and therefore had to be absent from PROTOYIDDISH. If Eggers’ arguments show that a number of traits of (modern) Yiddish are likely to have arisen under the influence of Bavarian, in many cases he also accurately observes that these features were not uniquely Bavarian and therefore doubts still remain. Generally speaking, his analysis presents a comprehensive account of the time period and geographic location of various linguistic peculiarities of German and Slavic languages that could have influenced Yiddish, and in this respect his consideration of several important characteristics is the most detailed that has ever been done in Yiddish linguistics. Nevertheless, when dealing with Yiddish itself, he resorts almost exclusively to linguistic reconstruction. Similar to several other contributors to the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS, he mainly draws his conclusions about Yiddish from the study of EY, an important shortcoming for statements concerning the history of the language. Gold (:) is right when he points out that if the German component of today’s EY resembles Bavarian and East Central German, this might not necessarily have been the case if we could recover the German component of Earliest Yiddish. It is not inevitable that earliest Yiddish should be identical with PROTO-YIDDISH, which was mainly reconstructed from an analysis of the elements of modern EY. For scholars who adhere to the GERMANISTIC APPROACH, the creation of (PROTO-)YIDDISH was preceded by a PRE-YIDDISH period in Ashkenazic history, in which Jews spoke German.
.. Jewish-oriented approach: terminological issues Scholars following the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH are found among the proponents of both the RHINE HYPOTHESIS (including among others Weinreich, Birnbaum, and Herzog) and the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS (including Katz and Jacobs) discussed in sections ..–. Currently, their opinions form a paradigm that dominates the domain of Yiddish studies. Contrary to the GERMANISTIC APPROACH, for these scholars one cannot distinguish a PRE-YIDDISH period in Ashkenazic history. According to this school, Jews in Germany spoke from the very beginning a language different from that of their Gentile neighbors, a language resulting from a fusion of several components including, at least, the German and the Hebrew ones. Often they also believe that the fusion of various German dialects took place during the establishment of Jewish communities in German provinces. Birnbaum (:–) directly addresses the question of the age of Yiddish in a paper where he analyzes CC. Firstly, he postulates—without providing evidence—that Yiddish was born during the ninth century when French Jews in the Rhineland started to adopt the language of their Christian neighbors. From this statement he immediately deduces that the language of CC cannot be designated as MHG simply because it was written five centuries after the beginning of Yiddish. Finally, Birnbaum identifies this language as WY since (i) EY is the language spoken by Jews of Eastern Europe during the last centuries; (ii) according to him, EY is the direct continuation of the Jewish vernacular the forefathers of Eastern European Jews spoke and wrote in medieval Germany. All the above arguments are methodologically untenable. They use a kind of circular logic. The elements taken as premises for his argumentation (birth of Yiddish in the Rhineland, the direct link between modern EY and the medieval Jewish vernacular tongue in Germany, as well as the genetic relationship between Eastern Jewry and Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in Germany) are far from I was unable to find in his book any other argument in favor of this specific time period for the birth of Yiddish. It is possible that Eggers points to the thirteenth century because it was during that time that historical chronicles mention the first Jewish communities in Poland, while he believes that the first Jewish migrants from the West were Yiddishspeakers (p. ). The last idea is not necessarily valid: the settlers coming from Bohemia-Moravia and East Germany to Polish lands before the fourteenth century could be speakers of Old Czech (compare Beider :). 23
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being self-evident and should, on the contrary, be deduced (if possible) from a detailed consideration of linguistic and other factors. The approach to the same question presented by Birnbaum (:–) in his recapitulative work possesses more nuances. Here he suggests several independent criteria to establish the age of Yiddish. Firstly, we cannot consider the language spoken by Jews to be German at the point in time when this Jewish tongue was no longer easily intelligible to German Christians. For this criterion, he cites a direct testimony from a work written in by Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil. Secondly, Birnbaum quotes a German priest from Magdeburg who in makes reference to a Jew “that looks like a Jew and speaks like one too.”24 No serious objections against these two criteria, called by Birnbaum “practical” and “psychological,” respectively, can be advanced: for the second part of the fifteenth century the use of the term YIDDISH is appropriate. A series of other ideas suggested by Birnbaum are grouped by him as a “linguistic” criterion. All of them are either false or at least extremely controversial. Birnbaum (:–) asserts that a number of features are retained by Yiddish from the MHG period: phonetic value of several diphthongs, reflexes of certain consonants, semantics of several words, gender of a few nouns, etc. These conclusions are made by him from the mere fact that modern Yiddish shares the features in question with MHG, while the NHG cognates behave differently. Such an approach is linguistically inappropriate. Modern Yiddish varieties should be compared not to the standardized contemporary literary NHG, but to German dialects and, preferably, to their historical rather than contemporary versions. Birnbaum (:) also assigns to the fourteenth century the realization /ej/ in the Yiddish of Lithuania in the place where other EY dialects have /oj/ simply on the basis of the idea that no important phonetic innovation in the Yiddish of Lithuania could take place after . It was in that year that Poland and Lithuania became politically united so no political barrier existed between the two countries after that time. This argument cannot be valid since, generally speaking, phonetic isoglosses do not necessarily follow political borders and, more specifically, onomastic analysis shows that even during the seventeenth century the diphthong /ej/ was not stabilized yet.25 Also untenable is the assignment to the OHG period by Birnbaum (:) of the merger of the German ach-laut [x] and ich-laut [ç] into the single Yiddish /x/ because a similar merger characterized OHG, while in modern dialects it is known only in German dialects with which EY could not have had any direct contact.26 According to the final, “sociological,” criterion, Yiddish came into being when the Jews settled in Germany, with an intensive group life of their own, and adopted the German tongue. In contrast to the other criteria suggested by Birnbaum, this one is explicitly extra-linguistic. For Max Weinreich, generally acclaimed as the founder of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH, Yiddish was born when Jews started to live in Germany in an environment of multilingualism, that is, following his conception of Ashkenazic history, during the ninth century. He emphasizes that there was no Jewish community speaking “pure German” until the nineteenth century (WG :). To support this global position, he actually provides no direct arguments. Weinreich (WG :–) postulates his main principle almost as a mathematical axiom and regularly uses it throughout his entire magnum opus.27 In his methodological constructions used to show the existence of the fundamental difference between Yiddish and German from the earliest times of Jewish presence in Germany, Weinreich proceeds in two steps. First, he introduces the distinction between several
The same quote also appears in WG :. See Beider : and section .. of this book. 26 See the discussion of the feature {C}. 27 Weinreich also regularly declares that characteristics shared by Yiddish with certain German dialects generally are due to internal Yiddish developments independent of similar features in German rather than to borrowing by Yiddish from German (compare WG :, ). 24 25
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terms all chosen from the point of view of Yiddish: (i) STOCK LANGUAGES, (ii) DETERMINANTS, and (iii) COMPONENTS. The first category corresponds to languages (Hebrew, German, etc.) from which raw materials came for the fusion language Yiddish. The second category covers parts of these stock languages (limited in time, space, semantic fields, etc.) that could, in principle, influence Yiddish. Any member of the third category (German, Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic) encompasses elements internal to Yiddish that can be related to only one determinant and, therefore, only one stock language. Every component is different from its determinant because of the selectivity that was operative throughout the history of Yiddish. In addition, by definition, every determinant is just a subset of its stock language. Secondly, Weinreich asserts the existence of fusion between various components and sometimes inside of them (for example, merger of elements coming from various German dialects or different Slavic languages). It is evident that under this theoretical construction, Yiddish automatically becomes a language dramatically different from German from the very beginning since (a) German represents only one of the stock languages, (b) there is a fundamental difference between a stock language and the corresponding component (Weinreich’s notion of SELECTIVITY), and (c) this component combines with other components (Weinreich’s notion of FUSION).28 However, a closer examination of the above construction shows that his conclusion is primarily based on terminology rather than on appropriate substantive linguistic material. Indeed, if one applies the same terminology outside of Yiddish (or other vernacular languages used by Jews), one can “demonstrate” that almost every language results from a “fusion” of several “components” coming from different “stock languages.” For example, English becomes a language resulting from a fusion of Anglo-Frisian dialects (West Germanic), Brythonic languages (Celtic), Old Norse (North Germanic), Old French and Latin (both Romance), while French can be considered a fusion of Vulgar Latin (Romance), Celtic languages of Roman Gaul, and Frankish (West Germanic). Evidently, both English and French were very “selective” when taking elements from their stock languages, and in both of them one can find traces of fusion of various elements. Moreover, in the history of both languages, one can also find periods when some ancestors of speakers of these languages who today live in England or France shifted from one language (Celtic) to another. Yet, dominant paradigms do not consider English and French to be fusion languages but idioms belonging to the (West) Germanic and Romance branches of the Indo-European family, respectively. In other words, from the point of view of linguistic systems, one “component” appears significantly more important than others, while other “components” are considered to be either “substrata” (Celtic), or “superstrata” (both Norman dialects of Old French and Old Norse for English; Frankish for French). This terminology appears more fruitful in analyzing the historical development of English and French than the introduction of the notion of “components.” For this reason, it is universally accepted in modern historical linguistics. In the case of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH, as in the case of the NAÏVE GERMANISTIC APPROACH (see Figure .), we face the important role that terminology can play in linguistics. One can imagine that if a neutral term—including neither YIDDISH nor GERMAN—were available to designate the ancestor common to both modern languages in question, it would be significantly more easily acceptable (MRPC). As a result, one can observe that here the change of paradigm was, at least partly, motivated by extra-linguistic, ideological, factors. To illustrate this issue, one can suggest a thought experiment. Imagine that the term LATIN had been conventionally retained throughout the centuries from ancient times to cover not only the medieval lingua franca for scholars in Western Europe and the liturgical language of the Catholic Church (both of which are closely related to the
28
See WG :– for detailed discussion of the notions of SELECTIVITY and FUSION when applied to Yiddish.
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Latin of Roman times) but also vernacular dialects spoken in the Apennine Peninsula to this day (that have dramatic differences in comparison to the language of ancient Rome). In this scenario, one would say that (ancient) Latin has several modern descendants, one of which, spoken in Italy, is also called (modern) Latin (rather than Italian). It can be predicted that such a “linguistic” situation would be unacceptable politically because it puts all Romance idioms spoken outside of Italy (including French) in a subordinate (and therefore minor) role in relation to the language spoken in Italy. In contrast to this fictive scenario, we can find close authentic analogies in contemporary history. The first example corresponds to the Dutch language.29 Its official name was changed from Nederduits ‘Low German’ to Nederlands ‘Dutch’ when, with the advent of dialectology, German linguists started calling northern German dialects Niederdeutsch ‘Low German.’ The Dutch nation wanted to assert its cultural and political independence vis-à-vis Germany in this way. (Neder)diets, sporadically used several decades prior to World War II, disappeared completely after . The second example characterizes the recent development of Ukrainian historical linguistics. As was mentioned above, the corresponding terminology issue is similar to that in Yiddish studies. The use of a neutral term to designate the common ancestor of both Ukrainian and Russian can allow us to avoid a misinterpretation of Ukrainian as a form of Russian “corrupted” during its historical development (due, among other factors, to its close contacts with Polish). Such a term does exist in English: OLD EAST SLAVIC. Yet, it is lacking in East Slavic languages in which the traditionally used term corresponds to the English expression OLD RUSSIAN. It is no surprise that this terminology led in the past and continues to lead in our time to numerous ideology-biased misuses. During the days of the Russian Empire it often served to assert the inferiority of the Ukrainian language in comparison to its Russian “mother-language.” During the last decades a significant number of Ukrainian linguists shifted to a new paradigm that distances their language from OLD EAST SLAVIC, either considering that Ukrainian evolved directly from PROTO-SLAVIC, or creating a new classification for Slavic languages according to which Ukrainian and Russian appear in different subgroups. Such nationalist-based theories have found few followers among international scholars. Most linguists continue to place Ukrainian firmly within the same group of languages descending from OLD EAST SLAVIC, with close ties to Belarusian and Russian. The situation in Yiddish studies is in many respects similar. Indeed, today the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH represents the dominating paradigm only for linguists trained in Yiddish linguistics. However, it is not shared by academics approaching Yiddish from the point of view of general historical linguistics of which the GERMANISTIC APPROACH represents a particular case. For these scholars, the topic is ideologically neutral and it is not a surprise to see that in various international encyclopedias and general books about world languages, Yiddish is firmly placed together with NHG in the same branch of High German languages.
.. Jewish-oriented approach: fusion character of Yiddish Surely, the purely terminological issues described above, despite all their importance, do not express the essence of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH. A significant part of this method deals with substantive topics that can and should be discussed using linguistic (rather than extra-linguistic) arguments. The hypothesis of the presence of the fusion phenomena in Ashkenazic speech since the period of the initial Jewish settlement in Germany represents a central point of the theoretical constructions made by Weinreich. However, all his examples of fusion between elements coming from different stock
29
Marion Aptroot (personal communication).
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languages actually correspond to periods that are centuries removed from that of the inception of Yiddish hypothesized by him.30 One hypothetical scenario imagined by him can serve as a particularly clear illustration of his general ideas. Weinreich (:) believes that an approach equivalent to what is called in this book GERMANISTIC would be valid only for a Jewish community made up of a group of Germanspeaking Gentiles who converted to Judaism. Only in this case would the language be German during the initial stage, and it would deviate from its German mother language because of the gradual incorporation of additional Judaic-specific terms. Otherwise, the language of Jews has to be different from that of their German Christian neighbors from the very outset. This consideration is more than questionable. Indeed, one can find numerous historical situations where a population group shifted from language L to language L (without producing systemic changes in the target language at the moment of the shift) and gradually created a new language L (a descendant of L) during the next generations. For example, it is the case of various Celtic groups (L) who shifted to Latin (L), the language of their Roman conquerors, that later gave rise to modern Romance languages (L). From a purely linguistic point of view, the fact that in this example the shift was followed by the merger of Celts with Romans into a unified community, while in the case of Jews and Germans the clear-cut separation between the two communities continued to exist, has no importance. One can also refer to non-Jewish instances in which a (social) difference between the two groups continued to exist after the shift. For example, when Anglo-Norman and Frankish conquerors shifted to English and French, respectively, a large part of them continued to form a layer separate from other social groups, that of nobility. Moreover, from the history of the twentieth century, we know of numerous examples of linguistic shifts within Jewish population groups that were followed neither by the creation of a new language, nor by the loss of Jewish identity. When immigrants from Eastern Europe crossed the Atlantic Ocean at the turn of the twentieth century, for the first generation to be born in the US, English (and not Judeo-English) often became their native idiom. Similarly, Jewish children who grew up in the USSR between the two World Wars generally acquired Russian (and not JudeoRussian) as their native language. In both cases, the differences between (non-Jewish) English and “Jewish” English, as well as between (non-Jewish) Russian and “Jewish” Russian were not significant enough for them to be considered separate languages. Of course, it is not totally appropriate to extrapolate a situation from the twentieth century to the period about one thousand years before us. In the Middle Ages, there were no public schools and religion played a significantly more important role in the relations between Jews and Gentiles. However, even during the second half of the twentieth century or in our time we can find evident traces of linguistic Jewish peculiarities in comparison to the other part of the population. Jews in various countries when speaking among themselves the language of the majority used a highly specific set of words (mainly from the Hebrew component, but not exclusively) that were often not understandable to their Gentile neighbors. Among the examples of specially Jewish words that Jews from Moscow (without any knowledge of Yiddish) could intermingle during the s in their Russian when they were among fellow Jews are: bikitser ‘briefly,’ drek ‘excrements, something worthless,’ gefilte fiš ‘stuffed fish (a meal),’ gešeft ‘business, deal,’ goj ‘non-Jew,’ a id ‘a Jew,’ magen-dovit/magen-duvit ‘six-pointed star,’ mansy/majsy ‘stories,’ mešugene/mišigine ‘crazy,’ mišpoxa/mišpuxa ‘(Jewish) family,’ kovet/kuvet ‘honor, glory,’ mamzer ‘bastard,’ naxes/naxis ‘luck,’ polka/pulka ‘drumstick of a fowl,’ pots ‘fool,’ šiksa ‘non-Jewish girl or woman,’ šleper ‘tramp, vagabond,’ šlimazl ‘unlucky fellow,’ šmaty ‘rag,’ šnobel’ ‘(big) nose,’ štrudel’ ‘strudel (cake),’ 30 The arguments provided by Weinreich to corroborate his thesis about the existence of fusion phenomena at the end of the fourteenth century for elements coming from various German dialects are untenable (see footnote in Chapter ).
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švitser ‘dandy (ironical),’ toxes/tuxis ‘buttock,’ tsores ‘troubles,’ xala ‘white loaf,’ and xazer ‘pig, stingy person.’ Some formerly Yiddish words acquired new meanings, not found in Yiddish dictionaries. For example, tsimes became used not to designate ‘vegetable / fruit stew,’ but rather in its new figurative sense ‘the best.’ The list is not limited to words coming from Yiddish; to the same (or close) category one can assign such purely Russian words and expressions like naš cˇ elovek ‘Jew’ (literally: ‘our man’), frantsuz ‘Jew’ (literally: ‘Frenchman’), and Gorka ‘Central Moscow synagogue’ (literally, a diminutive of ‘mountain’). The corresponding meanings were not understandable to non-Jews who were not in close contact with Jews. Moreover, several new hybrid words were created including the adjective gojskij ‘non-Jewish’ and gojka ‘non-Jewish woman,’ both from Yiddish goj ‘non-Jew’ with the addition of Russian suffixes; note that the Yiddish words for ‘nonJewish woman’ are goyete and goye.31 Evidently, even despite these examples of “fusion,” it would be inappropriate to consider the language in question to be different from Russian.32 It was competely Russian according to all linguistic criteria, while the layer in question can be adequately classified as belonging to Russian Jewish slang. As a whole, this language can also be designated, to use the terminology of sociolinguistics, as a Jewish ethnolect of Russian.33 Using other, less ambiguous, terms, one can speak about the existence of a specifically Jewish repertoire in Russian.34 A situation in today’s North America is similar in several aspects. People who are third- or fourth-generation American, brought up and living in a secular environment, monolingual English-speakers, can often use (or at least understand) a number of specifically Jewish words intermixed in their English.35 A large portion of these words (as in the case of Soviet Jews) are explicitly expressive. Another group, significantly more important than in the USSR, directly corresponds to the religious realities of Judaism and includes, among others, bris ‘circumcision ceremony,’ brucha ‘benediction,’ chuppa ‘bridal canopy,’ megilla ‘scroll,’ minyan ‘prayer quorum of ten male adults,’ mitsva ‘good deed,’ rebbe ‘rabbi,’ rebbitsin ‘rabbi’s wife,’ shabes ‘Sabbath,’ shul ‘synagogue,’ yarmulke ‘Jewish skull cap,’ and yontif ‘Jewish holiday.’ Here again it makes no linguistic sense to speak about a language separate from that of the surrounding Gentile majority. This language, an American Jewish ethnolect (or religiolect) of English, is a “pure” English, but with a small layer of elements that can be characterized as “Jewish slang/jargon.” As in the USSR, the set of given names borne in North America by the first 31
This phenomenon can also be found in other contemporary Jewish communities. For English spoken in our time by American Jews, Benor (:) also notes that certain distinctively Jewish features are not related to the influence of any ancestral language (or modern Hebrew). 32 Vershik () discusses cases of a stronger influence of Yiddish in Russian spoken by Jews. With respect to the milieu briefly described above (known to the author of this book personally), she deals with previous generations and/ or other places and social groups. See also Brzezina (:–) for a list of specifically Jewish words found in Polish texts written by Jews. 33 The term “religiolect” would be inappropriate here: the Soviet Jews under discussion were mainly non-religious. 34 Benor (:) defines it as linguistic features that distinguish the speech or writing of Jews from that of local non-Jews. She presents a representative list of linguistic and socio-religious questions (“variables”) to be addressed when speaking about the distinctly Jewish repertoire in various languages in comparison to the speech of non-Jews (Benor :–; some of these questions were formulated in WG :). Thus we obtain a comprehensive program for the comparative study of various languages spoken by Jews. Her analysis aims to replace questions like “Does a given Jewish community speak a Jewish language?” (to which any answer has to include subjective elements because it faces strong terminological issues) with questions like “To what extent does a given excerpt of speech or writing by a Jew make use of a distinctively Jewish linguistic repertoire?” (leading to a much more objective discussion). The same author also explains the main limitations of the term “ethnolect” in comparison to “repertoire”: the latter allows us to take into account inter-communal, inter-speaker, and intra-speaker variation in a more efficient way than the former (Benor ). 35 I would like to thank Gary Mokotoff who provided me with the results of a small survey among members of his family and some of his acquaintances. This set is discussed here merely to illustrate certain ideas. For a much more nuanced coverage of the speech of American Jews see Gold and Benor .
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generations of people whose first language was no longer Yiddish but the official tongue of the country was highly distinctive in comparison to that of Gentile majority. Certain names, of Yiddish or Hebrew origin, were limited to the Jewish community. The relative frequency of others was significantly higher than for non-Jews. In many respects, the onomastic situation in the first Ashkenazic communities was similar. The above examples from contemporary history do not directly refute Weinreich’s ideas about the existence of major structural differences between the vernacular languages of Jews and non-Jews in medieval Germany. However, they can serve to illustrate the theoretical weakness of the JEWISHORIENTED APPROACH. In addition, we can find information that is more directly related to the topic under discussion in early Ashkenazic sources. Surely, the famous blessing found in a Hebrew prayer book from in Worms:
גּוט ַטק ִאים ְּבַט ְֿגא ְש ַו יר ִּדיש ַמֲחזֹור ִאין ֵּביֿת ַהְּכ ֶנֶסֿת ְט ַר ְֿגא
gut tak im betage švaer dis maḥ a˘ zor in beytˍ ha-knesetˍ trage ‘may a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue’ includes two words of Hebrew origin, namely ‘ ַמֲחזֹורJewish prayer book’ and ֵּביֿת ַהְּכ ֶנֶסת ‘synagogue,’ which distance it from any non-Jewish German text of the same period. However, both of them correspond to religious terms restricted to Judaism and, for this reason, have no direct correspondence in MHG. All other elements of this blessing correspond to regular MHG. From the Middle Ages well into the eighteenth century two major styles existed in Literary Yiddish: (i) VERTICAL STYLE based on Jewish tradition transmitted through the ages of biblical and prayer translations and closely following the Hebrew originals; (ii) HORIZONTAL STYLE based on coeval non-Jewish literature and therefore patterned after the MHG model.36 R, R, and Le, the three oldest documents analyzed by Röll (:, , ), all dating from the end of the fourteenth to the start of the fifteenth centuries, belong to the first group. All of them show no fusion phenomena. CC () belongs to the second group. Among its some , words only three are specifically Jewish.37 Note that the documents in question are removed in time from the period of the formation of the first Ashkenazic communities in western Germany by at least four centuries. Weinreich is certainly correct when he states that both styles deviated from the spoken language and neither was designed for use on the colloquial level. He may also be right when stressing that “component awareness” dictated the elimination of Hebrew component words from all these works. However, despite their plausibility, globally speaking his arguments look like subterfuges designed to ward off legitimate criticism by his opponents providing no positive support for his general idea about the original fusion. Moreover, the idea of “component awareness,” despite all its attractiveness, actually refutes the fusion character of the Jewish vernacular language in medieval Germany. Indeed, if someone is able to make a clear-cut distinction between various etymological layers of his own language (and, moreover, in a text written not for Christians, but for his coreligionists), this means that either this person is an excellent linguist or—a scenario much more plausible for medieval rabbinical authors—simply, that this author does not consider the layer he can withdraw so easily to 36 See Weinreich a: and Bunis . Fishman (:–) considers that according to several aspects the translation of the Book of Proverbs by Mendel Levin Satanower (Yiddish Mendl Lefin) (published in in eastern Galicia) represents the earliest book written in EY. Its author rejects the tradition of the literary language established during previous centuries in Western and Central Europe (heavily impacted by German) that was therefore twice removed from the spoken vernacular EY: geographically and chronologically. Levin Satanower’s approach is also revolutionary because he regularly uses Hebraisms and Slavisms integrated in everyday EY speech. Yet, all previous translations were mainly avoiding using both Hebraisms (in translations from Hebrew) and Slavisms (generally speaking). Shmeruk (:) considers Ezer Yisroel, a remedy book by Moses Markuse of Slonim, printed in in Poland, to be the first book written in a language that corresponds to spoken EY. 37 ‘ תפלהchurch,’ ‘ טולמאbridal canopy,’ and ‘ דוכוסduke’ (Weinreich a:).
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
be an integral part of his native (German) language. Also, we have evidence of phonetic shifts in words of German origin present in Jewish speech (shared by both Jews and local Gentiles) that provoked no change in words of Hebrew origin until at least the fourteenth century, and therefore it is linguistically inaccurate to postulate the fusion before that period.38 Other scholars who adhere to the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH generally provide no linguistic argument to support their position. The “demonstration” of the structural validity of Weinreich’s concepts by Jacobs (:) represents one of the rare exceptions. This author points out that the initial /s/ is, on the one hand, impossible in German and the German component of Yiddish, but, on the other hand, is possible in certain words from the Hebrew component of Yiddish. His example is StY soyne ‘enemy,’ derived from Hebrew ׂשֹוֵנא. From this observation, Jacobs concludes that the phonological system of Yiddish was different from that of any German dialect from the very inception of Yiddish. However, we cannot be sure that (i) this particular word or other words with similar structure were really present in the vernacular language of the first Ashkenazic communities in Germany, and (ii) if they were present, they were pronounced with initial /s/. And even if they were, this would not be evidence of enough structural difference to consider Jewish vernacular a separate language.39 Moreover, sources from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries mention a series of names of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Old Czech origin, in which the initial /s/ present in the language of origin was realized as the affricate /ts/ when used by Jews in German-speaking provinces. Among the examples are: (i) various names related to biblical ( ׂ ָש ָרהSarah): ( צריטZaret) in in the Rhineland, ( צערליןZerlin), ( צורליןZorlin), and ( צרליףZarliep), all three in in East Franconia, Zara and Czara in late fourteenth-century Vienna; (ii) hypocoristic female forms ( צימליןZimlin) in in East Franconia, ( צימלאZimle) and Czimla in fourteenth-century Nürnberg and Moravia;40 (iii) Zadia in in Regensburg from ( ַסַע ְדָיהSaadiah); and (iv) Zlawa in in Austria, from Czech sláva ‘glory.’ These examples make Jacobs’ argument particularly weak for the medieval period. The idea of the early presence of the fusion character of Ashkenazic vernacular also contradicts the general findings of contemporary linguistics dealing with languages in contact. As discussed by Thomason and Kaufman (:), if a whole population acquires a new language within as little as a single generation, the linguistic system that results may have massive interference from the structure(s) of the language(s) originally spoken by the group. Here, according to the same authors, two extreme situations can be distinguished: (a) a population with little access to L creates an Lbased creole; (b) a population that speaks L and feels strong pressure to assimilate to L becomes bilingual, later shifts to L,and creates a new language L used as their ethnic code or jargon, with lexicon from L and grammar from L. In these cases, we are dealing with an “abnormal” linguistic transmission for which it is impossible to construct a LANGUAGE TREE with only one mother language. See section ... For example, in our time English spoken by American Jews has the addition of the [x] phoneme found in certain words from the specifically Jewish repertoire and a few personal names (Benor :). This difference is clearly insufficient to consider that American Jews speak a language structurally different from that of their Gentile neighbors. 40 The full form of this name is derived from Hebrew שְמָחה ׂ ִ ‘Simḥ ah’ ‘joy.’ This full form—as both male and female names—is known to have been in Ashkenazic use since the Middle Ages. However, among men as opposed to women, no form with the initial /ts/ and no rendition for the Hebrew חwere ever created. From the viewpoint of linguistics, it is impossible to explain why the phonetic developments of the male and the female names were not identical. This difference can be explained from Jewish cultural history. For men, certain shemot ha-qodesh were used almost exclusively on occasions for which the religion demands the use of a sacred name, while in everyday life these appellations were replaced by other, profane, names (kinnuim). Among Ashkenazic Jews, the male name in question seems to belong to that category of “official” appellations whose pronunciation has always been determined by their Hebrew spelling. Indeed, it does not appear in Christian sources, and no hypocoristic form is known for it. Yet, all female names are vernacular appellations. They have always been affected by phonetic changes that take place in the spoken language. 38 39
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Main concepts and classifications
Before assigning Jewish vernacular in medieval Germany to (a) or (b), one should check the main characteristics of the resulting languages and the major conditions required for such imperfect linguistic transmission to take place. It appears that both of these verifications provide negative results. Languages resulting from this abnormal transmission are primarily characterized by the impossibility to assign all of their subsystems (lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax) to the same branch of a linguistic tree. In other cases, we can observe a dramatic simplification of grammar. Yet, nothing similar can be found in all written traces of the early Jewish vernacular language in Germany. All subsystems can be easily linked to High German, while no major change in grammar is discernable. A possible counterargument might emphasize that the documents in our possession, precisely because they are written traces, do not reflect the actual state of the vernacular-spoken Jewish language. For such argument to be valid, one would be forced to admit that medieval Jewish authors from Germany were bilingual/bidialectal. No traces survive for their first, colloquial, fusion language (the ancestor of modern Yiddish), while the available sources are written in the second language (German) used in contact with Gentile neighbors. By itself, such a theoretical construction is not absurd. For example, in our day, a number of Afro-Caribbeans from Guadeloupe and Martinique speak both French-based creole and standard French and write only in the latter. However, such a scenario for medieval German Jews looks significantly more complex than a scenario with only one spoken language including a small layer of specifically Jewish elements used only when speaking with fellow Jews. For Ashkenazic Jews, the conditions for an abnormal transmission are not verified either. We find no historical evidence of mass migrations from Romance-speaking countries to Germany at the turn of the Second Millennium. Most likely, early Ashkenazic communities were formed gradually, with individual families migrating during a relatively long period of time and involving several generations. Moreover, these migrants likely integrated with those Jews who have lived in the same territory without interruption since Roman times.41 It is possible that the first generations became bilingual, with a large impact of the phonology and grammar of their original language in their way of speaking the new language and an extensive borrowing of words from the newly acquired language into their original tongue.42 However, subsequent generations abandoned the original language(s) of their parents and acquired a perfect learning of the new idiom, the one spoken by the surrounding majority. From historical sources, we know that Jews were voluntarily settling in central quarters of medieval German cities. During the centuries before segregated living quarters were imposed on them they were in immediate contact with German Christians.43 Contrary to classical creole languages with only one identifiable parent and additional inputs due to uncertain extra sources, even in our day almost all Yiddish items can be easily assigned to its various components. Taking together all the information presented above, we can say that all the principal conditions that can, in theory, lead to a creation of a “fusion” language as a result of an abrupt creolization are not met in the case of early Ashkenazic settlements.44 A comparison of Yiddish with those creole languages that developed from the pidgin stage appears not to be fruitful either. A pidgin-like inception of Yiddish would imply that during the Such a historical scenario is plausible at least for Cologne (see Schütte ; see also section ..). Compare the results of the analysis by Rayfield (:) of a contemporary bilingual Yiddish-English community in California. See also the discussion of the bilingualism in section ... 43 See Weinreich :–. 44 See the detailed description of these conditions in Thomason and Kaufman :, –. The same authors (pp. –) also provide a convincing analysis showing that the notion of “creolization” is not applicable to English unless one wants to rob this notion of much of its meaning. The global ideas of this approach are relevant for Yiddish too. Wexler (:–) and Fishman (:) both suggest additional cogent arguments that show the fundamental dissimilarity betweens creoles and Jewish languages. For a general discussion of the statements of various authors about the relationship between Yiddish and pidgins/creoles see Eggers :–. 41 42
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
initial period of its development, Yiddish was a non-native language—with highly simplified grammar and limited lexicon—of Ashkenazic Jews who had a very limited contact with German Christians. There is not a single shred of evidence to corroborate the existence of this stage. In recent decades, linguists created a new concept of MIXED LANGUAGES to cover various languages—different from pidgins and creoles—that do not have just one single clearly identified ancestor. These languages arise through the fusion of two source languages L and L, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism. In the resulting languages, certain subsystems come from L, while other subsystems can be directly traced to L. For example, the morphology is mainly due to L but most of the lexical elements are from L; or, on a finer level, the verbal morphology corresponds to L, while the nominal morphology continues the patterns of L. The total number of languages universally classified as MIXED is small. It includes Michif (particular Métis communities in Northern America), Mednyj Aleut (Bering Island, Russia), Mbugu (Tanzania), and a few other examples. It would be linguistically unfruitful to widen this narrow definition of MIXED LANGUAGES to cover all languages for which several stock idioms can be distinguished. In this particular sense, neither English nor Yiddish should be assigned to this group. In both of them, all major systemic elements are due to the same unique linguistic ancestors. It is certainly true that “mixedness” of languages exists on a continuum. For example, it decreases in the following sample: Michif – English – Yiddish – French – Italian. However, within the framework of historical linguistics, there is a fundamental difference between Michif and all the other languages cited. For Michif, the LANGUAGE TREE model cannot be applied. For the other idioms on this list (including Yiddish) the application of this model is possible and, moreover, fruitful. Surely, the linguistic concepts discussed in the two previous paragraphs are relatively new. Weinreich clearly meant something else when he posited the fusion character of Yiddish “from its very beginning.” To illustrate his point, Weinreich (WG :) proposes the following model StY sentence: nokhn bentshn hot der zeyde gekoyft a seyfer ‘After the blessing, the grandfather bought a religious book.’ This example perfectly illustrates the possibilities of having—within the same sentence—elements belonging to various origins: the root of bentshn is Romance; zeyde and seyfer belong to the Slavic and Hebrew components, respectively; other elements (including the ending of bentshn) are High German. It also serves to show Yiddish developments that are not found in the stock languages: German has no equivalent for nokh-n (although both of its morphemes are of High German origin); contrary to Yiddish zeyde, the word meaning ‘grandfather’ starts with /z/ in no Slavic language (but with /dz/ in Polish and /d/ in many other languages), and the root diphthong is also specific to Yiddish; not a single Romance language has the root /bentš/ in verbs ultimately derived from Latin benedicere ‘to bless’; seyfer means ‘religious book’ only in Yiddish, while its Hebrew etymon signifies simply ‘book’; the syntax fits modern German but for the placement of the (nominal) object (a seyfer) that would be placed in NHG before the perfect participle (gekoyft). Yet, in Early NHG an object was placed on either side of the perfect participle.45 Consequently, Weinreich’s idea about a possibility of Hebrew or Slavic influences here is unnecessary. The sentence suggested by Weinreich is surely a good illustration of fusion internal to Yiddish. However, the importance of this and similar sentences for the question of the fusion character of Yiddish should not be overestimated. Even in this artificially constructed example, the High German basis is evident in all grammatical elements: syntax, inflectional endings, and definite and indefinite articles. For this reason, one can construct
45
For example, this is true of the writings of Martin Luther (see Light ).
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Main concepts and classifications
effortlessly millions of Yiddish sentences in which all elements are of German origin. For example, it suffices to replace in Weinreich’s model sentence the non-German words to obtain: nokhn frishtik hot der foter gekoyft a bukh ‘After the breakfast, the father bought a book.’ Yet, it is impossible to do a similar exercise with any other component. This argument shows another important difference between Yiddish and various “non-genetic” idioms such as MIXED LANGUAGES, pidgins, or creoles. Moreover, examples similar to that proposed by Weinreich can be constructed in almost any language. For example, consider the English sentence: an ugly tailor drinks whisky. Here in addition to West Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), the other elements derive from Old Norse (ugly), French (tailor), and Celtic (whisky). Contrary to Yiddish, in English one can also compose a sentence—including at least a subject, a predicate, and an object—all the elements of which are Romance (French or Latin), such as famous annals describe sumptuous furniture, or Old Norse, such as they get trust until they hit Eric. In many aspects, the label of a “fusion language” fits modern English better than Yiddish. Nevertheless, despite this fact, English is considered an essentially West Germanic language.46 It is for this reason that the Romance- and Old Norse-based sentences suggested above both sound semantically bizarre and awkward, while one can construct millions of long English sentences in which all elements will be West Germanic. Even for languages that are significantly less “mixed” than English such as French, German, or Russian, it is not difficult to construct sentences encompassing elements of various origins like that proposed by Weinreich. There is no reason to consider all of them “non-genetic.”
.. Jewish-oriented approach: classification of Jewish languages The notion of JEWISH LANGUAGES as a category of idioms that deserves a separate study was nonexistent within the framework of the GERMANISTIC APPROACH. It was introduced by proponents of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH. In their consideration of the genesis of Yiddish, these scholars suggested that—contrary to the standard LANGUAGE TREE model applicable to the development of a large majority of languages—this language had several “mother” tongues. Only one of them was German. The number depends on the author. Birnbaum speaks only about ZARPHATIC (Judeo-French) and Hebrew. For Weinreich, this notion covers three tongues: WESTERN LOEZ (Judeo-French), SOUTHERN LOEZ (Judeo-Italian), and Hebrew. Katz postulates only Judeo-Aramaic.47 All the above stock languages besides German belong to the general category of JEWISH LANGUAGES. Wexler (:–) proposes a classification that comprises four distinct types: (A) Languages—like Yiddish and Judezmo—linked through a chain of language shift back to spoken Palestinian Hebrew and characterized by the merger of components of a coterritorial non-Jewish language with imported components (invariably including those of Hebrew and Aramaic origin); (B) Languages—like Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic—that originated in the absence of any significant Jewish substratum, but subsequently acquired a Jewish identity either because of innovations that did not affect the Jewish and non-Jewish population in the same way, or because of migrations of Jews to new territories; (C) Non-spoken calque-languages—like Ladino—developed for certain forms of written expression, mainly biblical translations and exegesis;
46 47
See Thomason and Kaufman :–. See sections .. and .. and Figures . and ..
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
(D) Languages that differ from coterritorial Gentile idioms by the introduction of specifically Jewish elements (Jewish English in the US during the twentieth century, Jewish German in Germany during the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, etc.). They mainly correspond to transitory speech forms arising during the shift from a specifically Jewish to a non-Jewish language. Wexler (:–) calls types A and B (“primary” and “secondary”) Judeo-X languages (for example, JUDEO-ARABIC), type C “Judeo-X calques” (for example, JUDEO-ARABIC CALQUE), and type D “Jewish-X languages” (for example, JEWISH-GERMAN). Certain general aspects of the above classification are highly questionable. The first objection concerns the criteria chosen by Wexler to distinguish his four types. The standard scientific approach implies that any classification of items under analysis should be based on their distinctness according to the same criteria applied to all these items. Yet, Wexler (implicitly) applies different criteria to various parts of his classification. Type C is distinguished from others because it covers non-spoken languages. Among the other groups, all encompassing spoken languages only, B is distinguished from A and D by the size of their respective Jewish substrata. Finally, languages from type D have small differences in comparison to coterritorial Gentile languages, while those from A represent fusion languages. As a result, in a purist approach, we are dealing with a three-level classification rather than four groups within a single-level classification. The second remark concerns the presence of vague (and therefore highly subjective) elements in the above criteria. Indeed, type B is defined as having no significant substratum, while the distinction between D and A uses the term merger without clearly defining exactly what it means in this context. If we withdraw these vague terms from the definitions given by Wexler, we immediately obtain a logically incoherent classification because the same Jewish language can, in principle, be simultaneously put into several groups.48 Thirdly, the unique example taken to illustrate type B is rather problematic for the classification of JEWISH LANGUAGES. Wexler makes reference to Blanc . Yet, his quote from that source omits one crucial detail. Blanc (:–) places the demarcation line not between Jews and Gentiles, but between, on the one hand, Muslims (speakers of the southern, gelet, dialects) and, on the other hand, Jews and Christians (speakers of the northern, qeltu, dialects). No specifically Jewish peculiarity has been discovered by him. For Yiddish, Wexler (:)—relying upon ideas exposed in WG :–—proposes the uninterrupted chain of vernacular JEWISH LANGUAGES that, globally speaking, is equivalent to Figure ..49 In the scheme shown here, the vertical arrows correspond to shifts of languages spoken by Jewish communities from one Jewish mother language to another daughter language. According to both Weinreich and Wexler, all Judeo-X idioms mentioned belong to the type A of the above classification suggested by Wexler. In other words, all of them result from a fusion of one non-Jewish language X with the vernacular Jewish language Judeo-Y used before the shift. The notion of “Judeo-Romance,” as given in Figure ., represents a simplification because it actually comprises at least two stages: (i) Judeo-Latin, (ii) its descendants: Judeo-French (WESTERN LOEZ = ZARPHATIC) and Judeo-Italian (SOUTHERN LOEZ=ITALKIAN),50 from both of which, if we follow Weinreich rather than
This extrapolation is made in Benor :. Contrary to Figure ., JUDEO-SLAVIC is not presented in the picture suggested by Wexler. However, his own explicit statements (Wexler :–) and especially the consideration by WG (:–, ) allow inclusion of JUDEO-SLAVIC (i) as an heir of JUDEO-GREEK, (ii) influenced by both Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic, and (iii) influencing Yiddish only on a horizontal, adstratal, level. 50 WESTERN and SOUTHERN LOEZ are terms suggested by Weinreich (WG :), while ZARPHATIC and ITALKIAN are terms coined by Birnbaum (:) along with a dozen other neologisms he proposed for putative JEWISH LANGUAGES in various countries. 48 49
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Main concepts and classifications Spoken Hebrew
Judeo-Aramaic
Judeo-Greek Judeo-Romance Judeo-Slavic
Judeo-German = Yiddish
FIGURE . Chain of JEWISH LANGUAGES according to Weinreich
Birnbaum, Yiddish is (partly) derived. The horizontal arrows on the scheme indicate the influences that the “language of the holy” ([StY] LOSHN-KOYDESH), covering both Hebrew and Aramaic and used in numerous religious contexts of Judaism, continues to exert on vernacular Jewish languages.
.. Suggested approach The criticism of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH presented in previous sections does not imply that the ideas of the proponents of this method do not deserve any attention. On the contrary, these ideas represent a major linguistic achievement, and thanks to them a number of questions concerning the development of Yiddish received adequate scholarly coverage and certain aspects of Yiddish history became elucidated. The authors adhering to the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH generally believe that their theoretical positions are incompatible with those elaborated by the representatives of the GERMANISTIC APPROACH. In other words, their new ideas are suggested to replace those of their predecessors, the latter seen as linguistically inadequate and outdated.51 The author of this book mainly follows the classical LANGUAGE TREE model that characterizes the GERMANISTIC APPROACH, according to which Yiddish is derived from MHG (see Figure .) and therefore belongs to the same branch of Western Germanic languages as NHG. Nevertheless, several ideas of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH appear to be fruitful. The consideration of the fusion of various components as one of the most important idiosyncrasies of Yiddish and even the feature that can, in principle, determine it as a separate language represents the first major contribution of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH.52 However, instead of positing this fusion to the initial period of the development of Ashkenazic communities, it is linguistically more appropriate to date it several centuries later. A detailed discussion of the fusion of the phonologies of the German and Hebrew
See, for example, explicit statements in Jacobs :–, , –. Callenberg (:–) was among the first authors who wrote on Yiddish to stress that this language is a fusion language par excellence, with two components (German and Hebrew), the former resulting from a merger of elements coming from various German dialects. His ideas were later developed by Avé-Lallemant (:–). 51 52
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
Spoken Hebrew
Jews’ Aramaic Jews’ Greek Jews’ Latin Jews’ Provençal
Jews’ Czech Jews’ East Slavic
Jews’ French WY
EY
FIGURE . Suggested chain of languages spoken by Jews
components as a possible criterion for defining the age of Yiddish appears in section ... Such an approach places the birth of both subdivisions of Yiddish, WY and EY, in the fifteenth century, initially as two languages structurally independent of each other but sharing a large number of surface-level substratal elements that are specifically Jewish.53 Another idea worth retaining is the notion of an uninterrupted chain of JEWISH LANGUAGES, to which both WY and EY can be linked.54 However, Figure . is in need of several important amendments (see Figure .). First, the vertical links between elements of this chain should not be considered on the same genetic level as the link between MHG and Yiddish; in other words, Yiddish is not a “non-genetic” language with several parents. If we consider these links to be substratal (in the same sense as various Celtic languages represent substrata to numerous languages spoken in Western Europe without being their additional “parents”),55 the situation becomes significantly clearer. In other words, vertical lines correspond to the chronology, but not necessarily to the genetic links between languages. Weinreich describes this chain in a rather ambiguous way; indeed, a reader can have the impression that for this scholar, whose opinions are by far the most influential in modern Yiddish studies, the vertical links in the chain of JEWISH LANGUAGES are even more significant than the genetic relationship between JEWISH LANGUAGES and their non-Jewish correlates (that is, between Yiddish and German, Judeo-French and French, Judeo-Greek and Greek etc.). This can lead to the incorrect assumption that Jews are not really shifting from one vernacular language L to another L but that L is a genetic parent of L. Since the lexicons of L and L are dramatically different, one can be tempted to explain the change from L to L via relexification, that is, a gradual replacement of words from L with those from L having the same meanings. Surely, Weinreich himself never said that Yiddish appeared after a
See details in Chapters and . But see sections .. and .. on the discontinuity of certain elements of the Jewish linguistic and onomastic heritage. 55 Substratal elements represent a particular example of borrowing and therefore correspond—according to the LANGUAGE TREE model—to horizontal links between languages. They are borrowed during the shift of a population group from one language to another. 53 54
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Main concepts and classifications
relexification of Judeo-Romance languages with German vocabulary. However, he discusses at length various cases of relexification (calque, loan translation) that occur in the history of JEWISH 56 Wexler (, )—abandoning his own initial () moderate position directly LANGUAGES. based on the theory by Weinreich—developed a linguistically inappropriate theory of the inception of Yiddish via the relexification of Slavic languages, namely Judeo-Sorbian and Judeo-East Slavic (Kiev-Polessian dialects). The arguments and methods of obtaining information found in this theory contradict all major methodological principles elaborated by general linguistics in the last two centuries. Since Yiddish has a High German basis not only in the lexicon but also in all other subsystems (morphology, syntax, and phonology),57 the inappropriate extrapolation by Wexler of some of Weinreich’s theories yields absurd results. A second major amendment concerns the notion of numerous “Judeo-X” languages that appear in Figure .. For the bottom element of this scheme, modern Yiddish, its status as a language of its own, separate from modern German dialects and characterized by numerous fusion phenomena, is unquestionable. As a result, if we follow the classification suggested by Wexler discussed at the end of the previous section, it is appropriate to see it as a kind of JUDEO-GERMAN and to assign it to type A of JEWISH LANGUAGES. Yet, this assignment to all other elements that are called “Judeo-X” languages in Figure . is problematic. Based on the information available to us, we cannot consider them to be fusion languages having systemic differences from the X languages of the Gentile majority. For example, as has been amply discussed by scholars who deal with medieval Jewish manuscripts from northern France, their language is different from that of the contemporary Old French only by the presence of a number of specifically Jewish lexical elements, either of Hebrew or Old Provençal origin. As a result, it would be inappropriate to call it JUDEO-FRENCH if by that term one understands a language to have systemic differences from French spoken by non-Jews.58 Similarly, the information taken from the only items that survive from the idiom of Jews who lived in medieval Czech lands—several dozen glosses and given names—is insufficient to conclude that this language
56 See, for example, WG :– with numerous examples from the domain of given names (some of them are— as discussed in Beider :, —incorrect or, at least, doubtful). 57 In contemporary EY, we can actually observe significant influences from neighboring Slavic languages (mainly, Polish) on all its subsystems. For example, as indicated by Weinreich (WG :), of all classes of words only articles, pronouns, and numerals remained unaffected. However, nothing points to the substratal character of these influences. On the contrary, older Yiddish documents from Eastern Europe contain fewer Slavic items than newer ones, implying that we are dealing with a relatively recent borrowing (though, partly this phenomenon can be explained by stylistic constraints; see footnote of chapter ). 58 See details in Banitt , which argues against the concept of “Judeo-Romance languages” (of which Weinreich was one of the most influential promoters). As discussed by Banitt, nothing suggests the existence of any phonological or morphological peculiarity of the language spoken by Jews in medieval northern France, while (a) many thousands of glosses correspond to Old French; (b) less than one hundred glosses reveal items unknown in sources available for Old French; (c) about fifty of them can be assigned to the Old Provençal language spoken by Jews in southern France. The last point is of particular importance in Jewish interlinguistics. Banitt (:–) shows that a number of specifically Jewish words used in medieval communities of various Romance-speaking countries could have their roots in the tradition of biblical translations and other religious literature created by Jewish scholars from Narbonne, in southern France. His conclusions show the theoretical inadequacy of the approach suggested in Blondheim (and endorsed in WG :) about the putative “Judeo-Latin” lexical pool from which all Romance-speaking Jewish communities drew a significant portion of their lexical peculiarities. We should not confuse links in the LANGUAGE TREE model and relations that can exist between Jewish languages. If French is derived from Latin, it does not necessarily mean that a specifically Jewish repertoire that was found in the language of medieval French Jews was due to their ancestors who spoke Latin. In the case of French Jews, the contribution was (at least, partly) not vertical (from Latin), but horizontal (from Old Provençal). Kiwitt () complements the general concepts by Banitt by details concerning the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of texts written by Jews in northern France showing the absence of any systemic difference in comparison to Old French. For additional information concerning non-systemic peculiarities of French used by Jews in medieval France see Kiwitt :– and Fudeman :–.
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
was structurally different from Old Czech.59 Similar results are provided by the comparison of Greek and Latin inscriptions found in Jewish catacombs in Italy to the Gentile use of the same languages in the area in question.60 In the absence of convincing data, it would be safer to replace ambiguous expressions like JUDEO-X LANGUAGES (or JEWISH X LANGUAGES) by JEWS’ X LANGUAGES as is the case in Figure .. Other possibilities would be calling them Jewish ethnolects/religiolects of the corresponding X languages, or X speech of Jews incorporating a specifically Jewish repertoire (if we follow the terminology suggested in Benor ). For an average person, these terms are less likely to imply that we are dealing with a language having more than surface-level differences from that of Gentile neighbors. For the same reason, it is better to replace the global notion of JEWISH LANGUAGES by a more neutral expression like “languages spoken by Jews.”61 Of course, the main issue here is not terminology (which is in any case purely conventional) but rather the linguistic ambiguity in Figure .. Indeed it uses the same expression JUDEO-X LANGUAGE to designate, on the one hand, Yiddish, an idiom with numerous system-level differences in comparison to German and, on the other hand, other Jewish idioms of the past that—according to our current knowledge (and contrary to opinions of both Weinreich and Wexler)—are no more than ethnolects/ religiolects of the corresponding non-Jewish languages.62 An introduction of separate terms to cover these two categories fundamentally different from the point of view of historical linguistics is suggested here to eliminate the ambiguity in question.63 For idioms corresponding to type A in Wexler’s classification we might withdraw from their names any mention of non-Jewish languages that—according to the LANGUAGE TREE model—were their parents. In this sense, YIDDISH and JUDEZMO are better terms than JUDEO-GERMAN and JUDEO-SPANISH, respectively,64 while, according to the terminology in Figure . suggested by Wexler, these two pairs are synonymous. For idioms See details in Bláha et al. a, Ulicˇ ná and Polakovicˇ (), and Ulicˇ ná :–. Of course, a very limited literary corpus available for medieval French and Czech Jews (that can, moreover, in some cases be modeled on examples from the majority culture) may not say much about the spoken language. However, following general methodological principles of scientific research—such as SIMPLICITY (or OCCAM’S RAZOR) and Popper’s FALSIFIABILITY— the idea of absence of systemic differences between the languages of these Jews and their Gentile neighbors appears significantly more attractive than the idea that such differences were present. 60 See Leon :– (on Venosa), :– (on Rome). Rutgers (:–) shows that only the content of the inscriptions found in ancient Rome was significantly different for Jews and non-Jews. Yet, no difference can be found from the point of view of phonology, morphology, or syntax. See also Aslanov on the vernacular language of Jews in medieval Greece being Greek rather than “Judeo-Greek.” 61 Compare Benor :–. 62 One can suggest one global criterion showing a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, Jewish ethnolects and, on the other hand, languages like Yiddish (or Judezmo). Speakers of Jewish ethnolects are generally able to identify the specifically Jewish elements of their speech and, if needed, avoid using them when talking to Gentiles. This way they switch to registers of the language that are shared by both Jewish and non-Jewish speakers. Yet, this is impossible for a monolingual speaker of Yiddish. Precisely because of the existence of systemic differences in his/her vernacular idiom, the idiom in question can be immediately identified as distinct from various German dialects spoken by Gentiles. 63 Several linguists who address the question of languages spoken by Jews write about a continuum rather than clearly distinguished types (see an overview in Benor :). Globally speaking, the approach of analyzing these languages using a continuum scale of their distinctness from non-Jewish correlates appears adequate, especially if it is applied for sociolinguistic analysis. However, for historical linguistics, it is more appropriate to introduce somewhere within this continuum a demarcation line separating Jewish ethnolects of various languages from specifically Jewish dialects/languages. This can be done paying attention to system-level differences (phonological, morphological) in comparison to surface-level peculiarities. For example, to address this question, certain linguistic variables in the list proposed by Benor are significantly more important than others. In section .., three criteria were suggested for identifying Yiddish as a separate idiom in comparison to various German dialects. Two of them have direct correlates with the following variables mentioned in Benor :: “displaced dialectalism” and “archaisms.” 64 Exactly as we say, for example, “French” and “Italian” rather than “Franco-Latin”/“French Latin” and “ItaloLatin”/“Italian Latin.” 59
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from the second category, that is, those having no systemic differences in comparison to the corresponding non-Jewish languages, the opposite is true. Within the framework of historical linguistics, it is appropriate to name them to keep explicit references to their non-Jewish correlates. For this reason, in Figure . they are (conventionally) called JEWS’ X LANGUAGES.65 They belong to type D in Wexler’s classification, which covers various Jewish speech forms that follow shifts by Jews from one language to another. Some of them correspond (as pointed out by Wexler) to dying languages. In this situation, the transition is from a JEWS’ X LANGUAGE to a non-Jewish X language (for instance, from JEWS’ ENGLISH and JEWS’ RUSSIAN to English and Russian, respectively). To the same category belongs JEWS’ GERMAN, which corresponds to what Guggenheim-Grünberg (:–) and Weinberg () called “remnants” (Reste, in German) of a former specifically Jewish language (WY)—found in several western German provinces during the first half of the twentieth century.66 Others may survive for centuries, gradually acquire more and more elements not found in the speech of the Gentile neighbors and—under certain historical circumstances—even give rise to new specifically Jewish languages. In this case, the original JEWS’ X LANGUAGES can be seen as a linguistically intermediary stage between a non-Jewish X language (never spoken by local Jews) and a specifically Jewish language having systemic differences in comparison to its non-Jewish X correlate. As discussed in Chapter , this is the case of WY and EY, languages that evolved from two different kinds of JEWS’ GERMAN. If the non-Jewish X language branches to several daughter languages, the corresponding JEWS’ X LANGUAGE branches as well. This way one can speak about the disappearance of JEWS’ LATIN giving rise to a series of JEWS’ ROMANCE languages. Finally, there are JEWS’ X LANGUAGES that disappeared without any genetic heir. Most often this occurred because of the migration, voluntary or forced by expulsions, of the corresponding Jewish group. This migration was followed by a shift of the group in question to a new JEWS’ Y LANGUAGE structurally equivalent to the non-Jewish Y language. JEWS’ FRENCH belongs to this subtype. At the end of the First Millennium CE one part of its bearers shifted to JEWS’ GERMAN (for which JEWS’ FRENCH can be seen as substratal but certainly not as its parent). After expulsions in the fourteenth century other parts of the Frenchspeaking Jewish communities merged with Jews from several countries, including Italy, Spain, and Germany. Another group of major changes needed in Figure . concerns the concept of JUDEO-SLAVIC. One modification is terminological: as discussed in the previous paragraph, the expression “Jews’ Slavic” is more appropriate. Another modification is more substantive. We need to split this notion, considering separately the idioms of two medieval Slavic-speaking Jewish groups: (i) EAST CANAANITES who lived in Russian principalities and later in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (JEWS’ EAST SLAVIC, mainly in the territories of modern Belarus and Ukraine) and (ii) WEST CANAANITES from Czech lands (JEWS’ CZECH).67 The first of these provided a small horizontal influence on Yiddish resulting in EY borrowing certain lexical and onomastic elements long after its inception. Yet, the second one represents a lexical and onomastic substratum that has been important since the inception of EY. It encompasses elements borrowed during the shift of Czech Jews from Jews’ Czech to the Jews’ German idiom (the immediate ancestor of EY), most likely during the fourteenth to fifteenth 65 On the other hand, new terms coined by Weinreich and Birnbaum such as WESTERN LOEZ/ZARPHATIC and SOUTHERN LOEZ/ITALKIAN can be misleading precisely because they make no explicit reference to French and Italian. Note that Weinreich regularly repeats that special names are needed even for cases where no difference can be discerned between idioms spoken by Jews and Gentiles (see, for example, WG :, , ). The terminological issue under consideration is directly related to the different frameworks applied: historical linguistics (this book) and Jewish interlinguistics (Weinreich). 66 As used in this book, the notion of “specifically Jewish languages” does not imply that all their speakers are Jews. It just means that the corresponding idiom initially appeared within Jewish communities. 67 See sections . and ..
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
centuries. This idiom was not a language separate from (the Bohemian dialect of) German yet, but rather a Jewish ethnolect of it. The elements in question were inherited by speakers of Proto-EY from (one part of) their ancestors. The whole (tiny) set of Slavic elements found in WY is adstratal, resulting from horizontal contacts with EY speakers during various periods.68 Scarce linguistic and historical information available to us concerning JEWS’ (OLD) CZECH does not allow us to assert with certainty its immediate Jewish predecessor(s), and for this reason in Figure . two vertical links are drawn using dashed lines. The predecessor(s) in question could be JEWS’ GREEK (equivalent to JudeoGreek in Figure .) and/or JEWS’ LATIN from Italy. An additional change in comparison to Figure . concerns JUDEO-ROMANCE (or, more precisely, “Jews’ French”). In Figure ., it represents a definite substratum for WY only. On the other hand, a small set of Romance elements found in EY is heterogeneous. One part of it results from horizontal contacts with WY speakers and is therefore adstratal. Another part—including important lexical elements related to the religious sphere such as StY leyenen ‘to read’—may, in principle, be substratal (and for this reason, a dashed vertical line appears in Figure . linking JEWS’ FRENCH to EY), being present already in the Jewish ethnolect of Bohemian German that was the immediate predecessor of Proto-EY. This substratum would be acquired by the ethnolect in question from Ashkenazic Jews who migrated in the Middle Ages from Germany to Bohemia and Moravia, and merged there with Jews who had lived in these territories for centuries. These migrants shifted to the local Jewish ethnolect of either Old Czech (before the fourteenth century), or Bohemian German (during the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries). The suggested synthesis of ideas found in the GERMANISTIC and JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACHES is not totally new. During the last decades all publications by Erika Timm have put forth a global consideration of the history of Yiddish that combines ideas of her predecessors belonging to various schools. On the one hand, she considers the end of the fifteenth century as the period when Yiddish clearly became distinguishable from German (TG ) and that before the mid-fifteenth century the phonology of the language of texts written in Hebrew characters and based on German corresponds to that of surrounding German dialects (TG –). The analysis by Timm can be used to illustrate the idea that until the century in question, Jewish speech mainly followed the development of local German dialects (TS , ). Her studies include myriads of details concerning possible links between Yiddish elements and their etymons from various High German dialects. In these particular aspects, she is close to the proponents of the GERMANISTIC APPROACH. On the other hand, Timm regularly claims to adhere explicitly to the classical theories of Weinreich and Birnbaum. For example, as with both these authors, she uses the term YIDDISH to label all known texts written by Ashkenazic Jews in their vernacular language in various parts of Europe from the Middle Ages onward. In many repects, one can say that Timm benefited from Weinreich’s innovative ideas in the best way. She presents the richest collection of data concerning the earliest references to fusion elements peculiar to Yiddish. A document compiled in in the Cologne area mentions the gloss ‘ ויריןto line, rule’ that is likely to have a root from (Jews’) French and a German ending.69 Note that the verb viren, with the same meaning, is also present in modern Yiddish. The verbal form vermassert (an ancestor to the StY verb farmasern ‘to betray’), with a Hebrew root and German affixes, appears in a document of from Zürich. That source reproduces in Latin characters a sentence pronounced by a local Jew during a trial. First references to specifically Jewish elements from the German component also exist in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The verb lernen ‘to study Jewish religious texts’ is present in a document written in Hebrew characters in . The compound noun schulklopper appears in a Frankfurt Christian source of ; compare StY See detailed discussion in section .. Though this element was not written by the manuscript’s scribe, Asher ben Jacob Halevi, several factors imply that it is likely to have been produced by the hand of someone from his milieu or family (Timm :, ). 68 69
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Main concepts and classifications
shulklaper ‘one who knocks on doors calling people to synagogue’ (TG –). The first mention of the Yiddish verb shekhtn ‘to slaughter according to the Jewish ritual,’ with a root from the Hebrew component and a typical German ending, appears in a document compiled in western Germany circa . Periphrastic constructions combining a Hebrew word with the verb zayn (compare NHG sein ‘to be’) have been known since the beginning of the fifteenth century. They became common during the second half of the same century (TG ). Her most important contribution to theoretical debates about the major stages of the development of Yiddish is found in TS. In that book, Timm shows the channel through which numerous specifically Jewish idiosyncrasies gradually became widespread in various Ashkenazic communities in both German- and Slavic-speaking regions. This channel corresponds to the tradition of biblical translations whose first traces are found in medieval Rhenish communities. The language of these translations is called Ivre-taytsh in StY. Some of its elements developed as calques of the original Hebrew text to the Ashkenazic vernacular. Certain of these idiosyncrasies have been linked by Timm to the tradition of biblical translations developed previously by Jews from northern France (TS –). From Ivre-taytsh these items—not only lexical but also morphological—penetrated into the common vocabulary of all modern Yiddish varieties. In other words, thanks to her work, something that earlier could have been considered simply as Weinreich’s intuitive guess (major elements of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS, the importance of the uninterrupted chain of languages spoken by Jews) received strong factual corroboration. Figure . incorporates findings from Timm and the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH to a represention of the history of WY. This variety of modern Yiddish is taken here as an example to illustrate the approach suggested in this book. The scheme shows all German-based Jewish idioms that are linked to WY as well as (using dashed lines) their immediate predecessor, JEWS’ FRENCH. Here for every element the type from the classification introduced by Wexler () is given in parentheses. Initially a Jewish ethnolect of German (JEWS’ GERMAN ) developed in medieval western Germany. It was different from coterritorial German only by the presence of a specifically Jewish layer one part of which was inherited from Jews who shifted from JEWS’ FRENCH. Gradually, it gave rise to WY, a vernacular idiom whose development was already in many respects independent of the surrounding German dialects. In parallel, the same ethnolect also gave rise to a calque (written) language Ivre-taytsh. The latter had an important influence on the later development of the lexicon and, to a lesser extent, morphology of WY.70 During the nineteenth century, Jews Jews’ French (D)
Jews’ German 1 (D)
WY (A)
Ivre-taytsh (C)
Jews’ German 2 (D)
FIGURE . Western idioms spoken by Jews (according to the classification of JEWISH LANGUAGES) 70
Formally speaking, Ivre-taytsh should not be considered a separate language. In many respects, it is more appropriate to view it merely as a (written) register of JEWS’ GERMAN that developed for the specific purpose of biblical translations and whose development was important for the development of the vernacular language (WY). Other vernacular languages also exhibit influence from written registers, especially that of administrative documents (compare Polish Styl urzędowo-kancelaryjny, German Kanzleistil).
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Definitions of the term YIDDISH
MHG
French
German 1
WY
German 2
FIGURE . Western idioms spoken by Jews (according to LANGUAGE TREE model)
living in a large part of Germany gradually abandoned WY and shifted to the language of the Christian majority, keeping, nevertheless, in their speech a specifically Jewish layer inherited from WY.71 One can say that these German Jews were speaking JEWS’ GERMAN . According to the classical LANGUAGE TREE model, this language cannot be considered a descendant of WY. It would be more proper to call it a Jewish ethnolect (or religiolect) of German with relics from WY belonging to its substratum. In order to avoid any confusion, Figure . presents all the vernacular idioms of Jewish communities appearing in Figure . (except Ivre-taytsh), but this time according not to the approach of JEWISH LANGUAGES, but following the LANGUAGE TREE model. In Figure ., dashed lines show processes that do not directly concern vernacular Jewish languages with a High German basis. Vertical lines designate genetic linguistic links, while horizontal lines show shifts of Jewish communities from one everyday language to another. The first shift occurred from (Jews’) FRENCH to (Jews’) GERMAN (dialect(s)) . These two languages appear on two different branches of the tree for the Indo-European family, those of Romance and Germanic languages, respectively. The second shift occurred from WY to (Jews’) GERMAN (dialects) . Here both the source and the target languages belong to the same High German branch of the Germanic languages. If we compare Figures . and . we can see that only one link is vertical in both of them: that from GERMAN (including its specifically Jewish repertoire) to WY. For this link, a genetic relationship characterizes not only both languages in question but also their speakers. In Figure . the links from JEWS’ FRENCH to JEWS’ GERMAN and from WY to JEWS’ GERMAN are vertical, because the corresponding linguistic shifts concern genetically related Jews. Yet, in Figure . the links from FRENCH to GERMAN and from WY to GERMAN are horizontal because the source languages are not ancestral for the target languages. Moreover, vertical links between MHG and GERMAN / appear in Figure . only: these transitions did not concern Jews and therefore they are beyond the scope of the Jewish language model. The above-mentioned example of WY, represented in Figures . and ., can be generalized. When a group of Jews settles in new territories where a local idiom is different from their vernacular tongue, an interaction starts between the two languages in question. Most often, during the first generation(s) these Jews (or, at least, a large portion of them) become bilingual. On the one hand, their former language borrows elements (mainly lexical) from the local language and can undergo
71 The transition from WY to the Jewish ethnolect of German included a period of bilingualism when people were speaking WY and the language of the surrounding Gentile population, both to a great extent mutually intelligible. The first was losing its prestige and dying, and the second was borrowing elements from it.
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Main concepts and classifications
certain new shifts. On the other hand, the local language when spoken by these immigrants acquires new items too. Some of them are substratal, that is, inherited from the former language. Others result from innovations unrelated to the former language. Of course, for different communities significant variation can be observed concerning the number of generations during which this bilingualism persists and the degree of change in both languages they speak. At one pole of this continuum scale can be placed communities that do not acquire local language at all and continue speaking (but for a few surface-level changes) the language used in their previous home country. One example is certain Ultra-Orthodox Yiddish-speaking communities that emigrated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Eastern Europe to Northern America or the Land of Israel. If in a new area the period of using this language of foreign origin is significantly long, natural changes occurring in every idiom provoke systemic modification in comparison to the dialect spoken before the migration. Only a few languages—such as Yiddish and Judezmo—appear on this pole.72 At the other pole of the same scale appear Jewish groups that starting with the first generations born in new territories use the local language only (again initially but for a few surface-level peculiarities). All other communities can be placed between these two poles. A large majority of Jewish communities known to us from history are situated close to the second pole: in their new countries they gradually shifted to local languages, abandoning their former idioms. A few of these newly acquired local languages had survived within the Jewish communities even after local Gentiles shifted to a new language (or dialect).73 In every (unusual) case like this, a separate analysis is needed in order to understand the sociolinguistic and historical reasons for this survival.74 The model described in the previous paragraph is not specifically Jewish. However, its application to languages spoken by Jews reveals a number of idiosyncrasies. First, during the last two and a half thousand years Jewish communities have been characterized by more numerous migrations than almost all other population groups. Moreover, these migrations were not going from one source area to various target regions (as is, for example, the case for Italians and Poles during the last centuries), but from country to country, with a previous target region becoming a source area for new migrations. Second, numerous Jewish groups had access to the same linguistic sources, Hebrew and/or Aramaic, related to the religious literature of Judaism. Some of these sources are textual.
72
For Judezmo and EY developed since the end of Middle Ages in the Ottoman Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, respectively, their status as Jewish idioms heavily based on vernacular languages spoken in their home countries is beyond doubt. For both of them, the geographic separation caused by migrations from West to East (from Spain for Judezmo and primarily from Bohemia-Moravia for EY) was one of the principal factors for their linguistic distinctness. The role of migrations in the inception of WY as an idiom having systemic differences in comparison to all (non-Jewish) German dialects is less clear: WY is much closer to surrounding German dialects than Judezmo to Greek and Turkish or EY to Slavic or Baltic languages. Yet, even if numerous details of the gradual unification of various forms of Jewish speech in western German-speaking and northern Italian provinces still remain obscure, the role of displacements of the Jewish population (partly provoked by expulsions, partly voluntary) was clearly crucial (see sections . and ..). 73 Benor (:, :) proposes similar considerations. She suggests distinguishing between two qualitatively different categories of languages spoken by Jews: “coterritorial” and “post-coterritorial.” The former languages are used in the same geographical area as their non-Jewish correlates. The latter category covers cases in which a “Jewish community maintains a language for many generations after migrating to a new language territory or continues to speak a language after local non-Jews have shifted to a different language.” She stresses that representatives of the second category are rather exceptional in Jewish history and calls for “slightly different tools of analysis” than those of the first category. Weinreich (WG :) also suggests distinguishing two basic types of JEWISH LANGUAGES according to the territory (old or new) where the inception of a new idiom takes shape. Yet, despite the purely descriptive purposes, in the framework of his particular approach it is unclear why this dichotomy is important. 74 The suggested classification is designed to cover only linguistic phenomena in the Diaspora. It is not directly appropriate for describing processes that took place in antiquity in the Land of Israel such as acquisition of Hebrew and propagation of Aramaic and Greek.
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Classifications of Yiddish elements
During various periods of time, they could enrich the specifically Jewish repertoire of languages spoken by Jews. Other sources correspond to spoken traditions providing substratal elements for various Jewish idioms. Influences between various communities were also indirect, passing through the tradition of biblical translations.75 Third, often in the past migrating Jewish groups had not been socially integrated, thereby amplifying their linguistic differences. Fourth, in the case of Jewish migrations the situation is often more nuanced than the simplified picture presented in the previous paragraph. Indeed, in certain cases Jewish immigrants come to territories where other Jews are living, and therefore the interaction occurs not only with the language of the Gentile majority but also with the speech—that can possess significant peculiarities with respect to that of Gentiles—of local Jews too.76 If we want to pursue linguistic, rather than ideological, objectives, Weinreich’s position that all JEWISH LANGUAGES “must be viewed from within” (WG :) is unacceptable. However, it suffices to replace in his slogan the word “must” by “can” to obtain a correct statement. On the one hand, the GERMANISTIC APPROACH provides appropriate frameworks for the general analysis of the genesis of Yiddish according to the LANGUAGE TREE model, standard in historical linguistics and ignoring any Jewish specificity, the model whose use led during the last two centuries to some of the most important achievements in this domain of human knowledge. Vertical links appearing in schemes drawn following this method relate mother and daughter languages ignoring whether their respective speakers are genetically related or not. On the other hand, several notions introduced by the proponents of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH (viewing Jewish languages from “within”) represent a major breakthrough in Yiddish studies. The notion of “fusion” creates an appropriate theoretical tool for studying the development of Yiddish varieties. The consideration of the uninterrupted chain of languages spoken by Jews sheds light on factors that were invisible within the framework of the more traditional GERMANISTIC APPROACH. Yet, considering that the links in this chain are as important for the structure of Yiddish as the genetic links in a standard LANGUAGE TREE model can only mislead linguistic research in directions that contradict scientific realism. Vertical links in schemes drawn for languages spoken by Jews relate idioms used by successive generations. In other words, they focus on the genetic relationship between people and ignore that of the languages concerned. Some of these links are also vertical according to the GERMANISTIC APPROACH. Others relate languages that— according to the GERMANISTIC APPROACH—are not in the direct mother/daughter relationship but correspond to linguistic shifts within the Jewish population. In these cases, the source languages provide substratal elements for the specifically Jewish repertoire of target languages.
.
CLASSIFICATIONS OF YIDDISH ELEMENTS
.. Principal classification used in this book As is true for any language, Yiddish elements can be classified as belonging to one of the several linguistic subsystems listed in Table ..
75
See the above discussion of TS. Moreover, in certain regions several languages were spoken by local Gentiles. From the linguistic point of view, one of the most complicated situations was that of Ashkenazic migrants coming during the fifteenth century to Lwόw/ Lemberg (now L’viv, Ukraine), at that time the capital city of the Red Ruthenia region of the Polish Kingdom. In addition to the presence of Jews who had apparently lived in that area for a few centuries, local Christians were speaking German, Polish, Ukrainian, or Armeno-Kipchak. 76
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Main concepts and classifications
TABLE . Elements of language systems Subsystem
Main elements
Lexicon / Vocabulary Words (including their semantics) Morphology
Affixes (suffixes, prefixes, infixes), inflectional rules, word formation rules
Phonology
Phonemes (individual, combinations of), morphophonemic rules, prosodic rules
Syntax
Syntactic rules
For any element present in a variety of Yiddish spoken in one particular region, one can distinguish several stages of its “life cycle” within the language in the region in question: () Inception, that is, a genesis of a new element that is not concomitant with a disappearance of any other element, with several possible sources: (.) LANGUAGE TREE heritage, that is, inheritance from the mother High German language according to the LANGUAGE TREE model (.) Substratum heritage from Jews who shifted from another language (.) Borrowing (..) Via direct contact with languages of Gentile neighbors (..) From LOSHN-KOYDESH, that is, Hebrew and Aramaic, both being the prestigious languages of Jewish religious literature and Hebrew representing the lingua franca for contacts between Jews from various areas (..) Via cultural contacts with vernacular languages of Jews from other areas (..) Via cultural contacts with vernacular languages of Gentiles from other areas (.) Creation, mainly as a result of internal processes, though in one particular case—that of calques—one also observes the influence of elements of another language (.) Migration of a ready-made element brought by Yiddish-speaking migrants from another area (..) Establishment of a new Ashkenazic community (..) Interdialectal borrowing inside of Yiddish () Internal changes during which an old element is replaced with a new one. Depending on the nature of the element, one can distinguish several types of changes: (.) Phonetic change (not applicable for syntactic elements) (..) Regular sound change including gradual alteration of a phoneme (spontaneous or context-dependent) and assimilation (..) Other kinds of “natural” sound change (dissimilation, metathesis, haplology, etc.) (..) Renorming following rules that for various reasons, linguistic or extralinguistic, are considered to be “correct” (hypercorrection is a particular case) (..) Mistaken associations (folk etymology, contamination, etc.) (.) Grammatical change that can also be “natural” or resulting from a renorming (not applicable to lexicon) (.) Semantic change (applicable to lexical elements only) () Disappearance of an old element without the genesis of a new one to replace it. The main interest of the above classification is related to the fact that it allows us to follow—in the context of historical linguistics—major features of the development of the Yiddish language. Note that this classification represents the basis of Figure . given in section ... In that general scheme, vertical lines depict LANGUAGE TREE heritage, horizontal simple arrows designate borrowing,
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Classifications of Yiddish elements
while horizontal triple arrows correspond to substratum heritage. Only internal innovations (that is, categories ., , and ) are absent from the scheme. For a comprehensive coverage of the Yiddish development for all elements of category , the above classification is insufficient. In addition to the assignment of an element to one of the subcategories .–, one should also proceed to internal reconstruction. This process consists in identifying the old element that was present in Yiddish before the change and assigning its origin to one of the subcategories of categories (inception) or (change). In the former case, the analysis can be stopped. In the latter case, the reconstruction should be continued until arriving in the inception phase, that is, the assignment to the subcategories .–. The results of the above classification together with the comprehensive list of internal innovations can be helpful in shedding light on the question of the unity of Yiddish. As discussed in section ., this information provides cogent criteria for asserting the polygenesis of this language. It can also suggest an important insight into the history of Ashkenazic settlement in various European countries.77 Two factors are central to this classification. The first is chronological: all main terms used are taken from the domain of the diachronic analysis belonging to historical linguistics. The second is geographical: the results of the application of this classification are directly dependent on the size of the region taken into consideration. This approach allows us to make analysis at different levels going from the general to the particular and vice versa. An element that can be classified in one particular area A as belonging to one particular category, different from . (“migrated”) will belong to the same category in any region A that covers A in its totality. Yet, if exactly the same element is found in a region A that has no overlap with A, this element will mainly be treated as belonging to category . unless identical inception or change processes took place in A and A independently, a phenomenon that is relatively rare. Generally speaking, the smaller the area, the larger the part of category . that encompasses migrated elements and the more difficult the distinction becomes between other categories. If we consider the geographical area covering all Yiddish-speaking communities, category . becomes empty and the geographical factor disappears from the analysis. In theory, this category covers two fundamentally distinct historico-linguistic situations: (..) migration of elements of the Jewish vernacular language to new territories because of the establishment of a new Ashkenazic community there; (..) migration of elements between two existing Ashkenazic communities. In the first case, we are dealing with a geographical expansion of the Yiddish-speaking area. Evidently, in this situation, the “migration” concerns simultaneously all elements of a dialect spoken by Jewish newcomers. The second case concerns individual elements of the language and can result from migrations of individual persons or merely be due to contacts between Ashkenazic Jews of various areas. Certain other categories also deserve additional remarks. When a population group is shifting from one everyday language (L) to another (L), there is necessarily a transition period of bilingualism during which both idioms are spoken by this group. It is during this period that L acquires certain elements as loanwords from L. As a result, category . (Jewish substratum heritage) is close to category .. (borrowing from the vernacular language of other Jews). In both cases, we are dealing with borrowing between two languages. Yet, a clear-cut distinction between these categories is useful to facilitate an analysis whose aims are related to the domain of historical linguistics. As discussed in the next section, the categories of loanwords in the two cases are not the same. This substantive difference comes from the fact that for category .. the borrowing takes place between
77 See section C... In order to avoid circularity of arguments, this should be done only when using results of the classification that were not themselves obtained using historical information concerning Jewish settlements.
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Main concepts and classifications
TABLE . Distinction between several classification categories Classification Category
Is the source language internal to this population group?
Is the source language vernacular?
. (substratum heritage)
Yes
Yes
.. (borrowing from LOSHN-KOYDESH) Yes
No
.. (borrowing from other Jews)
Yes
No
idioms spoken by different population groups, while for category . both idioms are spoken by one and the same group. Before being incorporated into Yiddish, elements from the two categories under discussion belong to everyday Jewish spoken languages. This feature distinguishes both of them from category .. dealing with borrowing from LOSHN-KOYDESH, that is a language that is not vernacular. This information is summarized in Table .. Several aspects of the distinction between the two kinds of heritage, LANGUAGE TREE (.) and substratum (.), are specific to Yiddish and certain other languages spoken by Jews. The category . corresponds to heritage that is almost purely linguistic. Indeed, for Yiddish, this category covers the High German layer that was taken by Jews as ready-made from another population group, namely German Gentiles. Yet, once Ashkenazic Jews shifted to their new language, they did not merge with the “donor” population and continued to be separate from German Gentiles according to their religion and many other aspects of their culture. In other words, in Jewish tradition in the Diaspora, for centuries the spoken language did not represent the essence of the culture. The essence was religious, while the religious texts defining all major aspects of life are written in Hebrew or Aramaic and not in the various vernacular languages Jews acquired in the Diaspora. Certain elements of the substratum heritage deal with this uninterrupted Jewish cultural chain. For this reason, we can say that in category . (contrary to category .) we are dealing with a heritage that for Jews is not purely linguistic but also partly cultural. However, other elements of the same category . were taken as ready-made from Romance- or Slavic-speaking Gentiles. For speakers of Jewish languages with a Romance or Slavic basis before their shift to Yiddish, this layer corresponded to category .. Within Yiddish, it already belongs to category .. Nothing similar can be said about non-Jewish European languages with substrata that were discussed in previous sections. Indeed, Celtic substrata for both French and English are not repositories of values from an uninterrupted cultural chain. In these cases, as opposed to the situation with Jews, the linguistic shift was accompanied by the cultural and genetic merger with the “donor” population group. Another distinction concerns the social status of the substratum language. In linguistic studies dealing with language contacts, it is common to call “substratum” the language of the conquered local population that has a lower status, in contrast to “superstratum,” the language of the foreign conquerors having a superior status. For Jews, the term “substratum” (as used in this book) corresponds by definition to the vernacular idiom spoken by the same group of Jews before the shift to a new everyday language. Here, a shift from one to another spoken language has nothing to do with conquests. Often, it is related to the Jewish settlement in new territories and the adoption by newcomers of local Gentile languages. In this case, the notion of Jewish “substratum” appears to be close to the notion of non-Jewish “superstratum.” Both are applicable to foreigners shifting to languages used by the local population. Yet, history also knows of cases when Jews shifted to a new language without making any geographical displacement. Here, the notion of Jewish “substratum” is already close to that of non-Jewish “substratum.” We can deal with shifts to the language either of the Gentile majority or spoken by another Jewish group that settles in the same territory. However, even in this case, elements inherited by Jews from
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their previous language often correspond to the most prestigious domain, that of Judaism. It is for this precise reason that they are retained. As a result, in some sense we can speak about the earlier language having a higher social status than the new one, exactly as for the non-Jewish “superstratum.” In order to avoid these terminological issues, it was conventionally decided in this book to use only the term “substratum” (and never “superstratum”) when speaking about languages spoken by Jews. The above arguments show the asymmetry between the notion of “substratum” when applied to Jewish and non-Jewish languages. This asymmetry is surely fundamental culturally. It also has a certain linguistic importance. For these reasons, the notion of JEWISH LANGUAGES introduced by Weinreich and his school certainly makes sense and can be useful when discussing some particular aspects of these idioms. Yet, this should not prevent applying to Yiddish and other JEWISH LANGUAGES the methods of analysis elaborated by general historical linguistics. From the purely linguistic point of view, that is, ignoring extra-linguistic aspects of the Ashkenazic culture, the layer resulting from the LANGUAGE TREE heritage—constructed using the classical methods of historical linguistics perfectly applicable to myriads of languages—is fundamental for any JEWISH LANGUAGE. It is by far the most important linguistically in comparison to other layers. For many Yiddish elements the exact classification is far from trivial. In some cases, it can be impossible because of the paucity of written information available to us. Yet, fortunately, the global situation is not hopeless. Several factors can facilitate the choice to be made. These are discussed in the two next sections.
.. Classification methodology The classification described in the previous section, distinguishes four major origins for Yiddish elements: LANGUAGE TREE heritage, substratum heritage, borrowing, and internal innovation. To obtain reliable results when making this classification, several methodological approaches can be applied. The most reliable approach is the one having an empirical basis. One should establish a list of elements that exist in dialects of modern Yiddish. It should be as comprehensive as possible and should encompass all four major subsystems: lexicon, morphology, phonology, and syntax. The analysis of this representative collection can be performed in several steps. Step consists in identifying for every element the place and period of its existence. As many references as possible should be collected in order to obtain comprehensive information about where and when a particular element was present in the vernacular language used by Ashkenazic Jews. In most cases, these references come directly from written documents. The situation with phonological features is special. Direct proof (non-ambiguous graphic evidence or testimonies of authors who lived in that period, preferably grammarians) can rarely be found. Consequently, conclusions about phonological features are more often derived from indirect factors: • Discovery of alternate spellings that helps to eliminate the ambiguity of certain graphic elements; • Analysis of poetry noting the rhymes used; • Comparison of the spelling of the same words in documents written in various languages. The information obtained during Step may show modification in time of the same element in the same area. These data may allow us to identify Yiddish forms resulting from internal innovative changes from older variants. Another important result of Step consists in the possibility of assigning various elements to several geographic subgroups: (i) pan-Yiddish, (ii) belonging to one of major subdivisions of modern Yiddish, either WY or EY (but not to both of them), or (iii) regional,
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that is, found only in Yiddish varieties of such regions as Lithuania, Ukraine, Alsace, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Bohemia, or any combination of them (but still not covering the entire area of WY or EY). For some elements, this assignment may be purely empirical because the available information concerning their geography is explicit. For others, additional theoretical factors should be taken into account. Indeed, there is the possibility that the absence of a feature in one particular region can result from local innovation. Prior to this process, the feature could have been presented there, but no documentation survives. Here geographical distribution can be helpful. For example, if a feature is peculiar to both easternmost and westernmost varieties of Yiddish and is absent from some intermediary area then it is very plausible that in the latter area we are dealing with an innovative change.78 As a result, this feature will be considered pan-Yiddish. Step consists in determining for any element of this list where and when earliest evidence exists for its usage by Jews. This will allow us to clarify later the answer to the question where and when a given feature entered into Yiddish. As a result, formally speaking, for other geographic areas where the same element is found, it should be formally classified as belonging to the category ., that is, that of “migrated” elements. Globally speaking, this step is partly empirical, partly theoretical. The answer will never be definitive since the same feature could, in principle, already be present in the same or another region during an earlier period without any surviving documentation. Due to the scarcity of medieval sources—no representative text is available for the period prior to the end of the fourteenth century—very often the earliest occurrences are found in the same few earliest texts which, by chance, have survived until our time. Sometimes it will be necessary to address the impossibility of assigning a precise date and place to the document, as well as the possibility that the discovered feature is not necessarily peculiar to a local community. It could, in principle, correspond to the area where the author of the document lived before coming into the community in question. When dealing with the oldest available documents one should keep in mind that some of them were preserved only in copies made at a later date. It is also important to stress that written documents do not necessarily reflect the features of the spoken language. This factor is of particular importance for Yiddish, since in addition to the existence of internal graphic convention rules present in any language, we need to take into account its specifically vernacular (and hence non-prestigious) status for its own speakers, and the adaptation to norms of local (Christian) German deliberately made by certain Jewish scribes.79 The consideration of the latter issue is very important when dealing with phonological features. For lexical and morphological traits it is irrelevant. In analyzing the earliest evidence, cases of negative correlation are of particular interest. This corresponds to finding proof of the presence in the Jewish vernacular language of a specific area and time period, characteristics that diverge from modern Yiddish. These elements will mainly be phonological, morphological, or grammatical. More rarely, some negative information can also be deduced for lexical elements too. If some word W typical of modern Yiddish is totally absent from the texts of a specific area, while another word W is regularly used there with the same meaning, the odds are very high that the lack of references to W is not accidental. We will conclude that W was absent from the Jewish tongue of that region and period. Step consists in splitting the list of Yiddish elements into several subsets according to languages with which they are shared: • G: with some German dialects; • S: with some Slavic languages;
See Manaster Ramer :, . Some of these arguments were already suggested in BN . Also see a comprehensive review of these issues in Katz a:. 78 79
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• R: with some Romance languages; • H: with Hebrew or Aramaic used by non-Ashkenazic Jews; • Y: encompasses elements that are distinctly Yiddish having no direct analogy in any German, Slavic, or Romance dialect, or—for elements of Hebrew or Aramaic origin—show no similarities with their use in non-Ashkenazic Jewish communities. Formally speaking, this task is theoretical. Yet, for a large majority of non-phonological elements (and particularly, lexical and morphological) the assignment to one of the above subsets (except for the subset Y) represents a task that is so trivial that one can see the entire procedure as almost purely empirical. The simultaneous use of the results of the previous steps allows for readjusting certain results obtained using only one of the above procedures. Consider two Yiddish varieties V and V that treat the same linguistic phenomenon in a different way, with the only difference that V shows the presence of additional information in comparison to V. Formally speaking, during Step the linguistic feature in question should be considered as not shared by these two varieties. Yet, in this specific case, it is plausible that for the ancestor common to V and V the behavior was similar to that known in V, while the loss of this additional information resulted from innovation in V. If, moreover, during Step it is identified that the feature is likely to be of German origin and German dialects deal with it in a similar way to V, then the probability of the innovation that occurred in V becomes significantly stronger. In this case, this probability becomes very great if during Step it was identified that V corresponds to the area where the local Christian population is Slavic showing the treatment of the same linguistic phenomenon to V. Vowel length can be taken as an illustration of this combination of internal and comparative reconstructions. In Yiddish, the distinction between the long and short vowels does not exist in dialects spoken in Lithuania and Ukraine (V) but it is present in both Poland and Western Europe (V). The distinction is also peculiar to German and, at least since the Middle Ages, it is unknown in East Slavic languages. Taking into account the above consideration, the vowel length distinction should be treated as pan-Yiddish rather than regional. For our main task—that of assigning Yiddish elements to one of the categories enumerated in the previous section—one of the results of Step is of direct value. The distinctly Yiddish elements (subset Y) correspond to internal innovations. Using for this layer the results of Step concerning their geographic distribution within Yiddish varieties allows the establishment of a relationship between these varieties: The existence of shared innovations often represent cogent arguments concerning the genetic links between dialects. The information obtained during Step provides an estimation with respect to the region where particular innovations took place. It allows us to observe the direction of interdialectal influences. For other categories of our principal classification, the following choices remain possible: • the subset G (German) corresponds to either . (LANGUAGE TREE heritage) or .. (borrowing from local German Christians); • the subset S (Slavic) and Romance (R) both correspond to either . (substratum heritage) or .. (borrowing from local Slavic- or Romance-speaking Christians); • the subset H (Hebrew) corresponds to either . (LANGUAGE TREE heritage), or .. (borrowing from Ashkenazic Hebrew) or, less likely, .. (borrowing from other Jews). From the above list one can see that the global task consists in telling inherited forms (categories . and .) from borrowed ones (.., .., and ..). Here, two independent kinds of analysis can be helpful, conventionally called Step and Step . Step aims to provide for elements from subsets G, R, and S, all obtained during Step , further details concerning their geographical and temporary frameworks. This implies the identification for any element of the subset G of the exact German dialects and for any element of the subsets
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R and S of particular Romance and Slavic languages (and, preferably, dialects) that include the element in question. This information taken from studies of linguists specializing in the history of the corresponding languages should be explicitly related to the time periods. Available studies in Germanistics, Romanistics, and Slavistics often provide information about a period (typically a century, or half a century) during which a linguistic “wave” related to a particular sound shift reached various dialects of the corresponding Gentile languages. Comparing the realization of the corresponding Yiddish phonological element to the reflexes before and after the shift in question may allow us to establish for various possible Gentile dialects or languages the periods when they could be donors for Yiddish. Items taken by various Yiddish varieties during the post-medieval period or acquired by a western Jewish ethnolect (or ethnolects) after the end of the eleventh century (that is, during the period when the shift of local Jews from Romance to German was already completed) are borrowed and not inherited. Step consists in estimating for various Yiddish elements the plausibility of their borrowing. The smaller the logical probability of this process is, the bigger the chances are that the element in question is inherited. In textbooks dealing with historical linguistics, it is generally assumed that the following elements are rarely borrowed:80 • inflectional affixes; • all of the basic vocabulary that encompasses various function words such as prepositions and conjunctions, articles, pronouns, numerals, body parts, terms for close relatives, nouns referring to basic natural phenomena (sun, rain), verbs denoting basic activities (eat, sleep, do) or auxiliary. To this, one can add that the borrowing of elements that are linguistically highly marked (for example, a very unusual rule from any linguistic subsystem or a rarely found phoneme) seldom takes place.81 In non-basic vocabulary, the frequency of borrowing increases in the following list: verbs – adjectives – nouns. Though no exact statistical analysis has ever been done, these criteria were obtained by linguists via the consideration of huge empirical data and they are generally applicable to various languages. Certain other criteria take into account the structure of two languages in contact. The closer the genetic relation between the two idioms, the larger is the domain of borrowing. In the case of Yiddish, a language of High German origin, this means that examples of borrowing from various coterritorial German dialects (as well as interborrowing between varieties of Yiddish) can be expected in any subsystem. The above purely linguistic general criteria can be complemented by several additional factors that are extra-linguistic. One is historical. During its modern history, Yiddish had very limited direct contact with Romance languages. The only exceptions are dialects from northern Italy, the area where populous Yiddish-speaking communities lived in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries before they gradually shifted to Italian. No historical documents show the existence of mass emigration during the period in question of Ashkenazic Jews from Italy to other European countries. As a result, but for a few exceptions from the domain of food or fashion, no modern borrowing is found in Yiddish from Romance languages. Until the expulsions of the fourtenth century, populous Jewish communities existed in northern France and we have ample direct proof of their contact with Rhenish Jews whose spoken language was based on German. Yet, no such information exists for See Hock :, –, ; Lass :, . This assertion is a consequence of a more general observation implying that markedness plays an important role in linguistic changes of different types (of which borrowing is just one particular case), with changes from more marked to less marked structures being significantly more common than those operating in the opposite direction. See discussion of this issue in Thomason and Kaufman :–. 80 81
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medieval northern Italy. Taking into account these historical factors, we can conclude that the rare Romance elements found in Yiddish varieties mainly either belong to the substratum of Yiddish or were borrowed by Ashkenazic Jews from their coreligionists from northern France no later than the fourteenth century. On the other hand, if during Step it was identified that a particular element is non-existent in WY, then the odds are high that it cannot be of Romance origin. Historical information can also appear helpful when estimating the possibility of borrowing by EY from German dialects imposing temporary and geographic restrictions to this process. Indeed, the German presence in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was insignificant, while Polish towns—in which numerous Germans lived in the Middle Ages—became totally Polonized before the start of the sixteenth century. Social and economic factors should also be taken into account when analyzing the possibility of borrowing. Yiddish has always been under the strong influence of the languages used in the same territories by the Gentile majority. For WY, this reinforces the possibility of borrowing from local German dialects that was already quite strong because of the close genetic links between these languages in contact. For EY, before the sixteenth century, borrowing from the German-speaking urban population in Polish towns was possible even under moderate social pressure. Here the structural similarity of two the languages, Yiddish and (the Silesian dialect of) German could be the primary factor.82 From the sixteenth century onwards, the social and economic pressure was being exerted on EY only from local Slavic languages: Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. For Romance elements, the situation is totally different from that of German and Slavic items. Romance languages exerted no social pressure on Yiddish varieties outside of Italy where it was, as discussed in the previous paragraph, limited in time and space. Because the religion was central in Jewish culture, the terminology used in the religious sphere was conservative; it was difficult for new words to be incorporated into that semantic field, and borrowing from other languages in that domain was rare. The greatest difficulty in distinguishing borrowing from inheritance (via substratum) lies in the layer covering elements of Hebrew origin. A large bulk of this layer comes from biblical texts. Consequently, the same element could, in theory, be incorporated into the vernacular language multiple times, sometimes making the distinction in question formally impossible. Since the Middle Ages, Ashkenazic men have had some, at least basic, knowledge of Hebrew. This idiom was not just read or written, it was regularly used in certain oral contexts too, those directly related to the religion. As a result, it would not be an exaggeration to consider that Jews were internally bilingual. In the social stratification of community members, the highest level has always been occupied by rabbis and religious scholars, that is, exactly those whose Hebrew knowledge was particularly good. Since Hebrew was clearly considered to be the language of prestige, this bilingualism provoked massive borrowing into the language of lower prestige, Yiddish. Taking these factors into account, one can see that for elements of Hebrew origin a distinction between various categories (borrowing, substratum heritage, and innovation) cannot reuse several methods applicable to items of German, Slavic, or Romance origin. Here the exact geographical and temporal frameworks (that is, the results of Step ) can be genuinely helpful. For example, it is thanks to the study of medieval sources that we can deduce that the distinct pronunciation of vowels called segol and tsere in the TIBERIAN system of Hebrew pointing, that is, the pronunciation that characterizes all modern varieties of Yiddish, cannot belong to the substratum of the language(s) of Ashkenazic Jews. Yet, words of Hebrew origin showing the merger of the reflexes of these two vowels can indeed belong to the substratum.83 On the
82 83
See the general exposal of this principle in Thomason and Kaufman :. See details in section ...
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other hand, the idea of borrowing should be privileged when observing for one particular word of Hebrew origin that several conditions are all verified: (i) it is known today only in one regional variety of Yiddish, (ii) it never appears in sources in the same region from earlier periods, and (iii) it is unknown in other areas. Elements that are unlikely to be borrowed are of particular interest for research into the origins of the Yiddish language: They are either inherited, or result from internal innovations. Inside of this group, elements that correspond to general rules and, therefore, concern large numbers of individual elements are significantly more important than individual words, phonemes, or morphemes.
.. Comparison between competing hypotheses Among different kinds of analyses discussed in the previous section, Steps and , the most theoretical of all, can yield the most ambigious results. They deal with a splitting of Yiddish elements into various language subsets—G(erman), R(omance), S(lavic), H(ebrew), and specifically Y(iddish)—and their assignment to particular dialects of the corresponding languages. For certain elements, their assignment to one of the above five major subsets (or to their subdivisions) can be obtained only on the basis of the linguistic reconstruction for which, in principle, several competing hypotheses can be formulated. For a number of linguistic items, even if a direct correspondence is found in some German or Slavic dialect (subsets G and S, respectively), it is always reasonable to check the possibility of an independent internal Yiddish development (subset Y) that could lead to similar results. Moreover, cases of convergence of several originally independent sources are also known in Yiddish. Here the major methodological question is that of the logical probability of coincidence. For the lexical subsystem, Steps and directly correspond to etymologies. Yet, certain Yiddish words are of uncertain origin. For example, grayz ‘error’—considered by some scholars to be derived from Hebrew—most likely has a German source.84 Another obscure word is penets ‘slice, section’ for which Romance, Germanic, and Slavic etymons have been proposed.85 A number of words sound similar in several idioms (including internationalisms), and therefore the identification of the subset that provided the immediate etymon for Yiddish is far from being trivial, not to say, impossible.86 Major uncertainties also exist for a few morphemes. Certainly, the most controversial is the origin of the Yiddish plural suffix -s that, according to various authors, can be originally Hebrew, French, or German, while in a number of words it clearly corresponds to an internal Yiddish innovation resulting from a convergence of several sources.87 Specific problems characterize the domain of phonology. It certainly makes sense to consider the origin of various phonemes individually. However, of particular interest is an approach consisting in analysing their development within two independent phonological subsystems, consonants and stressed vowels. Both of these subsystems have evolved during Yiddish history, and consequently, by definition, they should be assigned to the subset Y, and more precisely, to the category .. covering regular sound changes. As discussed in section .., for these processes—as for any other internal change—the internal reconstruction should identify all previous stages (each of them being synchronic) until we arrive at the inception of the earliest phonetic systems, those of PROTO-YIDDISH(es). This reconstruction is ambiguous, with a number of mutually exclusive hypotheses that can, in theory, be proposed, all of See section . (feature {L}). See section .. 86 Fortunately, internationalisms are of little importance for the establishment of Yiddish origins, the main focus of the present book. 87 See details in section .. 84 85
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them being compatible with the empirical information about previous stages of Yiddish varieties taken from the available written sources. Several general methodological principles can be used when addressing the issues enumerated above. The principle of simplicity, also called OCCAM’S RAZOR, is applicable in any domain of science. It asserts that, ceteris paribus, the smaller the number of independent hypotheses included in a theory is, the greater is its logical probability.88 StY khoyzek ‘mockery; simpleton’ can be taken as an example. Weinreich (WG :) suggests—following Harkavy :—the OHG hosc ‘mockery’ as its etymon. This etymology contains several independent hypotheses. Indeed, one needs to explain: (i) introduction of a vowel between /s/ and /k/; (ii) change of the initial /h/ to /x/; (iii) intervocalic voicing /s/ > /z/; (iv) lengthening /o/ > /o:/ in open syllables (with later diphthongization /o:/ > /oj/); (v) spelling of this word as if it were of Hebrew origin. Of these processes the fourth is regular in Yiddish and the third is standard in German. The last one is partly conventional and could be due to a folk etymological link with or contamination by Hebrew ‘ ֹח ֶזקstrength.’ However, the first two processes would be unique if this etymology is accepted. Note that OHG /sk/ gave rise to MHG /š/ (compare MHG hosche < OHG hosc) and we also find /š/ in corresponding NHG and Yiddish words. Among the examples are: OHG fisc-MHG visch-StY fish ‘fish,’ OHG frisc-MHG frisch-StY frish ‘fresh,’ and OHG fleisc-MHG vleisch-StY fleysh ‘meat.’ As a result, the etymon hosc would normally give StY *hosh, a form that phonetically is very different from khoyzek. In other words, Weinreich’s hypothesis violates the classical NEOGRAMMARIAN PRINCIPLE of the regularity of the phonetic change. If to the above we add the facts that: (i) the etymology of no other Yiddish word is related to OHG, (ii) the earliest reference to this word is known only in the nineteenth century, and (iii) there is no known reference outside of Eastern Europe,89 it becomes clear that the etymology in question should be rejected according to OCCAM’S RAZOR. The actual etymon should in some way be related to the Hebrew root ‘ חזקto strengthen, reinforce’ with the semantic change that remains to be explained. The etymology of the female given name Lifshe can serve as another example. Weinreich (WG :; ) considered it to be a hypocoristic form of *Live, that in turn, according to him, was influenced by the pronunciation of the word meaning ‘love’ in Christian dialects of northeastern Germany. This supposition is not appealing. First, no reference to the given name *Live is known from available sources, while Libe (from StY word for ‘love’) is frequently used. Second, Lifshe includes the suffix -she of Slavic origin that is unknown in Yiddish varieties outside of Slavic countries. Third, during the nineteenth century the name was particularly common in Belorussian and Ukrainian guberniyas of the Russian Pale of Settlement, eastern Galicia, and southern Poland 88 For someone with at least an elementary knowledge of mathematical probabilities, this principle can be seen as an expression of the general idea that the probability of N independent events becomes smaller when N is growing. This follows from the classical formula: P(E\ E\ . . . EN) = P(E) * P(E) * . . . P(EN), where the left part gives the probability of the simultaneous realization of N events, while the right part represents the product of probabilities of every individual event. The right part of this expression diminishes if we introduce an additional event EN+ because the previous result is multiplied by a value of P(EN+) that, like any probability, is a number between and . In the simplest case of every factor in the right part of the above formula being the same, we obtain what is called “geometrical progression” in mathematics with a quick decrease of the result every time N is increased by one. For example, if the probability of one event is ., then the probability of two events becomes ., that of three events is already ., etc. 89 Weinreich (WG :) points to the nineteenth-century reference, but considers the earliest reference to be given in a dictionary of “German-Jewish” language (actually describing SWY) where it appears as cheisik and is translated into German as “Belustigung” ‘amusement’ (PhilogLottus :). Note that (i) the root does not use the diphthong /ou/ (that in the Yiddish dialect in question corresponds to StY oy), but either /aj/, or /ej/; (ii) the meaning in StY is different. As a result, this reference can be unrelated to StY khoyzek, but represents a variant (possibly, errroneous) of StY kheyshek ‘desire’ (from Hebrew שק ׁ ֶ )ֵח, that appears in the same book as cheischik “Lust,” ‘desire’ (PhilogLottus :).
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(Lublin and Piotrków guberniyas), that is, quite far from northeastern Germany. Fourth, we find several EY examples of the regressive assimilation [pš] > [fš]. One of them is shroyfshtik ‘vise,’ derived from shroybshtik that is also known as a variant; compare NHG Schraubstock. Another corresponds to the rabbinical surname derived from the town of Liběšice in Bohemia (Liebeschitz, in German). During the nineteenth century, the form [lifšits] was common in Belorussia and Ukraine (Лифшиц / Лившиц). In eastern Galicia, the same form was frequently found (Liefschütz/ Lifschitz) along with the variant [lipšits] (Lipschitz, Liepschütz, Liebschitz etc.). The latter form was dominant in western Galicia, the Czech lands, Germany, Courland, Lithuania (Липшиц), and the Kingdom of Poland (Lipszyc).90 Taking all the above factors into account, the logical probability that in the given name Lifshe we also deal with the same regressive assimilation [pš] > [fš] in the territory of modern Ukraine and Belarus (and, therefore, its original form was *Lipshe, morphonemically Libshe) is significantly higher that the probability of its derivation from **Live. The third example comes from the domain of toponymy. In rabbinical sources of the eleventh century, one finds a mention of two young boys from the town of פרימוטin ( פלוניPoland?), one of whom was brought by Gentiles to Prague ( )פרגאfor sale. Brutzkus (:) suggested that the last letter in the unclear toponym results from a misinterpretation of shin ( )שas if it were tet ( )טand proposed that Peremyshl’ (now Przemyśl, Poland) is the town in question. His opinion is often quoted by historians and linguists who generally agree with Brutzkus.91 Weinryb (:–) is among the rare authors who are skeptical about this identification. He stresses that Peremyshl’ was Polish only during the short period between and . He tentatively suggests several alternative possibilities: Pruem in Germany, Premuda in Croatia, and Czech Přemyšl/Prenet/Primda. As for the word taken by Brutzkus for the country name, Weinryb considers it to represent the Hebrew adjective meaning “unidentified” and proposes that the word meaning “place” ( )מקוםwas erroneously omitted before it. Both the above theories appear unattractive: each of them includes several independent unusual hypotheses. On the one hand, Brutzkus introduces the idea of the confusion of the last letter in פרימוטand ignores other important differences between this Hebrew spelling and Peremyshl’, namely the absence of any rendition in Hebrew letters of the final /l/ and the unexplained vav ()ו. Moreover, a connection of Peremyshl’ to Poland is badly correlated with the political history. On the other hand, Weinryb introduces an idea of a word omitted from the text, while toponyms suggested by him are phonetically and/or geographically dubious. A much better candidate appears to be Przemęt. Today it is a village southwest of Poznań. This locality represents one of the oldest urban settlements of Greater Poland and during the thirteenth century it was one of the most important towns of that province. In earliest known (Latin) sources it is spelled Premut.92 This old Polish name perfectly fits the Hebrew פרימוט. Moreover, the connection to Poland is corroborated. The distance from this town (situated in the immediate vicinity of the Silesian border) to Prague is not great. Other approaches are specific to linguistic reconstructions, internal or comparative. A number of them are particularly valuable for describing regular sound changes within Yiddish varieties.93 “Process naturalness” privileges among two competing phonetic processes suggested during the reconstruction the one that is more commonly found in various languages. Here the available statistical information for idioms related in some way to Yiddish, or for tongues of the Gentile majority, is of significantly greater importance than data of the same kind for languages outside of See Beider , , , and Menk . Examples: Schiper a:, Kupfer and Lewicki :, Gieysztor at al. :, WG :, :, van Straten :–. 92 See, for example, Lehr-Spławiński :. 93 The general principles (but not the examples) presented in this paragraph appear in Lass :, –. 90 91
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the domains of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic studies. “System naturalness” examines not the individual processes but the general description of a reconstructed phonological subsystem as a whole. Several characteristics of this system make it more plausible. One of them is internal symmetry including (a) that of the vocalic triangle or trapeze (with the number of front vowels being equal to that of back vowels);94 (b) either the total lack of distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants, or an existence within the same system, of pairs of voiced/voiceless consonants. Also appreciable is a suggestion of internal shift tending to the establishment of symmetry of a system that on the previous stage of its development is reconstructed as asymmetrical. Several other principles applicable to phonetic reconstruction can be seen as particular cases of the application of OCCAM’S RAZOR in this specific domain. They are still useful by themselves because they are much less abstract than the general principle. When we assert that an item reconstructed as ancestral to two or more dialects is not logically attractive if it is different from all its postulated descendants,95 we simply try to diminish the number of independent hypotheses and minimize the changes needed to be explained. For the same reason, one global process explaining a large set of observed forms is clearly preferable to atomistic explanations valid for individual elements of this set. As one particular case of the previous statement, one can emphasize that, generally speaking, explanations via regular sound changes should be favored over analogical or non-phonetic changes.96 Several criteria correspond to a possibility of coincidence. The first deals with probabilities of one individual element to have identical or close meaning or function in two dialects or languages. It is clear that the fewer the number of possibilities for an element in any of these two dialects, the bigger the chance of coincidence. The gender of a noun is among the simplest examples. It is clear that if, for example, the same gender of a Yiddish word and some Slavic word with the same meaning can easily be due to chance, the choice here is limited to only three possibilities: masculine, feminine, or neuter.97 Another example of the same kind comes from the domain of syntax, with only a few possible sequences such as Subject-Object-Verb, Subject-Verb-Object, etc. For words or morphemes, their length represents one of the major parameters influencing the chance of coincidence. Indeed, since any idiom contains only a very limited number of phonemes, a coincidence is plausible for elements consisting of only one sound. The number of possible sequences of two sounds is already much greater: the probability of coincidence diminishes dramatically, and so on. Globally speaking, the longer a lexeme having the same meaning or an affix having the same function in two dialects or languages is, the smaller the possibility of coincidence is and, therefore, the higher are the odds of a common origin.98 The above example of Yiddish plural suffix -s illustrates this principle. 94 This aspect was important when suggesting schemes of PROTO-YIDDISH Hebrew vowels (Table . in section ..) as well as various schemes of section ... 95 This principle is called “Family consistency” in Lass :. 96 The last two principles appear—independently of OCCAM’S RAZOR—in Hock :. 97 In this case, if we simplify the real matters considering that the distribution by gender is random, the probability of coincidence is equal to /, that is, about .. 98 See Hock :. This method can also be seen as a particular case of OCCAM’S RAZOR. Indeed, for a coincidence of two elements whose length is N, one needs a (i) coincidence of their first phonemes, (ii) coincidence of their second phonemes etc. until (N) the last phoneme, that in the position N. Formally speaking for any natural language, these N events are not independent. For example, if the first sound is /p/, the second one normally cannot be a /p/ or a /b/. Moreover, depending on a language under consideration, other phonemes can also be excluded in this context; typically only vowels, liquids and, maybe, a few other categories of consonants are left as possibilities. Here the probability of two events P(E\ E) is not calculated anymore as P(E) * P(E), but according to a more general formula P(E) * P(E | E), in which the second factor designates the probability of the event E under the condition that the event E was already realized. This factor is bigger than P(E) and the result of the multiplication is higher than in the case of two independent events. However, in our specific phonological context, P(E) is still significantly smaller than , and, therefore, P(E\ E) is significantly smaller than P(E). This shows that the global applicability of OCCAM’S RAZOR is still verified in this case, too.
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Since this suffix contains only the sound /s/, the probability of convergence of independent sources is quite high. On the other hand, the Yiddish diminutive plural suffix -lekh represents a sequence of three sounds /lex/. Consequently, the probability that it could be unrelated to -lech/lich/lach, found in historical sources for several German dialects99 and having in them the same function, is significantly smaller. The chance of coincidence between two words or morphemes also directly depends on the exact phonemes of which they are composed. The less usual certain phonemes are for the languages under consideration, the smaller the probability is that we are dealing with a coincidence (MRPC).100 Another criterion involves probabilities of a set of lexical items having identical or close meaning in two dialects or languages. It is clear that the larger the size of this set, the smaller the chances of coincidence and, therefore, the more reliable the hypothesis about the existence of links between these idioms (Hock :). The same conclusion can be drawn from SHARED ABERRANCIES, that is, forms that in both languages are anomalous representing exceptions from general rules applicable to these languages.101 A very close criterion concerns the presence in both languages of some unusual shared phoneme, figurative sense of a word coming from an unexpected association, or any other highly marked feature. Unlike the previous criterion, here we are dealing not with elements exceptional to these very languages but to the “markedness” (a term opposed to “naturalness”) that is measured taking other languages into consideration.102 Finding a large set of SHARED ABERRANCIES or particularly marked features (a situation that combines the criteria enumerated above in this paragraph) provides a clincher in favor of the theory about the common origins of the two idioms.103 All criteria enumerated above, as well the criteria described in the previous section for addressing the plausibility of borrowing (Step ), deal with logical probabilities of competing theories. All these criteria are independent factors. The ideal situation would be that in which the ceteris paribus assumption is verified, that is, two theories under consideration are equally plausible according to all factors except for one that precisely allows us to make a choice. However, in numerous cases several factors are applicable simultaneously. If at least two of them prompt for opposite choices, the situation becomes formally insoluble.
.. Classification by components Numerous Yiddish linguists speak about the existence of German, Hebrew-Aramaic, and Slavic “components” of Yiddish. This term is used, among others, in classical works written by Bin-Nun (BN), Weinreich (WG), and Birnbaum (:–). The latter two scholars add to this list a fourth,
See the feature {M} in section .. Mathematically, the unusualness of one phoneme found in position N can be expressed via the probability P(EN) close to zero. 101 This idea is formulated in Meillet :. In Yiddish linguistics, Katz (a:–) speaks about “congruent anomalies” in a very similar context (see section .). 102 All criteria discussed in this paragraph are no more than additional, quite useful, examples of the application of the general principle of OCCAM’S RAZOR to the domain of historical linguistics. Indeed, in order to explain the similarity of N elements of a set, all of which are believed to result from independent developments, one needs to advance N independent hypotheses. Yet, a single hypothesis about the existence of a link between two idioms allows us to explain all these N similarities. In the last two criteria, if two languages are considered to be unrelated, aberrancies or particularly marked features found in both of them should be explained according to two independent hypotheses, both of them being non self-evident because, by definition, we are dealing with an “aberrancy” or “markedness.” Again, in the case of a common origin of the anomaly observed in both languages it suffices to suggest only one hypothesis. 103 In this book, this is done in Chapter dealing with the Hebrew component of Yiddish. 99
100
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Romance, component.104 Wexler (a) regularly suggests paying particular attention to the Greek origin of certain Yiddish lexical elements without explicitly postulating the existence of the Greek component. The main advantage of such a classification, with respect to language groups or individual languages, consists in the simplicity of its application. Indeed, if we take a word from the Yiddish vocabulary, except for rare exceptions, it is not difficult to assign it to one of the above components. Such information can often be useful in determining the approximate region where this particular lexical element entered the spoken language of Ashkenazic Jews. Yet, for a scholarly approach in the framework of historical linguistics, this classification can provide results that are not sufficiently exact or are even misleading. Its main disadvantage consists of being mainly limited to the geographical factor ignoring the crucial factor of chronology. Consider a few examples for each component. The German component of StY includes words such as, for example, (i) groys ‘big’ and kleyn ‘small’; (ii) gayst ‘spirit’ and krayz ‘circle’; (iii) yortsayt ‘anniversary of death’ and lerner ‘Talmudic scholar.’ In the first group, we are dealing with lexical items whose ancestors were already present at the inception of Yiddish.105 They are directly due to the High German ancestor of Yiddish.106 The second group contains recent loanwords from German.107 In the third group, we are dealing with words that have existed in Yiddish for many centuries, but unlike elements from the first group, here we can observe a specifically Jewish semantics. It is clear that for the history not only of language but Yiddish culture in general, the importance of the three groups in question is not the same. The first group testifies to an early contact with German Gentiles. The phonological study of such words can help determine in which German-speaking province and during what period Jews incorporated the word into their vernacular idiom. The elements of the second group are mainly due to the ideas and actions of the representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (HASKALAH) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.108 The third group shows results of innovations internal to Yiddish. A detailed study of the causes of the creation of such words or meanings, without any counterpart in German dialects, can lead to important conclusions concerning the cultural history of Ashkenazic Jewry.109 Note that the very fact that an element belongs to the German component does not really allow us to determine the geographical area in which it entered into Yiddish. For the items from the last group this is particularly evident. From the Middle Ages and up to the twentieth century, Ashkenazic communities have gradually become widespread over a large area, from Alsace in the west to eastern Ukraine in the east, from northern Italy in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north. In theory, innovations in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews could occur in any of these regions. However, even for items from the two other groups that are both due to the influence of the German dialects spoken by Christian neighbors, the geographical area of contact was extremely broad, from Alsace and Switzerland in the southwest to Courland in the northeast passing through Germany and Austria. Moreover, we should not forget that from the Middle Ages German has been the main idiom among Christians who dwelled in the towns of Bohemia and
104
Here, the difference between Weinreich and Birnbaum is purely terminological. The latter speaks about Semitic, Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic “elements” rather than “components.” 105 The diphthong present in StY groys (but not in its NHG cognate groß) has developed from a long monophthong /o:/ present in MHG grôʒ . The same diphthong /ej/ is found in StY kleyn and its MHG ancestor kleine, while standard NHG has /aj/. 106 According to the principal classification introduced in section .., they belong to the category ., that of LANGUAGE TREE heritage. 107 A direct derivation from MHG geist and kreiʒ would give StY **geyst and **kreyz, respectively. Consequently, modern StY forms result from an introduction of the ready-made NHG forms Geist and Kreis (WG :–). 108 See details in Birnbaum :–. 109 See, for example, TS.
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Moravia (up to the nineteeth century), Silesia (until World War II), and many of the towns of the Polish Kingdom (for several centuries).110 As a result of the three partitions of Poland (, , ) German-language Prussian and Austrian administration were introduced in western and southern Poland. In the Hebrew component of Yiddish, one can also select several groups of a similar kind to those discussed above for the German component. This component includes words—such as shabes ‘Sabbath’ and rov ‘rabbi’—whose ancestors were already in use in the earliest Ashkenazic communities.111 They have been inherited from the spoken language of those Jews who were ancestors of the Ashkenazic Jews. Some of the lexical elements of Hebrew origin could enter into Yiddish much later as a result of direct borrowing from Jewish sacred texts. Finally, a considerable number of words with Hebrew roots are unknown outside Ashkenazic culture. They are due to internal innovations. Among the examples are balegole ‘coachman’ and kaptsn ‘poor man.’112 Obviously, the fact that a word belongs to the Hebrew component of Yiddish does not provide any chronological or geographic indication about the period when and the region where this item entered Yiddish. In Yiddish, there are only a few dozen words whose roots are of Romance origin. Nevertheless, their consideration is important for the history of Ashkenazic Jewry. Some of them belong to a semantic layer for which a borrowing from other Jewish communities seems extremely unlikely, not to say impossible. Here we are certainly dealing with elements that were inherited by Yiddish from a language (or languages) spoken by (some) ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews, that is, with the substratum of Yiddish. Among them are the StY verbs bentshn ‘to bless’ and leyenen ‘to read’ whose phonetic variants are found in all Yiddish varieties, as well as ōren ‘to pray,’ dormen ‘to sleep,’ prāen ‘to invite,’ and bāfen ‘to drink,’ all known in WY only. Note that in all these examples the ending is of German origin. Consequently, we are dealing with lexemes formed inside of the Jewish communities during the transitional period of the shift from a Romance to a German-based spoken language. In contrast to these old elements belonging to the Yiddish substratum, several centuries later a number of Romance items were acquired by Yiddish horizontally, due to direct contacts with the corresponding Romance languages. These elements are usually not pan-Yiddish but found only in particular dialects: (i) during the sixteenth century, Italian in Yiddish spoken in northern Italy, (ii) French in Alsatian Yiddish, and (iii) Romanian in Yiddish varieties of Romania, Moldavia, and Bessarabia, the latter two cases during the last centuries only. Their consideration is without any significance for the study of Yiddish origins.113 Even less important is the ultimate Romance origin of various internationalisms with Latin, French, or Italian roots that entered Yiddish not directly from the corresponding Romance languages but through the intermediary of Slavic languages or German. The number of Yiddish elements of Greek origin is even smaller than that of Romance items. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that Yiddish directly took any of these items from Greekspeaking Jews. It is much more likely that the ancestors of words such as trop ‘the cantillation of the Bible and its notation’ came into Yiddish from the language of French Jews. Some other words of ultimate Greek origin entered Yiddish through the intermediary of Hebrew, German, or Slavic languages.114 For the same reason, WY almemer / EY balemer ‘synagogue reading desk’ does not
See section . and Appendix B. According to the principal classification introduced in .., they belong to the category ., that of substratum heritage. 112 Concerning innovations in the Hebrew component of Yiddish see section ... 113 See Chapter for details concerning Yiddish Romanisms. 114 A detailed analysis can be found in Timm and Beckmann :–. 110 111
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imply the existence of the Arabic component in Yiddish. This word, ultimately derived from al-minbar ‘pulpit in a mosque’ (WG :) was brought to Germany by French Jews. The fact that the standard classification by components is not effective for a study aimed at shedding light on Yiddish origins is clearly obvious taking the Slavic component of Yiddish as an example. Indeed, this component consists of several layers that are quite different in their geography and their significance in the history of Ashkenazic Jewry. The most recent loans have been made from Russian during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among them are, for example, gubernie ‘province of the Russian empire’ and gorodovoy ‘policeman,’ as well as numerous terms related to the the realities of Soviet life. A large number of Slavic words were borrowed by EY from surrounding Slavic languages (primarily, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Polish) long after the inception of Yiddish. In East Slavic territories—mainly corresponding to modern Belarus and Ukraine—the period of borrowing covers the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. For areas where the surrounding Christian majority was mainly composed of ethnic Poles, this period began several centuries earlier. Among these loanwords one counts a number of Yiddish words whose phonology retains traces of the existence in Polish of vowel quantities up to the start of the sixteenth century (Stieber :); compare StY sod ‘orchard,’ polke ‘drumstick of a fowl,’ ston ‘waist of a garment,’ stoyg ‘pile of hay,’ and droyb ‘giblets’ to Polish sad, pałka, stan, stóg, and drób, respectively. The strong influence that Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian exerted on Yiddish during this period resulted not only in thousands of loanwords (some of which are pan-EY, while others are only regional) but also in changes in the morphology and syntax.115 Finally, EY encompasses a small layer of words with Old Czech roots whose origins go back to the medieval Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia. Among the examples are: treybern ‘to remove the forbidden fat and veins from meat to make it parev kosher,’ meyre ‘the dough for baking matzot,’ beylik ‘white meat,’ preydik ‘front part of an animal/fowl,’ zodik ‘(butchery) hindquarters,’ parev(e) ‘neither dairy, nor meat (food),’ zeyde ‘grandfather,’ bobe ‘grandmother, midwife,’ and the interjection nebekh ‘poor thing!.’ Unlike other words mentioned above, they belong to a substratum of EY and remind us of the existence of Old Czech-speaking Jewish communities during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries who shifted to Yiddish during the fourteenth to fifteenth.116 It can be easily observed that the classification by components has a small correlation with the principal classification used in this book and exposed in section ... Indeed, only elements from categories . (LANGUAGE TREE heritage) and .. (borrowing from LOSHN-KOYDESH) belong to one component, German and Hebrew-Aramaic, respectively. All other categories include elements from several components. If we consider different phases of the general approach for studying Yiddish origins suggested in this book, the classification by components is closest to the analysis described in section .. as Step , namely, splitting the list of Yiddish elements into several subsets according to the languages with which they are shared: G, S, R, H, and Y. Here the first four subsets cover large portions of what Weinreich called German, Slavic, Romance, and Hebrew-Aramaic components, respectively.117 Yet, Step is no more than one intermediary result in the general procedure aimed at obtaining a classification that is fundamentally different from the classification by components. Nevertheless, this step is useful. For this reason, Chapters to globally follow it.
For syntax see examples by Geller (a:–, b:–) who consider them to be substratal. See section ... 117 Even here the existence of the subset Y, that of internal Yiddish innovations (that can be valid for several components at the same time) represents an important difference between the two methods. 115 116
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.
SPECIAL DOMAINS OF APPLICATION
OF THE PRINCIPAL CLASSIFICATION
.. Orthography For Yiddish, as for any written language whose alphabet is phonetic, one can distinguish two kinds of elements that correspond to its orthography: (i) graphemes and (ii) rules of correspondence between graphemes and sounds. The principal classification of section .. is globally applicable to these elements as well. Their important peculiarity in comparison to elements of the spoken language is related to the fact that since the beginning, Ashkenazic Jews have always used the Hebrew alphabet not only when they were writing in Hebrew or Aramaic but also when transcribing words and sentences of their vernacular German-based language. Spelling elements are internally Jewish: none is really due to the Gentile neighbors of Ashkenazic Jews.118 As a result, for one particular geographic region in this domain one can distinguish only the following categories of elements according to their inception: inherited from other Jews (.); borrowed from other Jews (..); created (.); migrated (.).119 There is no doubt that in the Hebrew alphabet the diacritic signs from the TIBERIAN pointing system, as well as a large number of correspondence rules between graphemes and sounds, were all inherited from the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews (category .). However, after the shift to the vernacular German-based language, additional specific rules became necessary to adapt the existing graphic system to the new phonological system. Here ambiguities of choice sometimes existed: several Hebrew graphemes were available that corresponded to sounds that were different (but close) in biblical Hebrew and whose pronunciation—when reading Hebrew texts—in certain preAshkenazic or non-Ashkenazic communities merged. Among the examples of a situation where a choice was to be made are: הa, ח, and כfor expressing /h/ and /x/; טand ּתfor /t/; ש,aסa,ת, and צfor /s/, /š/, and /ts/; קand ּכfor /k/. Important ambiguities also existed for expressing vowels, with various TIBERIAN diacritics and several alphabet letters (originally consonants) such as aleph ()א, he ()ה, waw ()ו, and yod (( )יHebrew “matres lectionis”) and their combinations being the available options. In all these cases, the choice could either be due to factors internal to Ashkenazic Jews (and in this case, it would be suitable to assign the resulting rule to the category . of “created” spelling elements), or be directly influenced by a tradition established for the same or a similar context in some nonAshkenazic communities with which Ashkenazic Jews were in contact (category .. of borrowed elements).120 If we take the Ashkenazic history in its globality, we find that the number of created elements is larger than that of borrowed elements. The most spectacular innovation is the use of the letter ayin ( )עfor expressing mid-front vowels, /ε/ and/or /e/. We also find no analog for the EY use of זשfor /ž/ and ײַfor /aj/. Also peculiar to EY is the regular use of אָfor expressing /o/. In WY sources
118
Actually German spelling conventions did have some influence on Jewish spelling in Germany. However, this influence was quite limited (in time, space, Jewish authors concerned) despite the fact that in medieval Germany certain socially very influential Jews knew the Roman alphabet well (see TG –). As a result, it would be inappropriate to speak about “borrowing” in this domain. One can cite a few examples from the sixteenth century. The first correspond to the use of “qibbuṣ ֻ ” for the rounded vowel expressed by German “ü” and, significantly less common, “ḥ aṭ ef-qameṣ ֳ” for German “ö.” In both these cases, the choice of Hebrew diacritics having several dots could be due to the presence of two dots in German umlaut (BN ). The second correspond to the doubling of certain consonants and non-etymological letter he ( )הin places where the corresponding German words have doubled consonants or have a post-vocalic “h” serving to indicate that the preceding vowel is long (TG ). 119 The conventional numeric designations for various categories given in section .. are reused here. 120 See the discussion of medieval links with Jews from northern France in section ..
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from the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, we find certain other graphic idiosyncrasies such as the digraph ויfor rounded monophthongs /ü/ and /ö/ or the trigraph וייfor diphthongs like /ou/ or /au/.121 Orthography stands apart from the subsystems that compose an oral language such as lexicon, morphology, syntax, and phonology. Contrary to these subsystems, orthography does not belong to the core of a language, but instead remains a superficial layer of it and is primarily conventional. In the history of Europe and the Middle East, graphic systems used by various languages were (and still are) closely related (at least historically) to the upper, prestigious, language of the religion: Latin for Catholics and Protestants, Cyrillic for Orthodox Christians, Arabic for Muslims, and Hebrew for Jews. A few exceptions from this general rule are consequences of official laws that decreed the changes of scripts used in the corresponding countries: from Cyrillic to Latin for the Romanian language in Romania () and Moldova (),122 and from Arabic to Latin for Turkish in Turkey (). These extreme situations, as well as the case of Serbo-Croatian characterized in our day by active digraphia (with both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets used in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia), numerous spelling reforms applied to various languages (including Yiddish in the USSR), all having small or no consequences on various fundamental subsystems of the corresponding idioms, as well as the existence throughout the history of large illiterate population groups with perfect command of language, all testify to the minor role orthography plays in the development of languages. As a result, for the primary aim of this book—that of the analysis of origins of Yiddish—various questions related to spelling properly speaking (and not those concerning the use of written sources to discover characteristics of the spoken language) are marginal. Yet, the information concerning the spelling traditions can still be useful when evaluating the possibility of the existence of genetic links between various Jewish communities. Indeed, if similar spelling conventions are found in two regions, one can conjecture (especially if the similarity concerns a whole set of graphic features) that the conventions in question correspond to the same source. This would imply the common origins of (at least some) local Jews. If, on the other hand, graphic rules in two regions are distinctly different, then other hypotheses appear to be most plausible: (i) that of independent routes by which these traditions came to the areas in question, and/or (ii) that a long time passed since the time when the two Jewish groups separated from each other. Here the arguments provided by the consideration of orthography are cultural rather than linguistic. These arguments should be considered together with other extra-linguistic factors that can also provide some insight into our understanding of settlement history, those of sharing or difference in various cultural traditions including paleographic information about forms of letters used, religious rites, formulae appearing in tombstone inscriptions, meals, clothes, etc.
.. Toponyms Our principal classification suggested in section .. for various elements of Yiddish is globally applicable to Yiddish toponyms also. This is no surprise: toponyms constitute an integral part of any language. A few peculiarities can, however, be discerned. We do not find any toponyms acquired by Jews via cultural contacts with the vernacular languages of Gentiles from other areas. As a result the corresponding category .. is empty. But for a very few exceptions (discussed below), no toponyms are borrowed from other Jews or from Hebrew (categories .. and .., respectively).
See details in section .. Between and , in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, the local dialect of Romanian was spelled according to a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet with a few graphemes different from those of the Cyrillic script in use in Romania before . 121 122
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It is well known that from the Middle Ages, Jews of various origins used a highly distinctive set of specifically Jewish designations for several geographic areas of Europe. In Hebrew documents, they appear as: ‘ ספרדSpain and Portugal’ (StY sfard), (‘ צרפתnorthern) France’ (StY tsorfes), ‘ כנעןSlavic countries,’ ‘ אשכנזGermany’ (StY ashkenaz), ‘ יוןGreece’ (StY yovn), and ‘ הגרHungary.’123 Since we do not know the exact period when these correspondences became established, it is difficult to decide to which category the toponyms from this list (which were incorporated into the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews) should be formally assigned. If they were already present in the everyday idiom used by the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews before they shifted to High German dialects, then they belong to the substratum of Yiddish (category .). If, however, they entered the spoken language later and were unknown outside of Hebrew written contexts, then the classification into the category .. (loanwords from Hebrew) is more appropriate. Finally, we cannot exclude a possibility that at least some of these toponyms became known to Ashkenazic Jews because of their cultural contacts with Jews from other areas (category ..). Certain place names used by the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews before they shifted to German could, in theory, be retained in the new spoken language (category . of substratum heritage). Here of particular interest for the settlement history may be names for places that are situated in Germanspeaking territories: they shed light on the geographic origins of Ashkenazic Jews.124 Names from several categories can be attributable to German Christians. A number of German toponyms were automatically acquired by ancestors of (one portion of) Ashkenazic Jews when they shifted in medieval Germany to the language of local Gentiles (category . of LANGUAGE TREE heritage). Numerous other toponyms may have been borrowed by Jews from German Christians during the following centuries. Because of close contacts between Germans and Slavs, the German language incorporated names of certain places from regions where the Gentile majority was Slavicspeaking. This is particularly true of toponyms designating entire provinces or the biggest cities situated not far from the borders between German- and Slavic-dominant areas. As a result, even living in German-speaking territories, Jews—thanks to their use of the spoken language in many respects similar to that of their German neighbors—were already clearly using in the vernacular idiom names for certain places in Slavic countries. Consequently, when Jewish migrants came to Eastern Europe from the West, their language included these ready-made German toponyms (category .). Moreover, in these eastern territories Yiddish speakers often encountered German Christians whose presence was particularly visible in urban centers of southern and western Poland, as well as in Red Ruthenia.125 Among these Gentile inhabitants it was usual to have particular German names for local places, different from those used by local Slavs. Since the language of these Germans was close to Yiddish, its influence on the vernacular Jewish language could be stronger than the influence on Yiddish of the local Slavic languages, Polish and Ukrainian. Borrowing by Jews of some German toponyms in medieval Poland (category ..) was one of the results of this (presumably moderate) social pressure. It goes without saying that numerous other toponyms—that is, other elements of the same category ..—were borrowed directly from the Slavs. The information presented in the two previous paragraphs point to the same general idea that we should keep in mind when analyzing Yiddish toponyms: Names used by Jews in one particular All these words correspond to biblical toponyms or personal names. The first three names in our list all appear in Obadiah though for all these toponyms this is not their first reference in the Bible. Ashkenaz (אשכנז, Genesis :) is the son of Gomer ( )גמרand a great-grandson of Noah. Javan (יון, Genesis :) is the son of Japheth and the brother of the same Gomer. Details concerning כנעןas the designation for Slavic countries can be found in Jakobson and Halle . About the use of הגרfor Hungary see Kupfer and Lewicki :, . Here we are clearly dealing with an association that is phonetic. Curiously, we find no special Hebrew word for Italy. 124 See section ... 125 See historical details in Appendix B. 123
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Special domains of application
region for local places are not necessarily directly based on toponyms used for the same places by the population group that demographically represents the majority there. In some cases, they can be due to names of the same places known already to Jews before their migration into these territories. In other cases, Jews can borrow them not from the majority group but from a group that—like the Jews themselves—represent a minority for the region in question but is particularly close to Jews according to some social or linguistic criteria such as close economic contacts and/or close vernacular languages. The number of toponyms created by Ashkenazic Jews (category .) is small. Contrary to common nouns, almost all (rare) cases of creation correspond to calques. The town of Deutschkreutz (Burgenland, now in Austria) is called Tsēlem in WY, this word (from Hebrew ֶצֶלם, StY tseylem) being the translation of the German word Kreuz ‘cross.’ The Hungarian town of Pécs is called Fünfkirchen ‘five churches’ in German. Local Jewish sources make a calque of the German name and call this locality Khumesh-tymes (the Hebrew spelling would be טּוְמאֹותaֻח ּ ָמׁשa).126 The name of the town called Бiла Церква in Ukrainian (Biała Cerkiew in Polish, Белая Церковь in Russian) literally means ‘white church.’ It is known in local Yiddish as shvarts-time (the second part from Hebrew )טוְּמָאה, literally ‘black church.’127 Unlike the previous, pejorative, term, Senderke, is an example of a humoristic Yiddish toponym. This hypocoristic form of the Yiddish male given name Aleksander (Alexander) was applied as a byname to the town of Novoaleksandrovsk, called by Russian authorities in in honor of the (future) Tzar Alexander II.
.. Given names Many categories of the principal classification of section .. are applicable when considering the origin of Ashkenazic given names. The only major difference concerns the absence of names resulting from the LANGUAGE TREE heritage (category .): when ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews shifted to High German dialects, they did not automatically acquire given names as used by the Gentile population. If we keep the conventional numeric designations used in section .. and readapt the remaining categories to conform to the domain of given names, we can distinguish the following categories of names according to their inception: • Inherited from non-Ashkenazic Jews who shifted locally to German-based language (.); • Borrowed from: the Bible or the Talmud (..); local Gentiles (..); Gentiles from other areas (..); • Created (.); • Migrated from other Ashkenazic (.) or non-Ashkenazic communities (..). For given names, exactly as for other lexical elements, we can also speak about their phonetic change (category .) and disappearance (category ). Note that unlike non-onomastic elements, the categories . and .. cannot be considered as particular cases of borrowing. Indeed, in Ashkenazic communities, borrowing by certain families of names brought from other areas by other families was not a common process. Since the Middle Ages, Ashkenazic Jews have established a tradition of These two and several other calques are listed in Beranek :. In the last two Yiddish toponyms, ‘ טוּמאהchurch’ is itself a pejorative word, literally meaning ‘impurity, uncleanness (according to Judaism)’ in Yiddish. The form shvarts-time was suggested to YIVO by Yiddish informants who originated in the area. In Hebrew sources, the same town is sometimes designated ( ָׂש ֶדה ָלָבןpronounced Sudi luvn), literally ‘white field,’ that is, another—this time semantically neutral—partial calque of the Slavic name. An existence of a toponym in Ukraine known only in Hebrew is unlikely: this name was, most likely, used in Yiddish, the vernacular language, too. The existence of the Jewish surname Sudeluvin from the same general area points to the same conclusion. 126 127
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Main concepts and classifications
naming their children in honor of their close (deceased) relatives. As a result, for example, if we find in a community from Ukraine a woman bearing a name that originally entered into the Ashkenazic corpus because of migrations of French Jews, it is plausible that her name is inherited from her French Jewish ancestors. The classification of traditional Ashkenazic given names found in onomastic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has nothing to do with the one presented in the previous paragraph. In many respects it was rather close to Weinreich’s classification of Yiddish components considered in the previous section. The first serious work on this topic was written by Zunz () who distinguished Semitic, Greek, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic names, and assigned all names based on non-Jewish languages to four periods that he conventionally called Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Modern. The simplicity of this classification explains why various historians who have written about Jewish onomastics used it so heavily.128 This approach can be of some help for etymological research in the cases where available data do not allow us to proceed with a more subtle analysis. It is often impossible to tell whether a particular biblical name in an area is due to migrations (in this case, it would belong to our categories . and .. of migrated names or the category . of inherited names) or if it was taken directly from the biblical text (here it would correspond to the category .. of names borrowed from the sacred texts of Judaism). Yet, in both cases, classification by language would characterize this name as a Hebrew name. A researcher can face serious difficulties trying to identify whether a name was created or borrowed by Jews and, in the latter case, what was the exact reason for the borrowing. Again, classification by language disregards these problems. Our principal classification can encounter serious difficulties when one deals with areas where the Gentile population was not linguistically homogeneous. For example, in the Middle Ages both German-speaking and Slavic-speaking Christians lived in Silesia. As a result, when dealing with names used by Jews in Silesia, it is often difficult to determine whether a particular name entered into Jewish use locally or due to migrants who brought it from other countries. For instance, it is not known whether the name Eckehard used by Silesian Jews was borrowed in Silesia or in West Germany and brought from there to Silesia. On the other hand, classification by language is not problematic—Eckehard would be treated as a Germanic name. In many cases, classification by language is not helpful in understanding the history of the Ashkenazic corpus or it may even be misleading. This is particularly so when considering names ultimately derived from Hebrew or Aramaic. For these two, this classification does not provide any information that would allow us to understand, even approximately, where and when they became used by Ashkenazic Jews. Numerous names from that group appear in the biblical text. For a particular community, say, in Ukraine, they can therefore be taken directly from the Bible (category ..), or, more commonly, be due to migrations from other Ashkenazic communities (category .). Ancestors of other Yiddish names of Semitic origin—such as Abe, Simkhe, and Khayem—were created by Jews during the post-biblical period. As a result, they appeared in medieval Germany or Bohemia thanks to migrations of Jews from France, Italy, or the Balkans. Names like Tsvi, Zev, and Dov were created by Ashkenazic Jews (category .). A series of given names entered the Yiddish corpus after Jews borrowed from their Gentile neighbors Christian forms of biblical names: Ayzik< Isaac, Zalmen< Salomon, Ziml< Simon, Zanvl< Samuel. A small number of names used by Jews in medieval Germany, namely Jordan and Osanna, were borrowed from German Christians for whom 128 Among the scholars who used the same linguistic categories as Zunz one can cite, for example, Kracauer (), Kober (), and Schiper (), the authors of fundamental studies on the history of Jews from Frankfurt, Cologne, and Poland, respectively. The latter author has also applied it to his study of names used in medieval Germany () and enlarged the list proposed by Zunz by the category of Turkic names.
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Special domains of application
these names are based on words of Hebrew origin taken from Christian liturgy. In our classification all names mentioned in the last two sentences enter into category .., that of names borrowed from local Christians. In the Jewish cultural and linguistic context, the fact of their borrowing is significantly more important than the Semitic origin of the etymons of the corresponding German Christian names. When considering names of Germanic origin, one can distinguish such fundamentally different groups as borrowed from German in the Middle Ages (Anshl, Lipman, Gnane, Raytse) or in modern times (Betye< Betty, Fanye< Fanny, Pepi), created by Jews in the Middle Ages (Liberman, Zelikman, Ziskind) or in modern times (Alter). One can also find names of German origin that may have been borrowed by Jews in Eastern Europe not from Germans but from Poles (who, in turn, borrowed them from German). Adolf is one of the examples. According to the approach by languages, Offmia/Euphemia and Clara would be treated as Greek and Romance names, respectively. Jews in medieval Germany used all of them, and all were borrowed from German Christians. Their ultimate Greek and Romance origins have no value for Jewish onomastics; they represent facts of non-Jewish onomastics. If one wants the classification of names to be useful for the history of Jewish culture, Offmia and Clara must be treated together with other names borrowed from German Christians, for example, with such Germanic names as Gumprecht and Anselm. If one designated Offmia as a “Greek” name, one would put it into the same category as Alexander which appeared as a Jewish name during the Hellenistic period. Similarly, Clara would be considered to belong to the same category as Belle, Gentille, and Joie that were used as Jewish names in Romance countries. In these cases, the affiliations would be completely artificial. Several aspects of Jewish onomastics are of particular value for the linguistic analysis of Yiddish. One of them is purely practical. Direct sources that could be used by philologists specializing in medieval Yiddish are almost non-existent: very few medieval manuscripts and a limited number of glosses can be found. On the other hand, Jewish personal names appear in numerous documents compiled either in the official language of the country or in cultural idioms used by local authorities (typically Latin), or in Hebrew (primarily tombstone inscriptions). In many cases, the towns and the years to which these materials correspond can be easily identified— knowing the exact time and place facilitate the analysis. The presence of the same appellations in both Christian and Jewish sources often allows us to draw reliable conclusions about the way these names were pronounced. This possibility is practically lacking for common nouns, adjectives, and verbs of the Jewish vernacular language.129 As a result, these sources represent material of paramount importance for analyzing phonetic changes within Yiddish. For this reason, they will be cited often in the subsequent chapters. Another aspect is somewhat theoretical. For European Jews, given names represent one of the most conservative layers. This is expressed by the fact that even when in one region Jews shift from their previous spoken language to the new one, that used by local Gentiles, an important portion of given names borne in their previous language and/or in the country from which Jewish immigrants come can be retained for at least a few generations, thus testifying to the linguistic and cultural past. This phenomenon is related to the common practice of naming in honor of relatives. As a consequence, we can find numerous onomastic examples testifying to the independence of the medieval communities from the Rhine and the Danube areas, as well as to an Old French substratum in Yiddish and Old Czech substratum in EY.130
129 130
See Beider , chapter . See details in sections .., ..,and .., respectively.
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Main concepts and classifications
.. Surnames For the analysis of Jewish surnames, the same categories of the principal classification as those considered in the previous section for given names (except for those belonging to substrata of Yiddish) are also applicable. Indeed, Ashkenazic family names found in one particular region can also be either created there, or (rarely) borrowed from local Christians, or appear there after migrations of Ashkenazic or (rarely) non-Ashkenazic Jews. Yet, Ashkenazic surnames differ dramatically from other linguistic elements so far discussed in this chapter. A large majority of surnames were created only at the turn of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. Moreover, unlike all other elements so far considered, surnames do not result from (mainly natural) processes internal to Jewish communities. Massive assignment of hereditary names is due to official laws promulgated by Christian authorities who forced Jews to adopt surnames.131 In Galicia, Prussia, Kingdom of Poland, and, most likely, in Courland, that is, in all of Eastern Europe except for the Russian Pale of Settlement, a large majority of surnames were invented by Christian clerks. As a result, Ashkenazic surnames from Eastern Europe generally tell us nothing about Jewish history before the mid-eighteenth century. The only exceptions are constituted by a small group of appellations commonly borne by rabbinical families that existed before the mass surnaming.132 Apart from Luria and Treves, both known already in the fourteenth century, all other rabbinicial surnames were created during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, well after the Black Death. Surnames taken by Ashkenazic Jews during the mass surnaming (turn of the eighteenth– nineteenth centuries) in various German-speaking provinces of Western and Central Europe are rarely related to Yiddish. Almost all of them have German etymons. The same is true of all regions in Central and Eastern Europe that belonged to the Habsburg Empire. Family names used by Jews during the nineteenth century in the Kingdom of Poland were mainly invented by Austrian, Prussian, or Polish clerks. Their etymons are either German or Polish. It was only in the Russian Pale of Settlement that the whole process of surnaming was internal to the Jewish community. As a result, numerous surnames based on Yiddish words and expressions were created. Only this layer can be useful for Yiddish studies. However, the data it provides correspond to the beginning of the nineteenth century only and are, therefore, irrelevant for a study of the origins of Yiddish. Considering surnames can also shed light on the history of migrations of Ashkenazic Jews that took place during the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Again, this period is too recent: it is outside of our scope. For all these reasons, surnames are never mentioned in this book outside of this section and section C...
131 Among the most important laws of this kind are: Austrian (Habsburg) Empire (), South Prussia and New East Prussia (), Russian Empire (), West Galicia (), France (), Baden (), Prussia (), Bavaria (), Kingdom of Poland (), Württemberg (), Great Duchy of Posen (), and Saxony (). 132 Among them are: Auerbach, Bachrach, Braude/Brojde, Eiger, Emden, Eilenburg, Epstein, Ettingen/Ettinger, Frenkel, Günzburg, Halpern, Heller, Horowitz (Gurevich, Gurvich), Katzenellenbogen, Landau, Lipschitz, Lunz, Luria/Lurie, Minz, Oppenheim, Rappoport, Rothenburg, Schapiro/Spiro, Treves/Triwusch, and Wallerstein (all derived from toponyms from Western or Central Europe), аs well as Cheifetz, Jaffe/Joffe, Margolis/Margulis, Schor, and T(e)umim (all having Hebrew roots). Only a few rabbinical names first appeared in Eastern Europe: Babad, Charlap, and Sack (all acronyms of Hebrew expressions), Gordon (from the town of Grodno), Bloch and Morawczyk (from Polish włoch ‘Italian’ и morawczyk ‘one from Moravia,’ respectively), Schrenzel (from a female given name), and, most likely, also Axelrod (from a male name). (In the above list, all surnames are given according to their German spelling.)
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Classifications of Yiddish dialects
.
CLASSIFICATIONS OF YIDDISH DIALECTS
.. Previous classifications The first classification of Yiddish dialects was suggested by Friedrich (:–). This author distinguished the following dialectal areas: () Prussia (except for the town of Halberstadt), Danemark, Mecklenburg, Hanover, Braunschweig (he says that the dialect used in Greater Poland is close); () Swabia (he indicates that the same variety is also used in Halberstadt); () Habsburg Empire (called “Roman Emperor Lands” by Friedrich); () Lesser Poland, Belorussia (Reussen, in German), and Lithuania. Friedrich noted that Jews from Swabia speak High German but for the absence of the final -n in the infinitive, and also presented a few words whose pronunciation is peculiar outside of Prussia. Between and s, a number of scholars suggested different classifications that are summarized in Table ..133 As can be seen from the last three columns of Table ., for EY the classifications used by Boroxov, Birnbaum, Bin-Nun, and M. Weinreich are synchronically equivalent: they distinguish its three subdialects that for all these authors correspond to the same geographic regions. Here the difference between them is purely terminological. However, major diachronic differences exist between the approaches in question. Boroxov’s terms are time-independent: the designations he uses are purely geographical. Both Birnbaum and Bin-Nun explicitly indicate that the first split within EY separated dialects from Lithuania/Belorussia from those of Poland and Ukraine, while the split between the latter two subdialects took place more recently. On the other hand, M. Weinreich introduced a classification that results from an amendment of the system suggested by Prilutski. As a result, he implies that the first split took place between CY and the ancestor common to SEY and NEY. Several authors (U. Weinreich a:, ; Herzog :–) suggested schemes of the historical development that conform to the approach by Birnbaum and Bin-Nun and reconstruct the ancestor that was common to CY and SEY but not to NEY. Yet, no scheme of this kind was ever proposed to corroborate the classification by Prilutski and M. Weinreich. However, because of the fundamental influence of the writings by M. Weinreich on Yiddish studies, his classification became the standard in this domain.134 Another detailed classification of Yiddish varieties appears in Katz :–. It distinguishes the entities shown in Table .. The main criterion used by Katz is similar to those applied by Weinreich, Bin-Nun, and Birnbaum: systems of stressed vowels. For all eight varieties in question, Katz shows these systems and discusses their differences.135 His classification possesses several advantages in comparison to those of his predecessors. On the one hand, in its essence, it is much closer to that by Birnbaum (, ) and Bin-Nun (BN), linguistically the most appropriate, than to that by Weinreich. On the other hand, it is primarily based on the terminology standardized by Weinreich (compare such expressions as “Southeastern Yiddish” and “Northeastern Yiddish”), but Katz removes an awkward term “Central Yiddish” used by Weinreich to designate a subdialect of “Eastern Yiddish” and 133 About the history of the classification of Yiddish varieties see Katz :–, with a scheme that in many respects is similar to Table . (also compare LCA –). 134 The fact that Birnbaum himself gradually abandoned his own original classification (see the last line in Table .) could also be of some influence here. 135 He asserts that the first split took place between WY and EY and it concerned the reflexes of MHG ei, ou, ê, and ô (Katz :). As can be seen from Table ., for the first two diphthongs, Katz follows an approach close to that already used by Landau ().
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Main concepts and classifications
TABLE . Main classifications of Yiddish varieties Source
Main criteria
Approximate geographic regions Western Central Europe Europe
Poland and Galicia
Ukraine and Bessarabia
Lithuania and Belorussia
Eastern Yiddish (reflexes different from /a:/)
Landau
Reflexes of MHG ei and ou
Western Yiddish /a:/
Boroxov (: –)
Reflexes of stressed vowels, pronunciation of liquids, gender of nouns, lexical idiosyncrasies
Mentioned (a) Polish relics in several areas (particularly in Alsace); (b) particular dialect in Hungary
Birnbaum (:)
Primary: reflex of MHG â
U-dialect
Secondary: reflex of MHG ei
Ai-dialect (/aj/)
Äi-dialect (/ej/)
Central Yiddish /aj/
Eastern Yiddish /ej/
Prilutski (:)
Reflexes of MHG ei
Western Yiddish /a:/
Mieses (:XV)
No criteria given West Yiddish explicitly
South Yiddish
Bin-Nun (BN –)137
Mainly systems of stressed vowels
East Yiddish
West Yiddish
Volhynian136
O-dialect
North Yiddish
Westerly Easterly Central Yiddish West Central East Central
Weinreich Systems of (:–, stressed vowels WG passim)
Western Yiddish (WY)
Eastern Yiddish (EY)
Birnbaum Reflexes of (:–) stressed vowels
West Yiddish
East Yiddish
Central Yiddish
Northeast Yiddish
Central Southeastern Northeastern Yiddish (CY) Yiddish (SEY) Yiddish (NEY)
Southern East Yiddish Western part
136
Lithuanian
Eastern part
Northern East Yiddish
Boroxov says that Yiddish spoken in Bukovina, Romania, and southern Russia is close to the Volhynian dialect, while Hungarian Jews have their own dialect, different from the three main dialects he mentions for Eastern Europe. 137 In addition to subdivisions shown in Table ., Bin-Nun (BN ) introduces numerous supplementary details: (a) for Westerly Yiddish, he mentions an Alsatian subdialect; (b) for Easterly Yiddish, he distinguishes between Bohemian-Moravian Yiddish and Southwest Yiddish (that in turn has regional variants in Burgenland, Slovakia, and Hungary); (c) West Central Yiddish covers subdialects of Poland, Western Galicia, and Eastern Galicia; (d) East Central Yiddish has two branches, Bukovina-Romania and Bessarabia-Ukraine; (e) Northeast Yiddish has different variants in Lithuania-Belorussia and Courland.
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Classifications of Yiddish dialects
TABLE . Katz’s classifications of Yiddish varieties Main dialects
Subdialects
Approximate regions
Approximate equivalence
Eastern (EY)
Northeastern (NEY)
Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia
NEY (Weinreich), Northern East (Birnbaum )
Southern Mideastern Eastern (MEY)
Poland, Galicia, eastern Hungary
Southern East CY (Birnbaum ) (Weinreich)
Southeastern (SEY) Western (WY)
Ukraine, Bessarabia
Northwestern (NWY)
Netherlands, Northwestern Germany
Southern Western
Hessen, Franconia, Thuringia, Saxony
Midwestern (MWY)
SEY (Weinreich) West Yiddish (Birnbaum )
Southwestern Alsace, Bavaria, (SWY) Switzerland, northern Italy Transitional Northern transitional (originally, a part of EY) Southern transitional (originally, a part of WY)
East and West Prussia, Poznań, Pommerania Bohemia, Moravia, western Hungary
Central Yiddish (Birnbaum )
introduces his own term instead: “Mideastern Yiddish.” With this term substitution the fact that the latter dialect is a subdialect of “Eastern Yiddish” becomes explicit. Katz also paid attention to certain major features that the Yiddish dialect in Czech lands has in common not only with WY (as has been already discussed by numerous other scholars) but also with EY. As a result, his consideration of this dialect as transitional between WY and EY appears attractive.138 Finally, unlike certain other authors, when introducing new terms, Katz never reuses terms that were already applied by some of his predecessors but in a different sense. This approach avoids confusion.139 Manaster Ramer (:–) provided arguments showing that the oldest dialect division within Yiddish was not between WY and EY (defined according to the criterion known since Landau ), but rather along or west of the Elbe, that is, internally to the territory of WY. Consequently, he suggested distinguishing Westerly Yiddish from Easterly Yiddish, the former covering only a part of the WY territory and the latter covering the remaining (eastern) part of WY together with all of the EY area. Manaster Ramer asserts that the /a:/-reflex for MHG diphthongs ei and ou results from a relatively recent wave that was inspired by the identical reflex that developed in the large urban centers of southern Germany and Austria. Yet, the (mainly lexical) isoglosses passing approximately along the Elbe as well as a few other splits in western territories are older.
138 As indicated in Table ., Katz considers that originally Yiddish in the Czech lands was a part of WY, while the influence from EY is more recent. 139 Compare the last two lines of Table . that show that Birnbaum () uses the same term “Central Yiddish” in a sense totally different from that used in writings by Weinreich.
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.. Suggested classification As mentioned earlier, the classification by Katz (Table .) is particularly attractive because of his coherent terminology and his introduction of the notion of transitional varieties that previous scholars were normally viewing as subdivisions of WY. The importance of the approach by Manaster Ramer primarily lies in the fact that this linguist explicitly questions the adequacy of criteria used by his predecessors. Indeed, without any detailed analysis of genetic links that can exist between Yiddish varieties, various classifications suggested appear in many respects rather conventional. For example, it is not clear in which way isoglosses associated with reflexes of various MHG vowels (and, above all, ei, ou, and/or â) are so significant that they can serve as appropriate criteria for separating Yiddish varieties. The principle classification of Yiddish elements presented in section . appears fruitful for the classification of Yiddish varieties also. We can postulate that the two Yiddish varieties are placed in the same group if and only if German dialects underlying them (that is, the linguistically structural elements belonging to the category of the LANGUAGE TREE heritage) as well as their non-German substrata are the same. The detailed analysis shedding light on these questions is presented in the following chapters. It is not limited to the consideration of reflexes of a few stressed vowels, but addresses other parts of the language too. Table . shows the suggested classification based on these results, while Map . shows the approximate geographic borders of Yiddish varieties. TABLE . Suggested classifications of Yiddish varieties Main dialects Eastern (EY)
Subdialects
Country or region (country)
Lithuanian (LitY)
Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Lithuanian (Boroxov), northeastern Poland NEY (Weinreich, Katz)
Ukrainian (UkrY)
main part of Ukraine, Volhynian (Boroxov), SEY Moldova, northern Romania (Weinreich, Katz)
Polish (PolY)
main part of Poland, southwestern Ukraine, eastern Hungary, eastern Slovakia
Yiddish Czech (CzY) in Central Europe
Mixed western varieties Western Yiddish (WY)
Approximate equivalence
Polish (Boroxov), CY (Weinreich), MEY (Katz)
Czech Republic, western Central Yiddish (Birnbaum Slovakia, western Hungary ), Southern transitional (Katz)
Eastern German (EGY)
Eastern Germany, former East Prussia (now in Russia) and West Prussia (now in Poland)
Northern transitional + eastern part of MWY (Katz)
Dutch (DuY)
Netherlands
part of NWY (Katz)
Westphalian (WphY)
Westphalia (Germany)
part of NWY (Katz)
Southern Franconian (FrY) western Alsatian (AlsY) (SWY)
Franconia (Germany)
part of MWY (Katz)
Alsace (France)
SWY (Katz)
Swiss (SwY)
Switzerland
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North Sea
Baltic Sea
Vilnius
EGY
Hamburg
WphY
LitY
Poznañ Berlin Warsaw Breslau
Amsterdam
DuY FrY
AlsY
Kraków
Prague
CzY
PolY Lviv
Vienna
Strasbourg
SwY
Tra n
Mogilev
Minsk
sitiona
l
Kiev
Vynnitsia
UkrY
Budapest Chisinau Black Sea
MAP . Yiddish dialects
The classification in Table . focuses on the genetic links between distinct Yiddish dialects. It mentions two significantly different groups of them: (i) Yiddish of eastern communities encompassing EY and Yiddish varieties that were spoken in Central Europe, namely, in the Czech lands (CzY), eastern Germany, and former East Prussia (EGY), (ii) Yiddish of western communities: WY and Yiddish in the Netherlands (DuY). Such a global approach is different from the approaches of Weinreich and Katz. For the first of them, all varieties from Central Europe are parts of WY. For the second scholar, the idioms spoken in the Czech lands and East Prussia represent transitional dialects between WY and EY (though genetically that of the Czech lands is seen as an offspring of WY), while the idiom of eastern German provinces (including Saxony) is a part of WY. In Table ., all these varieties represent dialects whose oldest stratum corresponds to an ancestor common to them and to EY. Another difference in comparison to Katz’s classification corresponds to the consideration of DuY as mixed variety. Its oldest stratum is closely related to WY and, for this precise reason (and not the geographical location), it is genetically linked to WY without being a part of it. For Katz, Yiddish in the Netherlands is a part of WY, and, more precisely, Northwestern Yiddish, an entity to which he also assigns the idiom of northwestern German provinces. Yet, the last idiom (WphY) is treated in Table . separately from DuY as a part of WY. Putting aside the points enumerated above, the suggested classification is very close to that proposed by Katz and numerous remaining differences found between Tables . and . are purely terminological. The aforementioned substantive difference has important consequences for conventional names of subdialects appearing in the second column. In principle, one could retain the terminology suggested by Katz, or even that by Weinreich (more standard though less adequate). Yet, if we accept the names of Yiddish dialects used by these scholars, we will necessarily face major difficulties when choosing appropriate names for several varieties. For example, an attempt to follow Katz can yield for dialects in the Czech lands and eastern Germany/East Prussia designations such as “Southern Westeastern Yiddish” and “Northern Westeastern Yiddish,” respectively. Such awkward terms are to be avoided. The names of subdialects appearing in the second column are all based on the same criterion: they are all drawn from names of countries or regions. This approach is not new: it echoes the ideas of Boroxov. Moreover, the expressions “Lithuanian Yiddish,” “Ukrainian Yiddish,” and “Polish Yiddish” are also regularly used by non-linguists who speak about Yiddish varieties in Eastern Europe. The above
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advantages are more important than its main drawback, namely, the fact that the terms appearing in the second column are not totally exact in terms of the political geography.140
.. Classification schemes Figure . presents the distribution in time and space of Ashkenazic vernacular linguistic varieties whose existence is attested in written sources. The vertical axis corresponds to time and it operates by centuries. The horizontal axis corresponds to geography. Roughly speaking, it covers various countries in Europe from its west (at the left side) to its east (at the right side). During the first third of the twentieth century, specifically Jewish idioms, all having system-level differences between them and in comparison to any German dialect, are known in the Netherlands (and, more precisely, in Amsterdam), Alsace, Switzerland, Poland/eastern Hungary, Ukraine/ Bessarabia, and Lithuania/Belorussia.141 Following the conventional designations introduced in the previous section, local Yiddish varieties are called DuY, AlsY, SwY, PolY, UkrY, and LitY, respectively. For all of them, detailed documention is available. For several other Yiddish varieties, the information exists from earlier periods. Among them are: (i) those from western Germany including the subdialects spoken in Franconia (FrY) and the Rhenish area (with written sources from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries); (ii) CzY spoken in Bohemia and Moravia (with a representative set of sources from the end of the sixteenth century until the mid-eighteenth century),142 and
11th13th
Netherlands
Alsace, western Czech eastern northern Switzer. Germany lands Germany Italy
Eastern Europe
Early western Ashkenazic sources
14th15th 16th17th
Rhenish Yiddish, FrY
18th 19th20th
DuY
AlsY, SwY
CzY
EGY Pol Y
Ukr Y
Lit Y
FIGURE . Ashkenazic vernacular linguistic varieties 140 For all Yiddish dialects appearing in Table . one can find detailed sources including information that is sufficiently representative to allow (i) an appropriate analysis of their most important features and (ii) a classification of these dialects according to the results of that analysis. (See their exact list in the Introduction to this book.) For regions in Central and Western Europe, it is precisely the existence of such sources that was decisive for including them in Table .. For other regions, such as the Rhineland, Bavaria, and Austria, no sources of similar importance are available. As a result, they are not included in Table .. 141 This list is not exhaustive. The areas that are not included (for example, western Hungary and Romania) are marginal to our general analysis. 142 A few sources known for the nineteenth century—as, for example, Kulke , Ehrlich , Benno —are heavily Germanized. Trost (:) states that CzY was still a living idiom after the mid-nineteenth century, while at
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Classifications of Yiddish dialects
(iii) Yiddish varieties in Eastern Germany and East Prussia (EGY) whose descriptions are mainly known to us for the end of the eighteenth century only. A large sample of Yiddish documents was compiled and/or printed in northern Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It makes no particular sense to call it “Italian Yiddish” because a number of authors in question were born outside of this area, mainly in western Germany. Their vernacular language can be related more closely to their native areas than to a hypothetical Italian dialect of Yiddish. A number of early sources written in the Ashkenazic vernacular are also known to be compiled in the same areas as those mentioned earlier in this paragraph: western German-speaking provinces (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), Poland (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries), and the Netherlands (seventeenth century). Without detailed linguistic analysis we cannot consider them to be written in idioms ancestral to those known in the same territories during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Because of the possible discontinuity, these elements of the two groups, the early and the recent ones from the same territories, are separated in Figure .. Two different reasons may be responsible for the discontinuity. One, objective, is related to genuine major changes that occurred in Yiddish of the same area as a result of the existence of several waves of Jewish immigration into the area from various regions. Another, subjective, is related to conscious efforts made by publishers and authors of an area to avoid local dialectal peculiarities and use a language that will be understandable outside of the area in question. The last situation is clearly valid for Amsterdam during the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. Between and the mideighteenth century, Amsterdam was the leading printing center of Ashkenazic Jewry. Because of this status and the fact that a large amount of potential readers of these printed books lived abroad, local publications tend to be “dialectally-neutral” and certainly cannot be taken as representative of the local variety of Yiddish.143 In the history of Yiddish studies, several principal approaches to this problem have been suggested. The one by Max Weinreich was detailed in section .., with Figure . describing the development of Yiddish in time. Figure . presents this information in another way, covering not only the chronology but also the geographical aspects.144 Weinreich considers all available sources written by Ashkenazic Jews in their vernacular German-based idioms to be compiled in Yiddish. In this approach, the geographic expansion of Yiddish globally corresponds to the presence of Ashkenazic communities.145 The approach by Katz contains several major changes in comparison to that by Weinreich. It was detailed in section .. and depicted in Figure .. Firstly, Katz does not apply the label “Yiddish” to any Ashkenazic vernacular tongue but only to one that is genetically related to modern Yiddish dialects. The ancestor of all them is placed by him in the medieval Danube area. A number of earliest Ashkenazic sources compiled by Rhenish Jews are not written in Yiddish, but in another Jewish idiom that died out later being superseded in the same territories by Yiddish. Secondly, as indicated in Table . of section .., Katz considers that Yiddish dialects spoken in Czech lands and East
the beginning of the twentieth century it was spoken only by a small number of elderly persons. The bulk of Czech Jewry was using German or Czech as their vernacular language. 143 Details of the history of the publication in that city of the two earliest translations of the Bible, by Blitz and Witzenhausen (–) can serve as a colorful illustration for this topic (see Aptroot , Timm ). Another curious example of a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary printed in Amsterdam in is described in Katz :–. For certain entries, this publication provides in its Yiddish parts two words, one from WY and another from EY. Yet, the version printed in Kraków in includes only the EY terms. 144 To avoid terminological issues, in Figures . and . modern Yiddish dialects are called not after the names used by Weinreich and Katz but after their conventional designations introduced in the previous section (Table .). 145 Weinreich notes the existence of one non-Rhenish Jewish community, that of Regensburg (in the Danube area), already in the tenth century. However, he postulates as a working hypothesis that this community was an offspring of Rhenish Jewry. For his general outline of the development of Yiddish, Regensburg is marginal.
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Main concepts and classifications Rhine area 9th
Danube area
Czech lands
Eastern Germany
Eastern Europe
Early Yiddish A
1100
Early Yiddish B 1250 Old Yiddish 1500 Middle Western Yiddish
1750 New Yiddish
DuY
AlsY
Middle Eastern Yiddish
SwY
EGY
CzY
PolY
LitY UkrY
FIGURE . Development of Yiddish dialects according to Weinreich Rhine area
Danube area
Czech lands
Eastern Europe
eastern Germany
ProtoYiddish
1000
Eastern Yiddish
Western Yiddish
DuY
AlsY
SwY
CzY
EGY
PolY
LitY UkrY
FIGURE . Development of Yiddish dialects according to Katz
Prussia are not parts of WY, but rather transitional between WY and EY. Figure . depicts his global approach. The consideration of the development of Yiddish suggested in this book (see sections .. and ..) has a number of major differences with respect to the above two schemes. The synthesis of this information appears in Figure .. The information can also be presented in another way: Figure .
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Classifications of Yiddish dialects Rhine area
Danube area Jewish ethnolect of EF
Czech lands
Eastern Germany
Eastern Europe
Jewish ethnolect of Bohemian
15th16th «Proto-WY»
Proto-CzY
Proto-EY
17th20th DuY
CzY AlsY
EGY
SwY
PolY
LitY UkrY
FIGURE . Development of Yiddish varieties suggested in this book
adds the geographic axis, introduces CzY (that is absent from Figure . in order to not make it illegible) and withdraws from Figure . elements that are irrelevant for our current topic. One fundamental change in comparison to theories by Weinreich and Katz corresponds to the introduction of not one but two independent ancestral dialects, both of them being Jewish ethnolects of local German dialects. Their placement in Eastern Franconia (EF in Figure .) and the Czech lands roughly echoes the geographic links postulated by Katz. Of course, properly speaking, it would be inappropriate to call these territories the “Danube area.” However, in keeping with Katz and in contrast to Weinreich, here there is an emphasis on a compact area situated southeast of the Rhineland. Ashkenazic early sources compiled before the fifteenth century and many documents from the fifteenth century also are not written in Yiddish. It is more appropriate to characterize their idioms as Jewish ethnolects of local German dialects spelled using Hebrew characters. For the sixteenth century, we can already speak about at least three Yiddish varieties: those called in Figure . “Proto-WY,”146 ProtoCzY (ancestor common for CzY and EGY), and Proto-EY. All three of them were separate according to certain major system-level linguistic criteria. Numerous early Ashkenazic sources can be assigned to the first two of them: those from western German-speaking provinces and northern Italy are related to “Proto-WY,” while those from Prague and Kraków can be linked to Proto-CzY.147 We know of no authentic early source that would be written in EY. Another important idiosyncrasy consists in considering CzY and EGY as having the same ancestor as EY. Again, it is much closer to the ideas by Katz about these varieties being transitional between WY and EY than to their classification as subdialects of WY by Weinreich. This scheme also deals with DuY as a transitional dialect influenced by WY and EY. This mixture does not characterize documents written in Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century: they can be assigned to WY. 146 Exactly as in Figure ., the expression “Proto-WY” appears in double quote marks in order to emphasize that this notion results from an idealization (see details in section ..). 147 See the discussion of this question in section ...
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Main concepts and classifications
.
YIDDISH PROTO-VOWELS
As noted in section .., classifications of Yiddish varieties suggested by different authors are mainly based on the analysis of the stressed vowels. U. Weinreich (a:–) was the first scholar who suggested reconstruction of the phonetic values of proto-vowels of various EY dialects and listed the main phonetic shifts that lead to modern reflexes. His analysis covered fifteen phonemes, which he conventionally numbered to .148 Two years later, his father, M. Weinreich (b), suggested the classical kadmen-skheme fun yidishn vokalizm (“proto-scheme of Yiddish vowels”) that is, the PROTO-YIDDISH system of vowels and diphthongs. In his paper published in and posthumous magnum opus (WG :–), every Yiddish stressed protovowel is designated by two characters: an upper-case vowel (A, E, I, O, and U) that roughly characterizes its original quality and a digit indicating one of the following cases: . vowels that were short and remained short; . vowels that were long and remained long; . vowels that were short and became lengthened in open syllables; . nucleus of an original diphthong whose first element was a short vowel; . special type of short vowel, existing only for the E-quality. The analysis of the correspondences between reflexes of the same proto-vowels in various modern Yiddish dialects shows, however, that no difference can be discerned between E and E, I and I, O and O, or U and U. Weinreich was well aware of this fact, but he kept all these proto-vowels separate—most likely because the whole system looked more symmetrical—preferring not to treat the A-quality apart from others. Initially, the scheme consisted of twenty elements: (a) no protovowel with digit was postulated except for E; (b) A was lacking; and (c) the digits , , and were valid for all five qualities. Katz (a:) removed from this scheme the proto-vowels E, I, O, and U as redundant in the presence of E, I, O, and U, respectively. In the resulting scheme of sixteen elements, two, A and E, were treated separately: no other element with the same digit was found. To explain these anomalies in the otherwise symmetrical system, Katz (a:) conjectured that both elements were not present among the actual vowels of PROTO-YIDDISH but resulted from two splits that occurred during a later period, that of early Yiddish, under the influence of German. During that period, in High German dialects the short vowels were lengthened in open syllables. For Weinreich, at some point during the history of Yiddish this process was responsible for the creation of all proto-vowels with digit . For Katz, on the other hand, only two proto-vowels met the conditions of this German phonetic process, namely A and E. In open syllables, the former gave birth to A and the latter to E. Herzog (:–) developed the ideas of U. Weinreich, proposing a series of more detailed derivational rules and incorporating M. Weinreich’s new concepts. He also suggested a system of designations that represented a compromise of those used by U. and M. Weinreich: Herzog replaced M. Weinreich’s letters A, E, I, O, and U by digits , , , , and , respectively. Consequently, following his conventional designations the proto-vowel is equivalent to Weinreich’s A, is just another formal way to describe Weinreich’s A, etc. Jacobs (:–) was another scholar to deal with a similar topic. In schemes he presented, he suggested several amendments to those by Herzog (phonetic values of vowels and in Proto-Yiddish and in Proto-Northeastern Yiddish) and provided numerous additional details concerning shortening and lengthening of stressed vowels in specific environments and various other phonological processes. 148 To account for one specific development in the Yiddish of Courland, he also postulated the possibility of an additional, sixteenth, proto-vowel.
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Yiddish proto-vowels TABLE . Modern reflexes of Yiddish proto-vowels Yiddish proto-vowel (M.Weinreich’s SWY DuY EGY CzY EY and Herzog’s designations) SwY AlsY PolY UkrY
LitY StY
A =
a
o
a
a
A =
a
a
a
a
a
ɔu, o: ɔu, o: o:
o:
o:, u: u:
u
o
o
A =
a:
a:
o:
o:
o:, u: u:
u
o
o
E =
e
e
ε
e
e
e
e
e
e
E, = ,
εj
εj
εj
ej
ej
aj
ej
ej
ej
E =
e:
εj, e: e:
e:
e:
ej
ej
e
e
I =
i
I
e
i
i
i
I
i
i
I, = ,
i:
i:
i:
i:
i:
i:
i
i
i
O =
o
o
ɔ
o
o
o
o
o
o
O, = ,
ɔu
ɔu
ɔu
oy
au
oj
oj
ej
oj
U =
u
u
o
u
y
i
I
u
u
U, = ,
u:
y:, y
u:
u:
y:
i:
i
u
u
E =
a:
a:
a:
a:
a:
aj
ej
ej
ej
I =
aj
aj
εj
a:
aj
a:
a
aj
aj
O =
a:
a:
a:
a:
a:
oj
oj
ej
oj
U =
ɔu
ɔu
ɔu
au
au
ou, o: oj, u, ou oj, uj oj
Currently, the scheme suggested by Weinreich, with or without Katz’s amendments, is accepted almost universally. It includes two groups of tables of correspondences. The first, illustrated in Table . for several Yiddish varieties, is heuristic. It treats proto-vowels as diaphonemes and shows their reflexes in modern Yiddish dialects.149 The last column corresponds to StY, a normative literary language created Data in Table . are mainly extracted from LCA and LCA. In questionable cases, they were also compared with the information present in Herzog , BA, and GGA. Katz (:–, a:–) states that in all Yiddish dialects, E is [ε] and O is [ɔ]. For diphthongs, depending on dialect, he speaks about [ej] or [εj], [oj] or [ɔj], and [ou] or [ɔu]. For example, he mentions the existence of the following sounds in PolY: [ε] (E), [ɔ] (O), [ej] (E), [ou] (U), and [ɔj] (O, ). For the same dialect, Birnbaum (:–) provides another distribution: [ε], [o], [εj], [ɔu], and [ɔj], respectively. Other sources (WG, BN, LCA, and LCA) never mention mid-open vowels and refer to such sounds as [e], [o], [ej], [oj], and [ou]. Table . follows these authors. There is no phonemic contrast between their approach and Katz’s. His designations are intended to mean that in the dialects that distinguish vocalic quantities, there exist purely phonetic differences between the qualities of short mid-vowels and their long counterparts: the former are more open than the latter. The distribution stated by Katz is followed in Table . only for DuY since it appears in Beem . Zuckerman (:–) addressed in detail not only phonemic but also phonetic distribution of vowels 149
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Main concepts and classifications
during the twentieth century whose stressed vocalism is mainly based on the modern pronunciation peculiar to LitY.150 Only the reflex for O, , is taken by StY from modern PolY/UkrY. TABLE . Main correspondences between Yiddish proto-vowels and MHG and Hebrew vowels Proto- MHG vowels vowels
Examples StY form ‘meaning’ (MHG equivalent)
Hebrew vowels
Examples StY form ‘meaning’ (Hebrew etymon)
A
a in closed syllables
dakh ‘roof ’ (dach)
pataḥ and qameṣ in almen ‘widower’ closed syllables; ()ַאְלָמן, ksav ‘writing’ () ּ ְכָתב ḥ aṭ ef-pataḥ
A
â
zomen ‘seed’ (sâme)
qameṣ in open syllables
A
a in open syllables151
foter ‘father’ (vater)
a few exceptional rov ‘rabbi’ () ַרב, ov pataḥ and qameṣ in ‘Jewish month Ab’ closed syllables ()ָאב, kol ‘people of the community ()ָקָהל
E
e, ö, ë, ä and æ, all in bet ‘bed’ (bet), shmerts ṣ ere and segol in closed syllables ‘pain’ (smërze) closed syllables, ḥ aṭ ef-segol
get ‘divorce’ ()ֵּגט, khevre ‘association’ ()ֶחְב ָרה, emes ‘truth’ ()ֱאֶמת
E
ê, œ
geyn ‘to go’ (gên), sheyn ‘beautiful’ (schœne)
ṣ ere in open syllables
seyder ‘Passover meal’ ()ֵס ֶדר
E
e and ö in open syllables
reyd ‘speech’ (rede), eyl ‘oil’ (öle)
-
-
E
ë, ä andæin open syllables
leder ‘leather’ (lëder), shemen zikh ‘to be ashamed’ (schämen sich), kez ‘cheese’ (kæse)
segol in open syllables
gefen ‘vine’ ()ֶּגֶפן
I
i and ü in closed syllables
biter ‘bitter’ (bitter), din ḥ ireq in closed ‘thin’ (dünne) syllables
dibek ‘ghost’ ()ִּדּבוּק
I
ie, üe
briv ‘letter’ (brief), grin ḥ ireq in open ‘green’ (grüene) syllables
medine ‘province’ ()ְמ ִדיָנה
ponem ‘face’ () ּ ָפִנים
in AlsY. His results appear in Table . in the column dealing with AlsY. Note that he explicitly writes about [e] and [o] as standard reflexes for Eand O, respectively, with [ε] and [ɔ] being their allophonic variants in certain contexts (before [r], as well as [x] or nasals). 150 About the development of this norm see Katz . 151 All proto-vowels with the subscript also concern closed syllables in which the lengthening took place by analogy with inflected forms.
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Yiddish proto-vowels TABLE .
Continued
I
i and ü in open syllables
shtivl ‘boot’ (stivel)
-
-
O
o in closed syllables
horn ‘horn’ (horn)
qameṣ qatan; ḥ olem in closed syllables
khokhme ‘wisdom’ ()ָחְכָמה, of ‘fowl’ ()עֹוף
O
ô
royt ‘red’ (rôt)
ḥ olem in open syllables
soykher ‘merchant’ ()סֹוֵחר
O
o in open syllables
boygn ‘bow’ (boge)
-
-
U
u in closed syllables
hunt ‘dog’ (hunt)
shureq/qibbuṣ in closed syllables
mum ‘defect’ ()מוּם
U
uo
blum ‘flower’ (bluome) shureq/qibbuṣ in open syllables
shure ‘line’ ()ׁשוָּרה
U
u in open syllables
zun ‘son’ (sun)
-
-
E
ei, öu
kleyn ‘small’ (kleine), freyd ‘joy’ (vröude)
-
-
I
î, iu
vays ‘white’ (wîʒ), baytl ‘purse’ (biutel)
pataḥ + (ayin, alef or he) + ḥ aṭ ef-pataḥ in open syllables152
-
O
ou
boym ‘tree’ (boum)
-
-
U
û
toyb ‘dove’ (tûbe)
-
-
The second group of tables based on Weinreich’s approach indirectly deals with historical linguistics. They present correspondence rules between the proto-vowels and two main source languages of Yiddish: German and Hebrew. Table . illustrates this approach taking as examples reflexes found in StY. If one knows the corresponding word in MHG or Hebrew, one can deduce from this table the proto-vowel to which the stressed vowel should be attached. Once one knows this proto-vowel, one can identify the reflex of this vowel in various modern Yiddish dialects using information similar to that presented in Table .. The second column in Table . is directly taken from the information present in WG.153 Yet, the fourth column is based on ideas exposed in WG only partially. First, it follows Katz’s attribution of the digit (“originally long”)—instead of (“lengthened in open syllables”) suggested by Weinreich—for vowels of the Hebrew component of Yiddish that are present in open syllables. Second, contrary to Weinreich, it posits A and not O for qameṣ in closed syllables.154 Third, it ignores pataḥ in open syllables because for that, it is difficult to decide what correspondences should really be called “main.”155 152 153 154 155
See Table . and the discussion of feature {v} in section ... Indirectly, it can also be deduced from BN –, with similar results. See Table . and the discussion of feature {v} in section ... See section ...
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Main concepts and classifications
Weinreich himself takes a very cautious attitude regarding the historical reality of his PROTOYIDDISH vowel system. In particular, he rejects the idea of the proto-language and contrasts kadmenyiddish (PROTO-YIDDISH) with breyshes-yidish (Earliest Yiddish); he refuses to recognize the former as a real historical entity and treates it as a logical conventional construction.156 Note that Weinreich mentions both MHG and Hebrew vowels without giving any precision as to their exact phonetic value during the PROTO-YIDDISH period. He introduces basic tables of correspondences instead of positing rules that would show the derivation between the vowels and the diphthongs of the following linguistic systems: (a) from source languages for Yiddish to PROTO-YIDDISH and (b) from the latter to modern Yiddish dialects. This approach of correspondences rather than derivations is particularly manifest when one considers the Yiddish proto-vowels and their modern realizations. For that part Weinreich suggests no derivational rules at all. On the one hand, this purely heuristic approach is natural if we take into account his reluctance to accept the idea of the real existence of PROTO-YIDDISH. On the other hand, it seems to contradict certain basic definitions present in his logical construction. Indeed, his whole scheme is based on the concept of short and long vowels, and the changes of length in open syllables. The notions “short/long vowels” and “open/closed syllables” are not purely conventional: they make reference to phonetic reality (MRPC). The scheme of proto-vowels introduced and developed thanks to works by M. and U. Weinreich, Herzog, Katz, and Jacobs represents an important breakthrough for Yiddish studies. To eliminate its elements that still appear to be conventional (mnemonic/heuristic) “correspondences,” several amendments are worth doing. The first concerns derivational rules between the vowels of the German donor language and Yiddish proto-vowels omitted by all the aforementioned scholars. The second concerns the introduction of proto-schemes for WY and its subdialects.157 These amendments are discussed in detail in section ..
.
MONOGENESIS VERSUS POLYGENESIS
Of particular importance for the understanding of Yiddish history is the consideration of the possibility of the existence of PROTO-YIDDISH, an ancestor that would be common to all modern Yiddish dialects, generally speaking, or, at least, for the two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish: WY and EY. If the existence of PROTO-YIDDISH were corroborated, we would speak about the monogenesis of Yiddish. Otherwise, it would be appropriate to speak about the POLYGENESIS of Yiddish. These two terms were introduced for the first time into the context of Yiddish studies by Manaster Ramer (). His paper also includes the discussion of several important methodological aspects of the issue. A similar question was also addressed in a number of previous studies though their authors did not use the terms in question. Several scholars state explicitly that WY and EY are two different languages. One of them, Blosen () asserts this after making a comparative analysis focused on one morphological feature and a few phonological characteristics, all belonging to the German component of Yiddish.158 Marchand (:) provides only one argument: for him, WY and EY could not come from the same protolanguage because preterite and progressive tenses are known in WY and unknown in EY. This
This consideration is due to MRPC who bases it on WG :, . Indeed, both M. Weinreich and Katz do mention WY, but their consideration does not include any derivation scheme. For Herzog (:), WY was a marginal topic: he just mentions it in the general classification of Yiddish dialects. On the other hand, WY was clearly beyond the scope of studies by U. Weinreich and Jacobs focused on EY only. 158 The main positions of his paper and the discussion of its results appear in section . of this book. 156 157
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Monogenesis versus polygenesis
argument is untenable: in principle, at some stage of its development, EY could simply loose these features.159 Simon (:–) makes a detailed comparison between the original text of the memoirs of Aaron Isaak of Treuenbrietzen (–), written after , and their translation into modern EY. Her analysis shows numerous lexical and a number of morphological differences between the two idioms. She also emphasizes the absence of Hebraic conjunctions and prepositions in the original text, while they are common in the translation. Methodologically speaking, Simon’s approach is inadequate. The author of the memoirs, born in the province of Brandenburg, lived between and in Mecklenburg and thereafter in Stockholm. Taking into account the time period when and the places where he lived, it becomes clear that his language cannot be considered as representative of WY. It is not a surprise that Aaron Isaak uses numerous words of Low German and Swedish origin. On the other hand, as shown by Timm (:), numerous function words of Hebrew origin are present in the memoirs of Glückel who lived in the same general area but in a community with a large Jewish population (Hamburg) and approximately one hundred years before Aaron Isaak. Katz is one of the few strong advocates of the idea that a genetic linguistic link exists between WY and EY. He suggests the following four arguments for their unity (Katz a:–): . SYSTEMATIC CORRESPONDENCE of the system of stress vocalism of all Yiddish varieties. Katz illustrates this with the reflexes of the proto-vowel represented as U in Weinreich’s system of Yiddish proto-vowels. . ANALOGOUS FUSION between Germanic and Semitic vowels in all varieties of Yiddish, by which he means the fact that the German and Hebrew vocalic systems fused in such a way that it is possible to posit a single proto-system for both covering all dialects. If there had been several separate “Yiddishes,” then, as Katz notes, we would expect any given Hebrew vowel to merge with the reflexes of different MHG vowels depending on which particular “Yiddish” we are dealing with. . CONGRUENT ANOMALIES vis-à-vis the stock languages, by which he means the existence of a number of unexpected reflexes—shared by all Yiddish varieties—of either German or Hebrew vowels in particular words . CONCRETE DISPARITY OF REALIZATION. What he means is that the case for a single PROTO-YIDDISH is strengthened by the fact that in all of the cases at issue, we are not talking about phonetically identical reflexes in all Yiddish varieties (that could be due to direct inter-borrowings between dialects) but rather phonetically very disparate realizations in different dialects of the same proto-vowels. For several reasons, Katz’s arguments cannot be considered cogent. Katz’s last argument only demonstrates that sharing of a similar feature is certainly not due to recent interdialectal borrowings. On the other hand, it does not prevent the possibility of such borrowings several centuries ago. The SYSTEMATIC CORRESPONDENCE between the vowel systems of the Yiddish varieties is a not a valid argument for the original unity of Yiddish either. It is theoretically possible to design a system of correspondences between any two dialects or languages that are related in some way but do not necessarily descend from an ancestor that is common only to them but not to other dialects or languages from the same linguistic group. For example, Weinreich constructed his system of Yiddish proto-vowels despite the fact that there is no contrast between () A and A in EY; () E and E in EY; () O and O in EY; () E and O in WY. This means that Weinreich’s overall system could, in principle, be no more than an ad hoc list taking into account all the vocalic distinctions in all the dialects of Yiddish. If a new reflex is found in one specific dialect, one can introduce a new “protovowel” saying that in all other dialects it fused with the reflexes of other proto-vowels. There is 159
For the preterite, see discussion of the feature {M} in section ..
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Main concepts and classifications
nothing at all wrong with that conclusion, but it is clear that we could posit a system of correspondences in this way for any set of languages from the same linguistic group, and consequently, for any one Yiddish dialect (including a standardized language whose version referred to as StY in this book was artifically created during the twentieth century by Yiddish linguists related to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) together with, say, any one German dialect (including Standard NHG). In the latter case, since German and Yiddish are closely related, we would end up with a system which would not be particularly complicated, but would have no reality in terms of pre-history since there clearly was no proto-language from which specifically StY and Standard German (but not the rest of Yiddish or the rest of German) are derived (MRPC). An illustration of why Katz’s argument is not valid is presented in section .. which discusses the independent origins of proto-EY and protoWY diphthongs, despite the fact that all these diphthongs can be described by four “proto-vowels” (E, I, O, U). Here the Weinreich-like system of SYSTEMATIC CORRESPONDENCE between stressed vowels of various dialects of EY and WY is no more than the direct consequence of the fact that the German components of both EY and WY are both derived from (different) dialects of German that in turn had the same common ancestor: MHG. Consequently, in no case do these correspondences testify to the existence of PROTO-YIDDISH, that is, the putative specifically Jewish common ancestor of EY and WY. The second argument—that of ANALOGOUS FUSION between German and Hebrew vowels across the different Yiddish varieties—is much stronger than the first and the last arguments suggested by Katz. Still it also is somewhat problematic. Firstly, if this were true, then, as Katz tells us, it would be possible to account for the vowels of any given word in any given Yiddish dialect without reference to the German as opposed to the Hebrew origin of the word. There certainly are, however, some irregularities which occur in only one of the components in certain dialects. For example, there are the well-known differences between the stress position in two components, in the treatment of monosyllabic words ending in a consonant where Weinreich suggested considering the syllable open in the German component and closed in the Hebrew one, as well as some other discrepancies confined to one of the components.160 Secondly, it could also be that the vowel systems of different German dialects were quite similar at the relevant time so that, even if there were several “Yiddishes” (each based on a different German dialect), there would nevertheless have been unanimity as to the representation of the various Hebrew vowels. A direct illustration of this can be found in Figure . (section ..) of this book where the origins of proto-WY and proto-EY stressed vocalisms are placed in two different areas: East Franconia and Bohemia, respectively.161 Here the ANALOGOUS FUSION became possible because, on the one hand, the stressed non-rounded monophthongs in the German dialects spoken by Christians in the two areas in question were similar at the moment of fusion between the German and Hebrew components of WY and EY while, on the other hand, Hebrew has neither diphthongs nor rounded vowels and the pronunciation of Hebrew likely was similar for Jews of both areas.162 Katz’s argument of CONGRUENT ANOMALIES—which actually represents a particular case of the application to Yiddish of a more general concept of SHARED ABERRANCIES well known in historical linguistics163—is the most fruitful. Katz mentions only one example from the German component (cross-dialectal diphthongal realization in a word whose MHG ancestor had a short monophthong) and one from the Hebrew component (short reflex in both PolY and WY in a word whose Hebrew Actually, some of these variations are due to the influence of WHOLE HEBREW pronunciations (see section .), others to the analogy processes within the German component, to the borrowings into particular Yiddish varieties of forms from modern German, etc. 161 162 See details in section ... See section ... 163 See its discussion in section ... 160
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Monogenesis versus polygenesis
etymon has a vowel that normally gives long reflexes in Yiddish). Actually, the number of cases of unexpected reflexes shared by the Hebrew components of EY and WY is so strikingly large that one can conclude with certainty that the stressed vocalisms of the Hebrew components of these two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish have the same ancestor.164 The principle classification of Yiddish elements presented in section .. is helpful when addressing the question of the monogenesis or polygenesis of Yiddish. In this context, of particular importance are the categories of the LANGUAGE TREE (.) and substratum (.) heritages, as well as those related to internal innovations (. and ). The first of them deals with German dialects on which different varieties of Yiddish are based. The second encompasses specifically Jewish elements incorporated into the ancestor of certain modern Yiddish varieties from the idiom spoken by a Jewish group who shifted to this German-based language. The competing general descriptions are presented in Figures . and ., illustrating the possibilities of monogenesis and polygenesis, respectively. As discussed in section .., the first of them globally corresponds to the approaches by Weinreich, Katz, and to a lesser extent Bin-Nun (compare Figures .–.). The second represents an extract from Figure . suggested in this book. In Figures . and ., the following elements only are shown:165 • LANGUAGE TREE heritage (vertical arrows); • substratum heritage (horizontal triple arrows); • borrowing from German dialects (horizontal simple arrows); • borrowing between WY and EY (horizontal two-corner dashed arrows). Figure . postulates the existence of PROTO-YIDDISH, the ancestor of all Yiddish varieties. This proto-language is based on specific German dialect(s) (GP) (its ancestor according to the LANGUAGE TREE model) and specifically Jewish Romance (RP) and Hebrew (HP) elements (its substrata) inherited from the Pre-Yiddish language(s) of the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews who shifted to Gp Rp + Hp
Proto-Yiddish Gw
Ge
WY
EY
Se + He
FIGURE . Monogenesis See section .. The description of graphic conventions used in these schemes can be found in section ... The abbreviations used correspond to: (G)erman, (S)lavic, (R)omance, (H)ebrew, (I)nterdialectal borrowing. 164 165
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Main concepts and classifications Rsw + Hsw
Gsw
Gpw
Gpe Sse + Hse
Ip
Proto-WY
Gow
Proto-EY Goe
Io
Soe + Hoe
EY
WY In
FIGURE . Polygenesis (formal)
German. PROTO-YIDDISH branched into WY and EY, both of which underwent a horizontal influence of additional German dialects (GW and GE). Moreover, EY also became the vernacular language of other Jewish groups (CANAANITES) who shifted to it from their Slavic languages and thus brought to EY additional Slavic (SE) and Hebrew (HE) elements. Figure . asserts that Proto-WY and Proto-EY were independent. The ancestors of WY speakers originally shifted to German dialects GSW incorporating in their vernacular tongue a substratum with Romance (RSW) and Hebrew (HSW) elements. Later, they shifted to another German dialect GPW that appears as the direct LANGUAGE TREE ancestor of WY. One section of the ancestors of EY speakers (WEST CANAANITES) shifted to GPE, another German dialect. Their substratum encompasses Slavic (SSE) and Hebrew (HSE) elements. Ashkenazic migrants from western Germany to the Czech lands (IP) also shifted to the same German dialect GPE. During the Old Yiddish period: () both protolanguages underwent the horizontal influence of additional German dialects (GOW and GOE); () additional Slavic (SOE) and Hebrew (HOE) elements could appear in EY of Ukraine and Belorussia because of the shift to that language of EAST CANAANITES. Interdialectal borrowing has existed between WY and EY in different periods (see the designations IO and IN in the scheme). Figure . presents the information of Figure . in a less formal and therefore more readerfriendly way. Its dotted horizontal lines show the adstratal influences. For the monogenesis scheme (Figure .) to be realistic, all the following conditions must apply: () There is (at least) one particular High German dialect that is ancestral for all modern Yiddish varieties according to the LANGUAGE TREE model. () Only one variety of Hebrew underlies all dialects of modern Yiddish. () Romance substratal layer is shared by all Yiddish varieties. () The influence of the Slavic-speaking Jews who shifted to EY (both WEST and EAST CANAANITES) is superficial. () All Yiddish varieties underwent at least one common internal structural change that was decisive for the separation of PROTO-YIDDISH from its High German ancestral dialect(s). Formally speaking, if at least one of the above conditions is not corroborated, the idea of the monogenesis of Yiddish becomes doubtful. For various polygenesis models (including that of
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Monogenesis versus polygenesis
Bohemian German East Franconian German
West Canaanic Shift
«Proto-WY»
Proto-EY Silesian German Polish
Other German dialects
East Canaanic Shift WY
EY Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish
FIGURE . Polygenesis
Figure .) to be refuted there is no need for statements against all the five above to be verified. For example, if it appears that the same kind of Hebrew underlies both WY and EY, these models will not be falsified: this would just indicate that both Jewish groups inherited from their ancestors the same variant of Hebrew. However, the idea of polygenesis becomes rather weak if the assertions () and/or () are determined to be true, that is, one finds traces of pan-Yiddish system-level elements either inherited from the same particular High German dialect or internally innovated. In the previous sentence, the word system-level is of paramount importance. Indeed, the number of pan-Yiddish features is significant.166 However, many of these shared elements (or even all of them) can be due not to the putative PROTO-YIDDISH (as in Figure .) but to later admixtures corresponding to interborrowing between Yiddish varieties (IO and IN in Figure .) or to earlier contacts between western and eastern Jewish ethnolects that were linguistically not separated yet from the corresponding German dialects (IP in Figure .). This is particularly true of pan-Yiddish Romance elements whose existence is compatible with both schemes. Any EY term of Romance origin (or any other origin) can result from an intra-Jewish borrowing from WY. Indeed, migrations to Central and Eastern Europe of noted rabbis and religious scholars from the West are well known from historical sources. This highly authoritative layer within the eastern Jewish communities was certainly responsible for numerous cultural and linguistic innovations into EY. The borrowing of WY words into EY also can be influenced by the presence in Slavic countries of numerous other western Ashkenazic migrants. We do not find any historical documents corroborating the existence of mass migrations of this kind. However, onomastic information in our possession leaves no doubt here.167 166
An attempt to extract lexical, phraseological, and phonological elements specific to Yiddish and characterizing all varieties of this language was done in Manaster Ramer :–. A similar approach also characterizes TG – where, moreover, the earliest references to certain words are given. 167 See the discussions of pan-Yiddish given names in sections .. and ... These show for the Middle Ages the migrations that took place from West to East but do not reveal any trace of migrations in the opposite direction. For this reason, when discussing early intra-Jewish contacts (IP in Figure .), it is appropriate to speak about the existence of a linguistic shift of western migrants to the German dialect GPE (Bohemian) that became the basis for Proto-EY. See also section C...
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Main concepts and classifications
The regular study in eastern Ashkenazic elementary schools of biblical translations originally inspired by western sources (or even directly of documents compiled by western authors)168 represents another factor that contributed to strengthening the borrowing of a number of WY lexemes, some of them belonging to the domain of religion. The results of the methodological approach presented in section .. are useful for the comparison of the plausibility of the monogenesis and polygenesis models, respectively. Of particular help for various Yiddish elements is the identification of their geographic and chronological frameworks: • within Yiddish varieties (Step ), and • for those shared with non-Jewish idioms, within the corresponding donor German, Romance, and Slavic dialects (Step ). Sharing of a set of system-level characteristics with one German dialect can corroborate either monogenesis (if these features are pan-Yiddish), or polygenesis (otherwise). For a particular model of polygenesis suggested in Figure ., one needs to show the existence of two separate sets of shared characteristics: one for WY and another, related to a different German dialect, for EY.169 The narrower the area covered by the German dialects in question, the more important is this fact for Yiddish history. On the other hand, features common to numerous (and a fortiori all) High German dialects are of no interest here. For example, relating various Yiddish elements to their MHG cognates cannot be helpful for our specific purposes. The consideration of Slavic substratal elements sheds much more light on our understanding of the origins of EY than that of Romance elements. Indeed, a Slavic word used for centuries as a religious term in EY is unlikely to enter this idiom as a loanword from neighboring Christian Slavs. The high status of this semantic field excludes such an opportunity. The affiliation of the word in question to a substratum of EY is much more plausible. If, moreover, it appears that the substratal Old Slavic layer and the German dialect with which EY shared the largest number of structural features both point to the same geographic region, then the probability of the inception of EY independently of WY (and, therefore, that of polygenesis of Yiddish as a whole) becomes very strong. Actually, this is precisely the case, with the Czech lands corresponding to the region in question.170
.
TERMINOLOGICAL AND SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES
Works in the domain of Yiddish historical linguistics, generally speaking, and this book, in particular, often deal with questions for which different answers are suggested by various authors. For new questions never posited by predecessors, several alternative answers can usually, in principle, be provided. In this situation, it is extremely important to distinguish substantive issues from those that are merely terminological. For the former, linguistic arguments (and sometimes extra-linguistic too) as strong as possible should be suggested. They should obey methodological principles standard in science. Yet, the terminological questions deserve a totally different attitude. Various terms used in a linguistic discussion can be defined with a different degree of precision. Obviously, a controversy between two authors using different definitions for the same term is senseless. Sometimes, however, this issue is not on the surface because one of the two authors, or even both of them, apply terms that are rather vaguely defined. In this situation, the terminological
168 169 170
A detailed study of this channel is present in TS. This analysis is provided in Chapter . See section .. and . for the Bohemian German and Old Czech layers of EY, respectively.
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character of the controversy should be made explicit. For new terms with a precise definition, one can discuss the usefulness of their introduction in searching for answers to substantive issues.171 If, on the other hand, a term is not new, it is important to emphasize any difference that might exist with respect to its use by other authors. A number of questions addressed in the previous sections can be considered as to a large extent terminological. Among them are: – What is the exact age of Yiddish? Here the answer—even when dealing with centuries— depends on the definition of the term YIDDISH and the exact criterion applied to distinguish this language during the early stages of its development from German. In this book, the term YIDDISH is applied only if several conditions are met: (i) this idiom has structural (that is, concerning the grammar or the phonological system) differences in comparison to German dialects, (ii) it is the ancestor of at least one modern Yiddish variety. Both these conditions correspond already to the substantive part of Yiddish studies. – Considering terms like YIDDISH, JUDEO-GERMAN, JEWISH GERMAN, and JEWS’ GERMAN, which is the most appropriate? Here again the difference depends on the exact meaning various authors have when using these expressions. In this book (section ..), the first two terms are used as interchangeable designations of a language separate from German. The last expression corresponds to the Jewish ethnolect of German. It is globally similar to the notion of “Jüdischdeutsch” used in BN – for the medieval period and by Weinberg (, passim) for the language of Jews in western Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. In accordance with their definitions, the expression JEWS’ GERMAN appears twice in Figure ., once for the medieval ancestor of WY and another time for the language to which German Jews shifted from WY. In both cases, there is no structural difference between this ethnolect and the vernacular dialects of local Christians. The last aspect is already substantive and not terminological. – What is the most appropriate name among various designations for the dialect of Yiddish that was spoken in the main part of Poland: “Polish,” “Central,” western part of “Southern East,” “West Central,” and “Mideastern”? As was indicated in Tables . and ., all these words or expressions are used by various authors for the same linguistic and geographic entity. The difference between all these terms is merely terminological.
171 An example of a massive introduction of new terms whose usefulness is questionable can be found in Lass . This author expresses major substantive issues and approaches of historical linguistics in terms taken from evolutionary biology. Throughout his study he regularly speaks about, for example, taxonomy, cladogram, cladistic model, apomorphy, synapomorphy, plesiomorphy, and haplology (pp. –) instead of classification, language tree, language tree model, innovative feature, shared innovation, inherited feature, and feature resulting from a convergence, respectively. As a result, a statement usually found in other textbooks in the domain of historical linguistics such as for the discussion of genetic links between dialects, shared innovations are often more important than inherited features, is “translated” by Lass (:) in his terms when he writes about “the taxonomic priority of apomorphy as opposed to plesiomorphy.” For someone who is not trained in evolutionary biology, this approach creates a major difficulty when reading his book. A permanent exercise of mental substitution of these new terms by those commonly used in historical linguistics (and often immediately clear from their general meaning in English without the necessity of mastering the linguistic technical terms) is needed in order to understand numerous sentences. Observing structural analogies between major problems of evolutionary biology and historical linguistics would be of genuine help if one could proceed in the following stages: (i) introducing abstract models covering both domains and using this shared terminology; (ii) analytically deducing a number of general features on this abstract level; (iii) applying these results to particular instances of this abstract approach (namely for historical linguistics). It is precisely in this way that numerous mathematical problems are solved. However, if the central step (ii) is lacking (and this is, at least currently, the case for the domain under discussion), then the analogy between biology and linguistics becomes a mere intellectual curiosity and the introduction of numerous terms from the former domain into the latter has no added value and, consequently, is certainly not worth doing.
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Main concepts and classifications
– Does Yiddish possess a Romance component? To transform this question into a substantive one, one should provide an unambiguous definition of the word “component.” If it is used in its general meaning as a synonym of “part,” then, of course, the answer is “Yes”: both WY and EY include a few words whose etymons are certainly Romance. If, however, we understand “component” in a narrower linguistic sense as a layer whose impact is structural because its elements are found not only in the lexicon but also in other major subsystems of the language such as grammar and/or phonology, then the answer is “No.” As discussed in section ., a distinction between the old Romance substratum and more recent loanwords from Romance languages in the context of the study of origins of Yiddish varieties appears to be more fruitful than the classification by components. If we ask the same question about the Slavic component of EY, then even in this narrower sense, the answer is “Yes.” This answer is unrelated to the existence of a small Old Czech substratum of EY (whose role is in many respects similar to that of the Romance—and more precisely Old French—substratum of WY), but to the extensive borrowing by EY from neighboring Slavic languages in modern times that influenced all subsystems of EY. – What is the most adequate classification of Yiddish elements? The classifications by “components” or linguistic “elements” used by Weinreich and Birnbaum, respectively, are equivalent to each other and totally adequate if we apply them only to Yiddish items that do not result from internal Yiddish innovations. Indeed, for any Yiddish word, or morpheme, or phoneme, or syntactic rule that is due to external influences, we can, in theory, identify the source as German(ic), Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic (Semitic), or Slavic (or a blend of a number of them). The principle classification used in this book and described in detail in section .. suggests grouping Yiddish items according to a totally different criterion distinguishing between several subcategories of inherited, borrowed, and innovated features. It cannot be said that this classification is more adequate or intrinsically better than the above classification. However, as discussed in section ., it appears to be more fruitful in some specific contexts when dealing with the origins of Yiddish since it provides an additional insight that is impossible to obtain via the classical categorization by components. It also has an advantage of being similar—in its global approach—to the way that historical linguists (external to the domain of Yiddish studies) generally proceed. On the other hand, the classification by components is currently limited to Yiddish linguistics. Still, it can be helpful as an intermediate stage of the analysis. For this reason, the division of this book by chapters globally follows the classification by components. Inside every chapter, however, the discussion is focused on our principle classification. – Should we speak about Old French (WY) and Old Czech (EY) substrata, superstrata, or adstrata? In linguistics, the term “substratum” (or “substrate”) is used in several senses that are all close but formally different: () It is common to define both “substratum” and “superstratum” in a context in which foreign invaders conquer a new territory. If the language of the conquerors supplants the local language, the latter can provide “substratum” elements to the resulting new idiom used in the same territory and based on the language of the invaders. If, on the contrary, conquerors shift to the local language, the latter can aquire “superstratum” elements from the dying idiom originally used by the invaders. () When considering borrowing from a foreign language, one may distinguish between “substratum,” “superstratum,” and “adstratum,” according to the relative social status of the language with respect to the idiom that borrows from it: lower, higher, and similar, respectively (Hock :).
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() One sometimes calls “substratum” a language that is replaced in a population by another language (that in turn can be called “superstratum” in this situation), with the former leaving traces in the language that results from this linguistic shift. For European Jews, the first definition is out of context. If one tries to apply the second definiton to the analysis of borrowings made by Yiddish, the layer of loanwords from Hebrew can be assigned to “superstratum”: from, at least, the Middle Ages, Hebrew was seen as a “holy language,” more prestigious among Jews than their German-based vernacular tongue. The most appropriate term to be applied to modern borrowings from East Slavic languages is more ambiguous. For Jews, it is difficult to measure the relative status of these languages in comparison to Yiddish. “Adstratum” seems to be the most accurate designation here. The status ambiguity becomes even stronger if we speak about the period when Jews were shifting in the Middle Ages to the idioms that represent the ancestors of modern Yiddish dialects and were borrowing from their previous languages to the new ones. One can see that the second definition does not have any added value for the analysis of Yiddish origins. To simplify matters, instead of speaking about Hebrew “superstratum” or East Slavic “adstratum” using terms that are both ambiguous and technical, in this book, it was conventionally decided to speak in both cases in question about “borrowings” from the corresponding languages. The third of the above definitions appears to be the most useful for the specific purposes of this study. As a result, in this book the term “substratum” is applied in one precise sense only. When a Jewish group shifts from one spoken language to another, the traces of the former language in the new one are called “substratum heritage.” As discussed in sections .. and .., this layer has significant differences in comparison to other kinds of borrowing and its extraction is particularly useful for the analysis of Yiddish origins.172 According to this conventional definition, Old French for WY and Old Czech for EY represent “substrata.” Several other questions have both terminological and substantive parts: – Can Yiddish be assigned to the category of creole or pidgin languages? As discussed in section .., the answer is “No” if one accepts the definitions of the terms “creole” and “pidgin” that are most often used in linguistic literature dealing with languages in contact. According to these definitions, both pidgins and creoles are characterized by a radical simplification of linguistic structure and, at least during the early stages of their development, by a radical reduction of vocabulary. The formal distinction between the two of them is established on the basis of only one feature: unlike pidgins (that are not first languages for their speakers), creoles do have native speakers.173 Of course, in principle, Yiddish can be called a “creole” language if one uses a purely synchronic criterion of “creoles” being languages whose grammar is simplified in comparison to a majority of known languages (ignoring the diachronic aspects of the inception of these languages). However, such a wide definition, including several elements whose exact meaning is rather vague, is of little help for linguistic studies. A substantial part of this question is apparent if someone states that during its initial development Yiddish indeed went through a radical simplification of linguistic structure. This is the case for Hymes (:–) who asserts that “the process of pidgnization and subsequent expansion in internal use, accompanied by admixture, but without crystallization of a pidgin, may have occurred in the formation of Yiddish, which must have begun as a limited form of German used outside the home by speakers The definition of “substratum heritage” introduced in this book is close to what is called “substratum interference” by Thomason and Kaufman (:–). Note, however, that these authors place emphasis on the imperfect learning of the target language by the shifting group: this condition is not needed for our conventional definition that in this sense is totally neutral. 173 Compare, for example, Hock :–. 172
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–
– –
–
–
Main concepts and classifications of Romance dialects.” There is no doubt that at least one generation of Jewish migrants to German lands learned the language of local Christians imperfectly. Yet, there is simply no single piece of evidence for this factor—natural in any linguistic shift—being of any influence on the formation of Yiddish. Are glosses and documents compiled by Ashkenazic Jews in their vernacular idiom(s) during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries written in Yiddish or MHG? This question is closely related to that about the age of Yiddish discussed above. Its terminological part corresponds to the conventional character of the definition of the term YIDDISH. Nothing formally prohibits the use of a “wide” definition that automatically applies the label YIDDISH to the language of any source that is written in Hebrew characters and corresponds to a German-based Jewish vernacular idiom. Such an approach is, however, essentially extra-linguistic.174 Substantive elements appear when one starts addressing truly linguistic substantive aspects of the question such as: Can the language of these texts be considered the direct ancestor of some modern Yiddish varieties? Can we distinguish any system-level difference between this language and that used at those times by German Gentiles and known to us from Christian sources? Only if cogent linguistic arguments are suggested to provide a positive answer to both of these questions, will it be appropriate to call this language “Yiddish.” Otherwise, according to methodological principles standard in historical linguistics the label of “MHG” would be more appropriate. Was Yiddish a fusion (or mixed) language from its inception? The terminological part of this question corresponds to the exact criterion used when one decides to speak about a fusion or a mixed character of a language. For example, the presence in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews of a number of lexical elements inherited from idioms spoken by their ancestors can be judged, by definition, sufficient to say that this language results from a “fusion” or is “mixed.” Though formally possible, this approach has several serious drawbacks: the term “fusion” is unusual in historical linguistics, while the expression MIXED 175 LANGUAGES is normally used in a different, more specific, sense. On the other hand, an alternate definition, according to which the “fusion” is measured in structural subsystems of the language such as grammar or phonology, directly allows us to address some substantive questions. It forces a scholar asserting the fusion character of early Yiddish to show in it any trace of these structural changes that would be due to the presence in it of elements of nonGerman origin. Are WY and EY dialects of the same language or rather two different Ashkenazic languages? This question is directly related to the monogenesis/polygenesis issue discussed in the previous section where its substantial role is revealed. Following the definition standards of historical linguistics, one can consider these two idioms to be dialects of the same language only if according to the classical LANGUAGE TREE model they have a common ancestor. However, the same rule is verified for numerous pairs of languages (not dialects), for example, German and Dutch, French and Italian, Czech and Russian, whose common ancestors are Proto(-West) Germanic, Latin, and Proto-Slavic (Common Slavonic), respectively. In this sense, the difference between dialects and languages is to a great extent conventional, being influenced by extra-linguistic—primarily political or ideological—factors.176 If, on the other hand, it can be shown (as in Chapter ) that WY and EY are based on different German dialects, then, formally speaking, it becomes more appropriate to treat them as two languages and not as two related
174 This can be clearly seen from the comprehensive report by Frakes (:–) about opinions of various authors on this question. 175 176 See section ... See section ...
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dialects of the same putative specifically Jewish ancestor, PROTO-YIDDISH. However, even in this situation, the question also has certain terminological aspects. Firstly, it may be noted that during their initial development, the ancestors of both WY and EY were no more than ethnolects of different varieties of German that, in turn, were not separate languages but rather dialects of the same language, both belonging to the High German branch and close to each other. Secondly, WY and EY share numerous elements resulting from interborrowing that took place during different periods of their existence and even during the time when both were not yet separated from the corresponding German dialects. This interborrowing was greatly facilitated by the closeness of the corresponding German donor dialects, the sharing by both Jewish groups of a similar kind of Hebrew, the same (Hebrew) alphabet used, and numerous other, extra-linguistic features in common. As a result of all these characteristics we can surely speak about a partial convergence of these idioms and, moreover, there certainly could be a feeling among Jews of the existence of a common Ashkenazic vernacular language. For these reasons, on a partly conventional basis one can still call WY and EY dialects of the same language, Yiddish. In addition to the substantive aspects mentioned above, numerous other questions addressed in this book are non-conventional. Among them are: • distinction between borrowed, inherited, and innovated features; • etymology of vocabulary words, toponyms, and given names; • links between, on the one hand, Yiddish varieties and, on the other hand, particular German dialects,177 Romance and Slavic languages, varieties of Hebrew; • links between, on the one hand, modern Yiddish varieties and, on the other hand, languages used in early Ashkenazic literature known to us; • internal links between various modern Yiddish varieties. It goes without saying that a particular emphasis on substantive questions makes sense only within the framework of a realistic approach to which the author of this book fully adheres.178 This approach is in contrast to the relativistic views that consider that any scientist merely claims to be objective, while actually selecting (mainly unconsciously) factors as relevant primarily because of his/her ideology, highly influenced by the social and political environment.179 Without denying the importance of extra-scientific factors (including the background of authors) in the birth of various concepts in humanities, it would, nevertheless, be a great exaggeration to put them at the center of the evaluation of various theories. Such an approach would eventually declare any scientific endeavor to be senseless and in a fashionable “post-modern” style see various theoretical constructions as equally valuable results of human creativity. Quite on the contrary, in scientific writings the focus should be on questions that allow reality to be interpreted in the most objective way, aiming to neutralize the influence of psychological, social, and political factors. As Karl R. Popper, Imre Lakatos, and other champions of the realistic philosophy underlined, aware that
177 A discovery of a series of structural traits peculiar to, on the one hand, EY or WY, and, on the other hand, only one specific German dialect provides precious information suggesting a direct link between these idioms. If for no other German dialect a series of a similar kind can be extracted, then it is reasonable to state that the origin of EY / WY is closely related to that specific German dialect. This idea contradicts the general point of view by David Gold (:) who writes that a dozen features in common represent “a drop in the bucket” and therefore no conclusion about the affinity of Yiddish with German dialects can be drawn from small samples. 178 For a coherent overview of the realistic approach to historical linguistics see Hock :–. 179 Such relativistic views dominate the whole (extra-linguistic) analysis of the history of studies of early Ashkenazic texts in Frakes ; the particularly vehement attacks against the “objective,” “neutral,” or “positivist” approaches can be found on pp. – and –.
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Main concepts and classifications
the absolute truth cannot be achieved in any science (except for such totally formal disciplines as mathematics and logic), scholarship should be oriented towards suggesting theories in a way that allows the logical probability of competing hypotheses to be evaluated on an unbiased level. Fortunately, throughout the last two hundred years numerous methods of this kind have been elaborated in historical linguistics.180
180
See their discussion in sections .. and ...
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2 The German component .
MAIN ISSUES
The question of the unity of the German component, in all respects by far the most important component in Yiddish, is far from being consensual. Quite logically, this question is related to several other questions. Among them are: () To what German dialects are WY and EY akin? () How to distinguish Yiddish traits that resulted from internal innovations from those inherited from some German dialects? () How to distinguish features that one of the two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish borrowed from another from those that both of them inherited from their ancestor(s)? () How to distinguish elements present in EY or WY since their proto-period(s) from those that were acquired later under the influence of German dialects spoken by coterritorial Christians? Globally speaking, any attempt to provide an answer to any of these questions faces serious methodological issues. Maybe it is for these reasons that no one has ever tried to address all of them. Generally, Yiddish scholars either avoid/ignore all of them or try to suggest a very general answer to some of these questions, principally the first one. For example, Landau (:), who is often considered to have written the first scholarly studies of Yiddish, considered Yiddish to result from a mixture of various German dialects. The global position by Weinreich and Birnbaum in this domain is somewhat similar to that of Landau. Speaking about the genesis of Yiddish, Weinreich also refuses to give preference to any of the German dialects considering it to be a total mixture of them. When considering these dialects separately from each other, he only points to a few phonetic EY forms that he links to dialects of northwestern Germany, relates one major vocalic feature of WY to East Franconian, links a few words to Bavarian—some of them being limited to PolY—and a few others to ECG. At the same time, he severely criticizes the opinion of Gerzon (see below) who suggests the existence of a genetic link between EY and ECG.1 Weinreich also lays emphasis on the internal Yiddish innovation (WG :–). He considers—without providing any strong argument—that this process was more important for the development of Yiddish than the influence of German dialects. Moreover, Weinreich stresses that numerous German regional items could have come into EY through the mediation of WY rather than directly from German dialects. Birnbaum (:–) provides a list of a dozen characteristics of EY (and, more precisely, its western part only: PolY), 1 In addition to correctly stating that Gerzon’s evidence was insufficient for such a global idea, Weinreich proposed paying particular attention to four linguistic features of ECG that distance it from Yiddish: () the absence of apocope; () no /b/ in the ECG forms cognate with NHG Löwe ‘lion,’ ewig ‘eternal,’ Schwalbe ‘swallow,’ while in EY we find leyb, eybik, shvalb; () the main diminutive suffix is -chen (contrary to Yiddish -l ), and () the presence of the preterite. The last of these arguments is inappropriate: as discussed in section . {M}, relics of the preterite were still evident in EY at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. The third argument is incorrect since the main diminutive suffix in the Silesian subdialect of ECG is -l (see {M} in section .). The second argument is, at least partly, invalid: forms with /b/ are found in ECG words meaning ‘lion’ and ‘eternal’ (see {C} and {C} in section ..). Moreover, in SchlesWB we find such Silesian forms for ‘swallow’ as schwalma and schwolme. Their /m/ is derived from former /b/. Only the first argument is appropriate (see {U} in section .).
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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The German component
mainly phonological or lexical, that—according to him—are related either to Upper or Central German features. He postulates that Jews principally came to Poland from the areas of Bavarian (subdialect of UG), Thuringian, and UpS (subdialects of ECG) and, as a result, the German component of EY is to a large extent a mixture of these dialects. This idea about the dialectal mixture that took place in Poland formally contradicts his own consideration of Yiddish being about one thousand years old. Weinberg (:) when speaking about the German component of the Jewish idiom of Westphalia says that numerous peculiarities are from South Germany, mainly Alemannic. He considers this language to be independent of EY, but does not provide any data to corroborate his statements. For Bin-Nun (BN –), globally speaking, (Eastern) Yiddish realized a unique synthesis of different German dialects, taking various items from independent German sources, retaining some of their archaic features, and making a number of innovations. According to him (p. ), the fact that a German-based language became the vernacular tongue for East European Jews can be explained by three principal reasons: (i) massive migrations of German Jews to Poland; (ii) the linguistic dominance in Polish towns of numerous German Christian colonists (speaking a dialect related to ECG) that lasted for several centuries; (iii) regular trade contacts and exchanges of students and teachers between Polish Jews and their coreligionists from German-speaking countries. Bin-Nun also addresses the question of where stressed proto-diphthongs of WY and EY could appear. He states that according to the reflexes of MHG î, ei, û, and ou, WY is related to Bavarian (understood in his text as including Northwestern Bohemian and East Franconian, both heavily influenced by Bavarian), while PolY, a subdialect of EY, is mainly related to ECG. To the latter he also links consonants of Proto-EY saying that, generally speaking, the consonantism of Yiddish is similar to that of surrounding German dialects, while the vocalism stays apart: it evolved following internal Jewish innovations.2 Bin-Nun also defines the period of the existence of these two Yiddish protodialects as the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries (p. ). As for the derivation of the phonology of modern dialects from PROTO-YIDDISH, he merely points to main tendencies, without providing any comprehensive list of the phonetic shifts that did occur. Several other comparative studies of the German component of WY and EY also end up with the idea of the existence of independent sources for WY and EY, and hence the polygenesis of Yiddish as a whole. Blosen () bases his analysis on the comparison of the geographic distribution—in, on the one hand, modern German dialects, and, on the other hand, WY and EY—of one morphological element (diminutive suffix) and several phonological features: monophthongization of phonemes related to MHG ie and uo; diphthongization of those related to MHG î and û; unrounding of formerly rounded vowels; reflexes for MHG ei; the consonants [p], [f], or the affricate [pf] in various word environments. Taking into account some additional extra-linguistic data (such as the historical importance of Jewish communities in the past in certain geographic areas), Blosen comes to the following conclusions: WY appeared in the Hessian area, while EY is related to Silesian colonial German dialect. Krogh (:–) also supports the Silesian origin of EY. To draw his conclusion, he considers only nine elements: apocope of -e, the verbal prefix der-, and seven others, all directly taken from Blosen . Timm (TG ) indicates that before the phonetics of the everyday language spoken by Jews in Germany was identical to that of Christians. She suggests an idea about numerous features of WY originally appearing in the Jewish speech in areas where the Christian population spoke Rhine Franconian or, to a lesser extent, East Franconian, before being spread out to other western Germanspeaking territories during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (TG ). For drawing such 2
See BN , , , , , , .
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Main issues
conclusion, she considers several phonological features: (i) merging of [e]- and [ε]-qualities for short vowels, but different development for long or lengthened; (ii) reflexes for MHG ie and uo becoming equal to lengthened MHG i and u, respectively; (iii) [a:]-realization for both MHG ei and ou; (iv) diphthongal reflexes of MHG ê and ô and lengthened MHG e and o; (v) lowering /i/ > /e/ and /u/ > /o/ before /r/. The genesis of EY was beyond her scope. Against this, there exist a number of studies whose authors ignore WY, but try to establish links between EY and some German dialects. Gerzon (:) takes into account only one phonological feature (the distribution of [p]-[pf]-[f]) and makes a remark about the possible close relationship between EY and ECG. Manaster Ramer () insists on the common origins of varieties of modern Yiddish without suggesting a link with any particular dialect of German. He provides a wide list of lexical, semantic, phonological, morphological, and phraseological features, proper to both EY and WY and unknown in other languages.3 Several authors suggest the derivation of the German component of EY from Bavarian.4 Two of them belong to the first quarter of the twentieth century. Sainéan () starts by postulating this link (p. ) and later adds a small list of peculiar items from PolY vocabulary that he generally relates to Bavarian (pp. –). The Bavarian origin of Yiddish represents one of the main ideas of Mieses (). He mentions a number of individual Yiddish words (pp. –) whose German equivalents, unknown in literary NHG, are found in BaWB. He never checks that similar words can also be found in other German dialectal dictionaries as well. Similarly, he notes a number of grammatical parallels between EY and Bavarian without verifying the behavior of other German dialects. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, these theories were revived, principally thanks to efforts by King.5 Manaster Ramer and Wolf () clearly demonstrated the striking methodological drawbacks of King’s approach. Their article includes the discussion of the following Yiddish features that King takes as evidence for the putative Bavarian origin of EY:6 . Unrounding of front rounded vowels. Actually, this change occurred in a much larger area of High German, including not only Bavarian but also Alemannic and most of Central German too.7 . Lack of the umlaut in the present tense of verbs. Again, this feature was peculiar not only to Bavarian but other German dialects including WCG, Swabian, and Alsatian.8 Moreover, this phenomenon can represent a particular case of a larger one some additional aspects of which show (perhaps, fortuitously) some similarity with Rhenish dialects. . Double diminutive system. Alemannic also shares this feature.9 Moreover, there are a number of discrepancies between the Yiddish and the Bavarian diminutive systems, and even between
A similar list also appears in TG – where, moreover, the earliest references to certain words are also given. Bavarian is mainly understood by them as covering not only Bavaria and Austria, as in standard works on German dialectology, but also the speech of German colonists in Bohemia and Moravia. Moreover, examples are generally checked by these authors in BaWB, a book that covers the territory of the state of Bavaria at the moment when Schmeller compiled this book (). This area incorporates territories where Christians spoke not only Bavarian but also (eastern) Swabian, East Franconian, and (partly) Palatinate German. 5 Compare Faber and King , King , . The list of “Bavarian” features discussed by Manaster Ramer and Wolf () appears in King (:–) where King also lists three phonological features that Yiddish received due to its contacts with ECG. Gold () provided the first criticism of King’s general ideas. His paper deals more with methodological aspects of inappropriate extrapolations made by King rather than with his particular linguistic ideas. 6 One part of his arguments does not represent King’s original ideas. Certain of them were already quoted in WG, BN, or Birnbaum . For example, Birnbaum (:–) mentions (i) apocope; (ii) unrounding of vowels; (iii) pronouns ets, enk, and enker. Contrary to King, these scholars never generalized these similarities to advocate the Bavarian origins of Yiddish. 7 See the discussion of the feature {V} in section ... 8 See the discussion of this feature {M} in section .. 9 See the discussion of this feature {M} in section .. 3 4
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.
. . .
The German component those of EY and WY. This data shows that the Yiddish diminutive system was not necessarily inherited from Bavarian. It could also be due to an independent internal development. Apocope of the word-final reduced vowel and the loss of the rule of final devoicing. King suggests a direct causal relationship between these phenomena. However, apocope is widespread in High German and by no means restricted to Bavarian. Most High German dialects have weakened both voiced and voiceless obstruents to undifferentiated lax obstruents, and so the effects of final revoicing would have been obliterated. Moreover, certain facts of German and Yiddish dialectology clearly show that apocope does not necessarily lead to revoicing.10 Four ways of forming plurals are shared by Yiddish and Bavarian. Certain other German dialects, however, also have this feature. Loss of phonemic vowel length. Actually, this trait is clearly a regional phenomenon and can have no bearing on the origins of Yiddish as a whole.11 Pronouns ets, enk, and enker. Actually, they are limited to PolY and were necessarily absent from PROTO-YIDDISH.12 This kind of correlation with Bavarian should clearly be treated as being influenced by more recent periods than by the hypothetical period of the birth of Yiddish.
Jofen (:–) suggests that among the modern dialects of Yiddish, UkrY is closest to Bavarian German. To support her idea, she brings in evidence that in old Bavarian “we find parallels” with such phenomena peculiar to part of UkrY as the shifts /a/ > /o/ and /ou/ > /ov/. It is clear, however, that such “parallels” are far from being sufficient to draw any suggestion about the genetic link between the two dialects without doing a precise analysis of the time period of these regional Yiddish traits. No data exists showing that in Yiddish they are of medieval origin and as a result, it is much more plausible that they represent relatively recent local innovations, independent of old Bavarian. To illustrate the total methodological invalidity of the idea of looking at “parallels,” we can take as an example Jofen’s suggestion about the possible Bavarian origin of the suffix -tse present in the Yiddish female name Mintse. She draws her conclusion merely from the fact that a similar suffix, spelled -za exists in personal names used by Christians in medieval Bavaria. Analysis of the time frame and location of the use of the suffix -tse in Yiddish shows that (i) German Jews were not using a suffix cognate to German -za; (ii) -tse is mainly peculiar to female names in Ukraine where it became widespread only during the eighteenth century.13 But even without any meticulous analysis it is clear that before postulating a link between Ukraine and Bavaria, it would be much more appropriate to look at geographically closer “parallels”: the suffix -ца (cognate to Yiddish -tse) is commonly used in female personal names of Eastern Slavic Christians. Eggers () is another proponent of the theory of the Bavarian origin of the German component of Yiddish. He revisits most of the arguments suggested by his predecessors (including Mieses and King ), and presents some additional grammatical, morphological, and phonological features considered by him as “markers” of Bavarian, among which are: the merger of the ich-laut and ach-laut into a single phoneme in Yiddish (this phenomenon is also observed in Central Bavarian, pp. –) and several specific suffixes used to construct nouns and adjectives (pp. –). In a number of cases, he notes the sharing by Yiddish of a German dialectal phenomenon that initially appeared in Bavarian and considers that this fact corroborates the Bavarian origin of the Yiddish phenomenon in question. Actually, the exact place of any effect found in several German 10 Katz (b:–) suggests additional persuasive evidence against King’s arguments. He also stresses the regional character of ets and enk pronouns (Katz a:). Also see the discussion of this feature {U} in section .. 11 On the contrary, as discussed in section .., the distinction between long and short vowels should be considered to be historically pan-Yiddish (see also section ..). 12 See the discussion of this feature {M} in section .. 13 See Beider :– for a detailed history of the use of the suffix -tse by Ashkenazic Jews.
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Main issues
dialects is irrelevant for the history of Yiddish, being a fact of its pre-history. Only the dialect from which the effect entered into Yiddish is of real importance. For example, Eggers discusses the “Bavarian” origin of unrounding (pp. –). Yet, even if this process started in Bavarian, it gradually penetrated into a large number of High German dialects that could influence Yiddish. Globally speaking, after almost one hundred years since the first scholarly publications about Yiddish appeared, both the geographical and chronological dimensions of the question of unity of the German component of that language remain in many respects controversial. It was the study by Timm (TS) that created the first real breakthrough in this domain. She shows that a large number of semantic and morphological peculiarities of the German component of both WY and EY have common origins that can often be traced to medieval Jewish texts from West Germany. A large panYiddish layer considered in detail by her is due to the tradition of the translation of the biblical text into the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews. This continuous tradition—whose distinct traces can be found in western Germany by the end of the fourteenth century and whose stabilization is clearly observable in sources compiled during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Jews in such distant areas as western Germany, northern Italy, Bohemia, and Poland—had an important influence on the formation of the German component of Yiddish. This is principally because all Ashkenazic boys in the various European countries were being educated in Jewish elementary schools using translated biblical texts. Timm’s magnum opus provides a profound insight for both dimensions of the question of the unity of Yiddish. In some major respects, Timm echoes general, rather intuitive, ideas about the existence of the unity exposed in the past by Weinreich and Birnbaum, providing the first strong evidence that corroborates the ideas in question. Timm’s work mainly focuses on linguistic innovations that occurred within Ashkenazic communities and not features that are shared by Yiddish and German. Links that could exist between Yiddish and various German dialects are outside of the scope of her book. Yet, they are often addressed in TG, another fundamental study written by her. The aim of this chapter consists in providing additional insight into the controversial question of the unity of the German component of Yiddish. It attempts to complement the results obtained by Timm by a systematic study of elements that do not represent internal Jewish innovations but likely were inherited by Yiddish varieties from German dialects. The chapter primarily addresses phonological differences: isoglosses from this domain generally serve to identify various German dialects.14 To avoid paying attention to a few characteristics only whose choice could, in principle, be considered as random, the selection of phonological elements in this chapter is primarily based on the synthesis made in Žir, one of the most authoritative in German dialectology. Sections .–. deal with consonants, stressed and unstressed vowels, respectively. Sections . and . take into consideration only a sample of major morphological and lexical elements. In no case can this sample be seen as comprehensive: it serves merely to illustrate some basic principles complementing a much more detailed phonological analysis. All the aforementioned sections show that according to these purely linguistic aspects the putative unity of Yiddish is not corroborated. Section . covers the principal aspects of Yiddish orthography. Its main purpose consists in providing additional information (this time, partly extra-linguistic) allowing for the grouping of early Ashkenazic sources.
14 Hock (:) provides a list of cogent arguments in favor of phonological reconstruction with respect to morphological, lexical, or syntactic elements. He stresses that the phonological analysis is much easier becauses (a) the number of phonemes is significantly smaller than that of the morphemes or words; (b) phonological patterns are simpler; (c) more raw material is available to investigate phonological systems (even short texts can be sufficient); (d) sound changes are the most thoroughly studied (and, as a result, the “naturalness” of various phonological processes can be evaluated more easily than for processes from other linguistics subsystems); (e) sound change is regular. See also Lass :.
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The German component
Sections . and . deal with onomastics. They are mainly focused on several major characteristics of EY that are particularly in evidence via an analysis of Yiddish given names and toponyms. Section . addresses the question of “Selectivity,” one of the most important concepts in the methodological approach to Yiddish history by Weinreich. It shows the linguistic inadequacy of this concept. Section . uses the information appearing in previous sections to address several questions fundamental to the history of the German component of Yiddish. The first comparison (section ..) is made between German dialects and the language(s) of early Ashkenazic sources (thirteenth–seventeenth centuries) in order to see whether it is appropriate or not to consider these vernacular Jewish idioms to be different from the dialects spoken by the coterritorial Christian population. Since their links to modern Yiddish remains unproven, the word “Yiddish” is intentionally never used in this chapter when speaking about these early idioms. The second comparison (section ..) is made between modern Yiddish varieties and German dialects to see whether any distinctive links between them can be discerned. It sheds more light on the geographic dimension of the question of unity of Yiddish. Modern Yiddish varieties are also compared to the languages of early Ashkenazic sources in order to establish genetic links between them. This process—dealing with the chronological dimension of the question of unity of Yiddish—allows for the separation of some features genuinely inherited by modern Yiddish varieties from their ancestors from those features that are due to the rather more recent phenomena of interdialectal borrowing internal to Yiddish or to the influence of coterritorial dialects spoken by German Christians. Section .. considers elements that allow for an evaluation of the age of Yiddish as an idiom having system-level differences in comparison to any German dialect. In section .., modern Yiddish varieties are compared to each other and the non-adequacy of their classification currently used in linguistics is established. For this reason, the expression “Yiddish dialects” is generally avoided in this chapter when speaking about WY versus EY, or about various Jewish idioms generally considered being subdivisions of WY. Yet, during the preparation of this chapter no information was found contradicting the idea of the unity of EY. Subdivisions of EY clearly originate from the same ancestor and for them the expression “EY dialects” is totally adequate.
.
CONSONANTS
.. Changes of /p/, /k/, and /t/ The most important consonantal shifts—the one during the First Millennium CE made High German distinct from Low German—are generally designated by the term HIGH GERMAN (or SECOND GERMANIC) CONSONANT SHIFT (Zweite Lautverschiebung, in German). The first series encompasses the changes of old German voiceless stops /p/, /k/, and /t/: (a) in the initial position, in postvocalic gemination, and after consonants to affricates /pf/, /kx/, /ts/, respectively; (b) in intervocalic or postvocalic final positions to fricatives /f/, /x/, and /s/, respectively. The degree of completeness of some of these processes depends on the region. It is natural to start the discussion by the element that is used in Germanistics for distinguishing between the three major subdivisions of High German: UG, WCG, and ECG,15 namely the reflex of old German /p/ in several positions: (a) initial, (b) corresponding to old German 15 Formally speaking, it would be anachronistic to speak about ECG in the context of HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT. Indeed, during the First Millennium ECG was not yet in existence. It appeared during the first half of the Second Millennium as the dialect of German colonists (coming from both High German and Low German areas) on formerly Slavic territories.
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Consonants
TABLE . Reflexes of old German /p/ Element Example: MHG – NHG – StY
Sources
Reflex
Yiddish varieties
Early Jewish sources
German dialects
Old German p (initial; in gemination; after /m/; after /r/ or /l/) pfanne – Pfanne – fan ‘pan’; apfel – Apfel – epl ‘apple’; krampf – Krampf – kramp ‘cramp’; dorf – Dorf – dorf ‘village’
PMG –, Žir –, MK –, BA –, TG –, TS –, –; Schnitzler :, BN –, Beem :
pf; pf; pf; f
SWY, CzY (partly)
CC, Le, R, Be, H (partly), BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Aug, Ox, DB, H (main), HiP, BZR, BZP, Pr17
UG, EF, sBoh, sTh
R
MF, RF
p; p; p; f f; p; p; f
EY, DuY, CzY (main)
FF, NH
ECG
pf; p; p; f
EGY
Fl, H (partly),18 H (few), BZV, Kr, PB
nBoh, sSil
p; p; p; p
-
SAB
Rip
geminated /pp/, (c) after /m/, and (d) after liquid consonants /r/ and /l/. All of these contexts are addressed in Table . {C}.16 One can see that for WY, modern reflexes are globally similar to those of the surrounding German dialects. These reflexes are not new: they already appear in Jewish sources that are several centuries old. For EY, the situation is more complex. Modern reflexes correspond to those of ECG. We do not find, however, any mention of these realizations in the early literature: sources from western Poland compiled before the mid-seventeenth century all have /pf/ in the initial position. Some of them also have /pf/ in the internal position. This means that Polish Jews of that time (or, at least, the authors and/or editors of the sources in question) may have had the pronunciation (or just spelling) influenced by Bohemian German. The absence of the affricate [pf] in Slavic languages and the
16 Numerous other tables shown below have the same structure. To economize space, the titles of their six columns are not repeated. 17 The affricate [pf] is mainly expressed in Jewish texts via פֿפor פפ. Special diacritic signs are used over פin CC and R, caron and double dash, respectively. In a number of sources (Le, R, Be, and Ox) the exact grapheme used is ֿפ. Normally it corresponds to [f]. However, the possibility that in these cases it should indeed be read as [f] is rather unlikely since it would mean that the Jews in question had the distribution [f; f; f; f], not found not only in any German dialect but also not in any Yiddish variety whose phonetics is known to us. More likely, this grapheme is here used to express the affricate [pf] for which there is no sign available in the Jewish alphabet. 18 For example, the final consonant in forms cognate with MHG kopf ‘cup’ / NHG Kopf ‘head’ is once “p” (meaning ‘head’) and another time “pf ” (‘cup’). Also note qùper ‘copper’ (MHG kupfer).
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The German component
influence of the Silesian dialect used by German colonists in Poland could gradually turn this sound into [f].19 Moreover, it is worth noting that at least during the fifteenth century, [pf] was also present in ECG: it appears in Poland in the language of German colonists as a phonetic variant.20 The change from the initial /pf/ to /tf/ is an innovation valid in only a few Yiddish sources from Northern Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. It appears in GH and the translation of the Bible by Jekuthiel Blitz (Amsterdam, –).21 In intervocalic and postvocalic final positions, the old German /p/ generally appears as /f/ in Yiddish and all HG dialects. Compare: StY shlofn ‘to sleep,’ OHG slâfan, MHG slâfen, NHG schlafen, Middle Low German slâpen. Considering the reflexes of the same Germanic consonant in various EY words, Weinreich (WG :) suggests that some of these words entered the Jewish vernacular language in northwestern Germany in the region where the Gentile population spoke Low German or the northernmost strip of WCG. His StY examples—with, according to him, [p] instead of HG /pf/ or /f/—are: shtupn ‘to push,’ knaypn ‘to pinch,’ klapn ‘to knock,’ and shtapl ‘rung, step.’ However, stuppen and kneipen are typical CG forms {C}. The former is known not only in CF but also, at least, in the Thuringian subdialect of ECG, while NHG stupfen is based on UG. The word kneipen has been common in CG since the sixteenth century and the verb abkneipen appears in Martin Luther’s Bible, while the root in question was unknown in UG. NHG kneifen is a rather recent form derived from kneipen.22 In NHG, there are two verbs with close meaning: klopfen ‘to knock’ and klappen ‘to bang’ {C}. The second, common not only in Low German (as suggested by Weinreich) but since the Middle Ages in CG also, is the source for StY klapn. In biblical translations discussed in Röll , forms related to klopfen—all with /opf/, /of/, or /op/—appear in R, Le, R, Be, Ox, H, and Pr (same in DB), while that with /ap/ is present only in Kr, a document from Kraków. As a result, here we are dealing instead with a semantic peculiarity of the form borrowed into EY from CG. The only phonetically “troublesome” form in Weinreich’s list is shtapl (Table .) {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG staffel / stapfel staffel / stapfel – Staffel / Stapfel – shtapl ‘step, level’
TS –
f, pf p
EY, EGY
Teh, Mel, Aug, HiP, ZuR, BM
High German
MM
Low German
In DWB, we find two NHG variants Stapfel and Staffel, while Stapel is mentioned only as a Low German variant.23 BohWB mentions Stapfel and Stafel. Checking in various modern CG dictionaries does not give any satisfactory result either: only Staffel appears in PfWB and SchlesWB, no mention at all in RhWB and ObSWB. There is, however, one clue that allows us to conjecture that in older times some CG dialects had /p/ in this word. One of the OHG variants of this word appears as *staphal, that is, with the same “ph” that generally gave /pf/ in UG and /p/ in CG for phonetic variants of NHG Kopf and Krampf (see {C}). /K/ is another consonant involved in HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT. The area of its change to the affricate /kx/ (and, later in some regions to /x/) at the beginning of a word and in the position after a 19 According to the theory suggested by Wrede, the [f]-reflex in ECG also evolved going through the [pf]-stage (Žir ). 20 Anders (:) notes that in German sources from fifteenth-century Poznań MHG pf was mainly expressed via “pf.” In the initial position, it was often interchangeable with “ph.” Only a few words have “f.” 21 See Landau :, TG . Blitz hailed from Wittmund, a town in northern Germany situated not far from Hamburg (Aptroot :). 22 23 See DWB, ObSWB, SchlesWB. NHG Stapel ‘pile’ is also of Low German origin.
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Consonants
non-liquid consonant, as well as in gemination, is significantly smaller than that of /p/ in the same positions. In modern times, only HA, southeastern Swabian, and SB are involved. However, in medieval sources, /kx/ regularly appeared also in CB, and was a variant, along with [k], in NB and southern EF {C}.24 We can observe this shift neither in modern Yiddish varieties nor in early Jewish texts known to us. Moreover, Maharil discusses the affrication of word-initial /k/ in the speech of Bavarian non-Jews but not that of local Jews.25 The only traces are found in the domain of onomastics. Austrian Christian sources from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries mention Jewish men using such hypocoristic forms of Isaac as Haekchel, Eisakch, and Säkchlein. From these references, however, we cannot judge whether local Jews indeed had /kx/ in their vernacular language: the forms in question can reveal the pronunciation by local Christians that was not necessarily identical to that by Jews. Several female names such as בילכינטa/בלחינטa, פרוכינטa, and אדלכינטa, all ending in /(k)xint/ (compare MHG kint, NHG Kind ‘child’) and appearing in Nürnberg between and , represent the only evidence that the shift /k/ > /(k)x/ affected at some stage some Jewish communities also.26 Globally speaking, however, the consideration of this consonant shows that the influence of southern UG dialects on Jewish vernacular language(s) was marginal. The story of the fricative realization of old German /k/ after a liquid consonant is different. No general isogloss is established in Germanistics. For this reason, it is better to consider phonetic variants of individual words. Two of them are present in Table .. TABLE . Reflexes of old German /k/ after a liquid consonant kalc(h) – Kalk – kalkh ‘lime’
marc – Mark – markh ‘marrow’
Žir , MK , TS –, Schnitzler :
k x
EY, CzY, EGY
k x
EY, EGY
R, Le
WCG, ECG (main), LA (partly)
H, BB, SD, MM, Mel, Aug, ZuR, BM, NH
LA (main), HA, Swab, Bav, EF, Boh, UpS (rare), Sil (variant)
R, R, SD, Mel, ShB, H, HiP, Pr
CG (main), Bav, Boh, Swab, LA (variant), HA
NH, Kr, MY
PG (rare), LA (variant)
The analysis of forms cognate with NHG Kalk ‘lime’ {C} shows that the /x/-form in modern EY and various Jewish sources from Central Europe from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is not necessarily due to a common ancestor. EY can, in principle, inherit /x/ from Bohemian and be influenced by variants present in ECG. UG and EF could be donors for the /x/-pronunciation by Jews in Central Europe. Yet, the oldest Jewish sources from the areas of WCG and LA show the /k/-reflex present in the speech of surrounding Christians. The situation with the form cognate with NHG Mark ‘marrow’ {C} is more complicated. Firstly, from Table . it becomes clear that the /x/-form is not pan-Yiddish: sources from Western and Central Europe have /k/ that conforms to local German dialects. Secondly, the origin of /x/ in EY is obscure. References known in some western German See MK –, PMG , –, –; Žir , , , . Satz :, responsum (MRPC). 26 Note that in the Christian sources from Nürnberg, the letter combination “ch” for MHG k gradually disappears from the initial position only during the second half of the fourteenth century (MK ). 24 25
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The German component
dialects to a variant with /x/ are unlikely to be of any influence here: if it were the case, we would expect to find the /x/-reflex in Jewish sources from these western areas too. In dialects that could really influence the genesis of EY, we find only indirect evidence. For example, in BohWB we find two spelling variants for the coin name (that is also derived from MHG marc): “mark” and “march.” In BaWB, the word meaning ‘marrow’ is given as “marg,” but the noun cognate with MHG marc, NHG Mark ‘border’ appears as “march,” while for NHG Markt ‘market’ (MHG markt, market) the same source gives several variants, one of which being “march.” The existence of the above forms shows that the /rx/-reflex for MHG /rk/ was known in both Bohemian and Bavarian. This could be important for the genesis of EY markh, not necessarily as a direct inheritance but possibly as an indirect source for innovation internal to EY. In postvocalic final and intervocalic positions, the old German /k/ generally appears as /x/ in Yiddish and all HG dialects; compare StY makhn ‘to make,’ MHG and NHG machen. In Germanistics, this reflex actually represents the main criterion for distinguishing between High German (with /x/) and Low German (with /k/). The StY verb veykn ‘to soak’ {C}—cognate with MHG weichen, NHG (ein)weichen—represents one of the rare exceptions. The form with /k/ is not limited to EY: for example, it is also known in EGY and appears in PuV and NH. However, this exception is not specifically Jewish: we find similar phonetic forms in Bavarian (waicken in BaWB) and UpS.27 HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT also affected old German /t/. Here the area of its change to the affricate /ts/ in initial and postconsonantal positions, as well as in gemination characterizes the whole HG area and all of the Jewish dialects based on German. Compare: StY tsen ‘ten,’ MHG zehen, NHG zehn. In intervocalic and postvocalic final positions, old German /t/ gave MHG ʒ which mainly turned into /s/ in NHG (spelled “ß” or “s”); compare StY vays ‘white,’ MHG wîʒ , NHG weiß. These changes, as a general rule, also characterize all of HG, though a few vestiges survive in CF.28 In various Jewish sources, we find no mention of any /t/-form.29 This includes not only R but also medieval documents from the Cologne area, that is, the northernmost part of WCG. In SAB (), the equivalent of MHG ʒ is spelled either שor ( סTimm :). In , one finds in Cologne the given name זושקינטthat is cognate with MHG süeʒ ekint, NHG Süßkind ‘sweet child.’ It is spelled Suzekind(us) in Latin documents compiled in the same city during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.30 Words cognate with NHG Weizen ‘wheat’ and Hirsch ‘deer’ represent rare irregular forms. The former appears in Table . {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG weiʒ (e) weiʒ (e) / weiʒ ʒ e – Weizen – veyts ‘wheat’
27
TS , Schnitzler :
s ts
EY, EGY, CzY
R
WCG, Alem, Boh, Sil (all: variants), Th, EF
H, Teh, MM, Mel, ShB, Aug, H, HiP, Br, ZuR, BM
WCG, Alem, Boh (for all, variants), Bav, UpS, Sil (partly)
See the entry weichen in ObSWB. Yet, only [x]-forms appear is RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, and SchwäbWB. Examples: wat and dat instead of NHG was and das(s). The isoglosses corresponding to their pronunciation formally serve to define the border between two major subdivisions of WCG dialects: CF with /t/ and RF with /s/. 29 A regular use of different Hebrew characters for MHG s and ʒ is found only in the glosses present in commentaries by Rashi (–): שand ס, respectively (Timm :). That source represents the earliest traces of German spoken by Jews. 30 The same name is spelled Zothekind in in Lower Saxony, but here we have no evidence that such orthography reveals the pronunciation of local Jews and not that of the Christian scribe. The same remark is valid 28
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Consonants
We can observe that the Jewish pronunciation is much more uniform than the Christian one though in some early Ashkenazic sources we also find /s/ instead of the affricate /ts/.31 NHG Hirsch (MHG hirʒ ) had the form “hirtz” commonly found until mid-sixteenth century in Hessian and Swabian (MK ), while in the majority of HG dialects the last consonant became first /s/ and later /š/; compare StY hirsh {C}.32 MHG initial tw represents a particular consonantal context (Table .) {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG initial tw Initial MHG tw twehele – Zwehle/ Quehle – Tsvel ‘tablecloth’
MK –, TG , TS , Ganz :
tv
–
SAB, M,33 CC, R (few), Le, Be
old HG
tsv
EY, SwY, DuY
R (main), R, Fl, SD, MM, Aug, Ox, H, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Br, Pr, ZuR
new UG, EF, Boh; RF and Sil (both partly)34
kv, kw
–
–
new CG (main)
It was not affected by the HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT: before the twelfth century, one finds only the spelling “tw” in various sources from the HG area. However, gradually this combination disappeared ceding its place either to “zw” (in UG) or to “qu”/ “kw” (in CG). The chronology of new variants is as follows: Swabian since the twelfth century, HA since the thirteenth century, western EF, Bavarian, and Thuringian since the fourteenth century, LA, eastern EF, Bohemian, and Silesian since the sixteenth century. If the earliest Jewish sources include words starting with טוו, the later documents invariably use צווin the same context. They follow—exactly as all modern Yiddish varieties—the development that characterized UG, EF, and Bohemian. The same consonantal combination in forms cognate with NHG etwas ‘somewhat’ (MHG ëtewaʒ , ët(e)swaʒ ) received a different development {C}. The form epes seems to be pan-Yiddish.35 This does not necessarily mean that here we are dealing either with a form inherited by EY and WY from their putative common Jewish ancestor (PROTO-YIDDISH) or with a result of influences between Yiddish varieties. Indeed, a similar form ep(e)s/eb(e)s represents the main phonetic variant of this word in almost all HG dialects too.36 Moreover, Jewish sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do not present a uniform picture: epes in DB, BZP, and PB; etvas in BZR (TG ), H,
for Sutemann, appearing in in Cologne. This name, derived from the expression ‘sweet man,’ is spelled זושמןin Würzburg (), and Su(e)zman or Sus(s)man in various Christian sources of the fourteenth century. 31 The same word is also of interest because of the final /n/ present in NHG that is absent from MHG, StY, and the majority of HG dialects. The case of StY frid ‘peace’ (MHG vride, NHG Frieden) is similar. 32 In Hessian, we also observe the presence of the form /herts/, with a lowering /i/ > /e/ before /r/, typical of Central German dialects. For the details of the shift /rs/ > /rš/, see section .., feature {C}. 33 See Grünbaum :. 34 SchlesWB includes the word Zwehle ‘tablecloth’ and several other forms starting with zw- whose MHG ancestor had tw-. 35 See Weinberg :, Beranek :, Beem :. 36 Compare DWB entry eppes, ElsWB, RhWB, PfWB, SchlesWB, and Heilig . Only UpS has [əwas], [əwos] (see ObSWB).
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The German component
Kr, and Pr; etsvas in Mel; both etvas and etsvas in ShB and HiP. The last form is equivalent to German dialectal variant etzwas mentioned in SchwäbWB and BohWB.
.. Changes of /d/, /g/, and /b/ The second series of changes that are usually considered to be part of the HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT affect the Old German voiced consonants /d/, /g/, and /b/ which became unvoiced to /t/, /k/, and /p/, respectively. The first among these developments, /d/ > /t/ affected all of UG; it is also the standard reflex in both MHG and NHG. The same is true of geminated /dd/, /gg/, and /bb/ which became /tt/, /kk/, and /pp/. On the other hand, in medieval Christian sources, one generally finds the initial “d” in the whole area of WCG, while in the internal position, “d” is regular in CF and both “d” and “t” are present in PG sources until the end of the fifteenth century and in Hessian until the midsixteenth century.37 ECG mainly followed the UG development here. For Jews, forms with initial or internal /d/ are present in the earliest sources from western Germany: they are regular in medieval Cologne (SAB,38 female given names גודאand a hypocorism דייוולאa/דיוועלא, compare MHG guot and tûbe, respectively39 ), M,40 and R. In HiP, words with the root MHG/NHG tief ‘deep’ start with ד, while in other words we regularly find ט. In other historical documents (including CC)41 and in all modern Yiddish varieties, we find only /t/ in these contexts {C}. Literary NHG also mainly has /t/. Still, we find a few NHG forms with /d/ whose Yiddish equivalents have /t/: () NHG bedeuten, MHG bediuten, StY bataytn ‘to mean’ and NHG deuten, MHG diuten, StY taytn ‘to point’; () NHG deutsch (with the variant teutsch found in some texts of the first half of the nineteenth century), MHG diutsch, tiutsch, StY taytsh ‘German’42 and ‘meaning’; () NHG doppel(t), StY topl ‘double’; () NHG Dutzend, StY tuts‘dozen’; () NHG dunkel, MHG tunkel, StY tunkl ‘dark’ (compare TS ). The first two examples involve words that have the same root in German.43 The third and the fourth examples both involve words borrowed by German from Romance languages during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Note that Silesian also shows /t/ in cognate words (Žir ). Consideration of the above words shows links between EY and DuY. Indeed, in DuY we also find similar /t/-forms: beteyten ‘to mean,’ tātsh ‘German,’44 and topelt ‘double.’ The fifth example is different. Here Yiddish /t/ (also found in EGY and various early Ashkenazic sources, for example, Le, Ox, H, Kr, and Pr) corresponds to the sound typical of UG and ECG; Martin Luther uses only the form tunkel.45
See MK –, –, Žir . A few exceptional forms in SAB have /t/ instead of /d/. As explained in Timm :, at least for some of them, this fact does not contradict the phonetics of Ripuarian. 39 The same Jewish given names appear in Christian sources as Guda/Gude and Dyewale (full form Duve), respectively. 40 Compare Grünbaum :, , . 41 CC has /d/ instead of /t/ only in a few cases after /l/ or /n/ (WG :, Weinreich a:, Ganz :). This phenomenon is usual for CG, though during the fourteenth century forms with internal /ld/ were also common in EF (MK –). 42 For the meaning ‘German,’ U. Weinreich () gives only the form daytsh, while Harkavy () mentions both daytsh and taytsh. It is clear that the former represents an innovation: in early Ashkenazic sources, both eastern and western, the form with the initial daleth is rather exceptional. 43 Forms cognate with them, with /t/, appear in numerous early Ashkenazic sources including, for the first word, PuV, DB, and Pr, and for the second one, BB, DB, HiP, and NH (but both /d/ and /t/-forms in MM, see TS ). 44 GH also includes /t/-forms similar to these two words (Landau :). 45 The use of the initial letter “D” in modern literary German results from an innovation influenced by northern German (see DWB). 37 38
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Consonants
Generally speaking, the shifts /g/ > /k/ and /b/ > /p/ affected only parts of UG. There are, however, several exceptional forms that are found in CG also. One of them, cognate with NHG gegen ‘against,’ is shown in Table . {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG gegen Initial sound in gegen – gegen – kegn ‘against’
BA , MK , TG , Neumann :
g
SWY
CC, R, Le, R, Fl, BB, Teh, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, HiP, BZR, Br, ZuR (partly)
WCG (main), UG, EF
k
EY, EGY, CzY46
Be, BZV, BZP, FF, Kr, Pr, ZuR (main), PB, NH, GH
WCG (variant), ECG
From Table ., one can observe that the words have sources that are independent for SWY and EY. In SWY, it was borrowed from local WCG and/or UG dialects. In EY, CzY, and EGY, it is related to ECG. Jewish sources from the Czech lands dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show the same reflex as in modern StY, with initial /k/. It was only during the following centuries that CzY acquired /g/, under the influence of WY and/or standardized NHG. Among other exceptional CG /k/-forms one finds kauckeln/kockeln/köckeln ‘to roll’ and kucken/kücken ‘to look’ (MK ); compare NHG gaukeln and gucken, respectively {C}. Their StY cognate forms koyklen/kayklen and kukn are likely to be due to ECG.47 Similar developments can be observed in EGY: bekaukeln for NHG begaukeln. A regular change /b/ > /p/, especially in the initial position, characterizes Bavarian and medieval Alemannic. In CG, such forms are rare. Neither in available early Ashkenazic sources, nor in modern Yiddish varieties is the initial /p/ regular {C}. Among the exceptional StY forms are: poyer ‘peasant’ (MHG bûr(e), NHG Bauer), puter ‘butter’ (MHG buter, NHG Butter), pukl ‘bump’ (MHG buckel, NHG Buckel), preglen ‘to fry’ (MHG brëglen, NHG brägeln), pitsl ‘a tiny bit’ (NHG Bitzel ‘small part,’ a diminutive form related to MHG biʒ ʒ e ‘bite’),48 pizem ‘musk’ (MHG bisem, NHG Bisam), pims ‘pumice’ (MHG bümeʒ , pumʒ , NHG Bims), peym ‘penny’ (NHG Böh(ei)m ‘small silver coin (originally from Bohemia)’), vaymperlekh ‘currant’ (diminutive related to MHG wînber, NHG Weinbeere), kimpet ‘childbirth’ (MHG kint-bet(te), NHG Kindbett), and bashaymperlekh ‘evident’ (related to MHG schînbærlîche, NHG scheinbarlich). For the first five forms in the above list, we find exceptional /p/-forms in ECG, and, more specifically, in Silesian.49 They represent the etymons for StY words: a coincidence among rare exceptions in both EY and Silesian is unlikely {C}. Early Ashkenazic sources show phonetic variants of these words that are not uniform. For example, the word meaning ‘butter’ appears with initial /b/ in R, Be, SD, Ox, and H, while /p/-forms are found in Bohemia and Poland (Pr, Br, Kr, NH).50 This example points to the independent origins of some everyday words in, on the one hand, western Germany and, on the The /k/-reflex for CzY appears in Schnitzler :, while BA gives /g/ for CzY. The origin of the initial consonant in StY kern ‘to belong’ (related—as suggested in WG :—to MHG gehœren, NHG gehören) is more obscure. 48 This etymology was suggested in BN and WG :. Most important, however, is the fact that Schles WB includes the word pitzel ‘small part’ that could be the direct etymon for the Yiddish word. 49 See Žir , MK , DWB. 50 This word is also written with the initial /p/ in H, ShB, and HiP. However, in HiP (as well as in Be and H), we often find a general confusion between /b/ and /p/; see the table for {C}. 46 47
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The German component
other, Central and Eastern Europe. The origin of other /p/-forms is less clear; at least some of them may be due to Bavarian {C},51 perhaps, through Bohemian.52 Note that exceptions similar to those of EY are found in NH, CzY, EGY, and DuY.53 Several /p/-forms are, however, clearly due to diffusion internal to various Jewish communities. Kimpet, found not only in StY, DuY, and EGY, but also in AlsY (Zivy :) is one of them. Among other examples are the verbs antplekn ‘to reveal, disclose’ (MHG enblecken, NHG entblecken) and akhpern ‘to revere, venerate’ (MHG ahtbæren, NHG achtbären ‘to make famous’) {C}. In both of them, the progressive assimilation /b/ > /p/ after a voiceless consonant took place.54 Both are likely to be due to the tradition of biblical translations: only the /p/-forms appear for both of them in all available Jewish documents; the earliest are found for akhpern (and other words with the same root) in CC and R, and for forms cognate with antplekn in R and MM (TS , ).55 The phenomenon called GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS {C} remains closely related to the phonological aspects discussed above (Table .). TABLE . German neutralization of consonants Confusion between k, t, p and g, d, b, respectively kleine – klein – kleyn ‘small’; tragen – tragen – trogn ‘to carry’; spil – Spiel – shpil ‘game’; glas–Glas–gloz ‘glass’; drî–drei–dray ‘three’; brûn–braun–broyn ‘brown’
PMG –, Žir –, MK –, –, –, BA , TG –, TS , , , Timm :–
Yes
SWY
Be, H, Mel, H, HiP, BZR, GH
MF, RF, UpS, UG (in HA, for t/d only), EF
No
EY, CzY, DuY, EGY
SAB, M, CC, R, Le (all main), R, Fl, Ox, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr (main), NH
Rip, Sil, HA (for k/g and p/b)
Since the Middle Ages, in a large part of HG dialects, /d/, /g/, and /b/ have become unvoiced, while formerly fortes /t/, /k/, and /p/ have lost their strength, and, as a result, the two series merged into one series of unvoiced lenes stops (designated d̥, ɡ̊, and b̥, respectively).56 For several reasons, the 51 For example, weimper ‘currant’ is cited in Austrian sources (DWB, entry Weinbeere). Note the presence of both /p/ instead of /b/ and the regressive assimilation /n/ > /m/ before labial, exactly as in StY. 52 Chancellery documents from medieval Bohemia use ‘b’ (compare BohWB), but in non-official sources ‘p’ dominates (MK ). 53 NH mentions pizom, pims(nholts), poyer, puter (compare Weinreich :). Schnitzler (:) mentions the following forms found in Prague: poyer, puter, pims(enholts), pēhem ‘penny,’ beshaymperlekh (see also *beshaynperlekh in ShL, Neuberg :). In EGY, we find pauer, putter, puckel, and kimpett (while no equivalents for other words from our list are shown in Friedrich ). Beem (:–) mentions DuY potter ‘butter,’ pour ‘peasant,’ pitsel, and kimpet. In GH (Landau :), one finds pauer, pukel, shaynparlikh. However, the same source also includes several other examples of the confusion between /b/ and /p/, as well as between /d/ and /t/, unknown in EY and testifying to the fact that the language of its author was characterized by a more general phenomenon, GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS (see the feature {C}). 54 StY frukhperdik ‘fertile’ (cognate with MHG fruchtbære, NHG fruchtbar) and frukhpern zikh ‘to increase, procreate’ (this verb is also known in CzY, Schnitzler :) are due either to the same assimilation or the influence of Bohemian or Bavarian. 55 Forms starting with achper- were common in various German dialects during the MHG period (see Lexer , BohWB). Consequently, in principle, various Jewish communities could borrow this from Christian neighbors independently of each other. Its use in biblical translations could help to retain it in Jewish vernacular language(s). 56 The expression BINNENDEUTSCHE KONSONANTENSCHWÄCHUNG ‘Inner-German consonant weakining,’ commonly used in German linguistics, describes only the second process, namely, the lenition of /t/, /k/, and /p/.
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Consonants
number of contexts in which this merging led to confusion between consonants of different origins was limited. Firstly, in several positions discussed in the next paragraph, /b/ and /g/ became fricative in certain dialects and this way escaped merging with /p/ and /k/. Secondly, in some other positions, old German /p/ and /k/ became affricates or aspirate.57 This occurred before the unvoicing of /b/ and /g/ took place. Thirdly, in certain contexts, only one of the stops in question was present. For example, MHG has numerous words starting with /šp/ and /št/, but no example with /šb/ or /šd/. Due to these factors, it is not always easy to recognize the presence of GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS in written sources, Christian or Jewish (see also TG ). Consequently, it would be inappropriate to link early Jewish documents in which we find no confusion with rare HG dialects that distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops. Globally speaking, the consideration of this phenomenon shows us that here the behavior of modern WY is similar to that of surrounding German dialects, while EY generally follows Silesian.58 Northern and Central subdialects of Bavarian exhibit here a specific behavior. Generally speaking, in this dialect the distinction between lenes and fortes (not only b/p, d/t, and g/k but also z/s and v/f) depends on the preceding vowel. If it is long or a diphthong, the consonant is lenis, if it is short, the consonant is fortis; for example, [b̥re:d̥] ‘board’ (NHG Brett) but [b̥εtn] ‘to pray’ (NHG beten). No distinction can be observed in the initial position (Žir –). According to this feature, modern Yiddish varieties are unrelated to Bavarian {C}. In the part of WCG covering PG, Hessian, and southern and eastern parts of MF, since the late Middle Ages one has observed the phenomenon of RHOTACISM. MHG intervocalic d and t turn into /r/; for example, [šnajrə] ‘to cut’ (NHG schneiden) and [mo:rə] ‘fashion’ (NHG Mode).59 We do not find any trace of this phonetic process in early Ashkenazic sources and modern Yiddish varieties {C}.
.. Changes between [b], [w], [v], and [f] In the intervocalic position, as well as between a liquid consonant and a vowel, MHG b became fricative [w] (and sometimes [v]) in a large area of High German and in SWY too, the latter influenced by the pronunciation of local Christians (Table .) {C}. TABLE . Standard reflexes of MHG b MHG b (intervocalic; between liquid and vowel) selbic – selbig – zelbik ‘same’
PMG , MK , Žir , BA , Weinreich a:
b
EY, CzY, DuY, EGY
CC (main), R, Kr, Pr
Swab, HA, SB, Sil (old)
w, v
SWY
SAB, R, Le, Be, BB, PuV, Mel, DB, HiP, H
WCG, LA, EF, NB, CB, Th, UpS, Sil (new)
57 In certain HG dialects (as discussed in the previous section), they became affricates. In other dialects, initial /p/ and /k/ before a stressed vowel became aspirate, compare CG [phund] ‘pound’ (NHG Pfund), [khnoxn] ‘bone’ (NHG Knochen) (Žir , ). 58 We cannot, nevertheless, explain all related EY vocabulary as derived from Silesian. Indeed, certain words exceptional in Silesian such as priln ‘to roar’ (Žir ; MHG brüelen, NHG brüllen) are not exceptional in EY; compare StY briln. 59 See Žir –, MK , KA .
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Since in modern times the Hebrew alphabet has no sign for [w], this phenomenon is not necessarily apparent in early Jewish documents. We can be sure about the presence of the fricative sound in several old sources that use ֿבin this context (compare ‘ צװיֿבלonion’ in PuV, MHG zwibel, NHG Zwiebel). The stop [b] that characterizes modern EY can be due to several factors: () the absence of [w] in old Polish, () influence of old Silesian. Only a few EY forms are exceptional. One of them is StY ovnt ‘evening’ (MHG âbent, NHG Abend), with fricative [v] {C}. It is unclear why the reflex differs here from the general rule. However, it is worth noting that we find the same [v] in CzY (Schnitzler :) and EGY, but [b] in DuY (obend), SwY, FrY,60 and such early sources as H, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, HiP, Br, NH, and KrL.61 Other exceptions have [p]. The three words listed in Table . all have the same structure: their [p] appears before the final [l] {C}:62 TABLE . Exceptional reflexes of MHG b nabel – Nabel – nopl ‘navel’ Nebel – Nebel – nepl ‘fog’ gabel(e) – Gabel – gopl ‘fork’
DWB, Žir , BA , TG
b
EGY, DuY
R, Fl, Mel, ShB, Ox, H, HiP, Pr
Swab, HA, Sil (old)
w, v
SWY
R, Le
WCG, LA, Th, UpS, Sil (new)
p
EY, CzY
Be, Kr, NH
Bav
This specific context is likely to be a determining factor for their exceptional character and the most plausible source for their [p] is Bavarian.63 Indeed, BaWB mentions both nappel ‘navel’ and neppel ‘fog.’ For the third word, DWB (entry Gabel ‘fork’) mentions Alemannic form gappellen. We do not know Bohemian forms of these words. StY zipn ‘to screen; to sift’ (MHG siben, sieben, NHG sieben) represents an additional example, with internal [p] occurring in another context. Note that sources in which words with this root are present (NH, EGY) and those with [p]-forms listed in Table . are all from Central or Eastern Europe.64 The final position after a vowel or a liquid consonant represents another context in which MHG p received special development: here this consonant turned into /f/ in CF, for example, in words cognate with NHG Kalb (MHG kalp) ‘calf ’ and Weibe ‘wife’ (MHG wîp) (Žir , ). In early Ashkenazic sources and modern Yiddish varieties, we do not observe this reflex (compare StY kalb, vayb) {C}. This fact demonstrates that CF played a marginal role (if any) in the development of Yiddish. The same conclusion also follows from the consideration of the reflexes of MHG final -we after a liquid consonant. In NHG, it appears as -be and in StY as -b (as a result of apocope, see {U} in section .): compare MHG varwe, NHG Farbe, StY farb, EGY fareb ‘color, dye’; MHG milwe, NHG Milbe, StY milb, EGY mileb ‘mite’ {C}. In High German dialects in which apocope also took place, only in CF is the final consonant fricative /f/; all the others have a stop. Earliest references
60 Fleischer (:–) notes SwY forms [oubə(nd)] and [ɔ:bəd]. An example of obend(s) in FrY is given in Copeland and Süsskind :. 61 In many languages, intervocalic stops tend to weaken (Lass :). As a result, the /v/ found in EY and CzY can result from an innovation rather than be borrowed from German dialects. 62 H does not appear in this table because it has “b” in the word for ‘navel,’ but “p” in the word for ‘fog.’ 63 BA speaks about /b/ before a liquid consonant. TG suggests the provenance of these forms from Bavaria during the seventeenth century. 64 References to Be in tables for {C} and {C} remain exceptions. This source is one of the rare documents in which the confusion between stops is total (see {C}).
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Consonants
to /b/ in German written sources come from Swabia and date from the end of the thirteenth century though in works printed during the sixteenth century in the area of LA and HA one still regularly finds “w.”65 In early Ashkenazic sources, we find a definite /b/ in numerous sources,66 both /b/ and /v/ appear in R, ֿבin Be, and ( ווsound /v/) in CC and R. The geographic distribution of the realizations of the last consonant in the word meaning ‘lion’ in various HG dialects is far from being uniform (Table .) {C}.67 TABLE . Reflexes of MHG lëwe Last consonant in lëwe / leb(e) – Löwe – leyb ‘lion’
DWB (entry leu)
stop (b, p)
fricative (v, w, f)
EY, CzY, DuY, EGY, SwY68
Fl, H, SD, PuV, MM, Mel, Ox, DB, H, Br, Pr, NH
RF, LA, Bav (partly), EF, Boh, UpS (rare)
CC, R, Le, R, ShB, HiP
CF, Swab, Bav (partly), Sil, UpS (main)
Forms found in modern Yiddish varieties (compare StY leyb) could take their final stop from Bohemian, EF, and/or Bavarian. To explain the presence of a fricative consonant in early Ashkenazic sources from western German-speaking areas one should not necessarily point to CF or Swabian. Indeed, all these sources were compiled before the end of the fifteenth century. At that period, in both RF and Alemannic (including Alsatian) apocope of the final unstressed vowel did not occur yet. As discussed above (see the table for {C}), both these dialects are characterized by the existence of intervocalic fricative. As a result, it is quite plausible that at the time the Jewish documents in question were compiled, both RF and Alsatian could be sources for the Jewish forms with fricatives: note that in these documents the word meaning ‘lion’ invariably ends in alef that could correspond to a vowel. Alternation between [b] and [v] is also found in several other Yiddish words. The [b] present in StY eybik ‘eternal’ contrasts to the sound found in MHG êwic, NHG ewig, as well as the [v]-form appearing in CC {C}. The b-forms are not limited to EY: they also appear in CzY (Schnitzler :), DuY, EGY, as well as in numerous early sources.69 In the Middle Ages, [b]-forms appear in Swabian and Silesian (MK ), in which intervocalic [b] did not turn into a fricative consonant (compare {C}). A variant ēbig is also common in modern HA. As a result, here we are not necessarily dealing with internal Jewish diffusion. In principle, the /b/-forms may be due to Swabian for western Jewish sources and to Silesian for the eastern ones. Another example is StY ingber ‘ginger’ (EGY imber, MHG ing(e)wer, ing(e)ber, NHG Ingwer) {C}. In German dialects, we find forms with /b/ or /v/.70 However, in Jewish sources, /b/ dominates: ingber (SD, Pr, NH), inber (Kr). See MK , Žir –, PMG . Examples: Le, SD, Mel, Ox, H, HiP, Kr, Pr, and NH (TS –, see also WG :) 67 HA does not figure in Table . because of the absence of the final consonant in its main form Leu / Läu. 68 The SwY form corresponds to the given name Leyb (Fleischer :). 69 Examples: as H, PuV, Mel, DB, H, HiP, Pr, Br, NH, KrL, as well as GH (Landau :). In both DB (Dreeßen and Müller .:, ) and Mel forms with [ בb] are exceptional; a large majority of references to words having this root include [ װv]. Yet, this can be linked to a general tendency found in these documents for the fricative pronunciation of MHG b between vowels or between a liquid consonant and a vowel (see feature {C}). In HiP, one also finds both forms with [b] and [v]. However, all spelling variants of the word cognate with German ewiglich(en) have /v/. 70 Examples: ingber (BohWB), ingwer and imber (SchlesWB, ObSWB, PfWB), in(g)wer (RhWB), ingwer and ember (SchwäbWB). The etymologically correct sound is /b/ (MK , ). 65 66
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The German component
For words related to MHG swëvel, swëbel, NHG Schwefel ‘sulphur,’ reflexes in modern German dialects vary between /b/, /v/ (or /w/), /f/, and /g/. However, as noted in DWB, forms with /b/ were common in the entire High German area until the seventeenth century (only Ripuarian has schwegel from the thirteenth century onward). In modern dialects, /b/-forms are still found in Silesian, Swabian, Swiss, and Bavarian. In Yiddish, as expected, we mainly find /b/, but neither /f/, nor /g/; compare (a) ‘sulphur’: StY, CzY (Schnitzler :), EGY, DuY shveb(e)l (also found in NH); (b) ‘matchstick’ (NHG Schwefelholz): StY and SwY shvebele, and AlsY shvevlheldsle {C}.71 The development of MHG we after u (separate or the second element of the diphthongs ou, öu, and iu) or û is presented in Table . {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG we after u or û MHG we after u or û vro(u)we – Frau – froy ‘woman’
Žir , MK , PMG , TS , Heide :–
zero
v, b
all
R (partly), Be, H, MM, Mel, ShB, DB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Br, Pr
CG, EF (part), Boh, LA, nSwab
M, CC, R (partly), Le, R, H, BB, PuV, Ox72
Bav, HA, sSwab, EF (part)
Intervocalic MHG v gives /v/ in EY, CzY, and EGY, /f/ in SWY, and /b/ in DuY {C}.73 StY examples are (TG ): heyvn ‘yeast’ (MHG heve(n), NHG Hefe), oyvn ‘oven’ (MHG oven, NHG Ofen), shoyvl ‘shovel’ (MHG schûvel, NHG Schaufel), shtivl ‘boot’ (MHG stivel, NHG Stiefel), tayvl ‘devil’ (MHG tiuvel, tievel, NHG Teufel), and tovl ‘board, tablet’ (MHG tavel(e), NHG Tafel). In modern German dialects, only /f/ is used in UG and EF. As a result, the SWY reflex is well correlated with surrounding German. An analogy to the Yiddish /v/ can be found only in Bohemian and CG where this vowel is lenis /w/ in various subdialects except for Silesian and Ripuarian in which it is /v/.74 A more detailed look into dialectal dictionaries shows, however, that here the correlation between EY and CG is only partial. For example, for the words cited above, SchlesWB mentions forms with internal letter “w” only for Teufel (as one of the variants, others have either /f/ or /b/), ObSWB only for Stiefel and Teufel, PfWB and RhWB for Stiefel, Teufel, and Ofen. Consequently, the fact that the whole series has arisen is likely to be due—at least partly—to a process internal to Yiddish. In H, we find “w” in teÿwil ‘devil.’ Other early Ashkenazic sources generally use ֿבfor intervocalic MHG v.75 This sign most likely expresses a lenis sound, otherwise ֿפwould be used (see TG –). DuY /b/ is derived from the earlier /v/. See Zuckerman :. Note that in AlsY, intervocalic /b/ becomes fricative (see {C}). Compare יונקוראװהin PuV (Timm :) and ֿברװאןa יונקin Ox, both cognate with NHG Jungfrau ‘virgin’; see also Timm and Gehlen :. 73 See BA , Schnitzler :. 74 On “w” in Bohemian of Prague (fourteenth century) see Mourek :. The same sign is sometimes found in Silesian of fifteenth-century Poznań (Anders :). Until the thirteenth century in a large number of German dialects, “f ” or “v” (whose ancestor was an old Germanic f) corresponded to the lenis sound [v̥], while “f(f),” descending from old Germanic p, was fortis [f]. During the following centuries, the lenis [v̥] or voiced [v] pronunciation was maintained in certain CG dialects (including Silesian) in the word-internal position, and in Ripuarian in the initial position. In other HG dialects, only [f] survived in all positions (Žir , ). 75 This is, for example, the case for R, Le, R, Be, Mel, ShB, Fl, Ox, DB, H, HiP, BZR, BZP, and Pr. A few sources use either ֿבor ( ֿפKr). In EGY, we find “w” for Stiefel, Teufel, and Ofen, but “ff” for Tafel. Only a few authors from Slavic countries use ( װthe standard grapheme for /v/) in some words but ֿבin other words: Gump, NH (heyvn ‘yeast,’ shtivalin ‘boots’), and some others (TG ). 71 72
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Consonants
.. Changes between [s], [š], and [z] The pronunciation of the internal consonantal cluster st represents another feature that distinguishes various German dialects (Table .) {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of internal MHG st Internal MHG st brust-Brust-brust ‘breast’
Žir , MK –, BA , TG –, Beem :
st
EY, CzY, EGY
Kr, Br, NH
Rip, MF (main), nHes, eEF, SB, NB, eCB, Boh, ECG
št
SWY, DuY
R, PuV
swMF, PG, sHes, wEF, Alem, wCB
Here various modern Yiddish varieties behave like local Christian dialects. For EY, the most plausible sources are ECG and Bohemian. Early Jewish documents generally do not distinguish between /s/ and /š/: both sounds are expressed via the letter shin ()ש. Rare sources that allow such a kind of distinction76 show, however, that modern reflexes are not due to recent Christian influences but certainly are inherited from older, independent, Jewish traditions. Those from the West show /št/, while those from the East use /st/. In cases when we find /št/ in EY, such as StY barsht ‘brush’ (MHG bürste, NHG Bürste), dorsht ‘thirst’ (MHG durst, NHG Durst), ersht ‘first’ (MHG êr(e)st, NHG erst), gersht ‘barley’ (MHG gerste, NHG Gerste), and vursht ‘sausage’ (MHG wurst, NHG Wurst), we are actually dealing with another phonetic phenomenon: the shift /s/ > /š/ after /r/ {C}. Among other examples, this time without /t/, are parshoyn ‘person’ (MHG persôn(e), NHG Person) and andersh ‘different(ly)’ (MHG and NHG anders). This phenomenon characterizes all High German dialects except for HA and therefore it is not a surprise that it can be observed in Yiddish varieties too.77 EY has a few other cases with /š/ for MHG ss; compare StY kishn ‘pillow’ (MHG küssen, NHG Kissen), kushn ‘to kiss’ (MHG and NHG küssen), mesh ‘brass’ (found in NH) (MHG mëss(e), NHG Mess(e), more common word MHG messinc, NHG Messing), and the suffix -nish used to construct nouns (MHG nisse, NHG nis) {C}. Gerzon (:), who first paid attention to this series, suggested a general rule: (MHG ss) > (EY /š/).78 Despite the aforementioned difficulty of distinguishing /š/ and /s/ in early Ashkenazic sources, they still allow us to show that this idea is inadequate. The spelling קוסןis used in BZR for ‘to kiss’ (TG ) and in SD for both ‘pillow’ and ‘to kiss.’79 The equivalent of StY suffix -nish appears as ניסin DB (Dreeßen and Müller .:), MM (TS ), Kr, NH, ניזin Fl, and niß in H. The last source also uses the spelling meße for ‘brass.’ These examples show that for various Jewish communities (including those from sixteenth-century Poland), the rule proposed by Gerzon was not valid. Moreover, this EY reflex is not shared by SWY and EGY; it exists only as a variant in CzY.80 Globally speaking, /š/ in 76
The presence of samekh instead of shin indicates /st/. The reflex /št/ is clear either because of rhymes (PuV, see Timm and Gehlen :) or because of the diacritical sign over shin (R). 77 For example, FrY has [pɐshou] ‘person’ (Beranek :). See Žir , MK –. 78 The same idea appears in Sapir : and BN –. 79 The diacritical sign in the spelling ‘ ֻקוסןpillow’ appearing in another work of the same author, Tish (Grünbaum :), implies a pronunciation similar to that of German Küssen. 80 Compare SwY kuse ‘to kiss’ and its CzY equivalents kusen (Schnitzler :) and kyshn (Beranek :). DuY uses kosh ‘kiss’ along with a more common form kos (Krogh :). The form kiselekh ‘small cushion’ (whose
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The German component
these elements is rarely found in German dialects: (a) Swabian has mesch for ‘brass’ (already noted by Sainéan :); (b) MK mentions kuschen ‘to kiss’ in fourteenth-century Würzburg; (c) DWB gives references to küsch (along with küss) ‘pillow’ in Bavarian. However, the above information shows that /š/ in the suffix -nish is certainly an innovation, most likely internal to EY, much more recent than the end of the MHG period. The presence of the same consonant in certain other words (or maybe all of them) may also be due to developments internal to EY. In any case, the correspondence of the consonants in these words to MHG ss seems to be fortuitous.81 In standard NHG, intervocalic and initial prevocalic “s” is pronounced /z/. The same reflex characterizes several High German dialects: CF, Silesian, and northern parts of Thuringian and UpS. In other dialects, we are dealing with an unvoiced sound.82 Early Jewish texts generally use the letter זin this position, while —שwhich normally designates an unvoiced sound—is used only sporadically {C}.83 This fact does not mean that Jews were pronouncing this sound differently from their Christian neighbors. In certain German dialects, the sound, though unvoiced, is (or was) lenis: in the Hebrew alphabet, it was natural to express this sound via ז, the letter שbeing used for the fortis consonant only. Modern EY has a clear-cut distinction between voiced /z/ and unvoiced /s/, as is true of the standard NHG. Here the case is similar to GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS: the influence of Silesian (and, perhaps, partly of surrounding Slavic languages too: they have only voiced lenes and unvoiced fortes, but no unvoiced lenes) is quite plausible.
.. Changes related to nasals The development of MHG -em appearing as the final element in certain nouns is shown in Table . {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG em Final consonant of MHG em besem – Besen – bezem ‘broom’84
MK –, Žir , TG , Timm and Gehlen :, BN , Ganz :
m
EY, EGY
CC (partly), SD, PuV (partly), Mel, HiP, BZR, NH, GH
WCG, SB, Sil (partly), Swab (old), Boh (old)
n (or zero)
FrY
CC (partly), H,85 BB, PuV (main), Kr
EF, Th, UpS, Sil (partly), Alem (main), NB, CB
root is the same as in NHG Kissen ‘pillow, cushion’) is attested in FrY (Copeland and Süsskind :). Friedrich (EGY) gives the word pussen for ‘to kiss,’ with change /k/ > /p/ in the initial position, but with internal /s/. 81 For this reason, the idea by Krogh (:–) who considers the whole series to result from an innovation (internal to EY) that occurred before the sixteenth century sounds unattractive. 82 See Žir , MK . 83 Among the examples are: a few words in SAB and CC (others are written with )זand the unique occurrence in a sentence appearing in the Worms Mahzor (–) (all these references are noted in TG ), as well as certain forms in Be and H, that is, as it can be seen from the table for {C}, the only two documents included in Röll in which GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS can be clearly observed. 84 Among other examples: vadem/vaden-Faden-fodem ‘thread,’ bodem-Boden-boydem ‘garret’ (boyden ‘bottom’ in FrY, see Copeland and Süsskind :), buosem/buosen-Busen-buzem ‘breast,’ eidem-Eidam-eydem ‘sonin-law’ (ādn in CzY, see Beranek :), and âtem/âten-Atem-otem ‘breath.’ The case of brunne-Brunnen-brunem ‘well’ (with final /n/ in R, R, Mel, ShB, DB, and NH) is different: here, the MHG has no /m/. 85 Compare aÿden ‘son-in-law.’
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Consonants
German dialects have several reflexes for MHG mp and mb. In intervocalic position, they are assimilated to /m/ (with the exception of the southern strap of UG where no assimilation took place); for example, lember > Lämmer ‘lambs.’ In the final position /mp/ is kept, regularly in Bavarian and Thuringian, and partly in UpS and Silesian of Lusatia; compare krump ‘crooked’ (NHG krumm) (Žir –). Forms with “mb” or “mp” also appear in SchlesWB and BohWB. They were common in the German of Prague during the second half of the sixteenth century (Skála :). In modern Yiddish varieties, forms without assimilation are known in CzY, while other dialects (including SWY, EGY, DuY, and EY) have /m/ (BA ) {C}. In early Jewish texts, /mb/ or /mp/ are quite rare: one example is ‘ אוימבערalways’ (compare MHG umber) found in Pr, that is, again in Czech lands. Globally speaking, the consideration of this MHG consonantal cluster shows that (a) Bavarian was of little importance for Yiddish in Germany, (b) CzY was most likely influenced by Bohemian (that in turn was affected by Bavarian), (c) EY reflexes could be due (at least, partly) to Silesian.86 The elision of final /n/ after long vowels or diphthongs in monosyllabic words such as /šta:/ for NHG Stein ‘stone’ characterizes WY and CzY (BA ) {C}. In our day, this phenomenon is quite general for High German. It is unknown only in Turingian and UpS (except for small regions), CF, and areas inside of RF and LA (Žir –). It is not seen in early Jewish sources. Yet, the elision of final unstressed -en in verbs {C}, found in SWY and partly in CzY (BA , GGA ), can already be observed in some exceptional references in Be and Ox,87 as well as in dozens of rhymes in BB and PuV (Timm and Gehlen :). In German dialects, it characterizes RF, western EF, LA, and HA (Žir ).
.. Forms with or without /d/ The word meaning ‘thunder’ (StY and EGY duner, NHG Donner) also allows us to illustrate the idea that for Yiddish varieties their German donor dialects were not the same. MHG includes two forms: one with internal /d/ (tuonder) and another without it (doner). During the last centuries, donder/ dunder were principally found in UG. In other High German dialects, forms without /d/ were dominant (DWB). BohWB gives both donner and donder. In Jewish sources, we find ( דונרFl), ( דונדרPuV, ShB, and CzY; Schnitzler :), “dùnderen” (H), * דונדירdunder (NH), טונדר (main form) and ( דונדרone reference) in HiP, ( טונדראBe), and ( טונטרH). Also dialectal is the elision of the initial consonant in the EY conjunctive ‘that’ (MHG daʒ , NHG daß, StY az, AlsY as (Zivy :), but das in EGY and DuY) (TG ). The form without /d/ appears in numerous German dialectal dictionaries.88 In early Ashkenazic sources, it is present only in Central Europe (BZV, BZP, Pr, PB, ShL), while some documents from Eastern Europe (Kr) and all from western territories (examples: R, Be, and BZR) include forms with /d/ (TG , –). In the verbal prefix der- (standard in EY, CzY, and SWY), one can observe the opposite process: the addition of the initial /d/ in comparison to MHG and NHG er- {C}. This feature is not internal to Yiddish: der- starts to be used in German dialects in the thirteenth century, and during the next two centuries it is commonly found in Bavarian, EF, Bohemian, UpS, and Silesian (MK ), and rarely in Swabian too (TG ). Only westernmost early Ashkenazic sources (CC, Le, R, and M) have For example, for ‘crooked’ (MHG krump, NHG krumm, StY krum) SchlesWB gives krumm (main form), krump, and kromp (variants). Yet, ObSWB gives only krump and BohWB krumb. For ‘around’ (MHG umbe, umme, ümbe, NHG and StY um), BohWB and BaWB both give umb, but both SchlesWB (um) and ObSWB (um, im) provide only forms without /b/. In Silesian texts from fifteenth-century Poznań, MHG mb remained only in the word meaning ‘around’ (Anders :). 87 Both correspond to dative plurals (Röll .:, ). 88 Examples: PfWB, ElsWB, SchwäbWB, BaWB, Heilig , and ObSWB. In these German dialects, EY and AlsY a merging took place of words derived from two independent MHG sources: daʒ ‘that’ and als ‘when; as’ (see {C}). 86
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The German component
no /d/. R varies between der‐, er-, and her-. In other sources, der- is dominant.89 We see that concerning this specific aspect, WCG, LA, and HA were of no importance for the later development of main Yiddish varieties.90
.. Changes of /h/ and /x/ In several contexts, we can observe in German dialects an alternation between /h/ and /x/. Forms cognate with NHG Schuh ‘shoe’ that end in /x/ (or /k/ derived from it) appear in almost all dialectal dictionaries.91 This is not a surprise if one takes into account the final consonant of MHG schuoch. As a result, the presence of the final /x/ in, on the one hand, SAB, H, BB, SD, Mel, ShB, and HiP, and, on the other, in BZV, NH, CzY (Schnitzler :) and modern EY (compare StY shukh) could, in principle, be due to the influence of different German dialects {C}. For several other words, the independent origin in the vernacular language(s) of various Jewish communities is explicit. The cognates of StY fikh ‘live-stock’ (MHG vihe, NHG Vieh) also end in /x/ or /k/ in a large number of German dialects: LA, HA, Swabian (partly), EF, and ECG. A number of early Ashkenazic sources, for example, R and Be, include the phonetic form /fi/ {C}.92 StY floy ‘flea’ (same form in NH; MHG vlô(ch), NHG Floh),93 roy ‘raw’ (MHG râ, rô, rou, NHG roh)94 and roy ‘rough’ (MHG rûch, NHG rau(h))95 have no /x/ at the end {C}. Yet, in Mel we find forms with /x/ for the first two of these words, while HiP includes an /x/-form for ‘raw.’ Forms with final /x/ in the words cognate with NHG Höhe ‘height’ (MHG hœhe)—such as StY heykh, as well those occurring in MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, HiP, Kr, Br, ZuR, BM, and NH—contrast with those having /h/ that appear in R, Fl, BB, Teh, PuV, and DB (TS ) {C}.96 In CzY, we find intervocalic /x/ instead of /h/ found in NHG: fargekhen ‘to pass away’ (NHG vergehen, MHG vergên/vergân, StY fargeyen) and laykhen ‘to borrow’ (NHG leihen, MHG lîhen, StY layen ‘to borrow’) (Schnitzler :) {C}. Here, we may deal with cases, internal to certain Jewish communities, when /x/ appeared in infinitive forms by analogy to /xt/ (present in third singular and second plural), which in turn evolved from early /ht/.97 An influence of Central Bavarian can be an alternative explanation.98
89 See TS –, TG . For example, the prefix is common in Be (one of the oldest manuscripts) and HiP. The presence of certain words with der- in M is stipulated in TG according to a personal communication with M.G. Heide. However, note that both references to words with the prefix in question in Grünbaum (pp., ) have no initial /d/. 90 EGY shows verbs starting in both er- and der-. GH is among rare Ashkenazic documents written after the midseventeenth century in which er- dominates (Landau :, TS ). This prefix is also found in several works whose authors were from Frankfurt (one from the s and one from ; TG ). 91 Examples: RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, BaWB, Heilig , ObSWB, and SchlesWB. 92 H, Mel, ShB, HiP, FF, Br, Pr, and NH have /fix/. 93 Forms with final /x/ or /k/ are dominant in Alsatian, EF, UpS, and Silesian, while in CF, PG, and Swabian they appear as variants, along with main forms that end in a vowel. 94 Forms with final /x/ are known in Thuringian, Swiss (Žir ), and EF. 95 Forms with final /x/ are standard in Swiss, UpS, and Silesian. They are also found in Bavarian and represent unusual variants in Swabian and PG. 96 Forms with /x/ or /k/ are standard in Alsatian and EF, found in Swiss, PG, Swabian, and Bavarian and represent unusual variants in CF and UpS. 97 In StY, the conjugation of the verb tsien in the present tense is regular and all forms include neither /x/, nor /h/. However, in early sources the situation is different. For example, in third singular, H, Kr, and Pr all have /tsixt/, while R, R, and Be all have forms ending in /ht/. Its participle has internal /g/ (as StY getsoygn and NHG gezogen) in Le, H, Kr, and Pr, but /h/ in R and Ox. 98 This is the idea proposed in Schnitzler :. On the internal /x/ for MHG h in Central Bavarian see PMG . In principle, the influence of Central Bavarian could be indirect but rather via Bohemian: no information about the exact reflexes in Bohemian is available to us.
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Consonants
Standard NHG and the majority of High German dialects distinguish between the velar ach-laut [x] and the palatal ich-laut [ç] {C}. These two sounds are allophonic variants: the former occurs after back vowels, while the latter after consonants (especially in the diminutive suffix -che(n)) or front vowels. This distinction does not exist in the main parts of Allemanic and Bavarian (especially in their southern areas) that know only the velar [x] independently of the context. The chronology of the inception of these dialectal differences is unknown. It is unlikely that in UG we are dealing with a merger of formerly different sounds. Quite on the contrary, [ç] seems to be an innovation that appeared in the Middle Ages and gradually covered CG and EF.99 Taking this factor into account, the absence of [ç] in EY, as well as the high improbability of the influence of southern UG dialects on EY, Birnbaum (:) assigns the “uniform state in Yiddish” to the OHG period (that is, before the middle of the eleventh century) when the original uniform *[x] still existed in German.100 His assertion is untenable. Firstly, as can be seen from dialectal studies, universal [x] is known in EY and CzY. Yet, EGY and SWY have [ç] after front vowels, while DuY has [š], a reflex implying a former [ç], in this position.101 Secondly, the indirect influence of Bavarian, via Bohemian, should not be neglected. We do not have any information about the exact phonetic realization of /x/ after front vowels in Bohemian. Nevertheless, we know about an important influence of Bavarian on the formation of that colonial dialect of German. This hypothetical Bohemian feature can explain the absence of [ç] in both CzY and EY. Thirdly, the allophonic variation between the reflexes of /x/ in different contexts, even if it existed in Proto-EY, could disappear in Eastern Europe under the influence of Polish and East Slavic languages that have only one kind of /x/, the velar one.102 Table . presents information concerning the development of MHG ht {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG ht MHG ht naht – Nacht – nakht ‘night’
Žir , Heide :
ht
–
SAB (main), SSC, Le, R, Be (partly)
t xt
– Rip
all
SAB (rare), M, CC, R, Be (partly), Fl, H, H, BB, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, Kr, Pr
MF, RF, UG, ECG, EF, Boh
99 See details in Žir , PMG . A difference exists in North Bavarian and is small in both Central and South Bavarian (Kranz, p. ). The Central German suffix -che(n) is irrelevant for Upper German. 100 A similar idea appears in M. Weinreich :–. The only difference concerns the exact time frame. If Birnbaum speaks about OHG, Weinreich refers to the thirteenth century as the time when the palatal [ç] appeared in German dialects. 101 See GGA , BA , LCA , and LCA . The information about CzY appearing in modern Yiddish studies is contradictory: LCA speaks about [ç], while GGA gives the reflex [x]. The final realization is confirmed by Friedrich (:) who writes about the “hard” pronunciation in the Habsburg Empire and EY contrasting with the soft (leise) one in EGY. As already noted by Weinreich (:), in this context “hard” certainly means velar [x], while “soft” implies the palatal sound [ç]. For SWY, LCA and LCA give [š] that contrasts with [ç] appearing in GGA. The position of BA is intermediary: that source mentions different phonetic realizations in various SWY subdialects: [š] in AlsY and [ç] in SwY. These differences may reflect the pronunciation of different generations of speakers. GGA and BA provide more archaic forms, while LCA and LCA present new ones. For AlsY, we have a direct corroboration of this idea. As noted by Zuckerman (:), [ç] is used by the older generation and [š] characterizes the younger. 102 These ideas globally echo those by Eggers (:–) who suggests the influence of Central Bavarian and Polish. (In his study, Eggers never mentions Bohemian directly: he lays emphasis on the Bavarian that influenced the German in Bohemia.)
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The German component
It shows that here Ripuarian had no influence on modern Yiddish varieties. Moreover, no Jewish source from at least the sixteenth century onward bears any trace of the reflex /t/ proper to Ripuarian. The word nit ‘not’ should be considered differently. In MHG, we find not only niht (the source for NHG nicht) but also nit. The latter form (sometimes as net or nüt) is widespread in almost all of HG though it is a rather unusual variant in Bavarian and ECG.103 In Ashkenazic sources, forms without /x/ and /h/ have been standard in all regions since the Middle Ages up to modern times {C}.104 Taking into account this uniformity and the marginal character of this form in German dialects of Central Europe, it is quite plausible that the use of this particular form in EY is, at least partly, due to internal Jewish diffusion from the West.105 Reflexes of MHG hs are discussed in Table . {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG hs MHG hs vuhs – Fuchs – fuks ‘fox’
Žir –, MK –, Heide :, Althaus :
hs
–
s
R, Be
–
SAB, M, R (few), Le
RF, LA, Swab, Th (all old), CF
xs
–
CC; R, H, SD, and MM (all main), Fl, Mel, ShB, DB, HiP (partly), BZR
HA
ks
all
H, SD and MM (few), Ox, H, HiP (partly), BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, NH
RF, LA, Swab, Th (all new), Bav, EF, UpS, Sil, Boh
Here, the distribution in Jewish sources offers no surprises: earliest westernmost sources show /(h)s/, exactly as surrounding German dialects, while later sources from areas located more to the East, have either /xs/ or /ks/. The most instructive are the /xs/-reflexes (spelled )כש. In modern literary NHG, the spelling “chs” is read as /ks/ but reflects the earlier /xs/-stage. Due to this graphic convention, it is often difficult to establish the period when in any particular German dialect the pronunciation changed from /xs/ to /ks/. There are, however, sources that use other, unambiguous, spellings: “gs,” “ks,” “cs,” or “x.” Their analysis shows that /ks/ was already dominant in Bavarian and ECG during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (MK ), and, therefore, the language of Jewish sources with /xs/ is unlikely to have been influenced by these German dialects. In EY, there is, however, one form in which MHG hs did not give the expected */ks/, but /š/: StY ekdish ‘scorpion’ (MHG egedëhse, NHG Eidechse) {C}. Similar forms appear in numerous early Ashkenazic sources: ֵאי ְגַדעשׂin M (Grünbaum :), עגדישin R, Aug, ZuR, and BM, איגדש in BB, עגדיסin MM and NH. On the one hand, the last form demonstrates that even in the sixteenth 103 Compare DWB, MK , RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, SchweizId, BaWB, SchwäbWB, Heilig , and ObSWB; see also KA that for the fifteenth century shows only nicht in ECG, both nicht and nit in Bavarian and EF, only forms without “ch” (nit, niet, nut, neit) in WCG and Alemannic (but for sporadic references to nicht in Strasbourg). 104 M, R, Le, R, H, Fl, ShB, Ox, H, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, see Heide :–, TG , Schnitzler :. In CC, the phonetic form /nit/ can be deduced from a rhyme (Ganz :). In Be, one finds equivalents to both German nit (mainly in the first twenty verses of the Book of Job) and nicht (mainly beginning with Job :) (Röll .:). 105 Chrysander (:) listed nit among forms “spoiled” by Jews: he compared it to standardized literary NHG and not to German dialects.
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Consonants
and seventeenth centuries EY still had final /s/, while modern /š/ should be more recent.106 On the other hand, the sharing of this unusual form clearly points to its spreading inside of Jewish communities, from West to East, most likely via the biblical translations (TS –). Weinreich (WG :, ) considers this form to provide an example of the linguistic influence of medieval Rhenish Jewish communities on modern Yiddish. However, his consideration of historical German dialectology is partly inaccurate. As shown in the table for {C} given above, the reflex /s/ for MHG hs was valid not only for CF (as Weinreich apparently thought) but over a much larger territory. Such phonetic variants as egdes/ekdes appear in SchwäbWB (along with standardized eideks); the form egdess is present in ElsWB and BaWB. In southern German dialects, the combination hs appeared (after the disappearance of the internal /t/) in the following word whose reflexes are distinctly regional in Yiddish varieties as well (Table .) {C}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG niht(e)s niht(e)s – nichts – (gor)nisht ‘nothing’
DWB, KA , BA , TG , Schnitzler :, Neuberg :
ništ
EY, EGY, CzY (partly)
H, PuV; Mel, ShB, and DB (partly), Ox, BZV; BZP, Pr, and PB (all partly), Kr, ZuR (main)
ECG, EF (partly)
niks
SWY, DuY, CzY (partly)
SD; Mel, ShB, and DB (partly), H, BZR; BZP, Pr, and PB (all partly); Br, NH, GH
UG, EF (partly), PG (main)
najšt, nejšt
-
HiP
WCG (main)
Another example for which Weinreich (WG :) suggests the origin in WCG is StY vaynshl ‘sour cherry’ (MHG wîhsel, NHG Weichsel). His idea—based on Yiddish /(n)s/ in place of MHG hs— does not appear to be attractive: note that the EY form is well correlated with EF “wainsl.” The /n/ present in the Yiddish form reveals a general phenomenon of nasalization between /j/ and /s/ (or /š/) that is found only in a few German dialects, namely EF, Alemannic (primarily Swabian), and Hessian. It is illustrated in Table . {C}.107
106 In this word, as well as in the suffix -nish discussed above, the shift /is/ > /iš/ in the final position, internal to EY, could be influenced by the existence of the adjective suffix -ish, of German origin. The use of the spelling -nis in Harkavy (noted in TS ) does not necessarily imply that the phonetic variant -nish is quite recent: () Harkavy himself was a speaker of LitY in which there is no difference between /s/ and /š/, () his preference for -nis could have been influenced by his knowledge of German. Note also -nish in CzY (Beranek :). 107 StY also has meynst ‘mostly’ (MHG and NHG meist). For this word, the nasalized form is known over a larger territory, for example, it was a rare variant in Bavarian and UpS too (DWB). StY meyn ‘more’ (MHG mê, NHG meh)— forms with /n/ found in MinP (Kosover :), PuV, MM, Mel, DB, BZR, H (few), HiP, RBV, RBP, Kr, Pr), but no /n/ in CC, R, Be, H (main)—is likely to be derived from meynst. In modern Yiddish varieties, meyn is EY while mey is used in SWY (BA ; see also TG , TS ). The only reference with /n/ found in German dialects is “mean,” a variant used along with a more common “mih” in SchlesWB. This Silesian form may have been of some influence on EY.
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The German component
TABLE . Introduction of /n/ Introduction of /n/ between /j/ and /s/ or /š/ mei(n)ster– Meister– maynster ‘master’
MK , TS –, Beem :
No
EGY
CC, R, DB
CG (main), Bav, Alem (partly)
Yes
EY, CzY, DuY
H, BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Aug, HiP, Br, ZuR, PB, BM, NH108
EF, Hes, Alem (partly)
Since EY had no direct contact with any of these dialects, here we are, most likely, dealing with internal Jewish diffusion, from West (most likely, the area of EF) to East.
.. Miscellaneous German phenomena There exist also a number of Yiddish words sometimes viewed as specifically Jewish because they are different from their MHG and NHG cognates, while actually similar forms exist (or, at least, existed several centuries before us) in numerous German dialects. Among them are: az ‘when’ (MHG als(e), NHG als),109 azoy ‘so, thus’ (MHG alsô, NHG also),110 den ‘then’ (MHG danne, denne, NHG dann),111 mir ‘we’ (MHG and NHG wir),112 and un ‘and’ (MHG und(e), NHG und) {C}.113 Consequently, their presence in various early Ashkenazic sources and in modern Yiddish varieties is not necessarily due to internal Jewish diffusion. In certain other cases, the influence of specific German dialects is much more obvious. For example, a number of features of modern SWY that are not found in Yiddish varieties from Central and Eastern Europe seem to be due to the influence that local Christian dialects exerted on them rather recently: no trace of these phenomena is found in Jewish sources compiled before the seventeenth century. Among them are (BA –, ) {C}: • confusion between /g/ and /j/ such as /morjen/ for NHG Morgen ‘tomorrow’ and /a:ger/ for NHG Eier ‘eggs’; • shift /xt/ (phonetically [çt]) > /št/ such as /hešt/ for NHG Hecht ‘pike.’
108 Both HiP and NH also include another example of the same kind: hanshrek and haynsherig (respectively) ‘grasshopper’ (MHG houweschrecke, höuschrecke, NHG Heuschrecke); without /n/ in R, Be, and H. StY here uses a word with another root: shpringer. 109 In Jewish sources, only CC and HiP include /l/ (see also TG –, , TS ). Forms without /l/ appear, for example, in RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, SchwäbWB, BaWB, ObSWB, and SchlesWB. 110 In Jewish sources, only one document compiled in in Frankfurt includes /l/ (see Timm and Gehlen :), while no /l/ is present in main forms, for example, in R, Be, PuV, Ox, DB, H, HiP, Kr, and Pr. Forms without /l/ appear, for example, in RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, Heilig , ObSWB, and SchlesWB. 111 This form is found, for example, in DB, HiP, and GH (Landau :). Numerous early sources use a phonetically ambiguous spelling דן. 112 In Jewish sources, CC, Le, R, and Be have vir, while mir is, for example, present (sometimes, along with vir) in R, BB, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, BZR, BZV, BZP, and Kr. Forms starting with /m/ were common in almost all of HG until the seventeenth century (MK ). They appear, for example, in RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, SchwäbWB, BaWB, Heilig , and ObSWB. 113 Early Ashkenazic sources (including CC, R, Le, R, Be, Fl, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, Kr, and Pr) usually spell this word as אונ׳, that is, as if some letters were abbreviated. Forms ending in /n/ appear, for example, in RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, SchwäbWB, Heilig , and ObSWB.
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Consonants
For the first of these effects, one of the rare exceptions is the word meaning ‘lily’ (StY lilie, MHG lilje, NHG Lilie). In several Jewish sources we find, however, forms with /g/.114 Such forms have been common in numerous German dialects since the fourteenth century. It was during the sixteenth century that /g/ was gradually eliminated (DWB) though in some dialects, forms with /g/ (or /x/, /k/) still survive.115 Yet, SchlesWB gives only lilie, a form similar to that used in EY {C}. Another example of EY alternation between /g/ and /j/ can be found in several verbs in which /g/ is present only in past participles, while /j/ appears in their infinitives. StY examples (noted in Birnbaum :) are: shpayen ‘to spit’ (MHG spîwen, NHG speien) – geshpign ‘spat’ (NHG gespie(e)n) and shrayen ‘to shout’ (MHG schrîen, NHG schreien) – geshrign116 ‘shouted’ (NHG geschrie(e)n). Among German dialects, a similar alternation exists only in ECG (see ObSWB and SchlesWB): here EY is likely to have been influenced by Silesian {C}. The voicing /š/ > /ž/ after /r/ also characterizes both Silesian (Žir ) and EY: compare StY hirzh ‘millet’ (MHG hirs(e), NHG Hirse), kirzhner ‘furrier’ (MHG kürsenære, NHG Kürschner), and merzher ‘pounding mortar’ (MHG morsære, NHG Mörser) {C}. The absence of /r/ in StY matern ‘to torture’ (MHG marter(e)n, NHG martern) is another feature shared by ECG and EY.117 The shift /t/ > /k/ observed in the word meaning ‘turtledove’ (compare StY terkltoyb, but MHG turteltûbe, türteltûbe, NHG Turteltaube) is directly related to the influence of Bohemian and/or Silesian on Yiddish varieties such as CzY (Schnitzler :) and EY {C}.118
.. Yiddish innovations A number of peculiar forms are due to innovations internal to Jewish communities that, once they appeared in one region, were diffused to other areas. This layer was studied in detail by Erika Timm. Among the examples {C}: internal /ts/ in old Yiddish entslit ‘face’ (MHG antlütte, NHG Antlit, Antlitz),119 /v/ in StY ofnvor ‘manifest (adjective)’ (MHG offenbâre, NHG offenbar),120 /p/ instead of /t/ in StY loyshpern ‘to whisper’ (MHG lûstern, NHG laustern),121 /m/ instead of /n/ in StY roymen ‘to whisper’ (MHG rûnen, NHG raunen, rare variant raumen),122 elision of initial /n/ in StY and CzY (Schnitzler :) (n)akn ‘neck’ (MHG nac(ke), NHG Nacken),123 presence of /v/ in StY tsvang ‘pair of pliers’ (MHG zange, NHG Zange),124 /l/ instead of /n/ in StY and CzY vizltir 114 SD (לילילג, sic, with the syllable ליerroneously printed twice; the correct spelling לילגappears in Tish, Grünbaum :), Mel (plural )לילגן, a document printed in Kraków (לילגא, Perles :), all from the sixteenth century, and a more recent reference lilg in CzY (Schnitzler :). 115 Compare RhWB, PfWB, ElsWB, SchwäbWB, BaWB, Heilig , and ObSWB. 116 According to Katz b:, this form characterizes both PolY and UkrY, while geshrien is typical of LitY. 117 Identical form characterizes both Silesian and UpS. Forms without /r/ also appear in certain other dialects—such as PG and Swabian—but rather as unusual variants. Note that Friedrich gives a similar EGY form: (op)mattern (Weinreich :). 118 Note that in early Jewish texts the forms with /k/ are also found only in Prague (BM, NH) and Kraków (MM), while numerous other sources from western territories (examples: R, SD, and Teh) invariably have /t/ (TS ). 119 See TS . Only forms with internal /t/ are present in Le, R, and ShB. Those with internal /ts/ appear in R, Be, BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, Aug, DB, H, HiP, Kr, Br, Pr, and NH. 120 See TS . Only forms with /b/ (or /p/) appear in some early western sources (CC, R), as well as in GH and EGY (in both, most likely, under the influence of written German). Yet, only /v/ (or both forms with /v/ and /b/) are found in MM, PuV, Mel, and ShB. 121 See TS –. Only forms with /t/ appear in some early western sources (R). In others (BB, Teh, PuV, Aug, HiP, BM) we have /p/ (or /b/). 122 See TS –. Only forms with /n/ appear in R. In others (PuV, MM) we have /m/ already. 123 Forms with /n/ appear in R, SD, Pr; those without /n/ in PuV, Ox, NH. The last source also includes a reference to a word identical to StY egber ‘borer’ (MHG nägber, NHG unusual Negber). 124 See TS . Forms with /v/ are regular in various Jewish texts beginning with the Middle Ages (R, Le, etc.).
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The German component
‘bison’ (MHG wisent(t)ier, NHG Wisent, Wisentstier),125 /nd/ > /d/ in adjectives such as StY lebedik ‘alive’ (MHG lebendec, NHG lebendig), hinkedik ‘hobbling’ (NHG hinkend), and shmekedik ‘fragrant’ (NHG schmeckend).126 Also due to internal development seems to be the negative prefix um- {C}. It is present in EY, CzY, and partly in AlsY. Other modern Yiddish varieties (DuY, EGY, as well as the main part of SWY) have un- that corresponds to MHG and NHG.127 Some authors (Gerzon :, BN ) consider that /m/ present in EY zamd ‘sand’ (MHG sant, NHG Sand) is due to the influence of Bavarian; compare samb(d) in BaWB {C}. Yet, it is worth noting that available Jewish sources compiled in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries all have /n/ and not /m/.128 As a result, the possibility of an innovation, internal to EY, is not excluded. Note the form zant in CzY (Beranek :). Also it is to Slavic countries that appear to be due both the progressive assimilation that leads to unvoicing /v/ > /f/ and the disappearance of the second /t/ in StY entfern ‘to answer’ (MHG antwürten, NHG antworten) {C}.129 The voicing /s/ > /z/ observed in StY verbs lozn ‘to let’ (MHG lâʒen, NHG lassen) and muzn ‘must’ (MHG müeʒen, NHG müssen) represents another innovation internal to Jewish communities {C}.130 A similar phenomenon is known in CzY (Schnitzler :, Beranek :), DuY, SwY (TG ), and EGY. In modern EY, we observe a regular change of sibilants /s/, /š/, and /z/ into affricates /ts/, /tš/, and /dz/ respectively. It occurs after the resonants /n/ or /l/ (compare BN ) {C}. The origin of this phenomenon is uncertain. In no one German dialect is it general and one should distinguish several independent processes each of them dealing with only a few specific words.131 Firstly, the shift /ns/ > /nts/ can be observed in NHG Binse ‘rush (plant)’ (MHG bineʒ , binʒ ) in UG and some CG dialects during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. This word appears in early Ashkenazic sources in various forms, often with the plural ending (e)n; in some of them (Le, SD) one finds /nts/.132 The adjective lantsum/lantsem ‘slow’ (NHG langsam) appears in PuV, as well as in CzY (Schnitzler :) and DuY.133 In StY, one finds a number of other words with /ns/ > /nts/ or /nz/ > /ndz/. Among the examples are: fentster ‘window’ (NHG Fenster),134 fintster ‘dark’ (NHG See TS –. Forms with /n/ appear in R, Le, R, Be, Teh, MM, Ox, and HiP; those with /l/ in Aug, H, H, Kr, Pr, ZuR, and NH. 126 General analysis of words from this group appears in TS –. Forms with /n/ that mean ‘hobbling’ are present in MM and HiP; those without /n/ appear in R, SD, Mel, Aug, BM, NH and many other sources (TS –, ). Forms meaning ‘alive’ with /n/ are present in CC, H, ShB, DB, HiP, BZR, and Pr; those without /n/ in Be, SD, BZV, and EGY. 127 See BA , BN , Schnitzler :, Zivy :. Um- is unknown before the seventeenth century when it appears in Ha-Magid (Lublin, s), NH, and ShL. All early sources and some more recent documents have un-. Among them: CC, R, Le, R, Be, Fl, MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, Kr, Br,Pr and ZuR (compare TS –). 128 This is true, for example, of R, Be, H, SD, PuV, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, BZV, BZP, Pr,PB, and NH. 129 Indeed, forms with both /v/ and /t/ are regular in various early Ashkenazic sources (for example, CC, R, Le, R, Be, ShB, DB, H, HiP, BZR, and Pr). Unvoiced /f/ appears in BZP, FF, Kr, ZuR, and PB, while the second /t/ disappears in MM, BZV, FF, Br (sporadically), BM, and NH (TG , , TS ). 130 Only /s/ appears in R, Le, Be, Mel, ShB, DB, and BZR, and /z/ is present in BZV, BZP (TG ), Br, Pr, and HEZ. Yet, Kr and HiP have /z/ in ‘must’ and /s/ in ‘to let,’ while H shows inverse reflexes (however, as noted above, this source exhibits a general confusion between /z/ and /s/). See also the discussion of the feature {G} in section . where an explanation of this innovation is suggested. 131 The description of the behavior of German dialects is taken from MK –. 132 The spelling variants are: ( ִּבי ְנצּוןLe), ( ִּביְנְשןR), ( ּפינץSD), ( פימשיןOx), ( פינסןKr), and ( פימסןPr). This word is absent from StY (where it is replaced with kamish, of Slavic origin). 133 A similar form is also present in MinP (Kosover :), Tish, Br, the biblical translations made in Amsterdam during the eighteenth century by Blitz and Witzenhausen (Grünbaum :), and GH (Landau :). Here /t/ was introduced after the elision of /g/. The AlsY form is lansem (Zivy :). In StY langzam, /g/ is kept and, as a result, the context was inappropriate for the introduction of /t/. The form can actually represent a recent borrowing from German instead of pavolye and pamelekh, both from the Slavic component. 134 If a form with /s/ is present in CC, DB, BZR, BZP, and Pr, those with /ts/ appear in Kr and a document from Frankfurt-an-Oder compiled in (TG ). 125
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Consonants
finster),135 gandz ‘goose’ (NHG Gans), and undz ‘us’ (NHG uns). The first two examples from this list are also known in CzY (Schnitzler :). Secondly, forms resulting from the change /nš/ > /ntš/ in forms related to NHG Mensch ‘man’ are known in Alemannic, WCG, and in Nürnberg in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. During the same period wundsch / wuntsch ‘wish’ (NHG Wunsch) and wündschen ‘to wish’ (NHG wünschen) are mainly known in CG. In UG, they appear during the second half of the sixteenth century and become more common during the first half of the seventeenth century. The same words have /tš/ in StY: mentsh, vuntsh, and vintshen, respectively.136 Thirdly, the shift /ls/ > /lts/ can be observed (a) in Bavarian during the fourteenth century in words cognate with NHG als ‘when’ and vormals ‘formerly,’137 (b) in ECG and UG, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in words cognate with NHG Hals ‘neck, throat.’ The StY form haldz— cognate with the last word—is also characterized by a similar phonetic phenomenon.138 EY also has alts ‘everything, all’ (NHG alles), in which /t/ was introduced between /l/ and /s/ after the elision of the unstressed reduced vowel. Fourthly, the change /lš/ > /ltš/ is quite rare in German and known only in a few words in Ripuarian (fourteenth century). In StY, we have faltsh ‘wrong’ (NHG falsch).139 Globally speaking, it appears that the whole series of EY words discussed in this paragraph is due to a process internal to Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe. The presence in Slavic languages of the affricates /tš/ and /dz/, marginal in German dialects, is likely to have some influence on this process. The existence of similar cases in certain German dialects (that also influenced the pronunciation of certain specific words in the Jewish communities of Western Europe) certainly was of some importance, but it could not be responsible for the aforementioned phonetic shift as a whole. The internal character of this shift directly follows from the existence of its traces in Jewish male given names and in components of Yiddish different from the German one. Names in which this change took place—Yiddish Antshl < Anshl, Andzl < Anzl, and (H)endzl < (H) enzl, all of German origin—are all found in Eastern Europe only.140 Modern EY has another general phonetic rule: when a diminutive suffix -l is added to a stem ending in /n/, the sound /d/ is introduced before /l/ (BN –) {C}. The geography of this phenomenon can be most easily observed in the domain of onomastics because of the common use in various German dialects of the diminutive suffixes starting with /l/ such as MHG -lîn (NHG lein) and UG suffixes -(e)l, -le, and -li. Beginning with the fourteenth century, hypocoristic forms of Jewish names ending in -ndlin, -ndlein, or -nd(e)l (German spelling) or נדלא, נדלה, נדל, נדלין, or נדליין, regularly appear in sources from Bavaria (primarily, Regensburg), Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia. Among the examples are male Gnendlein, Haindlin/Heindl(in), Händl, Mändlein/ Mendlein, Mändel/Mendel, and Sund(e)l, female Breyndl, Chändlein (fourteenth century, with the Hebrew root), Kröndel/Krendl, Mindel, Schondlin, בונדלand ( ריינדלboth with Romance roots and both from seventeenth-century Prague). No exception to this rule is found in tombstone inscriptions from the old Prague Jewish cemetery (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries): numerous hypocorisms end in -ndl(e) and none in -nl(e). The same is true of the Altona cemetery (near Hamburg) (seventeenth 135
DB has /s/ in this word. Earliest Jewish references appear in APf (mentsh and vintsh ‘(I) wish’; see Turniansky :), PB (a form with /t/ derived from the verb vintshen, TG ), and NH (mentsh). However, only the variant mensh is present in DB, all sources included in Röll , PBK, Br, and GH (see also examples from books published in Poland between and in Shmeruk :, , ). Both mensh (main form) and mentsh (rare variant) are found in ZuR (Neuberg :). 137 There is no word cognate with the latter in StY, while StY az ‘when’ (cognate with NHG als) escaped the introduction of /t/ because at the moment when this process became active, /l/ was no longer present in the Jewish form. 138 No affricate appears in Ashkenazic sources compiled during the sixteenth century including BZR, H, and Br. 139 NH includes this form as well as veltshi ‘Italian’ (compare MHG walhisch, wälsch, NHG welsch ‘Romance’). 140 The earliest reference to Antshl appears in Volhynia during the second half of the sixteenth century. The only exception is Antzel, a variant of Ansel, mentioned in a Christian source from Hessen (). 136
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The German component
and eighteenth centuries). There is no doubt that Bavarian and German colonial dialects influenced by it (Bohemian and Silesian) were important for the genesis of this rule. However, even in them, this phenomenon is not as general as it had become in EY and CzY.141 In western German-speaking areas such as Hessen, Alsace, Switzerland, and Swabia, in conformity with dialects spoken by local Christians, forms without /d/ (male Menlin, Menlein, Männli, Menle, female בריינלה, שינלה/ שינלא/ )שינלי dominate during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and continue to be commonly used during the next two centuries, along with forms with /d/ that were due to influences of Yiddish varieties from the East.142 In female given names present in the engagement and marriage deeds from Amsterdam (–), the introduction of /n/ is common. However, forms with /n/ appear as well.143 NH is one of the rare early sources that have examples of the introduction of /d/ before /l/ (Weinreich :).
.
STRESSED VOWELS
.. Basic rules Important differences between various German dialects exist in the domain of stressed vocalism and a number of them are relevant to the history of Yiddish. If in the domain of consonantism numerous regional peculiarities (including features that compose HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT) already existed during the First Millennium CE, major vocalic HG dialectal characteristics generally evolved more recently, during the last centuries of MHG and the transition between MHG and NHG, that is, during the period when numerous Jewish communities already existed in German-speaking provinces. For this reason, for a discussion centered on Jewish pronunciation, chronological aspects of various dialectal shifts are more important for vowels than for consonants. For early Ashkenazic sources, the coverage presented here is only partial because, unfortunately, often no data is available that permit strong conclusions. This is directly related to the great difficulty (often the impossibility) of revealing exactly how the Hebrew characters used in these sources were pronounced, this issue being particularly acute for vowels.144 Diacritic signs for vowels appear regularly in SAB, M, R, Le, R, MinP, NH, and the preface to LBr, sometimes in Be, H, Fl, Teh, and H, quite rarely or never in numerous other sources.145 Their presence certainly simplifies the analysis though one should keep in mind that these diacritics were sometimes added by a pointer who was not the author of the original text.146 In principle, the two persons could belong to different generations and even live in different areas. In the absence of diacritics, numerous graphemes are ambiguous. 141 Diminutives given in various dialectal dictionaries for words meaning ‘man’ (NHG Mann) and/or ‘stone’ (NHG Stein) can serve as an illustration. BaWB gives Mannl, Mandl, Männle, Mannel, Mandel, and Männele; BohWB mentions steinlîn and steinlein; SchwäbWB includes Männle(in) (with rare variants Mendle and Mandele) and Stei(n)le(in); SchlesWB gives Männel, but Steindel; SchweizId mentions Män(d)li and Stein(d)li. No form with /d/ appears in PfWB, ElsWB, and ObSWB. Kretschmer (:) mentions diminutive forms for ‘hen’ (NHG Henne, Huhn): Hendl in Bavaria-Austria, Hühnel/Hündl in Silesia and Bohemia (compare StY hindl). 142 Compare FrY mendle ‘small man’ in Copeland and Süsskind :. 143 Examples: Brayn(d)le, Hen(d)le, Krayn(d)le, and Trayn(d)le. 144 For consonants, this kind of difficulty exists as well: שexpresses both /š/ and /s/ in a large number of early Ashkenazic sources. Among other ambiguous graphemes are: בthat can be read as either /b/ or /v/, and פthat can correspond to /f/, /p/, or even /pf/. For numerous documents, however, no ambiguity exists here because of the use of the raphe-sign over the letters expressing /v/ and /f/. 145 This is true, for example, for SSC, CC, BB, SD, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, and Pr. 146 This is certainly true for R (Röll .:).
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . MHG stressed vocalism Front diphthongs
Front vowels
Umlaut vowels
Umlaut diphthongs
Back vowels
Back diphthongs
ie
i; î
ü; iu
üe
u; û
uo
ei
e; ê
ö; œ
öu
o; ô
ou
ë; – ä; æ
a; â
Certain sounds—primarily those having [a], [ε], [e], and [ɔ] qualities—receive no graphic expression in many sources. The letter אcan express both [a] and [o]; יcorresponds not only to [i] but also to [e:] and in some cases to diphthongs ending in the glide [j]; וcovers [o], [u], [ɔ], and sometimes the consonant [v]; ויmay designate rounded vowels [y], [ø] (sounds that are expressed in German by the letters “ü” and “ö,” respectively), and numerous diphthongs such as [oj], [au], [ou], [øj], [øu], [uj] etc.147 In Jewish documents, the distinction between short and long vowels is rarely made. Dealing with vowels, one can also face another methodological issue. For Ashkenazic vernacular language(s), as well as for various HG dialects, the pronunciation of stressed vowels was significantly less stable than that of consonants or unstressed vowels. Since spelling is often conservative, graphemes found in various sources can in many cases correspond to phonetic values that were not necessarily valid anymore for the authors in question. There is, however, at least one aspect in which vowels are in a more favorable position than consonants: rhymes present in poems—among which are CC, BB, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, FF, ShL, and HEZ—are often helpful in identifying their pronunciation. The vocalism of the German component of Yiddish is ultimately related to that of MHG.148 For a better understanding of the following text, it is appropriate to present the classical scheme of stressed vowels and diphthongs of MHG (see Table .).149 The following conventions are used in Table .: • The columns dealing with vowels list a short vowel followed (after a semicolon) by its long equivalent. • The sign “-” is used to indicate that a vowel of such quality/quantity combination is absent from the system. • The lower the line, the more open the quality of its vowels. For example, ë designates the [e]-colored short sound that is more open than the one expressed by e. See examples in TG . See also section .. This is clearly the opinion of Bin-Nun (BN –) and Timm (TG). Weinreich (WG :–) agrees only with the general idea that the German component of Yiddish is derived from MHG. 149 This scheme shows the classical reconstruction of MHG stressed vocalism that results from studies by German linguists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a bulk of documents that never distinguish between MHG e and ë and rarely between short and long vowels, indicate umlaut irregularly, in many cases are known from later copies, and often correspond to a specific genre (poetry) that is generally far from the oral tradition. Taking all these factors into account, one could reasonably question the very possibility of making another reconstruction taking the classical scheme of MHG vowels as if it were a “fact.” Still, the attempt makes real sense. First, any new knowledge is always based on some other knowledge that can be considered more reliable. In the absence of any scheme that would explain the inception of Yiddish vocalism, the scheme for MHG can be seen as reliable. Second, if one succeeds in suggesting a system that explains major facts of the history of Yiddish vowels, this would be an additional corroboration for the general validity of the reconstruction of MHG. 147 148
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The German component
The phonetic values of a few (short) vowels underwent no change between the MHG period and the present day. Yet, for certain other vowels changes were dramatic, with striking differences in their chronology and/or results between various German dialects. The exposal below focuses on shifts of this kind. Information concerning the diphthongization of MHG î and û is shown in Table . {V}. TABLE . Diphthongization of MHG monophthongs Diphthongization of MHG î and û sîn – sein – zayn ‘his, her’ tûbe – Taube – toyb ‘dove’
PMG –, Žir –, MV –, Wies –, Kranz , KA , TG , , BA –
No
–
SAB, SSC, CC, Le, R, M, M
Rip, LA, HA, wTh; Swab, eTh, RF, and MF (all old)
Yes
all
R,150 Be, H, H; all from the sixteenth century onward
Swab, RF, and MF (all new), EF, Bav, Boh, ECG (except wTh)
In addition to MHG î and û, the diphthongization also affected the front rounded MHG iu whose phonetic value changed from [y:] to [øy].151 The whole process started in German dialects before the end of the twelfth century in Carinthia. During the next centuries, it spread northward and westward. Other areas of Bavarian became covered during the twelfth to the fourteenth century. The process reached Bohemian and the south of EF during the first half of the fourteenth century and the north of EF and Silesian during the second half of the same century.152 During the fifteenth century, it attained UpS, eastern Thuringian, Swabian (during the second half of the century), and PG (during its end). At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the diphthongization ceased its propagation after penetrating eastern Thuringian, Hessian, and MF. The consideration of these vowels shows that beginning with the second half of the fifteenth century, Ripuarian, western Thuringian, as well as Low and High Alemannic played no role in the development of Yiddish varieties. The earliest Jewish examples from onomastics all come from Nürnberg where we find such female given names as רייכלין () and Reichts (), both related to MHG rîch(e) ‘rich,’ and Preunlein () that corresponds to MHG briunlîn, a hypocoristic form of brûn ‘brown.’ In modern Yiddish varieties, the reflexes of MHG î are /a/-colored. They correspond either to diphthongs whose first vowel is [a] or to the monophthong [a:]. The main reflexes of MHG û correspond to diphthongs whose first vowel is [o], [ɔ], or [a]. This means that the following two panYiddish series of changes (also found in NHG) took place: • [i:] > [ej] > [εj] > [aj] for MHG î • [u:] > [ou] ( > [ɔu] ( > [au])) for MHG û. In that source, the author writes ( ייrarely )יfor MHG î and ויfor MHG û. In Ashkenazic sources, these graphemes (and especially the first) generally correspond to diphthongs. However, the pointer usually added ḥ ireq under the letter preceding letter יי. For וי, he either introduced qibbuṣ under the preceding letter, or added a dot in the first letter of the digraph turning it into ּוי. This means that in his dialect, contrary to that of the author, the sounds in question still were monophthongs /i:/ and /u:/, respectively. (The same interpretation is given in Röll .:.) 151 This vowel is not present in the above table because the consideration of its phonetic development needs to address an additional phenomenon, that of the unrounding of mid front rounded vowels (see the discussion of feature {V} in the next section). 152 In Silesian texts from fifteenth-century Poznań, MHG û and î are already diphthongized, with forms starting with “a” like “au / av / aw” for MHG û and “ai” and “ay” (MHG î) appearing since and the s, respectively (Anders :–, –). 150
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Stressed vowels
In Swabian and MF, the last stage, with [a] in the first position of the diphthong, has never been reached: their reflexes correspond, depending on the area, either to [ej] / [ou] or to [εj] / [ɔu]. The consideration of early Ashkenazic sources does not allow us to distinguish between [ou], [ɔu], and [au]: the digraph ויis generally used for all of them. The same issue characterizes [ej], [εj], and [aj]: all of these diphthongs are designated by יי. Only pointed texts are less ambiguous. The use of pataḥ (before or inside of )ייin both H and NH implies the pronunciation [aj]. Generally, sources written in Latin characters are not helpful either: on the one hand, “ei” can correspond to [ej], [εj], and [aj]; on the other hand, “ou” is almost nonexistent, while “au” seems also to cover various diphthongs ending in [u]. A few exceptional sources all provide information about the pronunciation of the vowel issued from MHG î. For that, the unique Jewish document in Latin character, H, uses the digraph “eÿ.” It corresponds to [ej] or [εj], while “aÿ” [aj] (along with “a” [a:]) appears in the same source for MHG ei. Certain Christian documents include forms with “a” that imply the presence of the diphthong [aj]. Among the examples are Aysack (, Moravia) and Ayzak (fifteenth century, southeastern Poland, now in Ukraine), both related to the old German form of biblical Isaac. The same pronunciation is valid for the Cyrillic reference to Айзак (, Brest in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). Czech “ej” (diphthong [ej]) appears in the following references from Prague: Rejcˇ e () and Rejcl (), both related to the MHG female given name Rîchenze, borrowed by Jews from Christians. For forms cognate to StY Brayndl, we find the following Cyrillic references from Eastern Europe: Брайна (, Volhynia), with [aj], but Брейна/Бренка, with [e(j)] (, Grodno, the wife of the local cantor).153 Reflexes of vowels cognate with MHG diphthongs ie and uo are given in Table . {V}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG ie and uo MHG ie and uo brief – Brief – briv ‘letter’ bluome – Blume – blum‘flower’
PMG –, MV –, Michels :–, Žir –, Wies –, Kranz , TG –, –, BA
[iə] and [uə]
–
CC, R, most likely R and H154
Alem (main),155 CB, SB, wEF
[i:] and [u:]
all
H, most likely Be, Ox, BB, SD, PuV, H, HiP, MM, Mel, ShB, DB, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, NH156
PG, eEF, ECG, Boh
(continued )
153 This given name represents a hypocorism derived (using the functional umlaut) from the full form based on the MHG brûne. As a result, it root vowel is related to MHG iu [y:] whose diphthongization was roughly simultaneous with that of MHG î and û. After the unrounding of front rounded vowels (see below the discussion of the feature {V} in section ..), reflexes of MHG iu merged with those of MHG î. 154 For MHG uo, we find ווin CC, ויin R (the pointer added either qibbuṣ under the previous consonant or turned vav into shureq-vav) and H (sometimes with qibbuṣ under the previous consonant), and ואin R. For MHG ie, R uses ḥ ireq under a consonant followed by יא. 155 In the Middle Ages, in Strasbourg and its area (that is, one part of LA), MHG ie rhymes with MHG ê (Michels :). Most likely, this implies a reflex close to /e:/ for both of them. Phonetic variants with /e:/ for MHG ie are common in ElsWB. 156 These sources mainly use וand יfor MHG uo and ie, respectively. For MHG uo, sometimes one also finds the trigraph ( וײin Be and Ox) or the digraph ( ויin Be, Ox,SD, PuV, Mel, and DB). In sources other than Be and Ox, the digraph clearly corresponds to the rounded vowel /y:/ rather than to a diphthong: the sources in question also sporadically have it for MHG u. Consequently, here we are dealing not with an old diphthong but with a more recent phenomenon of fronting /u, u:/ > /y, y:/ (see {V} below).
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The German component
TABLE .
Continued [e:] and [o:]
-
SAB, M157
Rip, nMF, nHes
[ej] and [ou]158
-
-
NB, sMF, sHes
Monophthongization started in German during the eleventh century. By the end of the next century, it was already valid for all of CG, EF, and NB. We can observe that earliest Jewish sources seem to have vowels that corresponded to the pronunciation by local Christians. Yet, since the sixteenth century the reflexes peculiar to UG and a large part of WCG are irrelevant for the development of the stressed vocalism of various Jewish dialects. Two other MHG diphthongs, ei and ou, also gave different reflexes in various German dialects. Table . presents five subgroups into which these dialects can be classified {V}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG ei and ou MHG ei and ou klein – klein – kleyn ‘small’ boum – Baum – boym‘tree’
PMG –, MV –, Žir –, Wies –, Kranz –; TG –, –, BA –, TS , Landau :
[e:, ε:] and [o:] [e:, ε:] and [a:]
SAB, SSC and M (all partly)159 –
[ej, εj, aj] and [oj, ou]
sMF, PG (main), wEF (partly) CC, Le, R
[ɔɐ, ɔj, ɔə] and [a:, o:]
–
[a:] and [a:]
WY, DuY, CzY, EGY
CF (main), ECG
Swab (old), LA, HA Bav (rural), Swab (new)
H and NH (both partly), GH
ePG (partly), Hes, EF (main), Bav (urban), Boh
157 Both SAB and M have ֹוfor some words with MHG uo and ṣ ere-yod for MHG ie. The same pointing appears in Le. However, in the last manuscript ֹוis used for both /u/ and /o/ and, as a result, the exact reflex of MHG uo in it cannot be determined. Yet, ṣ ere-yod implies an /e/-colored vowel or a diphthong including a vowel of this quality (for example [iə]). 158 For MF and Hessian, these “inverted” diphthongs evolved (during the fifteenth century or even later) from /e:/ and /o:/. The NB reflexes result from a totally different development. Here, MHG ie and uo became monophthongized to /i:/ and /u:/. In this area during the period in question, the process that started with the diphthongization of MHG î and û was still operational. As a result, the shifts /i:/ > /ej/ and /u:/ > /ou/ took place. The earliest references to “inverted” diphthongs in NB correspond to the fourteenth century. 159 In SSC, the monophthong for MHG ei is present only once and, therefore, it can, at least in theory, be due to a spelling error. In M, we find ḥ olem-vav ( )ֹוand qameṣ –vav for MHG ou and עײor ( עיboth often preceded by pataḥ , or, sometimes, ṣ ere) for MHG ei (Heide :). As a result, most likely, MHG ou corresponds to /o:/, but MHG ei does not correspond to /e:/.
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Stressed vowels
To understand better the development of Yiddish, it is important to address the chronology of the above realizations. In a large part of CF and ECG, in the thirteenth century the monophthongization of MHG ei to [e:] and MHG ou to [o:] had already finished. By the same period, in Bavarian, MHG ei and ou had already become pronounced [aj] and [au], respectively. The first of these diphthongs rapidly turned into [a:] in large towns and into [ɔj] in other areas.160 In CB, the MHG ou had changed to [a:] already during the thirteenth century. The Bavarian development was followed by Swabian. In both LA and HA, until the fifteenth century MHG ei and ou had still kept their original reflexes [ej] and [ou]. During the fourteenth century, the reflexes [e:] and [a:] were already established in the main part of PG and neighboring regions (including the Würzburg area of EF), while the reflex [a:]— obtained, as in Bavarian, from [aj] and [au], respectively—became valid for both MHG diphthongs in question in the remaining parts of RF, as well as in eastern and southern parts of EF and the Nürnberg area. German texts from Bohemia dating from the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries show a large variety of reflexes, some of them similar to those of ECG, others similar to those of Bavarian [aj] and [au] (MV ). During the second half of the sixteenth century, [aj] was the main reflex for MHG ei in Prague.161 Early Ashkenazic sources (including all cited in the table above) mainly use phonetically ambiguous digraphs ייfor MHG ei (valid for [ej], [εj], and [aj]) and ויfor MHG ou (valid for [ou], [ɔu], and [au]). However, alef—corresponding to [a:]—is also present in certain documents.162 In R, MHG ei is expressed via עײin a few cases (TS ). This trigraph implies the [ej]- or [εj]pronunciation by the author. Consequently, according to the reflexes of both MHG diphthongs, his language shows features peculiar to the area encompassing PG, western EF, and southern MF.163 In HiP, we find only ײfor MHG ei. Yet, in a number of hypercorrect forms the same digraph remains for the lengthened MHG a.164 The above information implies that in the sources in question (with the exception of the author of R), the reflexes of MHG ei and ou were [aj] and [au], respectively, both tending to [a:], the latter more advanced in this transition than the former. This means that the western Jewish texts mentioned above—though partially akin to German dialects listed in the two last lines of the table above—had a system of stressed vowels different from any known German dialect. On the other hand, no evidence exists about any difference between the pronunciation of these vowels by Jews and non-Jews in Prague during the sixteenth century. Onomastics provides additional information concerning the chronology of phonetic changes of the realizations of MHG ei and ou. For variants of StY female name Meyte (related to MHG meit ‘maid’), a few existing references spelled with “ai” or “ay” allow us to know that the realization [aj] was valid for MHG ei during the fifteenth century in southern Germany and Prague; compare Maitli
The last reflex produced [ɔɐ] at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. German Christian sources from Prague use both “ai” and “ei” for MHG ei and “ei” (with rare spelling variants “ey” and “eÿ”) for MHG î (Skála :). 162 For MHG ou, it appears rarely in R, Be, Fl, SD, DB, HiP, BZV, BZP, PB, and commonly in BB, PuV, Mel, Ox, H, BZR. For MHG ei, it is present sometimes in Be and PuV, a few times in BZR, BZP, Kr, and Pr. For all aforementioned sources except DB see Timm and Gehlen :, Röll .:–, Heide :. Examples of [a:] in DB: גלאבןfor MHG gelouben / NHG glauben ‘to believe’ (Dreeßen and Müller .:). Other references to the same word in this poem are spelled גלויבן. Timm (TG –, –) found [a:] in texts published in Prague at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only in a few words related to MHG ou and one related to MHG ei. In ShL (Prague, ), only one example of [a:] for MHG ei and a few instances of [a:] for MHG ou are present (Neuberg :, ). 163 However, the pointer of the same document often puts pataḥ before יי, the most common graphic expression of MHG ei in this document. For MHG ou, the pointer changes his sign depending on the grapheme chosen by the author of the manuscript. When the author uses וי, the pointer puts either pataḥ or qameṣ under this sign. When the author uses א, the pointer places qameṣ before this sign and pataḥ under it. 164 See these examples in Brünnel :XXIV. 160 161
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The German component
(Baden, ), Maytan (Nürnberg, ), Maitalein (Nürnberg, ), and Mayeta (Prague, ). Forms with [a:]—such as מאטה, מאטי, מטה, מאטלה, מטלה, מאטיל, מאטל, מטיל, —מטלhave been regularly present in Prague since the beginning of the seventeenth century. In Frankfurt, they have appeared only since the last decade of the same century, while during the previous period we regularly find such forms as מייטןand מייטא. StY female name Freyde is related to MHG vröude ‘joy.’ During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reflexes of MHG öu became unrounded and merged with those of MHG ei.165 In the census of Prague (), we find three Frejdl, one Fredl, and one Fradl. In the tombstone inscriptions from the same city, hypocorisms of this name such as פריידל, פריידלה, and פריידליdominate until the end of the eighteenth century though a few references to פראדלappear during the second half of the eighteenth century. In Frankfurt, וריידכהand וריידלן dominate until the end of the seventeenth century, while during the next century forms with the diphthong (פריידכה, פריידכן, and )פריידלהand those with the monophthong (פראדלה, פראדכה, and )פראדכיare both common. During the second half of the sixteenth century in Hessen, we find a set of variants of this name (Fraidge, Fraitgin, Fraid, and Fraidle) whose [aj] testifies that the unrounding was already completed. StY male name Koyfman is related to MHG koufman ‘merchant.’ The census of Prague () mentions three Jews called Kaf(f)man and only one Kaufman. In the tombstone inscriptions from Prague (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the monophthongized form קפמןis present more frequently than the one with a diphthong (קויפמןa).166 The above information implies that the monophthongization of MHG ei and ou to [a:]—often seen as a major shared peculiarity of all Yiddish varieties different from EY—became stabilized only during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, it is likely to have two independent German sources. Indeed, in German dialects [a:] is known in (i) the compact area covering Hessian, East Franconian, and, partly, eastern Palatinate German; (ii) Vienna and certain other of the largest cities in the area of Bavarian. The first of these areas could be responsible for the gradual monophthongization in WY. The influence of the second could be of a paramount importance for the urban speech in the Habsburg Empire and therefore for Yiddish in the Czech lands and western Hungary.167 The analysis of historical data shows that for MHG diphthongs ei and ou, all of EY went through the [ej]- and [ou]-stages, respectively.168 As a result, it is clear that, unlike WY subdialects, EY cannot be related to those dialects in which at least one of these diphthongs gave [a:] or a diphthong starting with [ɔ]. Nevertheless, to attach EY to one of the two remaining subgroups—those present on the first and the third lines Table .—we necessarily have to use additional theoretical arguments. For this reason, EY is not mentioned in the table. Formally speaking, it perfectly fits the Alemannic dialects (the third line). However, the geography contradicts this attachment: the area of Alemannic is too distant from Eastern Europe. This leaves two possible scenarios for the development of these vowels in EY. Firstly, EY could proceed through the stages of monophthongs [e:] and [o:] similarly to ECG cited on the first line of the above table.169 Secondly, EY could evolve under the influence of some transitional dialects that—similarly to Alemannic (cited on the third line)— retained the initial values of MHG diphthongs longer than others. In principle, medieval Bohemian, with its aforementioned large variety of reflexes during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, could be an important source for EY. Processes internal to Proto-EY could lead to a creation of its own
165
See the discussion of feature {V} in the next section. Only one reference to this name appears in the inscriptions from the old cemetery in Frankfurt. It does not allow us to draw any conclusion about the chronology of the monophthongization of MHG ou in that city. 167 Erika Timm (personal communication). 168 See section ... 169 This scenario is suggested and discussed in Beider :–. 166
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Stressed vowels
system, with reflexes [ej] and [ou] for MHG ei and ou, respectively, representing a kind of compromise between two German dialects having distinct reflexes for the vowels in question and both exerting a profound influence on EY: Bohemian and Silesian. In the first of them, during the fifteenth century the most plausible reflexes were [εj] or [aj] for MHG ei and [ɔu] or [au] for MHG ou. We cannot exclude a possibility that in some areas of Bohemia and/or Moravia [ej] and [ou] were also used as rare variants. All these reflexes could be brought by Jewish migrants from the Czech lands to Poland where they met German colonists speaking Silesian. In Silesian, during the same period, we find the following reflexes: [e:] or [ej] for MHG ei and [o:] or [ou] for MHG ou.170 In this situation, the compromise between the two influential German dialects was naturally achieved by taking over reflexes that existed as variants in both of them. Several arguments can be suggested to show that of the above scenarios, the first, with the stages of monophthongs [e:] and [o:], is the least plausible. The analysis of EY words of Romance origin171 indicates that some of them were brought to Central Europe and from it to Eastern Europe as forms having [ej]. In both CzY and EY, their root vowel merged with reflexes of MHG ei whose reflex was therefore also [ej] at this period. A theory implying that a sound ([ej] in our case) basically underwent no changes during several centuries appears significantly simpler than the idea about two consecutive changes in opposite directions after which the departure and the arrival points are the same ([ej] > [e:] > [ej]). Moreover, both changes in question, the monophthongization and the diphthongization that followed it, are purely theoretical, without any factual element that corroborates the existence of any of them in Jewish sources. It is also worth noting that none of the early Ashkenazic sources from Eastern Europe studied uses the same graphemes for the following two pairs of MHG vowels: () ei and ê (compare StY kleyn ‘small’ and geyn ‘to go,’ MHG kleine and gên, respectively); () ou and ô (compare StY boym ‘tree’ and royt ‘red,’ MHG boum and rôt, respectively) {V}.172 Yet, in modern EY, identical realizations are found for the two vowels inside of each pair. This means that either the merging occurred rather recently (and, consequently, the early EY reflexes of MHG ei and ou did not represent long monophthongs), or the documents in question are not representative for the EY vocalism of their time. No HG dialect that could influence Yiddish shows a similar merging.173 Generally speaking, the consideration of the realization of these two MHG vowels allows us to assert that by the development of Yiddish vocalism in the Czech lands and Eastern Europe was already clearly partly independent. On the one hand, the /a/-colored reflexes in the former area in force since that time (or even earlier) were of no influence on EY. On the other hand, the reflexes found in Silesian were of no further influence either because it was precisely by that period that this colonial German dialect lost the important role it played in Polish urban centers.174 MHG ei received a particular development in words cognate to MHG zweinzig ‘twenty.’ In German dialects, the form zwanzig has been known in Bavarian since the fourteenth century (MV ). Today, it represents the standard NHG form. Forms with /a/ are found in numerous dialects including Bavarian (along with /aj/), Swabian (along with /o/), Alsatian, EF, and CG. Yet, until the Such reflexes are, for example, known in Poznań during the fifteenth century (Anders :, ). See the end of section .. No merging is observable in all available sources from sixteenth-century Poland and Lithuania. In all the documents of this kind present in EYT and those quotes which appear in Dubnov , different graphemes are used for MHG ei, ê, ou, and ô, namely, יי, י, ויand ו, respectively. 173 Maps Wies , , , and show that similar merging for both pairs of vowels took place only in the western part of High Prussian (covering the East Prussian towns of Osterode and Mohrungen) that could not be of influence on EY. The merging of MHG ê and ei also occurred in a small area in Silesia around Leobschütz (now Głubczyce, Poland). However, in the same area, the reflexes of MHG ô and ou are different. 174 See details in Appendix B. 170 171 172
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The German component
seventeenth century the forms zwenzig and zweinzig were still common.175 Early Ashkenazic sources are not homogenous and can be divided into two groups: () western ( צװינציקin CC, צװײנציגand צװיינציקin Mel and ShB, * צװענציגtsventsig in DB and BZR, “czwenczek” (tsventsek) in H), and () eastern (*tsvantsig in BZP and NH). In modern Yiddish, we find tsvantsik in WY and LitY, tsvontsik in PolY and UkrY. The /o/ in the latter form represents a dialectal innovation related to the position before a nasal (BN ).176 MHG â raised from [a:] to either [ɔ:] or [o:] in all HG dialects during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. In some dialects, the raising continued up to [u:]. As a result, it is not a surprise to learn that (i) all modern Yiddish varieties have for this vowel either /o/- or /u/-qualities (compare StY zomen ‘seed,’ MHG sâme), while (ii) either qameṣ under the preceding consonant or the letter ֹוappear already in the earliest available Jewish sources.177 In several German dialects, this raising yielded a merging between the reflexes of MHG â and ô illustrated in Table . {V}. TABLE . Merging of MHG â and ô Merging of MHG â and ô slâfen – schlafen – shlofn ‘to sleep’; rôt–rot–royt ‘red’
Wies , , Kranz , , Žir –, , MV –, , BA , , , TG
Yes
SWY
BB, PuV, Mel
EF (partly), LA
No
EY, DuY, EGY, CzY
SAB, H, BZV, BZP, Kr, PB
CG, Bav, Boh, Swab, HA, EF (partly)
In numerous early Ashkenazic sources, both vowels are mainly expressed via ֹוor ו. This does not mean that the pronunciation of both was identical. Here the best indicators of the merging are poems in which we find rhymes between the two vowels. For this reason, only poems appear on the first line in the fifth column. In SWY, the merged phoneme became diphthongized. The same effect is observed in [oə] valid in western EF (Würzburg area) and [ɔu] of the region of Nürnberg (border between EF and NB). In ECG, since the Middle Ages the reflex of MHG ô has been /u:/. It merged with that of MHG uo. Examples: /gru:s/ ‘big’ (MHG grôʒ , NHG groß) and /fu:s/ ‘foot’ (MHG vuoʒ , NHG Fuß). We find traces of this phenomenon neither in early Ashkenazic sources nor in modern Yiddish varieties {V}. In modern Yiddish, MHG ô and lengthened o are mainly expressed via diphthongs; compare StY royt ‘red’ (MHG rôt, NHG rot) (BA ). Numerous German dialects also have diphthongs. Among them are: EF (partly), southern RF, Bavarian (where diphthongal forms have been known since the twelfth century), Swabian, and (regionally) Silesian.178 The earliest references to diphthongized forms appear in Ashkenazic sources from the sixteenth century.179 However, they are 175
See the entry zwanzig in DWB, with several references to zwen(t)zig in Alemannic. See BA (for WY and PolY) and Katz b: (for LitY). BN suggests several additional PolY examples of the same phenomenon: bromfm ‘liquor,’ shvom ‘sponge’; compare, LitY branfn and shvam (Harkavy ), NHG Branntwein and Schamm, respectively, CzY (Ehrlich :) brampfe ‘liquor.’ StY bronfn and shvom (used along with shvam) are based on UkrY. 177 Examples: SAB, M, CC, R, Le, and R. 178 On the development of MHG ô see Wies , MV , Žir ; compare also with the reflexes of MHG uo in Wies . In Silesian used in Poznań during the fifteenth century, MHG ô is mainly expressed via “o” and rarely via “u,” while MHG uo is regularly given as “u” (Anders :, ). 179 In a sample of spellings with vav-yod used for MHG ô collected in TG , we find: a few references in Par and documents from Regensburg compiled during the first half of the sixteenth century (including ShBLR), three cases in DB (), four in works from Kraków (–). Also note ‘ פויגלbird’ (MHG vogel) in FF (this instance is 176
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Stressed vowels
exceptional. According to the graphic conventions, vav was generally used during the following centuries though this grapheme gradually became associated only with diphthongs whose first vowel is [o] or [ɔ]. A number of German dialects are characterized by raising of MHG a {V}. During the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, this process occurred in Bavarian in both closed and open syllables; in the latter context, it caused a merging with MHG â. During the same period, in Hessian and EF the raising took place only in open syllables. However, here the realization [ɔ:] was more open than the [o:]-reflex of MHG â and therefore no merging was produced. The raising of MHG a in Alsatian (in both closed and open syllables) also gave a vowel whose quality is more open than that of the reflex of MHG â. In ECG, the same raising took place in all contexts and in certain (rather rare) cases merged in open syllables with MHG â.180 No information is available for medieval Bohemian. Yet, we know that in many aspects its development showed features intermediate between those of Bavarian and ECG, or a combination of them. Since the raising of MHG a is known in both of them, it is likely that the same process characterized Bohemian also. The merging of the reflexes of MHG â and those of the lengthened MHG a is total in such Yiddish varieties as EY, CzY, DuY, and EGY; compare StY foter ‘father’ (MHG vater, NHG Vater) and otem ‘breath’ (MHG âtem, NHG Atem). Yet, in these Yiddish varieties no raising is observed for MHG a that remained short.181 This means that the development of Yiddish varieties in Central and Eastern Europe (as well as in the Netherlands) has certain important features in common with that of Bavarian, ECG, and, maybe, Bohemian, but on the whole we are dealing with processes internal to Jewish communities. It is possible that at the initial stage in the Jewish idiom(s) spoken in Slavic countries the raising affected all reflexes of MHG a, exactly as in Bavarian and ECG, yielding [ɔ:] for the lengthened vowel and [ɔ] for the short one. At that time, [ɔ:] was also valid for MHG â and therefore a total merging of the two phonemes took place. Yet, the raising of the short vowel provoked no merging because the reflex [ɔ] was not legitimate for any other phoneme. During the following period, the short phoneme in question “returned” from [ɔ] to [a], that is, its original position. The form mon ‘man’ (contrasting with both NHG Mann and StY man) is present in several works of the seventeenth century including ShL (Neuberg :) and NH, both from Prague, and HEZ (compare Matut :).182 This peculiarity is unrelated to the general raising from [a] to [ɔ] conjectured above. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century we find a reference to CzY “mu” ‘man’ (Ehrlich :). This form (in which the final /n/ was dropped) implies that in this CzY word the stressed vowel was lengthened and actually the above references from the seventeenth century correspond to mōn, which during the following two centuries turned into mū(n) in the same region.
exceptional, in other cases the spelling is either פאגלor )ואגל, and ‘ טויטdead’ (MHG tôt) in a document of from the Polish town of Konstantinów (Dubnov :). Numerous examples appear in PB (), but only a few in BZV () and BZP (circa ) and none in BZR (s) (TG ). Many examples of the diphthongal reflex for MHG ô and the lengthened o are also known in GH (Landau :). This information shows that the placement of the diphthongization by Birnbaum (:) into the period before mid-fourteenth century—based not on linguistic arguments but on considerations from the domain of political geography—is untenable. 180 See Žir , MV –, TG –. Anders (:–) notes “o” in Silesian texts from Poznań for MHG a in both open and closed syllables. 181 Such development characterizes only a subdialect of UkrY (see section ..). It is rather recent and cannot be due to any contact with Bavarian and/or ECG. 182 In a few Christian documents from Bohemia written in Latin characters, Jewish given names ending in the element meaning ‘man’ are written “mon”; compare Permon (, StY Berman) and Librmon (, StY Liberman). It is unclear whether we are dealing here with misinterpretations or, more likely, with phonetic peculiarities of local Jews and/or Germans.
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The German component
In subdialects from western German-speaking areas such as SWY and WphY, MHG a in open syllables underwent no raising and gave rise to [a:]. This development of SWY has parallels with that of WCG, Alemannic, and EF.183 In early Ashkenazic sources, identical reflexes for MHG â and lengthened a (both mainly spelled with alef) are found in MM, BZV, Kr, PB, and BZP. Evidently, this graphic feature is insufficient for drawing a conclusion that for their authors or printers the reflexes of these two MHG vowels were already phonemically identical. However, this is highly plausible at least for the last of the above sources: this includes several cases of vav for both MHG â and the lengthened MHG a, and therefore, both vowels in question seem to have the /o/-quality (TG , ). For KO, ShL, and NH, both this quality and the merging of these vowels are beyond question.184 The same quality holds true for the lengthened MHG a in HEZ.185 Since for the Czech territories the earliest non-ambiguous examples are known for the beginning of the seventeenth century, while in the mid-seventeenth century the shift to [o:] was already clearly completed, the change of the lengthened MHG a from [a:] to [ɔ:] in these territories had clearly taken place before the end of the sixteenth century. If in the classical scheme of MHG stressed vocalism we can distinguish three different qualities of front mid vowels—namely /e/, /ε/, and /æ/—very few German dialects retained all of them. The situation can differ in open syllables where these vowels were lengthened and closed syllables; see the Table . {V}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG e, ë and ä/æ Number of different phonemes in open syllables for MHG e, ë, and ä/æ edel(e) – edel – eydl ‘noble’; leder – Leder – leder ‘leather’; kæse – Käse – kez ‘cheese’
Žir , –, Wies , MV , BA , TG –, –
-
(ä = ë)
all
-
Bav, Swab, HA (partly) M, CC, R, Be, MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, HiP, Kr, Pr
RF (main), LA, HA (main), EF, ECG CF, nHes, nPG
183 Beranek (:) notes that [a:] is found only in PG, Swabian, and South Franconian (sometimes seen as a subdialect of EF) and tries to relate WY to these dialects according to this feature. Indeed, as noted in the previous paragraph, in Hessian (main part of) EF, and Alsatian, the lengthened MHG a actually was raised to [ɔ:]. However, this change did not provoke any merging with reflexes of MHG â that were more closed. Neither SWY, nor WphY has phonemic differences between [a:] and [ɔ:]. 184 KO includes a number of rhymes between MHG â, o, and lengthened a (Joffe :). NH spells all three vowels via qameṣ -alef. For example, ‘ ָהא ִגלhail’ (MHG hagel), ‘ ָטאלvalley’ (MHG tal), ‘ פ ָראגquestion’ (MHG vrâge), and ‘ ָקאְפhead’ (MHG kopf). On the alternation between spellings using alef and vav and rhymes in ShL see Neuberg :–. 185 Compare the rhyme ‘ האליןto get’ (MHG hol(e)n) ~ ‘ ביצאליןto pay’ (MHG bezaln, StY batsoln) (Matut :). On the other hand, we do not find any rhyme between the reflexes of MHG â and lengthened a in Witz. In that source, words with the lengthened MHG a rhyme only with each other. Yet, we cannot be sure that this source is representative of the vernacular Yiddish speech in the Netherlands of this period. Note that the last name of its author, Joseph ben Alexander Witzenhausen comes from a locality in Hessen. He himself came to Amsterdam from western Germany as an adult.
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Stressed vowels TABLE .
Continued
MHG e, ë and ä/æ: number of different phonemes in closed syllables bet – Bett – bet ‘bed’; hëlfen – helfen – helfn ‘to help’; nähte – Nächte – nekht ‘nights’
NB (partly)
(ä = ë)
M, CC, R, Be; BB, SD, Teh, Mel, ShB (all rare)
(ë = e)
-
EY, SWY, DuY
RF (main), Alem, EF, ECG CB
M, BB, SD, Teh, Mel, and ShB (all main), PuV, MM, Ox, H, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr186
CF, nHes, nPG
Table . shows that the development of Yiddish stressed vocalism was not correlated with that of CF and CB where the merging of all three MHG vowels can be observed. Of least importance was Ripuarian in which this merging was already known during the thirteenth century.187 Data from this table also testify to the fact that no German dialect could be directly responsible for the general feature valid in all modern Yiddish varieties: total merging in closed syllables and the existence of two phonemes in open syllables. Taking into account early Ashkenazic sources, one can construct the most plausible scenario: both WY and EY inherited from German dialects the distinction between two qualities in both open and closed syllables: () [ε], for both MHG ä and ë; () [e], for MHG e. The merging of the reflexes in closed syllables is likely to be a phonetic process internal to Jewish communities. The age of this fusion is difficult to establish. We can be sure that in the sixteenth century it was not totally completed yet for the authors of BB, SD, Teh, Mel, and ShB. On the other hand, from numerous early Ashkenazic sources using עin closed syllables for all vowels in question, we cannot deduce that all of these vowels were pronounced identically. In modern Yiddish varieties diphthongs for MHG ê and the lengthened e are general {V}; compare StY shney ‘snow’ (MHG snê, NHG Schnee). It is only in southwestern Germany that /e:/ is found along with /ej/ (BA ). Among German dialects in which MHG ê gave rise to a diphthong—as a regular reflex or at least as one of phonetic variants—one counts EF, southern RF, NB, Swabian, and Silesian.188 Only a few exceptional references to diphthongized forms appear in Ashkenazic sources before the seventeenth century.189 According to graphic conventions, even during the following centuries, the letter yod (preceded in pointed texts by ṣ ere) was generally used rather than the double-yod.190 Gradually, ṣ ere became associated in various Yiddish dialects only 186 In both R and Le, numerous graphemes are used to designate three MHG vowels e, ë, and ä, namely segol, segol-ayin, segol-yod, and, sometimes even pataḥ –ayin. From this information, it is impossible to deduce the total number of different vowels involved. However, for the pointer of R (who sometimes uses pataḥ –ayin even for MHG e) the merging of all these qualities (in both open and closed syllables) seems to be the most plausible scenario. 187 This follows from rhymes present in a document from Cologne compiled during that period (Michels :). 188 See Žir –, Wies . 189 In a sample of spelling with (ṣ ere+) double-yod used for MHG ê collected in TG –, we find (among others): one word (with two references) in LekY, a few references in Par, numerous occurrences in ShBLR, and multiple cases in Gump. Other examples: six cases of ײfor MHG ê and one for the lengthened MHG e in Be (Röll .:), מיין ‘more’ (MHG mê) in FF (this source also uses other spellings for the same word, namely, מיןand )מען. Also note very few examples in PB and the absence of references in BZR, BZV, and BZP (TG , ). 190 For example, in both Prague and Frankfurt one of the most common male given names is invariably spelled ליב even at the end of the eighteenth century. This name cognate with StY Leyb is derived from MHG leb(e) ‘lion.’ The same form is regularly seen in official documents from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries from the Polish-
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The German component
with diphthongs. In Christian sources, diphthongs regularly appear in Jewish given names in various parts of Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onward.191 It was already during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that in CF, northern Hessian, Thuringian, and southern Silesian MHG i and u were lowered to /e/ and /o/, respectively; compare /belt/ ‘picture’ and /nos/ ‘nut’ (MHG bilde and nuʒ , NHG Bild and Nuss, respectively).192 Similar change occurred later in Alsatian (Žir –) {V}. Most likely, it influenced the reflexes /e/ and /o/ found in modern AlsY (where we find [I] and [℧], respectively) and DuY. In other dialects, the reflexes /i/ and /u/ dominate. In early Ashkenazic sources, the lowering is found only in SAB. Before resonants and primarily /n/, lowering affected other German dialects too. Particularly widespread are /e/-forms of the following verb (Table .) {V}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG bringen Stressed vowel in bringen – bringen – brengen ‘to bring’
MV , TG , TS
i
FrY193
CC
Bav, LA (partly), HA
e
EY, CzY, EGY
R, Le, BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Aug, DB, HiP,194 BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Br, BM, PB, NH
CG, EF, Swab,195 LA (partly), Boh
MHG o turned into /u/ in Silesian in closed syllables before liquids (compare durf ‘village,’ hulz ‘wood’), while in Hessian, Thuringian, and UpS, the same shift occurred only in open syllables.196 We observe this phenomenon neither in modern Yiddish varieties nor in early Ashkenazic sources {V}. In certain words, the /u/-form has a different dialectal geography in German. MHG woche (NHG Woche) ‘week’ has /u/ in Alemannic, MF, EF, UpS (partly), and Silesian (DWB, MV ). It is found in Teh, PuV, BZR, BZV, as well as in modern SwY,197 while HiP, NH, EY, EGY, and DuY have vokh {V}. Forms related to MHG vol (NHG voll) ‘full’ have /u/ in RF (partly), NB, and ECG. We find /u/ in the preface to LBr, in BZP, NH, EGY, and StY ful {V}. Yet, /o/ appears in R, BB, ShB (TG –), HiP, and Pr. The /u/-forms for MHG and NHG von ‘from’ dominate in RF, EF, and ECG, and represent variants, along with the /o/-forms in MF and Alemannic. In early
Lithuanian Commonwealth. These documents were mainly written in Hebrew. However, they included passages in Yiddish. In one of them (, EYT ), for example, we find ‘ גיןto go’ (MHG gên, StY geyn), again just with a single yod. 191 Compare: female Eydel (MHG edel(e) ‘noble’) (Prague, ) and male Лейбко (MHG leb(e) ‘lion’) (Grand Duchy of Lithuania, ). The latter example is particularly instructive because the same individual is also called Лебко (that is, with a monophthong) in another document. This alternation indicates that the diphthongization was not totally completed yet. The female names Sejna (MHG schoene ‘beautiful’) (Red Ruthenia, ), Kreinlin (MHG krœnlîn ‘little crown’) (Hessen, ), and Rejsl / Reisl (MHG rœsel ‘small rose’) (Prague, ) all include the vowel whose reflexes after the unrounding merged with those of MHG ê (see feature {V} in the next section). Only for a variant of the last name, Reislin (MHG rœselîn ‘small rose’), the earliest reference is significantly older: it appears in Alsace in . In principle, this unique early example may be due to some kind of misinterpretation. 192 The letter “e” for MHG i appears sporadically in Silesian texts from fifteenth-century Poznań. In the same texts, MHG u is often expressed via “o” (Anders :–, –, ). 193 Compare Copeland and Süsskind :. 194 In this source, several cases of lowering /u/ > /o/ before /n/ (compare Brünnel :XXIV). 195 Swabian /e/ is not cited in the studies appearing in the second column. However, it is the reflex that appears in SchwäbWB. 196 See MV , Anders :– (Silesian from fifteenth-century Poznań). 197 See TG , Fleischer :.
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Stressed vowels
Ashkenazic sources, R and HiP have /o/, while R, BB, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, BZV, BZP, and NH have /u/ (TG ), exactly as StY and EGY fun {V}.198
.. Unrounding, rounding, and lowering MHG possessed four rounded monophthongs (ü, iu, ö, œ) and two diphthongs whose first vowel was rounded (üe, öu) for all of which in certain dialects the unrounding took place. This phonetic process corresponded to the quality shifts [y] > [i] and [ø] > [e] valid for short and long vowels. As a result, the reflexes of the six MHG vowels in question merged with those of MHG i, î, e, ê, ie, and ei, respectively. Table . illustrates this phenomenon {V}. TABLE . Unrounding Unrounding dünne – dünn – din ‘thin’; biutel – Beutel – baytl ‘purse’; öle – Öl – eyl ‘oil’; schœne – schön – sheyn ‘beautiful; grüene – grün – grin ‘green’; vröude – Freude – freyd ‘joy’
Žir , MV –, KA –, TG –, WG :–, :–, Landau :
No
Yes
all
SAB, CC, R, Le, R, M, MinP, Be, H, H, Fl, BB, SD, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, BZR
MF, RF, LA, Swab, Boh, ECG (all old); Rip, HA, EF
BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, PB, NH, HEZ,199 GH
MF, RF, LA, Swab, Boh, ECG (all new); Bav
From Table ., one can observe that for WY, the unrounding is a relatively recent phenomenon: until the seventeenth century, Jewish sources from western German-speaking areas regularly distinguish between front rounded and front non-rounded vowels. They use ויas the equivalent to German umlaut-letters “ö” /ø/ and “ü” /y/ and וייfor diphthongs starting with front rounded vowels.200 As shown by Timm, the unrounding was not simultaneous for various MHG vowels. For example, unrounded forms (with the stressed vowel expressed via double yod) cognate to MHG vröude ‘joy’ are already found in R and are regular in H, BB, and MM. Yet, for other cases, the unrounding is not apparent before mid-sixteenth century but for a few exceptions in BB (TG ). A few unrounded forms appear in PuV (Timm :), SD, and DB. No unrounding—for vowels others than MHG öu—can be observed in H, a work written in Prague in (TG –).
198 Weinreich states that, on the one hand, the /u/-forms are known only in relatively small areas of WCG, while, on the other hand, in all Yiddish varieties we find either /u/ or /i/ derived from it (WG :). The first part of this assertion is incorrect. The validity of the second for Yiddish varieties other than EY and EGY remains to be shown. 199 In all these sources, unrounded forms dominate, with Pr and GH being the documents with the largest number of forms with rounded vowels. At least for GH, one can consider that rounded vowels that are present are mainly due to a literary tradition rather than to the vernacular use (Landau :). In Kr and PB, we still find traces of front rounded vowels. 200 See the discussion of the feature {G} in section .. Christian Hebraist Buxtorf () writes that it is incorrect when double yod is used for German eu, ayin for ö, and yod for ü (Frakes :). He is clearly describing the ongoing unrounding in (parts of) WY.
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The German component
To analyze the process of unrounding in the vernacular idioms of Jews, it is particularly useful to observe the reflexes of hypocorisms of given names whose full forms have the stressed vowel with the /u/- or /o/-quality. Indeed, these hypocorisms generally include diminutive suffixes whose addition is concomitant with the umlaut: in NHG, the resulting forms have rounded front vowels spelled with the umlaut sign, “ü” [y] and “ö” [ø], respectively. The digraph ױis rarely seen in the Prague tombstone inscriptions in hypocoristic forms of given names. One of the exceptional examples is [* גויטלgyt(ə)l] (). For this early period, data available to us are not really representative. Yet, numerous references with the unrounded stressed vowel in the same female name, [* גיטלgit(ə)l], have been known from the second half of the sixteenth century onward. As a result, according to the available information it is appropriate to place the unrounding in the Jewish vernacular spoken in the Czech lands to mid-sixteenth century. Yet, in Frankfurt the front rounded vowels were common for an additional one hundred years, until mid-seventeenth century; compare ( ברױנכן), various hypocorisms of Gute (such as גויטלן, גויטכן, גוידכן, and גוידכין, found until ) and the Jewish cognate to German Schöne ( שוינכןand שוינלן, until ).201 In the cemetery of Fürth, we find, on the one hand, ( שוינלן) and, on the other hand, ( בריינדל). Only forms with unrounded vowels (including שינדל, פריידל, גיטל, and )בריינלהappear during the following years.202 The process of unrounding started in Bavarian before the thirteenth century. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it became valid in LA and WCG (except for Ripuarian), respectively. By the end of the fifteenth century it was already completed in a large part of HG territory. In ECG, it has been known only since the sixteenth century.203 During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the unrounding was standard even in literary German. The above chronology taken from classical studies of German historical dialectology204 should be complemented by information concerning Bohemian German (Skála :–). German sources written in Prague during the second half of the sixteenth century contain undoubted traces of unrounding: “i(e)” and “e” in place of NHG ü and ö, respectively. Yet, we find MHG iu expressed only via either “eu” or “äu,” while “ei” is the unique graphic expression for MHG î, the vowel representing the unrounded equivalent of MHG iu. In other words, unrounding was not completed in the Bohemian of that time. The presence of rounded vowels in the early Ashkenazic sources from Western Europe could be influenced by MF and RF, all reached by this vocalic shift later than other areas, as well as by EF. The western Ashkenazic vocalic system(s) “resisted” during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries keeping the rounded vowels despite their absence in surrounding German dialects other than EF, but gradually also underwent unrounding. Both local Christians and Jews coming from areas where no front rounded vowels were known could be responsible for this process. Spontaneous fronting (umlaut) of both long /u:/ and short /u/ is limited to several modern Yiddish varieties. It gave rise to rounded vowels with the /y/-quality in CzY and Yiddish of southern Hungary, and the /i/-quality in PolY and UkrY {V}.205 Among PolY examples are: /hint/ ‘dog’ (MHG hunt, NHG Hund) and /hi:n/ ‘hen, chicken’ (MHG huon, NHG Huhn ‘chicken’) (BN ). In Only in forms of the Jewish name related to MHG vröude ‘joy’ the unrounded forms (such as ורײדא, ורײדלין, and )ורײדלappear significantly earlier, some of them are already known in the last third of the fourteenth century. 201
The information is based on Brann . In Silesian texts from fifteenth-century Poznań, unrounded forms are apparent only for MHG öu which is sometimes expressed via “ew” (compare Anders :, , , , ). 204 For all of them (MV, Žir, and KA), the exact page numbers appear in the table dealing with {V}. 205 The most detailed analysis of this phenomenon was made by Birnbaum (, ). Along with cogent arguments, it includes a number of inappropriate extrapolations. For example, Birnbaum (:, :) erroneously asserts (using arguments concerning the political geography) that the spontaneous fronting was already valid before the Black Death (mid-fourteenth century). See also BN –, WG :–, :–, TG –, GGA , and BA –. 202 203
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Stressed vowels
AlsY, in contrast to the above Yiddish varieties, only long /u:/ shifted to /y:/, while the short /u/ underwent no fronting at all (Zuckerman :–). The fronting is unknown in LitY, EGY, and DuY. In early sources, examples of this phenomenon are common in M, Be, and SD and also appear in Mid, Mel, Teh, PuV, Ox, and DB. In all of them, we find ויin place where NHG has /u/ (MHG u) and/or /u:/ (MHG uo and/or lengthened MHG u). During that period, the digraph in question was a typical graphic expression of the /y/-quality.206 Note that this sign appears in M and SD for both /y/ and /y:/. Among the examples from SD with the short vowel one can cite: *zün ‘sun’ (MHG sunne, NHG Sonne), *hünger ‘hunger’ (MHG hunger, NHG Hunger), *dürsht ‘thirst’ (MHG durst, NHG Durst), and *tsüng ‘tongue’ (MHG zunge, NHG Zunge). The vowel is long in forms such as: *zȳn ‘son’ (MHG sun, NHG Sohn), *tȳkh ‘cloth’ (MHG tuoch, NHG Tuch), *brȳder ‘brother’ (MHG bruoder, NHG Bruder), and *kȳ ‘cow’ (MHG kuo, NHG Kuh). In Be, ̄ we find only ̄ u (expressed via )וי. Yet, the main graphic equivalent for MHG one isolated case of fronting of MHG uo in that source is וײ, a sign that is also used for other vowels, all of them being either rounded monophthongs or diphthongs starting in a rounded vowel (while both occurrences of MHG ou are expressed via וי, a digraph rarely used in that manuscript). As a result, in Be we also are dealing with fronting /u:/ > /y:/ rather than with a diphthong /uo/ or /uə/. In Ox, no case of fronting of MHG u is found. However, MHG uo is expressed there either as וײor as וי. Despite the fact that in that manuscript, the trigraph וײalso expresses MHG ou, a similarity between the use of וײ, וי, ו, and several other graphemes in Ox and Be is so important that we can safely posit the existence of the fronting in Ox too.207 In modern HG dialects, the fronting is known in strips of land inside of the Ripuarian, Hessian, and neighboring southwestern Thuringian territories. The change /u:/ > /y:/ represents an idiosyncrasy of Alsatian and is also found in some neighboring areas of Baden, Württemberg, and certain Swiss subdialects. The fronting /u/ > /y/ is significantly less general: it mainly appears in Alsace and Baden before clusters of two consonants of which the first is /n/ or /l/.208 However, historically the diffusion of the phenomenon was more important. In written sources from Alsace, Baden, and northwestern Switzerland the effect has been known since the last third of the thirteenth century. The See the discussion of the feature {G} in section .. On M, see Birnbaum (:–, :–, with examples for vowels corresponding to both MHG uo and u) and WG :. Erika Timm (personal communication) indicates that () no example is found in BB, () in Teh, we find umlaut-forms—expressed in that source via qibbuṣ vav—in words cognate with MHG hunt ‘dog,’ ruofen ‘(to) call,’ and a few others (see also Birnbaum :); () in PuV it is valid for forms related to MHG hunt, ruofen, uns ‘us,’ unser ‘our,’ and suochen ‘to seek’ (see also Timm :CL); () in both Mid and M, for ruofen, the verbal prefix um, and certain other words; () additional references in books in Ashkenazic manuscripts and printings in northern Italy during the second half of the sixteenth century. Note that in the above sources we find examples of the fronting for both MHG uo and u. DB includes, for example, בלויטfor MHG bluot ‘blood’ (see also Birnbaum :). Spelling and rhymes of certain Hebrew words in Tish imply the existence of the fronting in the Hebrew component of the vernacular language of its author, Elia Levita (Birnbaum :). In Mel, we find, among others, the following forms: ‘ הויןhen,’ ‘ טוינןto do,’ and ‘ רויפןto call’ (Fuks .:, , ), whose MHG equivalents are huon, tuonen, and ruofen, respectively. Two uncertain examples are also found in BZV (TG ). Weinreich (:) writes that numerous examples of spontaneous fronting of /u/ and /u:/ appear in Ashkenazic documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries whose geographic origin seems to be northern Hessen and the Rhineland south of Cologne. He provides no argument for his statement. The fronting of MHG uo also characterizes GH. Landau (:) relates this effect to the influence of similar processes in Low German. However, it is more likely that we are dealing with the same effect as the one observed in certain western early Ashkenazic sources (Birnbaum :). 207 See section .. This analysis is based on results obtained in Röll .:–, . 208 Only an incomplete synthetic picture appears in Žir –, BN , and WG :–. All details, both modern and historical, can be found in Beyer (see : and : for /u:/, and :, for contexts where /u/ is fronted). All information about the historical development of this phenomenon in German dialects that appears in this paragraph is taken from that source: Alsace and Baden (:–), East Franconia (:), Swabia and Tyrol (:), Hessen and Thuringia (:), UpS and Silesian (:). 206
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The German component
umlaut-forms for non-lengthened MHG u disappear from there by . Medieval examples were common in the whole Alemannic area. We also find multiple cases in documents written in the Würzburg chancellery (East Franconia, fourteenth century, mainly for MHG uo), Tyrol, Hessen, and Thuringia. In Upper Saxony and Silesia medieval examples are mainly limited to MHG u. The above information shows a good correlation between Alsatian German and modern AlsY: the influence of the former on the latter is without question. The same German dialect directly influenced M209 and maybe DB too. Other early western sources could be influenced by other dialects, primarily EF and Swabian: note that for MHG u the known examples of fronting often appear in the same context as in the German of Alsace and Baden: before /n/ followed by a consonant. Yet, we cannot exclude the possibility of dealing with a new phonetic phenomenon inspired by German phenomena strengthened and diffused internally to western Ashkenazic communities. Common origins of the fronting found in the Yiddish varieties from the contiguous area covering Czech, southern Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian territories are of little doubt. These dialects could not have been directly influenced by German dialects for which the fronting is known from historical sources. The only exception is Silesian. However, evidence about fronting in this dialect is particularly small: we know about üns / ins ‘us’ (instead of uns) only.210 More likely, here we are dealing with an internal Yiddish innovation. For both Weinreich (:) and Birnbaum (:) there is no doubt about the western Ashkenazic origin of this innovation. Yet, their ideas remain rather problematic. The odds are high that fronting in a number of modern Yiddish dialects in Central and Eastern Europe and a similar process observable in certain western sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries result from processes that are, at least partly, independent. No source from that period indicates the existence of mass migration from southwestern German-speaking territories that could bring the new phenomenon to Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. As noted by Joffe (:), for the author from western Poland of a poem published during the s the whole process [u(:)] > [y(:)] > [i(:)] was already clearly completed. During the same period, in the southeastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth a process was already completed that necessarily took place after the fronting [u:] > [y:], namely the raising [o:] > [u:] for another phoneme.211 However, examples of fronting [u(:)] > [y(:)] are exceptional in sources from Bohemia and Poland compiled during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.212 Moreover, in Prague the fronting is not seen even during the first half of the eighteenth century.213 After the Cossacks’ wars of the mid-seventeenth century, no Jewish migration from Bohemia-Moravia eastward is known. The main direction of migrations was from Eastern Europe to Central Europe (as well as to the northern part of Western Europe).214 All the above data imply that the fronting, most likely, came from Poland 209 This source comes from Alsace: it has a number of typical Low Alemannic peculiarities (TG , , Dreeßen :). 210 See Mitzka :. 211 See onomastic data presented in section .. (footnote of chapter ). As noted by Trost (:–), the fact that the shift [o:] > [u:] was universal in PolY but only partial in CzY testifies to the fact that it was due to a wave coming from Poland to the Czech lands. Since this shift and the fronting are related, this information can be seen as an indirect argument for stating that the fronting came from PolY to CzY and not vice versa. 212 Among them: one in H, one (doubtful) in PB, and several in MM (see Birnbaum :–, :–). 213 See Schnitzler :– (primarily based on a prayer book published in Prague in ). 214 During the seventeenth century, one phoneme of the Ukrainian language (the one related to Polish ó) underwent a series of changes [u] > [y] > [i]. This process started in Podolia (Shevelov :–). Since these changes are similar to those that appeared in UkrY (that is, in the same territory) during approximately the same period and since numerous Jews fled from Ukraine westward after the Cossacks’ wars, we cannot exclude the possibility that the fronting in Yiddish dialects of Central and Eastern Europe actually started in (western) Ukraine before spreading to Poland and from there to the Czech lands. Moreover, it is worth noting that contrary to all other vocalic changes that characterized the development of PolY and CzY (see their description in sections ... and ..), the fronting is the only one that affected both the short and the long vowels of the same quality. All other changes concerned either long
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Stressed vowels
to the Czech lands and not vice versa. Also note that—as appears from the above discussion of the feature {V}—the general phonetic context in which the fronting took place in that area and the one from southwestern provinces was significantly different. Firstly, in Yiddish dialects of Slavic countries, the fronting of the short /u/ is spontaneous, while in early western Ashkenazic sources it seems to be common (exactly as in German dialects) only in certain contexts. Secondly, in CzY, PolY, and UkrY the fronting was completed when the unrounding of former rounded MHG vowels was already finished. As a result of this unrounding, the /y/-quality disappeared from the vocalic chart. The fact that this place became vacant could be favorable for the fronting in question. Yet, all early western Ashkenazic sources with cases of fronting are written by authors for whom the unrounding was not yet valid.215 The above arguments show that processes known in western German-speaking provinces and northern Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot be responsible for the development known in Slavic countries as a whole. Western Ashkenazic influence could be only one factor among those that contributed to the inception of fronting in PolY, UkrY, and CzY. Another decisive factor was certainly local. The word yid ‘Jew’ is pan-Yiddish {V}.216 The spellings used in PuV ( )יוידand BZR ( )ֻיודpoint to the form *yüd, that is, the one from which yid resulted after unrounding corresponding to feature {V}. Yet, spellings of this kind are rather exceptional. In a large majority of Ashkenazic sources from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, we find יודfor the singular and יודןfor the plural.217 These spellings should not be interpreted as evidence of the pronunciation **yud(n), similar to NHG Jude(n). Indeed, in the same sources words cognate to StY yidene ‘Jewess,’ yidish ‘Jewish,’ and yidl ‘small Jew’ are also spelled with a simple vav. Yet, for all these words all German dialects have no forms with [u], but only with either [y] or [i]; compare MHG jüdinne, jüdisch, and jüdelîn/jüdel.218 As a result, for words meaning ‘Jew’ and ‘Jews’ we can actually also deal with *yüd or *yid, the spelling with vav being traditional.219 Both jude and jüde appear in MHG. The first of them leads to NHG Jude and is found in numerous modern German dialects including Bavarian, Swabian, HA, RhF, and ECG. The second leads to jüd(e) or its unrounded form jid(e) known in EF (Heilig :), LA, and Ripuarian. It represents also the ultimate source for modern Yiddish forms. It appears that at some moment a phonetic variant based on jüd(e) started to be considered the “correct” pronunciation of this semantically extremely important word. As a result, gradually it spread to all Ashkenazic communities.220 vowels or diphthongs. On the other hand, Ukrainian has had no quantitative contrast since the Middle Ages and UkrY also lost it at some stage. As a result, for UkrY a genesis of the fronting of one quality (independently of the quantity) was easier than for PolY or CzY. 215 For these authors, the fronting was not necessarily provoking a merger with rounded vowels /y/ and /y:/. Indeed, as clearly shown by Beyer (.:, –), in Alemannic, the unrounding /y(:)/ > /i(:)/ is more recent than the change of /u(:)/. The absence of merger is explained by the fact that the passage from a back vowel /u(:)/ to the front vowel /y(:)/ is not direct: it goes through the intermediate stage of the central vowel /ʉ (:)/. When this intermediate stage was reached, the original front rounded vowel /y(:)/ was still unchanged. The unrounding of the last one allowed the process of fronting to achieve its final position /y(:)/ without merging between these vowels. 216 It appears, for example, in StY, DuY, AlsY (Weill :), and SwY. 217 For example, this is the case for CC, Mel, ShB, DB, HiP, BZV, BZP, ShY; see also EYT and Dubnov :, . 218 See examples from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in TS , , , ; same in HEZ and EYT . 219 It could be (at least partly) influenced by the Hebrew spelling of the word ‘Jew’ (( )ְיהּוִדיBirnbaum :). 220 Weinreich (WG :) considers Ripuarian to be the most plausible source. Yet, we have no evidence that the form with the umlaut was used in the Middle Ages by Rhenish Jews who lived south of Cologne. Moreover, as will be discussed in section ., Ripuarian is the one of the High German dialects whose differences in comparison to the idioms of early Ashkenazic sources and modern Yiddish varieties are the most striking. In this context, any influence of Ripuarian sounds particularly implausible.
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The German component
In UG and partly in EF too, we find cases of /u/ instead of MHG/NHG ü, especially in words in which this vowel was present in Old German before /kk/ or /gg/. This effect is particularly common in Bavarian and Swabian (Žir –). In modern Yiddish varieties, it is limited only to a few words such as StY muk ‘gnat’ (MHG mücke, NHG Mücke), rukn ‘back’ (MHG rücke and rucke; NHG Rücken), and kushn ‘to kiss’ (MHG and NHG küssen). Globally speaking, this effect cannot be observed {V}. Moreover, for the first and the second of the above words, the geography of the /u/forms in German dialects is larger than just UG: rucken also appears in BohWB and ruk(t)e and g(e) rukt are variants (along with rik) in ObSWB, while muk(e)—often in the meaning ‘fly’ rather than ‘gnat’—is also found in EF and RF. In CzY, we find /u/ in the first and the third of the above examples (Schnitzler :, ), while the exact form of the second one is uncertain. Friedrich (EGY) gives both muk (without umlaut) and mik (with traces of umlaut). In early Ashkenazic sources, NH mentions muk and rukn, undoubted umlaut-forms of the noun meaning ‘back’ appear in R and HiP, while the use of the letter וin Be, Mel, ShB, Ox, FF, and Kr for the same word leaves the pronunciation ambiguous because the same Hebrew letter is commonly used for German ü also.221 StY fuftsik ‘fifty’ and fuftsn ‘fifteen’ also have /u/ instead of ü (compare MHG vünfzec and vünfzehen, NHG Fünfzig and Fünfzehn). However, such forms are widespread in HG dialects.222 As a result, the presence of fuftsig ‘fifty’ in SwY and FrY, “ffùffczik” (*fuftsik) and “fùffczehen” (*fuftsēn) in H, *fuftsēn in NH and fuftsē in FrY223 along with modern EY forms with /u/ and no /n/ should not be taken for traces of “PROTO-YIDDISH.” In principle, in this specific case different Yiddish varieties could be influenced by different German dialects. Table . shows the characteristics of the umlaut /a/ > /e/ before /š/ {V}. TABLE . Umlaut before /š/ Change /a/ > /e/ before /š/ waschen – waschen – vashn ‘to wash’
Žir , MV , BA , TG , Timm and Gehlen :
No
EY, CzY, EGY, DuY (partly)
SAB (one word), Be (partly), BZV, BZP; Kr and ZuR (partly),224 PB, NH
Bav, EF, Boh, ECG
Yes
SWY, DuY (partly)
R, Le, R, M,225 Be (partly), BB, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, LBr, H, HiP, BZR; Kr and ZuR (partly), Br, Pr, GH
WCG, Alem
If we take into account the geography of this phenomenon in German dialects, the distribution in modern Yiddish varieties offers no surprises. Significantly less predictable are reflexes in early Ashkenazic sources. Here we observe the presence of /e/-forms in documents that according to numerous other features are well correlated with EF (such as BB, PuV, Mel, and ShB), as well as in certain texts published in Prague and Kraków. This information demonstrates the linguistic diffusion from West to East, internal to Jewish communities and/or the influence of western texts. Especially in Be and Ox, much rarer in other sources. Mel also includes ‘ מוקgnat.’ Forms with /u/ and no /n/ appear, for example, in RhWB, PfWB, BaWB, UpSWB, ElsWB, SchwäbWB, and Heilig :. 223 See Fleischer : (SwY), Copeland and Süsskind :, (FrY), and Röll : (H). 224 In Be and Kr, /a/ is present in the verb meaning ‘to wash,’ but /e/ in the form cognate with NHG Asche / StY ash ‘ash.’ In ZuR, the situation is inversed (Neuberg :–; personal communication with Simon Neuberg). The only word from this group present in SAB is שא ְ ‘ ַטbag, pouch’ (compare NHG Tasche, StY tash). 225 Compare Dreeßen :. 221 222
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Stressed vowels
AlsY, DuY, and EY cognates of NHG Apfel ‘apple’ all have an initial /e/: epfel (Zivy :), epel, and epl, respectively {V}. For at least two reasons, this feature cannot be taken as an argument about the common origins of these dialects. Firstly, we find forms with an initial “ä” or “e” in all of Alemannic (that could influence AlsY), as well as in ECG (the potential source for EY). Secondly, if an /e/-form appears in NH, the form ap(e)l is present in Br and characterizes CzY (Schnitzler :) and EGY, and consequently, /e/ is not pan-Yiddish. The initial /a/ characterizes WCG, Bavarian, and EF; compare [* אפֿפילapfəl] in Mel. The situation with the word meaning ‘glove’ is somewhat similar {V}. Both StY hentshke and SwY hendshik have /e/ that contrasts /a/ of NHG Handschuh (though MHG has both hantschuoch and hentschuoch).226 However, /e/ dominates in Alemannic, EF, and WCG, and is used, along with /a/, in ECG. Moreover, “hantschen” and “hanschkeß” appear in EGY, with /a/ as in Bavarian and (partly) ECG. The word menkherlay ‘a number of,’ cognate with NHG mancherlei, appears, always with /e/ in the first syllable, in Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Br, as well as in modern SWY and EGY, but is unknown in EY (TG ) {V}. In German dialects, /e/ is found only in Swabian. This dialect could influence the Jewish pronunciation in Western Europe that gradually spread out due to internal Yiddish diffusion. On the other hand, the root vowel /e/ in the word for ‘fir tree’ (compare StY ten to NHG Tanne) seems to result from a relatively recent innovation in Central or Eastern Europe: /e/ is also found in NH and GH (Landau :), but /a/-forms are present in R, Le, SD, H, and Pr {V}.227 Several German dialects have umlaut diphthongs contrasting with MHG ou and NHG au {V} (Table .). TABLE . Umlaut diphthongs gelouben – glauben – gleybn ‘to believe’
houbet, höubet – Haupt ‘head’ – hoypt ‘chief, main’
Žir , BN
Žir , MV , TG –, Schnitzler :
au, ou, a:
DuY
CC, Le, R, Be, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, H, HiP, BZV, BZP, GH
UG
ej, aj, eu, øu
EY
R
CG, EF
au, ou
EY
R, ShB (partly), H (partly), HiP
UG, PG (partly)
ej, aj, eu, øu
CzY
M, H, SD, Teh, MM, Mel (main), ShB (partly), DB, H (partly), BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Br, Pr, PB
WCG (main), ECG, EF
Table . shows that StY hoypt is likely to be rather recent: early sources from Poland show the presence of a form whose vowel derives from a German umlaut diphthong. 226 We find forms הענטשוךand הענשיך, both with /e/, in a document printed in Kraków in (Perles :) and NH, respectively. The final -ke in EY form results from a Slavonization; compare Polish rękawiczka ‘glove’ (Geller :). 227 In various German dialects, umlaut forms appear only in the adjective tännen (MHG tennîn, tennen) ‘made of fir wood.’ The existence of this adjective could influence the emergence of /e/ in EY. Also note /e/ present in Mel in tenenholts (exactly as in EY) ‘fir wood.’
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The German component
CzY (Schnitzler :) and StY elter ‘(old) age’ has an umlaut that is not present in MHG alter, NHG Alter {V}, but appears in numerous early Ashkenazic sources.228 This sound can be due to, firstly, the influence of German dialects (that also have either e (or ä) such as WCG or Bavarian) and, secondly, internal Yiddish diffusion. It is worth noting, however, that in CC and Le the initial sound is /a/, most likely under the influence of Alemannic.229 The situation with StY krel ‘coral’ (MHG koral(le), NHG Koralle) is somewhat similar. We find /e/-forms for ‘coral’ or ‘beads’ not only in EY (compare StY kreln ‘beads’) and EGY but also in Le and Mel (both have korel), MM, and NH. In German dialects, they are known in MF and RF (partly), as well as in diminutive Alemannic forms. Yet, the variant k(o)ral appears in R and Aug (TS ), koralen in HiP, as well as in numerous German dialects. The initial (stressed) vowel of StY entfern ‘to answer’ also contrasts with that present in MHG antwürten and NHG antworten {V}. Unknown in modern German dialects, it appears before the mid-fifteenth century in Alemannic, as well as in some RF, EF, Bohemian, and Silesian sources, most likely unstressed.230 Yet, the initial /e/ is standard in Jewish sources from the Middle Ages.231 Most likely, for Jews its development is to a great extent due to the diffusion internal to Ashkenazic communities. The root vowel of StY kest and SwY (Fleischer :) kesht ‘chestnut’ also looks as if it were resulting from umlaut applied to the root vowel of NHG Kastanie {V}. This impression disappears if we take into account the MHG forms: keste and keste(ne). Actually, the form with /a/ represents an innovation in German.232 StY honik ‘honey’ (MHG honec, NHG Honig) contrasts with CzY henik {V}. Schnitzler (:) relates the latter form to the Bavarian phonetic variant Hönig. It is worth noting, however, that hönig was also found, as a variant, in Bohemian German. Note also *hönik ( )הויניקin ShB and HiP, but *honik ( )הוניקin CC. Among forms related to MHG niht ‘not’ (NHG nicht, StY nit), one finds nüt in Alemannic (DWB). These forms are unknown in modern Yiddish varieties but they appear in both Le and R {V}. The initial vowel in the word meaning ‘work’ received an umlaut in several German dialects due to the presence of the diphthong ei in the second syllable (Table .) {V}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG ar(e)beit Initial vowel in ar(e)beit – Arbeit – arbet ‘work’
Žir , MV , TG , Schnitzler :
a
EY
Le, Be, Ox, NH
CF, PG, Alem (partly), Bav, ECG
e
CzY
CC, R, R, H, Fl, SD, MM, Mel, ShB, DB, H, HiP, BZV, Kr, Br, Pr, GH
Hes, Alem (partly), EF, Boh
It can be seen that early Ashkenazic sources from Central and Eastern Europe regularly have /e/. The presence of /a/ in modern EY (and NH) could result from two factors: the influence of ECG (and, less likely, Bavarian) and/or the lowering /e/ > /a/ before /r/. This process of lowering of various vowels before /r/ affected a large number of EY words {V}:
228 229 230 231 232
Examples: R, R, BB, PuV, MM, Mel, Ox, HiP, Kr, and Pr (compare TS –). The sound /a/ appears in both ElsWB and SchweizId and /o/ in SchwäbWB. See Stopp :–; compare “entwerten” in Silesian of Poznań (Anders :) It is present in CC, R, R, Le, Be, and all Jewish sources compiled after . On this word see TS , with /e/-references in R, MM, Aug, SD, PuV, BM, ZuR, and NH.
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Stressed vowels
• NHG e ~ StY a. Examples: barg ‘mountain’ (MHG bërc, NHG Berg), fartik ‘ready’ (MHG vertec, NHG fertig), har ‘lord’ (MHG hërre, NHG Herr), harb ‘severe, difficult’ (MHG hërwe, NHG herb), harberik ‘haven, shelter’ (MHG herbërge, NHG Herberge), harbst ‘autumn’ (MHG herbst, NHG Herbst), harts ‘heart’ (MHG hërz(e), NHG Herz), shparber ‘sparrow hawk’ (MHG sperwære, NHG Sperber), suffix -varg (MHG wërk, NHG Werk) • NHG ü or i ~ StY e. Examples: fertl ‘quarter’ (MHG viertel, NHG Viertel), shtern ‘forehead’ (MHG stirn(e), NHG Stirn), terk ‘Turk’ (NHG Türke), verdik ‘dignified’ (MHG wirdec, NHG würdig) • NHG ü or i ~ StY a (implying two consecutive shifts /i/ > /e/ > /a/). Examples: barsht ‘brush’ (MHG bürste, NHG Bürste), bar ‘pear’ (MHG bir(e), NHG Birne), dar ‘thin, skinny’ (MHG/ NHG dürre ‘dry, lean’), darfn ‘to require’ (MHG/NHG dürfen), gartl ‘belt’ (MHG gürtel, NHG Gürtel), karsh ‘cherry’ (MHG kirse, NHG Kirsche) • NHG u ~ StY o. Examples: dorsht ‘thirst’ (MHG durst, NHG Durst), forkht ‘fear’ (MHG vorhte, NHG Furcht), gorgl ‘throat’ (MHG gurgel(e), NHG Gurgel), nor ‘only’ (MHG nûr, NHG nur), vorem ‘worm’ (MHG wurm, NHG Wurm), vortsl ‘root’ (MHG wurzel), NHG Wurzel). Similar examples are also found in modern AlsY, FrY, DuY, CzY, and EGY.233 In early Ashkenazic sources, they are found in R, Ox, H, and Pr (in all of them, the lowering is mainly observed for /i/ and /u/), HiP (one example of /u/ > /o/, Brünnel :XXIV), BZV, BZP, Kr, and especially ShL (Neuberg :), NH,234 and GH (Landau :, ) where we also find a number of examples of the shift /e/ > /a/. In German dialects, the lowering—mainly for /i/ and /u/, rarely for /e/—is known in CG, EF, and Bohemian.235 These dialects certainly could have influenced Yiddish. However, they cannot be responsible for this phenomenon as a whole. Firstly, as noted in WG :, the exact distribution of specific words in CG and StY is not identical. Secondly, if in LitY (on which the above StY forms are based), examples of lowering are limited to certain words, the shifts /ir/ > /er/ and /er/ > /ar/ are regular in CzY, EGY, PolY, and UkrY, while /ur/ > /or/ is regular in CzY, EGY, and PolY. Moreover, in CzY, PolY, and UkrY, the same shifts occurred not only before /r/ but also before /x/.236 The completion of these shifts is more recent than the end of the period when EY still could have been under the influence of any specific German dialect. The male given name Hirsh (LitY) / Hersh (CzY, PolY) / (H)ersh (UkrY) ‘deer’ can serve as an example to illustrate the chronology of lowering.237 The earliest references to the /e/-form appear during the second half of the sixteenth century in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, namely in Brest and its surrounding. Yet, in Polish documents from Red Ruthenia we still regularly find the /i/-forms (Hirsz, Irsz) even during the first half of the seventeenth century. In the old cemetery of Prague, undoubted /e/-forms—such as הרשand —הערשלhave appeared since the mid-seventeenth century.238 In sources from Ukraine, forms with /e/ are dominant in the seventeenth and the following centuries though during the first half of the eighteenth century one also regularly finds forms with /i/. Sources: AlsY: Zivy :, and Zuckerman :); FrY: Beranek :–; CzY: Schnitzler :, , , , and Beranek :; see also TG and examples of “a” in place of NHG er in Yiddish of Hamburg (Rée :). For EGY, Friedrich () gives, in addition to numerous forms for which the lowering is observed in StY, other examples including kerbes ‘pumpkin’ (StY kirbes) and korts ‘short’ (StY kurts). 234 Certain examples from NH appear in Weinreich :–. Forms given in NH are generally correlated with those from LitY, but in some cases we also find those similar to forms of PolY whose LitY equivalents have no lowering. Examples: ‘ ֶהי ְרשdeer’ (PolY hersh, LitY hirsh) and korts ‘short’ (as in PolY, but contrasting to LitY kurts). 235 Weinreich (:) speaks about WCG only. For more accurate German dialectal geography see MV , –. 236 237 About CzY see Schnitzler :. See Beider :. 238 The most common form הירשis phonetically ambiguous: it can correspond to both Hirsh and Hersh (see footnote above). 233
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The German component
Several German words exhibit dialectal variations that look like forms with or without an umlaut, while actually they descend from different MHG ancestors. StY fregn ‘to ask’ is related to MHG vrëgen, while NHG fragen is related to MHG vrâgen (TG , ) {V}. In modern Yiddish varieties, the /e/-form is also known in CzY, only forms with /o:/ and /ou/ appear in SWY239 and DuY, while references to forms of both kinds exist for EGY. Early Ashkenazic sources are not homogeneous either. The sound /e/ appears in SD, DB, and Pr. Yet, CC, Le, R, Mel, ShB, and HiP to express the root vowel use only the letter vav or the diacritic sign qameṣ (implying the sound /o:/, /ɔ:/, or a diphthong starting with one of these vowels), while R, H, BZR, and BZP show both forms. These differences in Jewish pronunciation are related to those known from German dialectology. The /e/-forms appear in Bohemian and NB. They are also known as rare regional variants in Swabian, Swiss, and UpS. Yet, they are unknown in WCG, EF, and Alsatian. An additional example is shown in Table . {V}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG lâgel / lægel Root vowel in lâgel, lægel – Lagel ‘small cask’ – logl ‘skin (vessel)’
TS , DWB, Zivy :
o, a e
EY, SWY
Le, SD, Teh, MM (partly), NH
PG, Bav, Sil (all partly), LA, HA (main)
R, Be, MM (partly), Mel, ShB, Aug, Ox, H, HiP, Kr, Pr
WCG (main), Swab, Boh; Bav and Sil (both partly)
StY, EGY, and DuY geyn ‘to go’ is well correlated with MHG gên and NHG gehen {V}. However, several early Ashkenazic sources, namely Le, R, Be, and Fl use alef (instead of ayin or yod) for the root vowel. This fact implies that in the vernacular language(s) of their authors, this word descended not from MHG gên but from its variant gân. The latter form can also be deduced from rhymes present in CC (Weinreich a:). Forms related to MHG gên are found in numerous sources (examples: H, Teh, BZR, BZV, BZP, and Br). In Mel, ShB, and DB, we find references to both forms (spelled גיןand גון, respectively). In modern German dialects, forms derived from MHG gân are limited to Alemannic and are also known as rare variants in Bavarian (see also KA ).
.. Shortening and lengthening The passage from MHG to NHG is characterized by numerous cases of lengthening of formerly short vowels or shortening of long vowels. The global tendency was aimed at obtaining a situation in which open syllables have only long vowels, while closed syllables only short vowels. However, the number of exceptions is large and their distribution reveals important dialectal peculiarities. Shortening of MHG â and ô before f and ʒ in originally polysyllabic words characterizes Bavarian (MV ). We observe this phenomenon neither in modern Yiddish varieties nor in early Ashkenazic sources {V}.240 Numerous cases of shortening before f, ʒ , and ch are known in Hessian,
See Schnitzler : (CzY), GGA and Zuckerman : (SWY). For example, in words cognate with StY shtrofn ‘to punish’ (MHG strâfen, NHG strafen) and lozn ‘to let’ (MHG lâʒ en, NHG lassen), the root vowel is spelled ( וwhich corresponds to rounded MHG â) in R, Le, R, Be, Ox, H, and Pr. Also note the form “schloofen” ‘to sleep’ that Friedrich gives for EGY (compare StY shlofn, MHG slâfen, NHG schlafen). 239 240
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Stressed vowels
Thuringian, and UpS (Žir ). This effect is alien to Yiddish {V}.241 In a number of words, MHG â was shortened before /m/ in CG and Bavarian (MV ), while in Proto-EY this vowel was clearly long. One example is StY yomern ‘to lament’ (MHG (j)âmern, NHG jammern ‘to wail, to moan’) {V}.242 The spelling used in several early Ashkenazic sources also excludes the possibility of this word in the sources in question having short /a/ in the root. Among them are BZR, BZP (TG – ), SD, ShB, and DB; the case of EGY is similar. Long /o:/ is present in modern AlsY (Zuckerman :). As a result, all the above Jewish sources, early and modern, share the reflexes that are peculiar to Alemannic, EF, and maybe Bohemian.243 Shortening of MHG â and ô before a cluster of two consonants is regular in ECG and one part of EF; sometimes it is found in WCG too.244 EY klafter ‘fathom’ (MHG klâfter, NHG Klafter), with short /a/, is most likely due to ECG {V}. On the other hand, in several early Ashkenazic sources—for example, CC and Mel—the root vowel is expressed via וtestifying about their link with dialects in which the vowel remained long, namely UG or WCG. StY verb ziftsn ‘to sigh’ (MHG siufzen, NHG seufzen) deserves a special mention {V}. The NHG diphthong represents the regular reflex of MHG iu (phonetically /y:/). As a result, the shortening before two consonants in the form ancestral for that of StY necessarily took place in an area where MHG iu either never became a diphthong (Ripuarian, LA and HA) or got diphthongized later than the process of shortening. In early Ashkenazic sources, a monophthong—either /i/ or /y/ dominates.245 Consequently, here we face an example of diffusion, internal to Jewish communities, of a form with shortened vowel. The original German donor dialect remains uncertain. Globally speaking, shortening of MHG î, û, and iu before a cluster formed by a fricative consonant and /t/ or /ts/ characterizes LA and HA as a general rule; much smaller is the number of cases of similar shortening in Low Hessian and Thuringian (MV ). Taking into account this fact of German dialectal geography and the history of Jewish settlement in medieval German-speaking provinces, western Alemannic dialects appear in a favorite position.246 It is worth noting that this hypothesis concerns this specific word only: the global rule formulated above for German dialects in question is not applicable for other EY words {V}.247 In Central German (except for Ripuarian) and partly in EF too, one observes several specific contexts that favored shortening of long vowels issued from former MHG diphthongs ie, uo, and üe (MV ). Only a part of them have parallels in PolY.248 The best correlation is obtained before two consonants: compare StY likht ‘light’ (MHG lieht, NHG Licht). Shortening before lenes stops is particularly common in RF and Silesian. In PolY, we observe a good correlation with this rule before /g/ {V}. Among examples of words with short /i/ in PolY are those whose StY equivalents
Among words influenced by this effect in the German dialects in question are those cognate with StY shlofn ‘to sleep’ (see previous footnote), groys ‘big’ (MHG grôʒ , NHG groß), hoykh ‘high’ (MHG hôch, NHG hoch), and bukh ‘book’ (MHG buoch, NHG Buch). 242 The short vowel appears in SchlesWB, ObSWB, BaWB, RhWB, and PfWB. 243 BohWB mentions just MHG jâmer ‘wailing.’ More recent Bohemian forms are unknown. 244 See Žir –, MV , Heilig :. 245 It is present not only in Le and R in which no diphthongization took place generally speaking (see the table for {V}) but also in R, Be, Fl, BB, Teh, PuV, MM, DB, BZR, BZV, BZP, and NH. Both forms with diphthong and monophthong appear in Aug. Numerous other sources use ambiguous spelling (TG , TS ). 246 Weinreich (WG :, :)—faithful to his idea of Yiddish originating from the area that corresponds to WCG—points to the existence of a monophthongal form in Low Hessian. However, the reference he used is marginal for WCG: only forms with diphthongs appear in RhWB and PfWB. Yet, ElsWB shows sifze(n) and süfze(n) as the most widespread in Alsace. 247 Compare, for example, StY faykht ‘damp’ and laykht ‘easy, light’ (not **fikht, **likht), cognate with MHG viuhte and lîht(e), NHG Feuchte and leichte, respectively. 248 All PolY forms mentioned in this section are taken from BN –. 241
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The German component
are: genug ‘enough’ (MHG genuoc, NHG genug),249 klug ‘clever’ (MHG kluoc, NHG klug), krign ‘to quarrel’ (MHG and NHG kriegen ‘to lead a war’), krug ‘jug’ (MHG kruoc, NHG Krug), and shpigl250 ‘mirror’ (MHG spiegel, NHG Spiegel). If the existence of some influence of Silesian is quite plausible here, we cannot consider the whole set to result from a borrowing from that ECG subdialect of ready-made forms with short vowels. Indeed, in several words mentioned above, PolY has variants with /i:/ too, implying that the source for this shortening is rather recent and internal to EY. Moreover, as said above, in corresponding German dialects, the shortening occurred not only before /g/ but before other lenes stops too, while examples before /b/ and /d/ are not attested in PolY.251 In a number of other cases of shortening, we observe only a partial correlation between German dialectal phenomena and EY. This correlation could be fortuitous, with the shortening resulting from processes internal to EY. For example, in CG, we find numerous examples of shortening of various long vowels before /t/. This is the case for the PolY equivalents of StY blut ‘blood’ (MHG bluot, NHG Blut), gut ‘good’ (MHG guot, NHG gut), muter ‘mother’ (MHG muoter, NHG Mutter). Yet, a long vowel appears in the PolY equivalents of StY futer ‘feed, fodder’ (MHG vuoter, NHG Futter), bloter ‘blister’ (MHG blâtere, NHG Blatter), and noter ‘colubrid’ (MHG nâter, NHG Natter). The two last examples are, nevertheless, at least partly correlated with ECG: we find blotter/blutter and no(a)tter/nutter in SchlesWB, pluter and nuter in ObSWB {V}.252 In CG, the shortening of /u:/ and /i:/ also occurred before fricative fortes consonants issued from the HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT. All known PolY cognates with certain examples provided in MV for German dialects have a long vowel: fīs (MHG vuoʒ , NHG Fuß), bīkh ‘book’ (MHG buoch, NHG Buch), and zīkhn (MHG suochen, NHG suchen). On the other hand, a short vowel in the root of comparative forms of adjectives whose basic form has either a diphthong or a long vowel—compare StY hekher ‘higher (than)’ from hoykh ‘high,’ klener from kleyn ‘small,’ greser from groys ‘big,’ and shener from sheyn ‘beautiful’253—cannot be internal to Yiddish: this shortening is widespread in various High German dialects {V}.254 Lengthening of stressed vowels in open syllables has been known in CG dialects from the end of the twelfth century. During the next two centuries, it also reached EF, the northern part of Swabian, LA, and Bavarian. In the same area, vowels present in numerous monosyllabic words ending in only one consonant also became long. This occurred by analogy to inflected forms in which the vowel was present in open syllables. No lengthening occurred in southern Swabian and HA, while the process was only partial in Ripuarian.255 We observe lengthening in both EY and WY,256 and, consequently, the southern strip of Alemannic and Ripuarian were of no influence to Yiddish {V}. One exception was general to High German (and as a result, to Yiddish too): vowels were never lengthened before “ch” and “sch” whose OHG ancestors were hh and sc /sk/ respectively; compare StY makhn ‘to make’ (OHG mahhôn, MHG/NHG machen) and vashn ‘to wash’ (OHG wascan, MHG/NHG waschen).257 249 250 251 252
ECG.
In this section, long NHG vowels whose length cannot be automatically deduced from the spelling are underlined. In CzY (Beranek :) and EGY this word also has a short /i/. Compare PolY brīder ‘brother’ (MHG bruoder, NHG Bruder, StY bruder). That is, we do not find in these words the short /a/ that would be a clear indicator of their early shortening in
Similar forms are found in CzY (Schnitzler :). See MV – and Žir . Compare greser in DB, BZV and BZP, shener in BZP. 255 See MV –, PMG –, Žir –. 256 Among StY examples of lengthening by analogy are tog ‘day’ (MHG tac, NHG Tag), gloz ‘glass’ (MHG glas), rod ‘wheel’ (MHG rat, NHG Rad), and hoyf ‘court’ (MHG hof ). 257 Weinreich (WG :) explains the non-lengthening in Yiddish of vowels in open syllables before /š/ and /x/ via the OHG hh and sc, respectively. This explanation can be easily misinterpreted by his readers as if these Yiddish features were directly due to the fact that in OHG the syllable was closed. This fact actually belongs to the phonological history of German. It is pre-historical for Yiddish. 253 254
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Stressed vowels
For “ch” derived from OHG h, the lengthening could occur. An example is StY bokh ‘river’ (OHG bah, MHG bach, NHG Bach ‘brook’), with /o/ present already in NH {V}. For this word, lengthened forms are also known in ECG (compare ObSWB), EF, and Swabian, while only forms with a short /a/ appear in dialectal dictionaries of WCG and Bavarian. A number of other exceptions are regional. In many words, short vowels remained short before /m/ or /t/. This phenomenon is regular only for WCG and LA. For other dialects, it depends on the word. We find a short vowel in the PolY equivalents of StY himl ‘sky’ (MHG himel, NHG Himmel), kamer ‘chamber’ (MHG kamer(e), NHG Kammer), kumen ‘to come’ (MHG kumen, NHG kommen), zumer ‘summer’ (MHG sumer, NHG Sommer), frum ‘pious’ (MHG vrum, NHG fromm),258 hamer ‘hammer’ (MHG hamer, NHG Hammer), and nemen ‘to take’ (MHG nëmen, NHG nehmen). For the first five words, the short vowel is standard for all of High German. For ‘hammer,’ a short vowel is found in ECG, PG, Alsatian, Swiss, and Bavarian, forms with a long one are known (at least as variants) in EF, Swabian, and CF {V}. The last word, nemen, is a rare example of the absence of correlation between ECG and EY. Indeed, the vowel is long in ECG (MV ), exactly as in literary NHG, the word is unknown in MF, the vowel is short in Bavarian, Alsatian, Swiss, and PG, while EF and Swabian have both kinds of forms {V}. It is unclear whether the PolY vowel is due to one of the above dialects or results from a late shortening, internal to Yiddish. Note that the short vowel is also found in EGY, DuY, and various WY dialects including FrY.259 Long vowels before /t/ are rare in German dialects. The same is true for EY, compare glat ‘smooth’ (MHG glat, NHG glatt), got ‘God’ (MHG got, NHG Gott), and puter ‘butter’ (MHG buter, NHG Butter). Yet, we find a long vowel in the PolY equivalents of StY shotn ‘shadow’ (MHG schade, NHG Schatten), foter ‘father’ (MHG vater, NHG Vater; NH foter) and zotl ‘saddle’ (MHG satel, NHG Sattel, saatel/sootel in ObSWB, NH zotil).260 Here the development is similar to that of ECG, while UG, EF, and PG show only short vowels {V}. In a number of other words outside of the contexts discussed above, PolY has a short vowel, while literary NHG has a long one. StY examples are: fidl ‘fiddle, violin’ (MHG videl, NHG Fiedel), grob ‘rude’ (MHG grop, NHG grob), and honik ‘honey’ (MHG honec, NHG Honig). In German dialects, we find a short vowel for the first of them in WCG, UpS, EF, Alsatian, and partly in Swabian {V}. For the second one, the vowel is short in CG (including Silesian), Alsatian, and Swiss, while long vowels and diphthongs dominate in Swabian, Bavarian, and EF {V}. For ‘honey,’ a long vowel dominates in all of High German. Consequently, we are likely to be dealing with a process internal to EY {V}. In a number of other cases, the situation is opposite: literary NHG has a short vowel, while PolY has a long one or a diphthong. StY examples are: eyl ‘cubit’ (MHG elle, NHG Elle), shtot ‘town,’ ‘place in a synagogue’ (MHG stat, NHG Stadt ‘town,’ Statt ‘place’), keyt ‘chain’ (MHG keten(e), NHG Kette), gortn ‘garden’ (MHG garte, NHG Garten), hoyker ‘hump’ (MHG hocker, NHG Höcker), the neuter definite article dos (MHG daʒ , NHG das), and vos ‘what’ (MHG waʒ , NHG 258 The vowel /u/ of StY frum, kumen, and zumer contrasts with NHG /o/. It does not allow us, however, to make a connection with any specific German dialects: forms with /u/ (present in MHG) dominate various High German dialects. They are regular in UG and EF and commonly found in both WCG and ECG (see, for example, ObSWB). The same remark is valid for StY trukn ‘dry’ (MHG trucken, NHG trocken). In modern times, the root vowel is /u/ in UG and /o/ in CG. However, until the seventeenth century, /u/ was dominant in CG too (MV –). StY, EGY (Friedrich :), and SwY (Fleischer :) fun ‘from’ (MHG / NHG von; CzY fün, see Ehrlich :) shares /u/ with ECG, the main part of RF, Alemannic, and EF (compare TG ). Weinreich (WG :) suggests the following example of the “fusion” in EY of features that originated in different German dialects. According to him, kumen has /u/ of UG origin, while the same vowel in fun comes from WCG. The information given in this footnote shows that his argument is inappropriate. The /u/ in both words was found, for example, in ECG. 259 See Friedrich :, BA , Beranek :, Fleischer :. 260 The CzY word also has a long vowel here (Beranek :).
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The German component
was). However, if we open German dialectal dictionaries, it appears that for the first of these words only BaWB mentions a short vowel, while either a long vowel or a diphthong characterize WCG, UpS, EF, and Swabian {V}. As a result, it is no surprise that /e:/ is present in early Ashkenazic sources including BB, MM, Aug, NH (TS ), and ShB,261 and a diphthong appears in EGY. For ‘place (in a synagogue),’ the long vowel is present as a variant in DuY (Beem :). It is typical of ECG, while in WCG, and Alemannic it is short {V}.262 For ‘chain,’ a long vowel is found in ECG (see ObSWB), while WCG and UG have a short one {V}.263 For ‘garden,’ the long vowel— also present in NH, CzY (Schnitzler :), and EGY—dominates in CG (including Silesian) and Alsatian, while the short one appears in Bavarian, Swiss, and Swabian {V}. We rarely find forms cognate with StY hoyker in German dialectal dictionaries. Among the exceptions are PfWB and SchwäbWB, in both of which the vowel is short, while in SchlesWB one finds a compound word with the first part “hooker,” implying a long vowel that is correlated with the diphthong present in EY, CzY, and DuY {V}.264 Forms with /o:/ in words cognate with StY (and NH) dos and vos appear in Silesian and UpS and are unknown in other dialects (KA ). These forms are also known in EGY (compare TG ) {V}.
.. Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts In sections ..–, various vocalic phenomena were depicted individually. This approach is appropriate for the specific aims of the above discussion, namely a comparison between reflexes present in modern Yiddish varieties, early Ashkenazic sources, and German dialects. Yet, for every linguistic community at any period vowels constitute a system whose elements interact. Because of these links, several shifts occurring in a spoken idiom can represent elements in a chain of changes. For the history of the genesis of Yiddish dialects, it is important to identify these chains, evaluate a relative (and, if possible, an absolute) chronology of its elements. A number of major shifts are pan-Yiddish or, at least, concern a large number of Yiddish varieties. They are applicable to a large majority of words from the German component. Table . lists these shifts roughly according to their chronology. The third column indicates the proto-vowels according to the terminology introduced by Weinreich. In this respect, for every MHG vowel present in the second column, the proto-vowel corresponding to it is taken from section . (Table .). The fourth column lists those of the modern Yiddish varieties whose ancestors were affected by the process in question. All these shifts have been discussed in the previous sections of this chapter: the fifth column indicates the corresponding features.265 These discussions provided information for the last column.
261 In many other documents the ambiguity of the spelling does not allow us to identify whether the vowel is short or long. 262 The word meaning ‘town’ appears with /o:/ in EGY (compare Weinreich :), /o(:)/ in NH, and /u(:)/ in CzY (Ehrlich :). For this word, /o:/ is more widespread in German dialects than for ‘place.’ For example, such forms appear as variants in SchwabWB and RhWB where only /a/ is present in words meaning ‘place.’ 263 The long vowel is also valid for CzY (Beranek :). Weinreich (WG :) discusses the existence in PolY of both short and long vowels before /t/ and insists on a specifically Jewish character of this distribution. However, as shown in this section, the correlation with ECG is striking. 264 Katz (a:) took this word as evidence of the general unity of modern Yiddish varieties. However, we have no information that would confirm that in dialects other than EY, CzY (Ehrlich :), and DuY the stressed vowel is either a diphthong or, at least, a long vowel, while DuY appears in many respects closer to EY than to SWY (see section ..). 265 They are covered in the following sections: .. (shift #), .. (shift #), and .. (all others).
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts #
Vocalic shifts
Proto-vowels concerned
Yiddish varieties
Feature
Centuries (for Jews)
Merging of MHG æ, ä, and ë in open syllables266
E
All
{V}
before th
Monophthongization of MHG ie and uo
I and U
All
{V}
th–th 267
Raising [a:] > [ɔ:] for MHG â
A
All
{V}
th–th
Lengthening of MHG a, ä, ë, e, ö, i, ü, o, u in open syllables and certain other contexts
A , E , E , I , O , U
All
{V}
th–th 268
Diphthongization and later changes of MHG û, î, and iu
U and I
All
{V}
a
[u:] > [ou] for MHG û [i:] > [ej] for MHG î [y:] > [øy] for MHG iu
th–th
b
[ou] > [ɔu] for MHG û [ej] > [εj] for MHG î
th–th
c
[ɔu] > [au] for MHG û [εj] > [aj] for MHG î
Changes of MHG diphthongs ou and ei
a
[ou] > [ɔu] for MHG ou [ej] > [εj] for MHG ei
b
[ɔu] > [au] for MHG ou [εj] > [aj] for MHG ei
before th
c
[au] > [a:] for MHG ou [aj] > [a:] for MHG ei
th–th 269
O and E
Non-EY
{V}
th–th
(continued )
As discussed in section .., the merging took place after the raising of MHG ae/ä to the [ε]-quality. As discussed in section .., this shift started in Central German during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was absent from the early Ashkenazic sources from the Upper German area before the sixteenth century. 268 As discussed in section .., it was during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries that the lengthening covered all High German dialects except for Ripuarian, HA, and southern Swabian; Jewish speech clearly followed the general tendency of the everyday idioms of the Christian majority. 269 As discussed in section .., the first stage of this change (lowering of the first elements of the diphthongs) started during the thirteenth century in German dialects, while the last stage (monophthongization to [a:]) became stabilized in Yiddish dialects other than EY during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only. The fact that various sources from Western and Central Europe compiled during the sixteenth century all have examples of [a:] implies that in these idioms at least shift #b was already completed. Moreover, the only known early Ashkenazic source written in Latin characters, H (compiled circa ) uses either “a” or “ay” for MHG ei. 266 267
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The German component
TABLE .
Continued
Unrounding of MHG ü, üe, iu, ö, œ, öu
parts of I, I, I, E, E, E
All
{V}
th–th
Merging of non-lengthened MHG æ, ä, ë, and e
E
All
{V}
th 270
Raising of the lengthened MHG a
A
{V}
a
NonWY
[a:] > [ɔ:]
before th
b
[ɔ:] > [o:]
before midth 271
Diphthongization of MHG ê and the lengthened e ([e:] > [ej]), ô and the lengthened o ([o:] > [ou])
E, and O,
All
Raising [ε:] > [e:] and [ɔ:] > [o:]
E and A
All
{V}, {V}
mid-th 272
before midth 273
A number of shifts listed in Table . are related to each other. Figure . shows these links. The changes that are not pan-Yiddish are indicated via square brackets [] (if they are unknown in EY) and curly brackets {} (if they do not affect WY). The directions of arrows indicate the relative chronology. For example, shift # took place after shift # and before shifts # and #a. Shift # is clearly more recent than shift # (and, therefore, than # also), but its relative chronology in comparison to all other shifts cannot be formally determined. Shifts #, #, and # are independent of others and, as a result, their relative chronology is unclear. 1 2 3
8 4
[6a]
5a
[6b] {9a}
7 5b
[6c]
11274 10
{9b}
5c
FIGURE . Relative chronology of basic shifts As discussed in section .., this chronology is valid at least for western Ashkenazic sources. As discussed in section .., the chronology suggested for shift #b is valid at least for the Czech lands. In the same area, the placement of shift #a to the period before can be postulated taking into account H. The reasons for the connection of this document to the Czech lands are exposed in section ... In that source, we find numerous cases of “a” for MHG ei and ou. This means that for its author circa shift #c to the monophthong [a:] was well under way. Since these monophthongal reflexes never raised to [ɔ:] in CzY, we must conclude that at that period the raising from [a:] to [ɔ:] for A was already completed. 272 As discussed in section .., this chronology is valid at least for the Slavic countries. The opinion of Weinreich about the possibility of E and O becoming diphthongs before in both WY and EY has no basis. 273 For the Czech lands and EY, this change is either identical to shift #b or precedes it. See also the next footnote. 274 For shift #, formally speaking this relative chronology (after shift #) is necessarily true for all Yiddish varieties in which no merging between A and O ever took place, that is, among others, CzY and EY. However, even for varieties with the merging in question, this relative chronology is highly plausible because the raising of A corresponds to the same global phenomenon as the raising of E. The latter was clearly more recent than shift # since no merging between E and E is known in Yiddish varieties. (As it will be discussed in section ., the only exception 270 271
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Stressed vowels
Figure . ignores historical information in our possession. It is based only on formal criteria including the premise that the phonetic values of various vowels before and after the changes in question indeed conformed to the information present in Table .. For example, exactly the same chain of changes [ej] > [εj] > [aj] is conjectured for both MHG ei (shifts #a and #b) and MHG î (shifts #b and c). Since these two phonemes did not merge and the reflex for MHG ei continued its development by a monophthongization to [a:] (shift #c), it is logical to consider that the same changes inside of this chain took place for MHG ei earlier than for MHG î. This kind of premise cannot be taken for granted. It is just a hypothesis that appears to be the simplest one because it does not need any supplementary hypothesis. However, if one introduces additional ad hoc hypotheses, then the basis for the above relative chronology disappears. For example, one can imagine that the actual phonetic reflexes inside of the chains in question for MHG ei and î were not the same: in one of them, the second element of the diphthong was not the glide [j] but some other vowel and this way the merging was avoided. Actually, two premises of this kind were used when constructing the table above. The first corresponds to the explicit consideration in Figure . of the irrelevance of shifts # (dealing with MHG ei and ou) for the history of EY. Indeed, in this case, without introducing an additional hypothesis, one cannot explain the absence of merging between the reflexes of MHG ei/ou and those of MHG î/û after the diphthongization of the latter (shift #a). A conjecture ad hoc implying (slightly) different phonetic values of MHG ei/ou and those realized after the diphthongization of MHG î and û is purely theoretical and allows the avoidance of other ad hoc constructions in explaining the development of the EY vocalism.275 The second premise of a close kind corresponds to the nonintroduction in Figure . of any constraint for the relative chronology of shifts # (monophthongization MHG ie and uo) and #a (the diphthongization of MHG î and û). Yet, if the monophthongization should give [i:] and [u:], while the reflexes of MHG î and û before their diphthongization were also [i:] and [u:], then to avoid a merging one would need to postulate shift #a to take place before shift #. Such a rule is not postulated in Figure . because we know from German historical phonology that in numerous Central German dialects the relative chronology was exactly opposite: the monophthongization took place centuries before the diphthongization, without any merging between the corresponding vowels. This fact implies that the exact reflexes in the two pairs were certainly not the same.276 Globally speaking, as follows from the discussion in sections ..–, at least the first five shifts (#– and #a) should be placed in the pre-history of Yiddish phonology. In both modern Yiddish and early Ashkenazic sources, one finds not a single trace of the distinction between MHG ä and ë. Diphthongs corresponding to MHG ie and uo are known only in a few of the oldest Ashkenazic sources coming from the area of Upper German. In all Yiddish varieties, the reflexes corresponding to MHG â have [o]- or [u]-qualities. The lengthening in open syllables and some other contexts also characterized the development of all Yiddish varieties. For that reason, in Weinreich’s scheme (Table .) the reflexes of proto-vowels E, O, I, and U (corresponding to original short MHG vowels e, i, o, and u that became lengthened) are identical to those of E, O, I, and U, respectively (that for Yiddish were certainly long from the very beginning because they correspond to MHG ê, ô, ie, and uo).277 In is AlsY, with a partial merging. However, this change is rather recent because we do not find it in SwY, to which AlsY is closely related.) The raising of both phonemes was symmetrical in the vocalic chart and therefore, most likely, simultaneous. It is for this reason, that both processes are placed together in Table . as a single shift #. Note also that this shift is necessarily more recent than shift #. 275 See details in section ... 276 For example, one can imagine [i:] and [u:] in one of these pairs and, [I:] and [u:], that is, more open reflexes, in the other one. 277 The difference exists only in the treatment of A and A, the proto-vowels corresponding to MHG â and lengthened a, respectively. Yet, as discussed in section .. (feature {V}), the same kind of difference is found in a number of High German dialects, with raising of MHG â and no raising (or a relatively smaller degree of raising) of MHG a.
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The German component
TABLE . MHG stressed monophthongs underlying Yiddish (Stage ) Front rounded
Front
Central
Back
[y] short ü; [y:] üe and lengthened ü;
[i] short i; [i:] ie and lengthened i;
[u] short u; [u:] uo and lengthened u;
[ø] short ö; [ø:] œ and lengthened ö.
[e] short e; [e:] ê and lengthened e;
[o] short o; [o:] ô and lengthened o;
[ε] short ë and ä; [ε:] æ, lengthened ë and ä.
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] â. [a] short a; [a:] lengthened a.
other words, the German component of Yiddish mainly inherited ready-made lengthened forms from its German donor. The Yiddish words whose ancestors had î or û in MHG generally have diphthongs. It is in PolY that one finds monophthongs [a:] and [o:], respectively, but their quality is different and, moreover, the historical documents show that both of them are fairly recent and result from former diphthongs.278 In principle, taking into consideration only the facts listed above (which deal exclusively with the German component) does not preclude the possibility that the monophthongization and the diphthongization could occur during the early Yiddish period when the German component could still be under the influence of phonetic shifts in the German dialects spoken by the Christian majority. The consideration of the Hebrew component, however, rules out this possibility at least for the monophthongization. Indeed, one can observe in the Hebrew component only marginal traces of the diphthongization of ḥ ireq or shureq/qibbuṣ, a phenomenon we would expect if the fusion of the vocalisms of the German and Hebrew components took place before the diphthongization of MHG î and û.279 On the contrary, the long Yiddish reflexes of ḥ ireq and shureq/qibbuṣ are identical to those of German vowels descending from MHG diphthongs ie and uo, respectively, which implies the monophthongization of these diphthongs already during the pre-Yiddish period. Taking into account these results and applying the five first shifts in Table . to the chart of MHG vowels (Table .), we can present the scheme in Table . of German monophthongs during the pre-Yiddish period. The remaining shifts listed in Table . all have major characteristics (chronological, geographic, or phonetic) according to which the behavior of Yiddish varieties was somewhat different from that of the High German dialects spoken by Christians. For example, during our discussion above in this chapter the following peculiarities of the Ashkenazic speech have been noted: • reflexes of MHG ei and ou in western communities during the sixteenth century (shift #); • absence of unrounding in western sources during the same period (shift #); • innovative character (in comparison to German dialects) of merging of short reflexes of MHG e, ë, ä, and æ (shift #); • innovative character of the total merging of reflexes of MHG â and the lengthened a in Slavic countries (shift #); • innovative elements concerning the diphthongization (shift #) and the raising of mid-open vowels (shift #). 278 279
See section ... Compare BN , . See examples of the diphthongization at the end of section ...
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . MHG stressed monophthongs underlying Yiddish (Stage ) Front rounded
Front
Central
Back
[y] short ü; [y:] üe and lengthened ü;
[i] short i; [i:] ie and lengthened i;
[u] short u; [u:] uo and lengthened u;
[ø] short ö; [ø:] œ and lengthened ö.
[e] short e, ë, and ä; [e:] ê and lengthened e;
[o] short o; [o:] ô and lengthened o;
[ε] –; [ε:] æ, lengthened ë and ä.
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] â. [a] short a; [a:] lengthened a.
TABLE . Stressed monophthongs underlying Yiddish (Stage ) Front
Central
Back
[i] I; [i:] I,
[u] U; [u:] U,
[e] E; [e:] E,
[o] O; [o:] O,
[ε] –; [ε:] E
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A [a] A; [a:] A
Shifts #a and #b deal with diphthongs only and, therefore, they provide no change for the above scheme. Shifts #– # took place after the fusion of the phonologies of the German and the Hebrew components of Ashkenazic tongue. For all of them, we also have examples from the Slavic component of EY.280 As follows from Figure ., shift # is independent of the others. Table . presents the vowel chart obtained by applying shift # to the chart of Table .. Important differences exist between various Yiddish varieties concerning the chronology of shift # (unrounding). No information available to us allows us to identify whether it occurred before or after shift #. Moreover, the relative chronology of these changes can be different for different Yiddish varieties. In any case, the vocalic chart valid once it was completed can be obtained from Table . (if shift # preceded shift #) or Table . (otherwise) by dropping the first column and adding its elements to the corresponding vowels of the second column. For example, [i] became the reflex valid not only for MHG i but also for MHG ü. If instead of using the names of MHG vowels, we use the signs suggested by Weinreich for Yiddish proto-vowels taking them from Table ., we obtain Table .. As discussed above, Table . takes into account the following basic Ashkenazic shifts among those enumerated in Table .: #, #, #, #, #a, #, and #. To introduce others, one necessarily needs to consider at least three major Yiddish subdivisions separately: EY, CzY, and WY. In all 280
See section ..
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The German component
schemes below, the subscript will not be used for I, E, O, and U proto-vowels anymore. For the history of Yiddish (as noted by Katz), there is no need to distinguish these Weinreich designations from the corresponding proto-vowels having the subscript . EY was not concerned by shifts #. As a result, if for this Yiddish variety we take into account the earliest of the remaining shifts, namely #b and #a, and add diphthongs to monophthongs appearing in Table ., we obtain the following chart: TABLE . Vocalic chart underlying EY Diphthongs in [-j]
[ej] E
[εj] I
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
( [e:] E; [e] E #
[o] O; [o:] O ) #
*#
*#/#b
[ε:] E; [ε] –
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A,
+#c
Diphthongs in [-u]
[ou] O
[ɔu] U +#c
[a] A; [a:] –
In the scheme outlined in Table ., the arrows show the tendencies for future phonetic shifts. For example, for the phoneme E, the phonetic realization was [e:] tending to become the diphthong [ej] thus merging with the phoneme E.281 Once all shifts in question were completed the resulting chart is as shown in Table .. TABLE . Vocalic chart of Proto-EY282 Diphthongs in [-j]
[ej] E, [aj] I
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
Diphthongs in [-u]
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e:] E; [e] E
[o] O; [o:] A,
[ou] O,
[a] A; [a:] –
[au] U
281 In contrast to previous schemes, in this and the following schemes of this section, long front vowels are listed (in the second column) before their short counterparts. This approach allows us to draw arrows showing tendencies of some of them to become diphthongs (that appear in the first column). 282 Herzog (:) suggests the reflex [øy] for O,, while Table . gives [ou]. Herzog admits that to have assumed [oj] rather than [øy] would have simplified the subsequent development significantly; but he adds that it would have required positing a more recent sub-regional fronting-rounding [oj] > [øy] in LitY, an unlikely sound change in the absence of a distinctive front rounding elsewhere in the vowel system. The above argument is respectable though it can also be turned against Herzog. Indeed, if one accepts his general idea, one would need to explain the shift [ou] > [øy] during a previous period, before EY split to LitY, PolY, and UkrY. This fronting-rounding would be problematic for exactly the same reason: the absence of fronting-rounding elsewhere in the vowel system. Moreover,
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Vowel chart underlying CzY (Stage ) Diphthongs in [-j]
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[ej] I
( [e:] E; [e] E #
[o] O; [o:] O ) #
[ou] U
+#b
*#
*#/#b
+#b
[εj] E
[ε:] E; [ε] –
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A,
[ɔu] O
+#b
Diphthongs in [-u]
+#b [a] A; [a:] –
TABLE . Vocalic chart underlying CzY (Stage ) Diphthongs in [-j]
[εj] I
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
( [e:] E; [e] E #
[o] O; [o:] O ) #
*#
*#/#b
[ε:] E; [ε] –
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A,
+#c [aj] E) #c
Diphthongs in [-u]
[ɔu] U +#c
[a] A; [a:] –
([au] O #c
In contrast to EY, CzY was affected by all basic shifts. If to monophthongs appearing in Table . we add diphthongs and take into account shift #a (that actually—as can be seen from Figure .— preceded #a), we obtain the chart in Table .. According to the rules of relative chronology exposed in Figure ., the next changes correspond to shifts #b and (after it) #b. Once they are completed, the vowel chart is as shown as Table ..
note that for PolY, we actually do not have a single hint as to the existence of the diphthong [øy] in any time period, while the acceptance of Herzog’s theoretical construction implies that this diphthong would appear in the vowel system of the ancestor of PolY and later disappear. As a result, a diphthong whose nucleus would not be a rounded vowel appears to be much simpler. Jacobs (:–) suggests additional arguments against [øy] posited by Herzog for Proto-EY.
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The German component TABLE . Vocalic chart underlying CzY (Stage ) Diphthongs in [-j]
[ej] E
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e:] E; [e] E
[o] O; [o:] A,
[ou] O
[a] A; [a:] E, O
[au] U
[aj] I
Diphthongs in [-u]
TABLE . Vocalic chart underlying WY (Stage ) Diphthongs in [-j]
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[ej] I
( [e:] E; [e] E #
[o] O; [o:] O ) #
[ou] U
+#b
*#
*#
+#b
[εj] E
[ε:] E; [ε] –
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A
[ɔu] O
+#b
Diphthongs in [-u]
+#b [a] A; [a:] A
TABLE . Vocalic chart underlying WY (Stage ) Diphthongs in [-j]
[εj] I
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
( [e:] E; [e] E #
[o] O; [o:] O ) #
*#
*#
[ε:] E; [ε] –
[ɔ] ; [ɔ:] A
+#c [aj] E) #c
Diphthongs in [-u]
[ɔu] U +#c
[a] A; [a:] A
([au] O #c
After the completion of all processes indicated in the Table . scheme by arrows, the vocalic chart given in Table . is obtained. It takes into account all the basic Ashkenazic shifts. Schemes for WY may be obtained in a similar way (Tables .–). It suffices just to delete in those given above for CzY any mention of shifts #a and #b.
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Vocalic chart underlying WY (Stage ) Diphthongs in [-j]
[ej] E [aj] I
Front vowels
Back and central vowels
Diphthongs in [-u]
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e:] E; [e] E
[o] O; [o:] A
[ou] O
[a] A; [a:] A, E, O
[au] U
Table . can explain the stressed vowels in most subdialects of modern WY. Yet, it ignores one regional peculiarity. In SwY, MHG öu gave the reflex [aj] merging with I.283 In all other Yiddish varieties MHG öu is considered to be a part of E: its realizations are similar to those of MHG ei, with [a:] in other WY subdialects. In other words, to obtain a scheme valid for SwY, two small adaptations should be made in Table .. In that subdialect of WY: • [aj] is valid for I and MHG öu; • [a:] is valid for A, E (without MHG öu), and O. In various German and Yiddish dialects characterized by unrounding, reflexes of MHG öu went through the following stages: [øy] > [ey] > ([ay] or [ej]) > [aj]. Most likely, for SwY the final stage in this chain was reached after the monophthongization [aj] > [a:] for MHG ei (shift #c), while for other WY subdialects and CzY, shift #c is more recent than the unrounding (shift #). This phenomenon indicates that properly speaking a scheme similar to that of Table . (that is, before the completion of shift #c) is a better candidate than Table . for describing the development of all modern WY subdialects. Another peculiarity comes from historical sources. The subdialect in which PuV was written in northern Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century also shows vocalic features that cannot be explained by Table .. Indeed, as shown by Timm and Gehlen (:), that poem contains thirty-five unequivocal rhymes of MHG ei (E) with MHG î (I); most likely, both were pronounced [aj]. This means for that idiom, Table . also fits better than Table .. Contrary to modern WY subdialects for which shift #c preceded shift #c, for the author of PuV the opposite relative chronology has been valid. In other words, to obtain a scheme underlying the dialect in question, the two following adjustments should be made in Table .: • [aj] is valid for I and E; • [a:] is valid for A and O. The peculiarities found in modern Switzerland and sixteenth-century Italy can also be interpreted in another way, without making ad hoc adjustments in Table .. Indeed, as will be discussed in section ., the genesis of Proto-WY stressed vocalism is likely to correspond to one specific region of Germany. It was relatively late: at that moment, Ashkenazic communities already existed in other regions of West and Central Europe. Gradually, this system became dominant over a large territory, due to migrations and other, much more subjective reasons. As a result, at some point this new system became prestigious and introduced a new pronunciation norm.284 The “anomalies” noted in the two previous paragraphs, in principle, could be related in some way to older vocalic systems.
283 This behavior is described in Guggenheim-Grünberg :. Manaster Ramer (:–) uses it as one of his main arguments against the historical unity of WY. 284 See Manaster Ramer :–, partly based on views by Beranek and M. Weinreich.
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The German component
Schemes presented in Tables .– will be used in chapter to describe the development of the stressed vocalism of different Yiddish varieties. They show similarities with several German dialects. These schemes are all characterized by the monophthongization of MHG ie and uo {V}. This fundamental criterion eliminates all High German dialects except for PG, EF, ECG, and Bohemian. PG is incompatible with any scheme because of its reflexes of MHG ei and ou {V} and its later diphthongization of MHG î and û {V}. ECG is eliminated because of its reflexes of MHG ô {V}. As a result, only two dialects, EF and Bohemian, remain in our list. The consideration of the realization of the lengthened MHG a {V} shows a correlation, on the one hand, between Bohemian and both CzY and EY, and, on the other hand, between EF and WY. The same links are also validated by a consideration of the merging between MHG â and ô {V} and the chronology of unrounding {V}. Moreover, Proto-EY cannot be related to EF because of the history of their respective reflexes of MHG ei and ou {V}.
.
UNSTRESSED VOWELS
In German and Yiddish, the realization of unstressed vowels is significantly more homogeneous than that of stressed vowels. In all German dialects, we observe a general tendency to reduce unstressed vowels to /ə/. First of all, this is valid phonetically with respect to unstressed root vowels in words with only one root. These cases are generally expressed in the orthography of literary NHG and that of MHG via the use of the letter “e.” Yet, the reduction of vowels present in prefixes or in the root of the second part of a compound word is rarely expressed in German spelling even if it is valid phonetically. Such rendition does not correspond to the written tradition. In Jewish sources, this German graphic tradition plays no role: words are mainly expressed following their pronunciation. As a result, in some cases a difference between Yiddish and German is purely graphic and not phonological. StY anander ‘each other’ (also in the expression mit anander ‘together’)285 (MHG/ NHG einander), vayrekh ‘incense’ (MHG wî(h)rouch, NHG Weihrauch), and borves ‘barefoot’ (MHG barvuoʒ , NHG barfuß) are examples that may illustrate this rule {U}. Their unstressed vowel in Yiddish286 contrasts to those present in MHG and NHG. However, if we open dictionaries of various High German dialects or consult DWB, we immediately see that not one of them mentions a diphthong in the prefix of einander (but only monophthongs like /a/ or /ə/) or in the second syllable of Weihrauch, while the unstressed vowel in the adjective meaning ‘barefoot’ is either pronounced /ə/ or not pronounced at all. The unstressed /i/ present in StY donershtik, FrY donshtik (Copeland and Süsskind :) and SwY (Fleischer :) dorshdig ‘Thursday’ (MHG donerstac, NHG Donnerstag) is not specifically Jewish either. It is also known in UpS, Swabian, LA, and CF {U}. The indefinite article ein characterizes both MHG and NHG. In Yiddish, we observe dialectal differences here: a in EY, e in WY, CzY, and EGY, and both forms in DuY {U}.287 Here the reduction is related to the unstressed position of the article in a sentence. The geographical distribution in modern Yiddish varieties is well correlated with that in German dialects where we find /a/ in Silesian, /aə/ in Bavarian, /e:/ in UpS, /e/ or /ə/ in WCG and Alemannic.
285 Similar forms are found in numerous early Ashkenazic sources (including R, Be, PuV, Mel, ShB, H, and Pr); the form appearing in DB and EGY is enander. 286 In StY, the unstressed vowel pronounced /ə/ is spelled via ayin that in the standardized YIVO transcription of Yiddish is expressed via “e.” 287 See BA . Early Ashkenazic sources (including Kr and Pr) generally use the spelling איין. In Br, along with numerous examples of אייןwe also find a few cases of e.
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Unstressed vowels
Another Yiddish feature that is quite general for German is apocope of the unstressed vowel -e. This phonetic phenomenon started in Bavarian in the thirteenth century, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it covered Alemannic, EF, Bohemian, and a large part of RF, and in the sixteenth century reached CF. Northern Hessian and ECG remained the only High German dialects that were not touched by this process.288 Examples of apocope are found in numerous early Ashkenazic sources.289 In modern times, this phenomenon is pan-Yiddish {U}. Nevertheless, its expression is not uniform in all contexts. One significant difference can be observed in declension of adjectives {U}. In a number of early sources from Western and Central Europe (including HiP, BZR, BZV, and BZP) as well as in modern AlsY and SwY one observes no apocope in “strong declension” and apocope in “weak declension.” For example, the expression ‘the beautiful daughter’ appears as טוכטרaשויןa דיאin one of the above early sources; compare StY di sheyne tokhter, NHG die schöne Tochter, both without apocope. This distinction—unknown in EY—is peculiar to UG, EF, and southern RF, but not to ECG and the main part of WCG.290 Elision of the vowel of the prefix ge- represents a feature typical of UG and EF, with a number of references also found for Bohemian and Silesian.291 In EY, it characterizes a set of words: compare StY glust ‘desire, lust’ (MHG gelust, NHG Gelust; no elision in Mel, ShB, Ox, H, HiP, Kr, and Pr), gram ‘rhyme’ (MHG (ge)rîm, NHG Gereime), gret ‘laundry’ (MHG geræte, NHG Gerät; no elision in Mel), gring ‘easy, not weighty’ (same form in NH; MHG (ge)ringe, NHG gering ‘small’; no elision in ShB, H, HiP, and Pr), grod ‘straight’ (EGY grōd, MHG/NHG gerade; no elision in HiP), and gvald ‘violence, force’ (MHG gewalt, NHG Gewalt) {U}.292 Note that in all these words except for the last example the root starts with a liquid consonant /r/ or /l/ (TS , ). Yet, in the aforementioned German dialects the contexts concerned are different: in Bohemian, before /l/ and /n/, in Silesian, before /l/, /m/, /n/, and /v/, in EF, before /š/, /z/, /v/, and /f/ (Heilig :). In EY, the elision before /v/ or /f/ can be observed only in kvater ‘person bringing the child in for circumcision’ (MHG gevater, NHG Gevatter ‘godfather’). This word belongs to a specific layer of items with a strong religious connotation. Its form without the vowel seems to be brought to Eastern Europe by migrants from the West; compare gvater in CzY and gfater in SWY, while forms used in DuY and the Yiddish varieties coterritorial to WCG include a reduced /ə/ (BA ) {U}. The situation with words like apteyk ‘pharmacy’ (MHG ap(o)têke, NHG Apotheke) and helfant ‘elephant’ (MHG hëlfant, elefant, NHG Elefant) is totally different {U}. In these, the unstressed vowel was not present in MHG. In literary NHG, it was restored under conscious efforts to obtain a “correct” form under the influence of Martin Luther (TS , ). Vowels of several verbal prefixes had a peculiar development in Jewish speech. Table . presents the information for the reflexes of MHG/NHG zer- {U}.
See Lindgren :, PMG , Žir –, and KA –. R (‘ ֵאירשטbeginning,’ MHG êrste), Le (‘ ְּגְש ְּפ ֶריךconversation,’ StY geshprekh, MHG gespræche, NHG Gespräch), Be (‘ עשash,’ StY ash, MHG asche, NHG Asche), and H (hind, exactly as in StY; MHG hinde, NHG Hinde) are among the oldest examples. In several sources—such as SAB and R—we cannot be sure about the presence or the absence of the final unstressed vowel because their final alef is ambiguous: it can correspond to a vowel or be silent. 290 See TG –, Žir –. 291 See details in Sauerbeck :–. 292 Almost all these words are listed in BN . In H, we find gweltiger ‘mighty’ (compare StY gvaldik, MHG geweltic, gewaltec, gewaltic, NHG gewaltig). The same source also mentions a hypercorrect form geros ‘big’ (compare StY groys, NHG groß), as well as b(e)derber ‘demon’ and bscherung ‘presentation of gifts’ (compare NHG Bederber ‘spoiler’ and Bescherung ‘opening of presents’). In the last two examples, the vowel disappears from the prefix cognate with MHG/NHG be- and StY ba-. 288 289
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The German component
TABLE . Reflexes of MHG zerzer – zer – tse zerteilen – zerteilen – tseteyln ‘to divide into pieces’
Stopp :, WG :, TG , , Landau :
tse
PolY, UkrY
tsu
LitY, DuY
CF, EF, Bav, Boh (all partly) M,293 CC, R, PuV (partly), Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP (main), Kr, Pr (main), PB, NH, GH
WCG, EF, Bav, Boh (all partly); ECG
tsur
Le, Fl, PuV (partly), HiP (rare), BZR, Pr (rare)
RF, Boh (both partly)
tser
R, Be
WCG, EF, Bav, Boh (all partly), Alem
The information presented in Table . allows for several observations. Firstly, the prefix tse- seen in dictionaries of StY differs from the proto-EY form tsu- known in early Ashkenazic sources from Central and Eastern Europe.294 Note that it is found in both ECG and Bohemian. Secondly, one can see that reflexes in early Ashkenazic sources are far from being uniform: they were influenced by different German dialects.295 Information about the reflexes of MHG/NHG verbal prefix ver- is given in Table . {U}. TABLE . Reflexes of MHG verver – ver – far verstên – verstehen – farshteyn ‘to understand’
Stopp :–, TG , TS –, Schnitzler :
far, var
EY, CzY
NH, HEZ, GH
–
fer, ver
DuY, SWY, EGY
SAB, R, Be (partly), BB, SD, Teh; PuV and Mel (both partly), DB, MM, H, HiP, BZR, BZP, Kr, Br, Pr, ZuR (partly)
WCG, Boh (main), UG, ECG (since the th century)
CC, R, Be (partly), Fl, PuV and Mel (both partly), ShB, Aug, Ox, ZuR (partly)
ECG (th–th centuries), Boh (rare)
Le (spelled )ֿבּור
–
for, vor vyr?
–
See Grünbaum :. Here StY follows PolY and UkrY whose vowel results either from a more recent influence of Bavarian or Bohemian, or from the reduction of the original unstressed tsu-. 295 Weinreich used the prefix tsu- as one of his (erroneous) arguments about the early fusion of various dialects in Yiddish (WG :). He pointed out that CC has this prefix that is “at home in ECG,” while CC cannot be from the region where Christians spoke ECG. However, as illustrated above in the table for {U}, this prefix is known in German well beyond ECG. 293 294
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Unstressed vowels
Here one can also observe that EY/CzY far- is rather recent: it is unknown until mid-seventeenth century. It clearly results from fer- whose equivalent is commonly seen in early Ashkenazic sources (where it is mainly spelled )ורand numerous German dialects. Yet, it can also be seen that numerous other early (mainly western) Jewish sources mention a different prefix spelled ֿבור. Its German equivalent is vor-. However, in German sources, vor- is unknown in areas coterritorial with these sources, while the possibility of any influence of ECG on the language of Jews in western Germanspeaking provinces should be dismissed for both historical and linguistic reasons. Most likely, here we are dealing not with a phonetic reality but rather a graphic tradition established in Jewish sources for the unstressed vowel present in this verbal prefix.296 A similar explanation may be valid for the spelling of the equivalent of the MHG/NHG verbal prefix ent-. In early Ashkenazic sources, we mainly find אנטa.297 Generally speaking, this is not to be interpreted as phonetically equivalent to modern EY ant-298 but rather as a conventional spelling for /ənt/. Note that one finds ent-, int-, ont-, and unt- in German texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (the three last forms being known in some Central German dialects only) but never ant- (Stopp :). In more recent times, ant- became widespread in ECG (TG ). This group of dialects could be important for the development of EY ant- {U}. Peculiar forms of two other StY prefixes: op- and on-,299 cognate with MHG / NHG ab- and an‐, respectively, seem also be related to the influence of ECG {U}.300 Note that EGY uses similar forms spelled “op” and “oen” (the latter most likely corresponds to /o:n/), while, for example, in R these prefixes appear both with /a/, NH has op- and on‐, while DuY and MM both have an- and not on-. Today, the initial /a/ in numerous local adverbs (also used as verbal prefixes) looks like an idiosyncrasy of Yiddish. Among the StY examples are: aher ‘here’ (NHG hierher), aheym ‘homeward’ (NHG anheim), ahin ‘there’ (NHG anhin), arayn ‘into’ (MHG her în, NHG herein), ariber ‘across’ (MHG her über, NHG herüber), arop ‘downward’ (MHG her abe, NHG herab), aroyf ‘up’ (MHG her ûf, NHG herauf ), aroys ‘out, forth’ (MHG her ûʒ , NHG heraus), arum ‘around’ (MHG her umb(e), NHG herum), and avek ‘away’ (MHG enwëc, NHG hinweg) {U}. From the above list, one can observe that cognate forms in NHG are different. Instead of StY a- they have either her-, or hin-, or an-. Disappearance of the initial /h/ from her- and hin- is common in various German dialects. In early NHG texts, the vowel that follows it also disappears in UG and EF, while in ECG it is mainly retained,301 exactly as in modern EY. In modern German dialects, forms with the initial /ə/ in place of NHG her- or hin- are common in PG and appear as variants in Alsatian: these two dialects could be responsible for forms with the initial /ə/ that are found in modern SwY erayn ‘into’ and erous ‘out.’302 The most widespread word from this group, avek ‘away,’ also known in DuY, can be related to /ə(n)vek/ found in PG, Alsatian, and Bavarian. In early Ashkenazic sources, various words from the above list, with initial unstressed vowel expressed via alef, are present in BZV (arayn, arab ‘downward,’ arum), BZP (avek, arous ‘out’), FF (arab, arous, avek), Kr (ariber), Br (arouf, arous), and NH (aher, arob ‘downward’), all related to Prague or Kraków.303 Yet, the earliest known Compare Neumann :. This form appears, for example, in R, R, Be, PuV, Ox, H, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, and Pr. The variant אנappears in CC (Ganz :). Yet, Le and sometimes R use אינט ִ , while the spelling ענטappears only in Fl. 298 The earliest references to definite ant- appear in NH where the spelling אנט ַ is used (Weinreich :). 299 Vowels appearing in prefixes are addressed in this section even in cases where they are stressed. 300 ObSWB gives o(o)n/un/aan and op, respectively. SchlesWB mentions ob/op for NHG ab-. No similar form appears in Bavarian, EF, PG, Swiss, and Alsatian. Variants with /o/ are also present in Swabian. However, any influence of Swabian on EY is significantly less plausible than that of ECG. 301 See Sauerbeck :–. 302 See Guggenheim-Grünberg :–. Also note that Chrysander (:) gives WY “erab” for NHG herab. 303 Such forms are also common in GH (Landau :). 296 297
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The German component
references come from western sources: HiP (arum), H (*aruf ‘up’), and M (several dozen references to words like *arab, *arayn, *arous, *arüber ‘across,’ and *avek).304 Yet, in the sources of that period, the rule was not general. For example, we also find the following references: hinvek, hinayn, hinouf, and hinab in BZR; aynvek and aynhaym in BZV; herab, herouf, herous, herum (much more numerous than arum), and hinvek in HiP; a(y)nrab/herab/henab, aynrous/herous/ henous, and a(y)nvek/hivek/hevek in FF; herous and herum in Pr; herous, hinouf, hinayn, and hinvekin Br. Globally speaking, the generalization of the initial /a/ seems to be an innovation that had taken place already in EY.
.
MORPHOLOGY AND GRAMMAR
German dialects and Yiddish varieties show significant differences in the use of the diminutive singular suffixes (Table .) {M}. TABLE . Diminutive singular suffixes Diminutive suffix lîn – lein, chen – l
Stopp :– , Žir –, KA , GGA , TS , –, , , , , Landau :
Be,305 H,306 MM, FF, Kr, Br, BM, NH
Bav, sePG, LA, Boh, sUpS, Sil
(e)l
EY, CzY
le
SWY
li
–
R
HA (main), swSwab
khe (n)
EGY, DuY
SAB, R, H, HEZ, GH
CF, PG (main), Hes, Th, nUpS
EF, LA, nwHA, Swab (main)
All High German dialects also have -lein, with variants -lin and -len. They are also present in numerous early Ashkenazic sources, for example, regular לייןin Mel, DB, and BZP, ליןin HiP, and לןin PuV, both ליןand לןin BZR, all three aforementioned forms in ShB. Contrary to suffixes mentioned in Table ., their use does not shed light on the question of links between Yiddish varieties and German dialects. An analysis of Jewish given names provides us with several important details concerning the history of the use of diminutive suffixes by Ashkenazic Jews.307 The suffix -(e)l, commonly used by German Christians in Bavaria and Austria from the twelfth century onward, frequently appears in Jewish hypocoristic forms of the same area from the fourteenth century onward. However, until the second half of the fifteenth century it was less common there than -l(e)in.308 In the Czech lands, 304 The language of that source is clearly related to WY: it includes numerous cases of /a:/ for MHG a lengthened in open syllables (EY or CzY would have /o:/) (personal communication with Erika Timm). 305 In that source, according to the analysis by Röll (.:) one finds: one example with -(e)l and three cases of -lin/len. On the other hand, the idea about the presence of the German diminutive suffix-li* in the form לאמליא ‘(small) blade’ is doubtful: this word is of French origin (TS –). 306 307 Compare mümel, a diminutive of ‘aunt.’ See details in Beider :–. 308 For example, in the Hebrew-language lists of Jewish female victims from Nürnberg, hypocorisms in -lein / -lin constitute twenty-eight percent of (total of ) and forty percent of (total of ). Yet, only one doubtful example with -(e)l is known out of and no name with this suffix out of . In Christian sources from Vienna (–), names of forty-four percent of men and forty-six percent of fifty-five women end in -lein, while those ending in -l cover one percent of men and nine percent of women. Yet, the situation changes dramatically in Christian documents from Wiener Neustadt (–): among the names of men, twenty-seven percent end in -l and only eight in -lein, while among the names of sixty-eight women, thirty-five percent in -l and three percent in -lin.
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Morphology and grammar
the suffix -(e)l has been commonly used by both German Christians and Jews since the Middle Ages: numerous examples are known dating from the fourteenth century. Table . shows the statistics of the presence of various diminutive suffixes in female given names appearing in tombsone inscriptions of the old Jewish cemetery of Prague:309 TABLE . Suffixes in female given names in Prague Century
Total persons
Percentage by suffix ‐(e)l
‐(e)le
-ush, -ish, -she
‐ke
th
th
th
Table . shows that during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the suffix -(e)l was the most common, the proportion of names with -(e)le was gradually growing, while the role of all other suffixes (mainly of Slavic origin) was marginal. The dynamics of the use of various diminutive suffixes in female given names in tombstone inscriptions of Frankfurt is illustrated in Table ..310 TABLE . Suffixes in female given names in Frankfurt Century
Total persons
Percentage by suffix ‐lin, -le(i)n
‐(e)le
‐(e)l
‐khen
‐khe
th
th
th
th–th
This can be seen for the Jewish community of Frankfurt,-le becomes frequently used only during the eighteenth century, while from the second half of the fourteenth century through the seventeenth century the most commonly used hypocoristic element was -lin / -le(i)n, unknown in Prague. During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the proportion of names with the suffix -khe(n) equivalent to Central German -che(n) (pronounced [çe(n)]) remained fairly stable (– percent), though gradually the variant -khe became more popular than -khen. On the other hand, the suffix -(e)l, typical of EY and CzY, has always been marginal in Frankfurt.
309
Calculations are based on Hock .
310
Calculations are based on Horovitz .
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The German component
Tables . and . show the presence of important differences in the use of diminutive suffixes that existed between the communities of Prague and Frankfurt, during the relevant periods the most populous in Central and Western Europe, respectively. These statistics may serve to illustrate general tendencies. However, their numerical results cannot be considered as reliable for estimating the relative frequency of use of various diminutive suffixes in common nouns because of the existence of two important peculiarities applicable to female names but not to common nouns. Firstly, throughout the history of Yiddish female names there was a tendency, particularly strong in Slavic countries, to end them in a vowel.311 This was influenced by the fact that feminine nouns in Slavic languages and Hebrew mainly end in a vowel. This tendency (irrelevant for Yiddish common nouns) could be responsible, at least partly, for the growing number of names in -le in Prague.312 Secondly, the actual suffix present in certain names is not -le, but -ele. It corresponds to the second degree of diminutive, a phenomenon common to all of UG.313 The frequency of its use in female names is higher than in common nouns: for the latter, it is rarely present in written sources, being limited to colloquial expressions. Among modern Yiddish dialects, EY and CzY are characterized by the existence of diminutives of two degrees: -l for the first one and -ele for the second {M}. No data is available to confirm or to negate the existence of -ele in Bohemian German.314 A consideration of the female given names in the Hebrew-language engagement and marriage deeds from Amsterdam (–),315 with the total of , persons, shows the following percentages by diminutive suffix: twenty-two for -le and twelve for -khe. The popularity of other suffixes are significantly smaller: -l (fifteen persons) and -ke (of Slavic or Low German origin, five persons). This information shows that during the period in question Jews from Amsterdam were fairly close to those from the central part of western Germany: the data for Frankfurt are similar. Table . presents the distribution of diminutive suffixes in the female given names of the funeral inscriptions from Altona (near Hamburg).316 TABLE . Suffixes in female given names in Altona Century
Total persons
Percentage by suffix ‐khe
‐khen
-l
‐le
th
th
See Beider :. Note also that German Christians in sixteenth-century Prague used as diminutive suffixes not only -(e)l, but also -le(Skála :). 313 This was already pointed out by Birnbaum (:). Indeed, numerous references to two degrees of diminutives can be found in dictionaries of UG dialects. For example, for Mann ‘man,’ BaWB gives the following two series: () Mannl, Mandl, and Männle, and () Mannel, Mandel, and Männele. SchwäbWB includes () Männle and Mendle, () Mandele and Mendele. ElsWB cites () Manl(e) and () Manele. One can see that the following two opinions by Weinreich are erroneous: (a) about the functional difference between the two suffixes being limited to Yiddish (WG :); (b) about Yiddish having a unique combination of “Bavarian” suffix -l and “Swabian” -le (WG :). 314 NH includes one of the earliest occurrences of -ele (Weinreich :). About -ele in CzY see Beranek :. 315 Calculations are based on extracts from the archival data made by Jits van Straten that he shared with the author of this book. For the whole period in question the percentages for various suffixes remained approximately the same. 316 Calculations are based on Grunwald . 311 312
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Morphology and grammar
From these statistics, one can see that in this community forms with the suffix -l (typical of CzY and EY) were, on the one hand, significantly more common than those from -le, peculiar to SWY (and Yiddish in eighteenth-century Amsterdam), and, on the other hand, slightly less frequently used than names with the suffix -khe(n). For the last element, of Central German origin, the proportion of names having it is quite similar to that in Frankfurt and with the same tendency of the variant -khe to become more common than -khen. One of the most striking peculiarities of modern Yiddish varieties is the diminutive plural suffix -lekh found in both EY and SWY {M}.317 In modern German dialects, the use of its equivalent, -lech, is limited only to several islets inside of EF, southeastern PG, and eastern Thuringian (Žir ). Yet, earlier, it was much more common: this suffix (also spelled -lich and -lach) is often present in written sources of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries in EF, Swabian, and Bohemian, and more rarely in Bavarian and LA.318 Jews borrowed it from these dialects and as a result it appears in numerous early Ashkenazic sources.319 We cannot be sure that its presence in both EY and WY is due to the same source. In principle, their donor German dialects could be independent: Bohemian for EY and EF (and/or Swabian) for WY. SWY knoblikh ‘garlic’ and EGY “Knoploch” are well correlated with various German dialectal phonetic forms related to NHG Knoblauch. Yet, the form used in EY and CzY is knobl (BA ) {M}. Here the disappearance of the final sounds may be due to a hypercorrection: this ending was falsely interpreted as the diminutive plural suffix giving rise to a “singular” knobl (TS ). It is unclear whether this change was internal to Jews, or influenced by a similar phenomenon that took place in German dialects of Moravia, Austria, and Swabia.320 StY includes a large number of nouns, with no equivalent in NHG (or NHG correlates being more recent and independent of the Yiddish ones), in which the suffixes -ung, -nish, or -keyt (compare NHG -ung, -nis, -keit, respectively) or verbal prefixes ba- or far- (cognate with NHG be- and ver-) were added to the root {M}. Numerous words of this group are due to the tradition of biblical translations internal to Jewish communities. Many of them appear already in R and during the following centuries spread out from West to East.321 They are common in MM and other biblical glossaries, translations or paraphrases. R also includes forms that, on the one hand, are unusual to German, and, on the other hand, are directly related to StY forms ending in-edik. In these, the original suffix is pleonastic because it is composed of two German elements having the same role -end and-ig (StY -ik) (TS –).
GGA gives [liå] for SWY. Beranek (:) cites [(ə)ləx] for FrY. The most detailed analysis of this Yiddish suffix appears in TS –. 318 This geography appears in Stopp :. It is based on detailed analysis complementary to those on which previous opinions are based: MK about Swabian and EF, Žir about the common presence in the preachings by Berthold of Regensburg (thirteenth century), in the area of NB. 319 Examples: R (suffix /lext/), BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Aug, HiP, Br, and BM (TS –). Yet, GH uses the suffix -erkher, and, more rarely, -kher (Landau :). This feature is typical of Hessian (Žir ). 320 The presence of the form knofel in these three areas is mentioned in TS (without references). SchwäbWB lists Knobel and Knofel as rare regional variants. 321 See details in TS –, –. On the development of the German suffix -keit and StY -keyt see also Eggers :–. Details he provides do not enable us to see any link to Bavarian (contrary to Mieses : and the opinion of Eggers himself). Moreover, the common presence of this suffix both in R (an early Ashkenazic source that was clearly not compiled in the area of Bavarian, see section ..) and medieval Alemannic (Doerfert :) refute the existence of any particular relationship between this suffix and Bavarian. On -keit in the Silesian of medieval Poznań see Anders :. StY -keyt is based on the pronunciation of UkrY, while both LitY and PolY have -kayt (compare Jacobs :). 317
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The German component
Verbs ending in -ezen are typical of Bavarian. This fact explains the presence of verbs in -ets(e)n in the Yiddish of Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia (BA ). Contrary to the opinion of several authors, the pattern of using the infix -ets- is not present in EY: the forms in -etsn are exceptional.322 A detailed comparison of the grammatical features of Yiddish varieties requires a separate study and is outside of the scope of this book. Here only a few features will be taken into consideration. The absence of the preterite represents an important feature of grammar common to both EY and WY {M}. In German dialects, the preterite totally disappeared in Alemannic, while only a few relict forms remain in Bavarian, EF, Bohemian, a large part of PG, and southern Hessian.323 For Christians, the first traces of this phenomenon appear in the mid-fifteenth century. Circa in UG texts in more than fifty percent of occurrences, the preterite is substituted by the perfect and at the end of the same century in Bavaria, Switzerland, and Alsace the preterite covers less than one third of references.324 These changes in German dialects affected the language spoken by coterritorial Jews as well. For example, preterite forms are common in numerous early Ashkenazic sources including BZR, BZV, BZP (Chang :), Mel, ShB, and DB. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the preterite gradually disappears from written Yiddish sources in Bohemia and Poland. At the end of the same century the same process ends in Western Germany (Chang :). For WY, this disappearance is directly related to the influence of southwestern German dialects (EF, Alemannic, and southern RF). For EY, the most plausible source of influence seems to be Bohemian.325 Note that the preterite was retained in ECG (including Silesian). German forms of the verb ‘to have’ (MHG/NHG haben, StY hobn) are distinctly regional {M} (Žir –). In literary NHG, the present tense forms are: habe, hast, hat; haben, habt, haben. Taking into account apocope and the /o/-reflex for lengthened MHG a that both characterize EY, one can say that globally speaking the StY forms—hob, host, hot; hobn, hot, hobn—are quite close to those of NHG. However, forms present in numerous High German dialectal dictionaries are distinctly different from those of NHG and StY: • • • • •
Swiss (Žir ): hä:, hescht, het; häid (all three plural forms); SchwäbWB: hab/hob, ha(o)scht/hoscht/hescht, hat/hot/het; hewe, hewet, hewe; ElsWB: ha:/han, hesch, het/hat; han/hon/hen (all three plural forms); PfWB: han/hun/hab/häb, hascht/hosch(t), hat/hot; han/hun/hen (all three plural forms); Western Thuringian (Žir ): hu:n, häst, hä:t; hun, hån, hun.
Nevertheless, ObSWB (hawe/hap, hast/hust/host, hat/ho(o)t/hut; ham/han/hon, ha(p)t, ham/han/hon) and, to a lesser extent, BaWB (hab, habst, habt in singular) show forms quite similar to those of NHG. This is no surprise since in numerous aspects literary NHG is based on UpS. This factor shows an additional correlation between EY and ECG. Also note that forms known for EGY (Friedrich :), CzY (Schnitzler :), and DuY326—hob, host, hot; hob(e)n, hot, hob(e)n—are 322 Eggers :– (following Mieses :) mentions StY genetsn ‘to yawn’ (cognate with NHG gähnen), bleketsn ‘to chant unintelligibly’ (NHG blöken), and palmetsn ‘to embalm.’ Actually, at the very least, the last verb is irrelevant to this context. It appears as palmesn in StY and palmizn in Galicia (BN ). The verb is present in BM and ZuR (TS ). Its etymon is MHG balmesen, a variant form that arose after the metathesis in the original MHG balsemen (BN ). 323 324 See Žir –, Lindgren :. See Lindgren :, . 325 Weinreich uses the loss of the preterite in EY as an illustration of his concept of the fusion of various German dialects found in the German component of Yiddish. He considers this feature to be purely UG, while a few lexical elements of EY (including brengen ‘to bring’) are declared by him to be typical of CG (WG :). From the information provided in this section about the preterite and the discussion of brengen {V} in section .., it can be seen that his argument is inappropriate. 326 For DuY, see Beem : (infinitive hoben and first singular hob), (second singular host), (third singular hot), (first plural hoben), and (first plural hoben).
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Morphology and grammar
equivalent to those of StY. Yet, in SwY and early Jewish texts we find other forms. In records taken by Guggenheim-Grünberg (:) immediately after World War II in Switzerland, the following words are present: hab (first singular), hosh (second singular), and hen (third plural). As can be seen from the above list of German dialectal forms, all three of these words are found in PG only. In early sources analyzed by Röll, only Be, H, Pr, and Kr include forms similar to those of StY.327 However, these documents also make reference to alternate variants.328 Remaining sources employ another form in the first singular: hon (R, Fl, and Ox)329 or han (R and Le). Today such forms are peculiar to LA, HA, EF, Rip, western MF, western and northern PG, and Hessian. In HiP, the first singular is either *hab / *hob or hon, while the second plural is *habt / *hobt / *hebt. In CC, the first singular is *hab(e) and the second plural is *habt / *hebt / *hobt. In H, the second plural is habt. The StY and CzY (Beranek :) participle of the verb ‘to have’ is gehat (compare MHG gehât, NHG gehabt) {M}. This form, typical of CG (Birnbaum :, TG ) and Bavarian (Žir ), appears in Mel, ShB, HiP, BZV, Kr, Pr, and PB. The Alemannic form is [khet] (Žir ). Modern SWY (GGA, p. ) and BZR are related to it. The present tense StY forms of the verb zayn ‘to have’ are: bin, bist, iz; zaynen (or zenen), zayt (or zent), zaynen (or zenen).330 The forms given, in German spelling, in Friedrich : for EGY are quite similar: bin, bist, is; sân (or senen), seit (or sât), sân (or senen). In CzY, the singular forms are the same as in EGY, while both the first and the third plurals are zayne(n)/zene(n).331 In DuY, we find: zeyn (infinitive), bin (first singular), is (third singular), and zenen (third plural).332 Yet, the NHG equivalent sein (MHG sîn) has a significantly different set of forms: bin, bist, ist; sind, seid, sind. Numerous variants are found for this verb in German dialects. For the first singular, the forms sein/ sin are peculiar to Ripuarian, southern MF, Hessian, northern and western PG (Žir ) {M}. We do not find any mention of them in Jewish sources such as CC, R, Le, R, Be, H, Mel, ShB, or HiP. For the second singular, in several dialects—Ripuarian, Alsatian, and southern PG—the ending is -s instead of -st.333 Among various early Ashkenazic sources present in Röll , only Le has this feature. For others (as well as for numerous other sources including, for example, CC, Mel, ShB, and DB), the second singular has the final t {M}. For the third singular, forms without the final -t (/is/, /iš/, /es/, or /eš/) are widespread in various High German dialects. For this reason, the fact that the StY form iz is found in other Yiddish varieties too334 is no surprise {M}. Such forms are amply attested in early Ashkenazic sources.335 Significant dialectal differences exist for plural forms {M}. Several German dialects—ECG and northeastern PG—have plural forms sein, seit, sein that are quite close to those of EY.336 Similar variants are found in Mel, ShB, Ox, H, HiP, Pr, and Kr; the last source also includes one reference to a specifically Yiddish zenen.337 H gives the See Röll .:, , , , , , , , . Examples from in H and Kr: hon in first singular and third plural, *hobt / *habt / *hebt ( )הבטin second plural. In both Be and Pr, we find in first singular not only *hab / *hob but also *han / *hon. No example for second and third plurals appears in Be. 329 Same form appears in H (Staerk and Leitzmann :) and ShB. 330 The form zenen (first and third plurals) is peculiar to PolY and UkrY, while zaynen prevails in LitY (Katz b:). 331 These forms are given in Schnitzler :, with no reference for the second plural found. 332 See Beem :, , , . 333 This phenomenon is general for various verbs, not just for sein (Žir ); compare the forms for ‘to have’ cited in the previous paragraph. 334 See TS , , Schnitzler : (is in CzY), Weinberg : (is in WphY), Guggenheim-Grünberg :– (is and ish in SwY). 335 In Le, Be, Fl, PuV, Mel, ShB, Ox, H, HiP, Kr, and Pr, one finds forms of both kinds: with and without the final -t. Yet, in R, R, and H only forms with -t are present. 336 On the other hand, the second plural of Bavarian seits is unknown in Yiddish. 337 See Röll .:. The same form also appears in PBK, KO, and GH (Landau :). 327 328
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The German component
forms seÿnnen, seÿt, and seÿnnen. Yet, in R, Le, R, and Be one generally finds zint in all three plural forms. This feature is typical of western PG and Alemannic.338 SwY first and third plural form zin339 is equivalent to sin known (at least, as a variant) in RF, western EF, and LA. It is different from forms peculiar to several other dialects such as sein (ECG), sen(t) (CF), sind/send (Swabian), sî(n) (HA), sein(d)/san(d) (Bavarian).340 A significant difference can be observed between NHG and EY in the conjugation of numerous other irregular verbs in the present tense. In NHG, in a large number of cases the root vowel of the second and third singulars is different from that of other forms (including infinitives), while the cognate forms in EY are regular. Many NHG examples from this group can be assigned to one of the two categories that are covered by Table ..341 TABLE . Conjugation of irregular verbs Feature
[i] in second and third singulars for verbs with e in infinitive {M}
Umlaut in second and third singulars for verbs without umlaut in other forms and infinitive {M}
338
Examples: infinitive ‘meaning’ – second and third singulars NHG
StY
helfen ‘to help’ – hilf(s)t nehmen ‘to take’ – nimm(s)t brechen ‘to break’ – brich(s)t treten ‘to step’ – tritt(st)
helfn – helf (s)t nemen – nem(s)t brekhn – brekh(s)t tretn – tret(st)
tragen ‘to carry’ – träg(s)t graben ‘to dig’ – gräb(s)t wachsen ‘to grow’ – wächst, schlagen ‘to hit’ – schläg(s)t schlafen ‘to sleep’ – schläf(s)t
trogn – trog(s)t grobn – grob(s)t vaksn vakst shlogn – shlog(s)t shlofn – shlof(s)t
Reflex
Yiddish varieties
Yes
No
EY, CzY, AlsY, DuY
Yes
No
EY
Early Jewish sources
German dialects
CC, R, R, Be, Mel, ShB, Ox (main), H, BZR; HiP and Kr (both main), Pr
Bav, Swab, EF, HA, LA (partly), RF342
Le, BZV, BZP, PB (main)
PG, UpS, LA (partly)
R, Be
EF, CF (partly), UpS
R, Le, Mel, ShB, Ox, H, HiP, BZR, Kr, Pr
UG, PG, CF (partly)
No reference to forms used in EF in second plural was found in the available literature. See Guggenheim-Grünberg :, Fleischer :, . The root /i/ is lowered to some extent (Fleischer :). The SwY second plural does not appear in available texts. 340 A detailed dialectal coverage can be found in the entry sein of DWB. 341 See also TG –, Neuberg :, Beem :, Schnitzler :. 342 Reflexes found in German dialects are taken from the corresponding dictionaries compiled during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (BaWB, SchwäbWB, PfWB etc.). Moser (:) states that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, /i/ in the second and third singulars was typical of UG, while /e/ in all forms mainly characterized CG. 339
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Morphology and grammar
The consideration of the information in Table . shows that for the two series in question the development was not identical. For the first of them, {M}, the simplification of the Yiddish conjugation is clearly due to an internal innovation. Indeed, it can be seen that /e/ in the second and the third singulars is rare in German dialects coterritorial with Jewish communities. Among oldest Jewish sources only Le shows /e/, certainly in conformity to the local German dialect (LA). All others have /i/. Moreover, in several sources from the sixteenth century we can observe the presence of both forms, numerous with /i/ and a few with /e/, the latter revealing an innovation. For the second series, {M}, one can see that the influence of German dialects could be much more important for the establishment of the general rule according to which the root vowel does not change in the second and the third singulars.343 Note that the forms without umlaut were already common in early Ashkenazic sources. In a few old sources, namely Be and Ox, we find examples of the infinitive forms of verbs without the final /n/ (Röll .:–) {M}. In German dialects of the MHG period, this phenomenon is known only in EF, Hessian, and Thuringian (Michels :). Both EY (WG :) and WphY are characterized by the merging of accusative and dative forms of masculine articles and personal pronouns {M}. In StY, all forms of this category end in /m/ in both grammatical cases: dem (nominative der ‘the’),344 im ‘him,’345 maynem ‘mine,’ daynem ‘your,’ zaynem ‘his’ etc. In this respect, StY contrasts with NHG where we find the final /m/ in dative and /n/ in the accusative: dem/den, ihm/ihn, meinem/meinen, deinem/deinen, seinem/seinen, respectively. However, the merging of dative and accusative forms of the masculine definite article is also peculiar to several German dialects: CB (common form: dem), NB, Thuringian, and UpS (den).346 Without detailed historical study of the development of Yiddish forms, it is difficult to decide whether we are dealing with parallel processes in Yiddish and German or a particularly strong influence of dialects of the latter on the former. But for a few exceptions, we do not find this merging in early Ashkenazic sources.347 In LitY, dative and accusative forms merged (on the basis of the dative form) not only for the third masculine singular im [em] ‘him’ but also for all other forms of personal pronouns; compare LitY mir ‘me,’ dir ‘you (thee),’ ir ‘her,’ whose PolY equivalents are mir (dative) and mekh (accusative), dir and dekh, ir and zi, respectively {M}. This simplification results from an innovation internal to LitY. Another grammatical simplification concerns EY reflexive pronouns
343 Weinreich paid attention to the phenomenon of the simplification of Yiddish verbal patterns in comparison to NHG and mentioned two StY examples, nemen and shlogn. For both of them he suggested an internal innovation though for the latter he mentioned a possibility of additional influence of Bavarian (WG :, ). 344 Weinberg (:) mentions the merging in WphY though he does not provide the exact merged forms. Most likely, he meant *den. Indeed, this form is known in the Yiddish dialect of Hamburg (Rée :). If to this we add the fact that in Courland, the same form was used (Weinreich :), we can observe that den was generally valid in Yiddish-speaking communities situated along the Baltic Sea. 345 In EGY, im ‘him’ is also valid for both accusative and dative forms (Friedrich :). 346 See Žir –. The presence of a similar effect in both Bavarian and ECG implies that, most likely, it was also found in Bohemian, a dialect in many respects intermediate between them. Walch and Häckel (:, ) provide the following historical details concerning German dialects: () a large majority of sources have i(h)m in the dative and in in the accusative; () in in the dative appears in a few WCG and Silesian documents (fifteenth century), Bavarian and UpS (sixteenth century), and the dialect of Nürnberg (seventeenth century); () im in the accusative is unknown outside of UG; its rare occurrences appear in Bavarian and Swabian (fifteenth century). 347 Note () the confusion between im and in ‘him’ in the dative in a western source from Rovere (northern Italy) in and () that between dem and den in both dative and accusative cases in a book printed in in Amsterdam (Sand :), as well as () a variation in dative forms for ‘mine’ between *maynem and *maynen in H (compare Röll .:, ) and *minem and *minen in Le (compare Röll ., ). In ShL, den is the form used in both dative and accusative for the masculine definite article (Neuberg :). Examples of im in accusative are found in documents compiled in Lithuania and Volhynia during the second half of the sixteenth century (see Dubnov :, ).
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The German component
{M}. In PolY, dative and accusative forms merged on the basis of the accusative form: mekh ‘myself,’ dekh ‘yourself,’ zekh ‘himself/herself,’ ‘ourselves,’ ‘themselves,’ and āx ‘yourselves.’ LitY went further: zikh here became the unique form of reflexive pronouns. The merger of dative and accusative forms characterizes plurals (in both MHG and NHG) and the third singular (only in NHG). In both MHG and NHG, the form sich (equivalent to LitY zikh / PolY zekh) is applicable for dative and accusative forms (singular and plural) only for the third person, with the exception of dative singular in MHG. The same exception is also observed in Bavarian, HA, and (more sporadically) western Swabian; compare Bavarian eɐm ‘himself ’ (Žir ). However, in certain dialects—including, among others, Upper Hessian, the Nürnberg area of NB, and some areas in ECG—sich also became valid for the first plural (Žir ).348 This information shows that even if the global tendencies were taken by EY from German dialects, the grammatical simplifications observed in EY (and, especially in LitY) result from an internal innovation. This change could be influenced by the fact that Slavic reflexive elements meaning ‘oneself ’ just have forms independent of number and person; compare Polish pronoun się and East Slavic verbal affix -ся/сь. A more detailed analysis is needed to cover the phenomenon of double negation that characterizes both WphY (Weinberg :) and EY {M}. In both MHG and modern UG, this tool serves only to strengthen the negation and is in no way general.349 Among the most important idiosyncrasies of modern PolY and CzY one usually counts the following pronouns related to second plural: ets ‘you (nominative),’ enk ‘you (dative and accusative),’ and enker ‘your’ {M}.350 Their cognate words es (MHG eʒ ) and enk(er), respectively, formerly used as dual forms, are typically Bavarian, being known in that dialect since the end of the thirteenth century (Žir ). This fact does not mean that the above Yiddish varieties necessarily inherited them from their putative Bavarian ancestor.351 Firstly, references in Bohemian German are known as well.352 Secondly, these words seem to penetrate Yiddish varieties well after these varieties had already been formed. Note that they are unknown in LitY and UkrY and, therefore, were not a part of Proto-EY. These forms are rarely found in early Ashkenazic sources.353 One reference to es ‘you’ appears in PuV. The words ets, enk, and enker are present in PBK (letter #). They also dominate in one portion of ShY.354 Several letters from PB also mention them. Also note that Christian Hebraist
348 The information given in this paragraph was mainly taken from Eggers :–, the most detailed description of the personal and reflexive pronouns in Yiddish and their relation to German. (Only PolY forms were taken from Birnbaum :–. LitY forms were checked in Katz b:–, – which was actually the source for the analysis by Eggers.) However, the general conclusion by Eggers (p. ) about EY pronouns being “surely” of Bavarian origin is inappropriate. This statement is mainly based on several factors. First, Eggers notes the merger of dative and accusative forms for the word meaning ‘him’ in both EY and Bavarian. Yet, similar forms also appear in ECG and, most likely, were valid in Bohemian. Second, modern seu ‘them’ and medieval sei/sey (derived from MHG accusative variants siu and sî), all known in Bavarian and contrasting NHG sie (derived from MHG si/sie) are said by Eggers to be cognate with EY zay. Yet, in EY the form zay is limited to PolY. It results from a phonetic innovation. A more archaic LitY/StY zey is identical to the nominative form (see {L}) and cannot be etymologically related to seu. Here, Eggers (:) simply makes an error when quoting from Katz b:. Third, sich is used for the first plural form of the reflexive pronoun found in both EY and Bavarian. Yet, the same form is also known in other German dialects. Moreover, as noted above, Bavarian is one of the rare High German dialects in which an old dative form meaning ‘himself ’ was kept distinct from the accusative one. 349 Cases of the presence in the same expression of two negative words, generally nit ‘not’ and keyn / kayn ‘no’ can be found in numerous Ashkenazic sources including DB (Dreeßen and Müller :), HiP (Brünnel :), PBK (Weinryb :), Kr and Pr (Röll .:, ); see also Straus : (Regensburg, circa ). 350 The general map appears in BA . A detailed map for northeastern Poland is given in Herzog :. It shows that enk is unknown in eastern parts of PolY. 351 Such an inappropriate link is postulated in Eggers :–. 352 See BohWB, KA , Schwarz :–. 353 We do not find them in western sources (except for PuV), documents covered by Röll , ZuR, and Br. 354 As indicated by Simon Neuberg (personal communication), this is true for chapters –.
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Lexicon and semantics
Johannes Buxtorf in his book published in in Basel—dealing mainly with Jewish vernacular language in Western Europe—says explicitly that the word “enck” is used by Polish Jews.355 Dialectal differences exist also in the gender of certain nouns. An example is masculine StY tol ‘valley,’ while NHG Tal is neuter {M}. Yet, in a number of German dialects (primarily in ECG, and rarely in RF), the gender is also masculine. Note that one of the earliest references to this word in Eastern Europe appears in Kr, with the masculine article der, while in ShB the word is neuter. Both StY bokh ‘river’ and NHG Bach ‘brook’ are masculine {M}. The same gender is valid, for example, for the references in Mel, ShB, Kr, and Pr. It also characterizes Bavarian and Swabian. Yet, in R and HiP, as well as in a number of German dialects, this noun is feminine.356
.
LEXICON AND SEMANTICS
A large number of German words are either limited to certain dialects or have important regional semantic peculiarities. Their consideration allows us to shed some light on the history of Yiddish showing a correlation between words used by Jews and those of their German Christian neighbors and certain links that exist or do not exist between modern Yiddish varieties and early Ashkenazic sources. Hack(e) ‘hatchet’ (MHG hacke) is known in Bavarian, EF, ECG (including Silesian), and Bohemian {L}.357 StY, DuY, and EGY hak appears in numerous early Ashkenazic sources including Teh, Mel, Aug, and BM. Yet, SAB and R use words cognate with NHG Beil and Axt, respectively (TS ). StY and EGY mits ‘cap’ is cognate with NHG Mütze {L}. The latter is mainly limited to Low German and CG. Bohemia and Silesia are situated on the southern border of its area of propagation, while UG uses Kappe and (in Bavarian only) Haube (Kretschmer :–). StY zeyger ‘clock’ (NH zayger) and kretshme ‘inn’ are related to NHG Seiger (MHG seiger) and Kretscham/Kretschem,358 respectively, both peculiar only to ECG and Bohemian {L}. StY plump ‘pump’ corresponds to NHG Plumpe that seems to be limited to ECG only {L}.359 StY sheps ‘sheep’ is related to MHG schöpʒ ‘wether’ {L}. This word is also known in CzY (Schnitzler :) and found in Br. Being of Slavic origin, it is limited to eastern German dialects: ECG, Bavarian, and Bohemian.360 The meal tsimes ‘vegetable / fruit stew’ is known in EY, DuY, and SWY361 {L}. In German, similar meaning seems to be limited to Swabian.362 StY shretl ‘dwarf, gnome’ corresponds to NHG Schrättel/Schrettel found in Bavarian, Swabian, and HA {L}. StY top ‘pot’ (present in Kr, Br, and NH) is also found in CzY, EGY, and DuY {L}. Variants of its NHG equivalent Topf are particularly common in ECG and Bohemian. Yet, Alemannic, RF, and EF use instead the form Hafen, while Häfen appears in Austria.363 The form hāfen See the original text in Frakes : and its discussion in Landau :XLIII–XLIV. This is the case for references appearing in ObSWB, SilWB, and Heilig (for EF). Both masculine and feminine forms appear in PfWB and ElsWB. 357 Kretschmer (:) notes its use in German of Moravia. In the sixteenth century it was also typical for Prague (Skála :). 358 The NHG word is itself of Slavic origin (compare the medieval form kretscheme mentioned in DWb, entry Kretschem): it was borrowed from Old Czech (krcˇ ma). In principle, StY kretshme can be directly derived from Czech krcˇ ma too. 359 Weinreich (WG :) cites this word together with kretshme and zeyger as, most likely, related to ECG. According to him, StY grenets ‘boundary’ (NHG Grenze) belongs to the same group. This assignment is inappropriate. This word was borrowed by medieval German from Slavic languages through ECG and Bohemian dialects of German. However, during the following centuries it gradually became widespread in numerous German dialects (DWB). 360 See the entry Schöps in DWB. 361 See Zivy : (AlsY) and Copeland and Süsskind : (FrY). 362 See the entry Zimmes in DWB and SchwäbWB. This word is also mentioned in BaWB with a different meaning: ‘breakfast,’ ‘light meal.’ Tish spells this word as צומיזthat should be, most likely, interpreted as [tsyməs] (Grünbaum :). Riedel (:) makes references to a similar phonetic form in Br. 363 Kretschmer :–, KA , Heilig . 355 356
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The German component
is used in SWY and FrY (BA ). Its equivalent appears in R, Le, R, SD, and HiP. On the other hand, the main word in the Yiddish variety of the Rhineland tipen represents a form typical for WCG.364 A good geographic correlation between modern Yiddish and German words can be observed for several other words too, as in Table .. TABLE . Dialectal geography for ‘chimney,’ ‘sour cream,’ ‘orange,’ and ‘to iron’ – ‘chimney’ {L}:365 Yiddish varieties
German dialects
kamī
AlsY, Yiddish in Swabia and Bavaria
Kamin
LA, parts of CB and SB
kimish
SwY
Chämi(n)
HA
shlout
FrY
Schlout
EF, NB, sTh
rāfan
CzY
Rauchfang
Boh, parts of CB and SB
shornshtān
EGY
Schornstein
CG
– ‘sour cream’ {L}:366 rām
WY
Rahm, Raum
Bav and RhF (main for both), Th
zōn
EGY (partly)
Sahne
Sil, UpS
shmant
EGY (partly)
Schmand
Hes (partly), MF
smeyte
CzY
Schmetten
Boh
– ‘orange’ {L}:367 orānsh
SWY, FrY
Orange
LA, PG
apelsīne
EGY; Yiddish in northwestern Germany
Apfelsine
UpS, Hes
pomerants, marants, narantsh
EY
Pomeranze
Boh, Bav, Swab, HA
– ‘to iron’ and ‘iron (tool)’ {L}:368 bīglen
SWY, CzY
Bügeleisen, Bögeleisen
RF, Bav, Swab
platen
DuY, EGY
Plätteisen, Plätte
ECG, Low German
364
See the entries Tüpfen in PfWB and Düppen in RhWB. See BA ; Kretschmer :–, KA . StY koymen does not appear in this table: it is of Slavic origin (Sainéan :). The form שטײןa שארןappears in HEZ. 366 See BA , Kretschmer :–, KA . StY smetene is of Slavic origin. 367 See BA , Kretschmer :. 368 See BA , Kretschmer :–. StY presn has two meanings: ‘to press’ and ‘to iron,’ the latter being more recent than the former. The cognate NHG form pressen has only the first meaning. Note that Polish prasować also has the same two meanings as StY. 365
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Lexicon and semantics
Two words exist in German for ‘yeast’: Hefe and Gerbe(n). The former is widespread in various provinces, while references to the latter are mainly found in Bavaria and Austria (DWB). In modern Yiddish varieties, various forms related to Hefe—StY heyvn, a similar form in ECG, and SWY heyf— dominate, while the form gerben is known in CzY and the Yiddish of Hungary (BA ) {L}. For ‘butcher,’ Metzger is used in WCG, UG, and EF. This word appears in SD. Yet, Fleischer is peculiar to ECG and Bohemian (Kretschmer :–). This form corresponds to StY fleysher {L}.369 The form flāshhaker is known in the Yiddish of Hungary (BA ). It is related to German Fleischhacker that is, most likely, of Bavarian origin.370 German Tischler ‘carpenter,’ equivalent to StY tishler, is mainly limited to the area of ECG and Austria {L}. In the Rhineland, Hessen, Bavaria, as well as in Alemannic, the main term for the same activity is Schreiner (Kretschmer :). StY and DuY ferd ‘horse’ is cognate to NHG Pferd {L}. Variants of this word are found in numerous modern German dialects. However, in Upper German (except for northern Swabian) the word Ross is used instead of Pferd, while Gaul dominates in RF, northern Swabian, and southern EF.371 In early Ashkenazic sources, we find almost exclusively forms related to Pferd.372 Certain Yiddish peculiarities concern words from a more basic semantic layer. For ‘boy’ {L}, we find StY yingl (or bokher, from the Hebrew component) and EGY yung, while the standard NHG form is Knabe. In German dialects, we find significant geographic differences concerning the vernacular words: (i) Knab(e)/Knap(pe) in Alemannic; (ii) Jung(e) in EF, Bohemian, ECG; (iii) Bub(e)/Bue in PG and Bavarian.373 In early Ashkenazic sources, the third word is unattested, while forms cognate to the first one are found in Le, R, DB, BZR, BZP, Pr, those related to the second appear in R, Be, MM, Ox, and HiP, and both of them are present in BB, Teh, PuV, and ShB (TS –). StY haynt ‘today’ and nekhtn ‘yesterday’ are based on words different from NHG heute and gestern, respectively {L}. EY words are related to MHG hînt and nehten that gave rise to numerous German dialectal forms with the meaning ‘today night (or evening)’ and ‘last night (or evening).’374 In recent times, the first of them seems to be pan-Yiddish.375 However, several centuries ago the situation was different. Early Ashkenazic sources from various parts of Europe (Be, H, BB, SD, Mel, ShB, DB, Kr, Br, and Pr) include forms related to NHG heute (MHG hiute).376 NH gives haynt, but gesterin. Peculiar Yiddish forms are seen for pronouns corresponding to the third plural. StY zey ‘they’ contrasts to MHG/NHG sie {L}. A form equivalent to that of StY appears only in a few early sources among which are Be (a few references), Fl, H, Kr, and Pr. It is also known, along with /zi/, in CzY.377 Yet, in EGY, DuY, SwY, and AlsY only forms cognate to NHG sie (and therefore
369
SWY uses katsev, from the Hebrew component. This dialectal assignment follows from the fact that the verb hacken means ‘to chop’ (and not ‘to hoe’) only in Bavaria, Austria, as well as neighboring areas such as East Franconia, Moravia, and Silesia; compare {L}. 371 See KA , Žir , Kretschmer :. 372 For example, it is the case in CC, SD, ShB, H, BZR, BZV, BZP, and NH. A word related to Ross appears once in Mel, while more than thirty remaining references to ‘horse’ are cognate with the word Pferd. 373 For this distribution, various dialectal dictionaries were checked; also see Kretschmer :–. 374 Such forms are found in PG, Swabian, Bavarian, EF, Bohemian, and ECG. See also the entries heint and nächten in DWB. KA gives the following geography for hei(n)t ‘today’ (instead of ‘heute’): Bavarian, Swabian, and east of EF. However, he suggests no area in which a word related to MHG nehten would mean ‘yesterday.’ 375 See BA (p. ), Schnitzler : (CzY), Beem (DuY), Beranek : (FrY), Zuckerman : (AlsY), and Chrysander :. In EGY, we find both hânt and “heut” for ‘today’ and nekhten for ‘yesterday.’ 376 In some of them (for example, ShB), we find forms related to MHG hînt too. 377 Schnitzler (:) writes about /ze:/ and /zi/. 370
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The German component
identical to the pronoun meaning ‘she’) are found.378 Even if a number of German dialects have distinct colloquial forms for ‘they’ and ‘she,’ the exact form seems to result from an innovation internal to Ashkenazic communities of Eastern and Central Europe.379 Later, this form gave rise to the possessive pronoun zeyer ‘their’ {L}. Among earliest sources in which we find references to this word are ShY and PB.380 Early Ashkenazic sources often include words restricted to coterritorial dialects spoken by Christians. Several words appearing in Le are unknown outside of Alsatian, while certain lexical elements of R are unknown outside of Swiss German {L}.381 For ‘wick,’ R employs a form equivalent to CF Wick(e), Le includes the plural *takhun (typical of LA and HA), while SD, MM, Aug, and NH all use tsokhen, related to Zache(n)/Zoche(n) known in Bavarian, EF, eastern Swabian, and Bohemian {L}.382 For ‘violin, fiddle,’ NHG has two words: Geige and Fiedel. Nowadays, the first one is much more common but several centuries ago both were interchangeable and found in various dialects (DWB). Though Jewish sources mainly use the second of these words (compare StY fidl),383 forms related to the first one are also seen in some sources (ShB, DB, H, HiP, ZuR, GH), as well as in FrY (Beranek :) and EGY {L}. Family terms represent one of the most important layers for the analysis of the origins of a language. For ‘dad,’ we find ete in SWY, DuY, and Yiddish of Frankfurt, tet(e) and tate in CzY, ete/ tate in EGY, and tate in EY {L}.384 The last form, tate, may be of either Slavic or German origin. Other forms are necessarily of German origin. Cognate forms to all of them appear in a number of German dialects: UpS (tate and täte), Silesian (tate and tāte), Bavarian (tatta, ätt), Swabian (ete/eti, dete, date/dati),385 Swiss (ätti, dädi/dätti), and Alsatian (ette).386 In early Ashkenazic sources, we find et in BB, (t)et in PuV, and tet in PB (TS ). Important geographic variation also exists for the word meaning ‘mummy.’ In modern Yiddish varieties, it is pronounced meme in SWY and DuY, meme and mame in EGY, and mame in CzY and EY {L}.387 Here the situation is somewhat similar to that described above for ‘dad.’ Indeed, mame can be of both Slavic and German origin, while the source for mem(e) is necessarily German; compare mamme/mämme in PfWB and RhWB, memm found in old Alsatian and memme/mamme in Silesian (DWB, SchlesWB), mamme in SchwäbWB. In early Ashkenazic sources, we find memen in Mel, mem in PBand PBK, meme in GH, and mome—with no equivalent in German dialects—in a letter written in northern Italy in , as well as in BB and PuV (TS ). For frāle ‘grandmother’ and harle ‘grandfather’ found in See Friedrich :, Zuckerman :, and TG –. Contrary to Sapir :, any link between LitY zey and MHG se, a clitic variant of sie is unlikely. Indeed, the clitic form resulted from the atone position of MHG sie in various sentences. Such a context can be responsible for a presence of a reduced vowel, but not of a long vowel that later got diphthongized. 380 According to Simon Neuberg (personal communication), in ShY, references appear in the same part (chapters –) in which other vernacular elements including ets and enk(er) are found (see footnote above). In PB, it appears only in one letter (Landau :XLIII, ). 381 See Banitt : and Röll .. (Le), Röll .. (R). 382 On this word see TS –, Weinreich :, the entries Wieche, Zache, and Zoche in DWB. StY equivalent has a different root: knoyt. On CzY tsokhen see Schnitzler :. 383 It appears, for example, in R, BB, Teh, MM, Mel, Kr, and NH (TS –). 384 See BA , Schnitzler :, Weinreich :. The CzY form tate appears in Kulke :, Ehrlich :. 385 See the entry Aette in SchwäbWB. 386 ElsWB says that this word is today particularly peculiar for Jews, but it also gives several references showing that in former times it was found among local Christians too. The most detailed synthetic information concerning the use of these forms by German Christians can be found in the entries Ätti and Deite of DWB. Unfortunately, forms used in EF, Bohemian, and Silesian do not appear in the available literature. 387 See BA , Weinreich :. The forms ete ‘dad’ and meme ‘mummy’ were standard during the nineteenth century in the Yiddish of western Germany (see Fleischer and Schäfer :–). 378 379
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Lexicon and semantics
SWY,388 the related German dialects can be defined in a more precise way: we are dealing here with EF {L}. In this dialect: (i) the equivalents to NHG Frau ‘woman’ and Herr ‘gentleman, master’ (to which the above WY words are related) are pronounced /fra:/ and /ha(r)/, respectively; (ii) the diminutive suffix is -le; and, most importantly, (iii) the forms frale and harle, with exactly the same meanings as in SWY, appear in a Christian document compiled in in Würzburg (BaWB).389 The meaning of StY mume ‘(maternal or paternal) aunt’ is different from that of NHG Muhme ‘maternal female relative’ or MHG muome ‘mother’s sister’390 {L}. For Jews, the application of this word (or its diminutive forms) for the paternal aunt too is known from numerous early sources such as R, SD, MM, BM, and PB (TS –). The situation with the masculine equivalent of this word is partly similar. The meaning of StY feter ‘(maternal or paternal) uncle’ is different from that of MHG veter(e) ‘paternal uncle’ and NHG Vetter ‘cousin’ {L}. The application of this word by Jews for the maternal uncle too is known from MM, BM, and PB, while numerous early western Jewish sources (and DuY) use the word onkel, of Romance origin.391 StY words shnur ‘daughter-inlaw,’ eydem ‘son-in-law,’ shver ‘father-in-law,’ and shviger ‘mother-in-law,’ all with numerous references in early Ashkenazic sources, have the same meanings as their MHG ancestors snuor, eidem, swëher, and swiger, respectively. Yet, in NHG—except for small western German areas— these words were lost, being gradually replaced before the eighteenth century by Schwiegertochter, Schwiegersohn, Schwiegervater, and Schwiegermutter, respectively {L}.392 For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, various forms related to MHG eidem were used only in MF, as well as in a compact area covering northern EF and southern Thuringian, while in other German-speaking territories words related either to Tochtermann (in RF, southern EF, and large parts of Alemannic) or Schwiegersohn (elsewhere) were used instead. This phenomenon of retaining by Yiddish varieties of forms that either became archaic or were totally lost in NHG is quite general. Some other examples can serve here as an illustration of this rule {L}: StY trakhtn ‘to think’ (MHG trahten);393 StY gikh‘quick’—equivalent to gekh found in AlsY (Weill :), CzY (Schnitzler :), PBK, and Br—corresponds to MHG gæhe and unusual NHG gäch;394 StY, DuY, and WphY395 krenk ‘illness’ (MHG krenke, rare NHG Kränke). StY horkhn and SwY [horçə] both mean ‘to hear,’ exactly like MHG horchen, while NHG horchen means ‘to listen.’ StY kinigl ‘rabbit’—whose variants appear in numerous early Ashkenazic sources—is cognate with MHG küneclîn while NHG Kanninchen is derived from a root that was
388
BA (–) mentions them for AlsY. A reference to harle is also known for FrY (Copeland and Süsskind :). 389 References to words with the same meaning and same roots, Fräulein and Herrlein, also appear in BaWB (mention in the Upper Palatinate area of NB) and SchwäbWB (only as rare dialectal forms). EY, EGY, and CzY all use words of Slavic origin for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’; compare StY zeyde and bobe, respectively. DuY uses for ‘grandfather’ the same word as EY. In a number of early Ashkenazic sources we find forms cognate with rare NHG variants Ältervater ‘grandfather’ and/or Ältermutter ‘grandmother.’ This is, for example, the case for Mel, BZR, BZP, Br, ZuR, and FF (Neuberg :–). 390 The same meaning ‘mother’s sister’ appears for mume in SchwäbWB and for muem in BaWB. 391 See section .. 392 See TS –, KA –. StY shvoger ‘brother-in-law’ and shvegerin ‘sister-in-law’ have the same MHG ancestors (swâger and swægerinne, respectively) as NHG Schwager and Schwägerin. However, certain early Ashkenazic sources use words related to MHG geswîe ‘sister-in-law,’ ‘brother-in-law.’ It is the case of R (partly), MM, SD, BM, PB (partly) (TS ), NH (all for ‘sister-in-law’) and H (for ‘brother-in-law’). 393 Even if we do not find any direct evidence of use of the same verb in modern WY, its references appear in early Ashkenazic sources, for example, PuV and the preface to LBr. 394 The form *gokh ( )גוךfound in several western early Ashkenazic sources (including CC, PuV, Mel, and ShB) has as its MHG source not gæhe, but its variant gâch. 395 See Weinberg :.
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The German component
unknown in German before the fifteenth century.396 StY oyps ‘fruit’ sounds very different from NHG Obst, but much closer to MHG obeʒ . Forms present in early documents (such as, for example, R, Ox, DB, and Pr) invariably end in /s/. Actually, forms with the final -t started to be used in German only from the sixteenth century (DWB). StY lefts ‘lip’ also known in CzY (Schnitzler :) and AlsY (Zivy :) corresponds to MHG lefz(e) that was widespread in all of the High German territory but gradually became replaced in NHG by Lippe, of northern origin (TS ) though variants of archaic NHG Lefze are still known in UG, EF, and PG.397 Contrary to NHG Freund (MHG vriunt), both StY fraynt and SwY fraynd have not only the meaning ‘friend’ but also ‘relative’; the same in FF, PB, and NH. However, as shown in DWB, in earlier times German texts also used this word with the same meaning.398 Numerous other examples of this kind were found by Timm (TS).399 She also presents an inventory of words, known in early Ashkenazic sources from the West and in StY too, whose semantics seems to be limited to Jewish communities. A few of them appear in CC (TS ), numerous earliest examples are found in R. Their prevalence among Jews is likely to be related to the established tradition of biblical translations. Many of these innovations came through Ivretaytsh, originally a calque language devised by Jews not for communication but simply for assuring a literal understanding of the Hebrew Bible. To mention just a few of them: StY bahaltn ‘to hide’ (NHG behalten ‘to keep’), dozik ‘this,’ gingold ‘pure gold,’ zitser ‘inhabitant’ {L}. Since the direction of propagation of these words among Jews was mainly from West to East, EY retains today certain phonological features or words from German dialects of western German-provinces. Schwarzapfel, the NHG equivalent of StY and CzY (Schnitzler :) shvartsapl ‘pupil (of eye),’ literally means ‘black apple.’ For Christians, this word is marginal and might be taken from Jews (TS ). Note that the second part is apl (a form typical of WCG)400 and not epl (the StY word for ‘apple’). Among elements of western German lexicon is hoyern ‘to crouch’ (MHG hûren, NHG hauern) limited to UG, and Southern Franconian, a dialect transitional between EF and Alemannic (DWB) {L}. References to this word are found in numerous early Ashkenazic sources.401 Certain meanings related to Judaism could spread inside of Jewish communities due to numerous migrations of rabbis and religious teachers. Among them are, for example {L}: StY lernen ‘to study the Talmud’ (NHG lernen means ‘to learn’),402 StY bahelfer and AlsY (Weill :) behelfer ‘teacher’s assistant in Jewish school’ (compare NHG behelfen ‘to manage’), StY oyfrufn and AlsY (Weill :) ofrufe(n) ‘to call for Torah reading in the synagogue’ (MHG ûfruofen, NHG aufrufen ‘to call’), pan-Yiddish shul ‘synagogue’ (NHG Schule ‘school’),403 shulkloper ‘one who knocks on doors calling people to synagogue’ already mentioned in Frankfurt in (TG ), kloyz ‘house of worship or study’ (MHG klôse, klûse, NHG Klause ‘hermitage’),404 tuk See TS and the entry Königlein in DWB. In StY, lefts and lip are synonyms. Yet, in EGY only the second form is attested. 398 Moreover, the meaning ‘relative’ also appears in SchlesWB. Friedrich regularly uses it in his German text in the same meaning. 399 Among them are, for example: StY dikh ‘thigh,’ laylekh ‘bed sheet,’ shnit ‘harvest,’ shpayzer ‘provider,’ shpreytn ‘to spread,’ tsaytik ‘ripe, mature,’ and zang ‘ear of corn.’ Forms related to them were widespread in earlier times in various German dialects. Others—as NHG Träher ‘tear’ and winzig ‘tiny’ from which StY trer ‘tear’ and vintsik ‘little’ are derived—despite their large dialectal geography have never been main forms in any German province (TS , ). 400 401 See features {C} and {V} above. Examples: R, Teh, MM, and HiP (TS ). 402 About this word—whose specifically Jewish meaning appeared in Western Europe—see TG and TS –. See also TS about the whole layer in question. 403 The meaning ‘synagogue’ is not limited to Jews. It also appears in German translations of the New Testament (DWB). For detailed discussion of the etymology of this Yiddish word see Timm and Beckmann :–. 404 The specifically Jewish meaning is known from a text written in the fifteenth century in Austria (TG ). 396 397
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Lexicon and semantics
‘ritual bath,’405 gut(e) ort ‘Jewish cemetery’ (literally ‘good place’),406 yortsayt ‘anniversary of death’ (NHG Jahrzeit ‘anniversary’),407 StY yidishn, CzY (Schnitzler :) and DuY yidshen, WphY (Weinberg :) yitshen, and AlsY (Weill :) yidshe ‘to circumcise’ (compare NHG jüdisch ‘Jewish’),408 and, most likely, also StY dreydl and WY trendel ‘Hanukkah’s play thing’ (BA , NHG Trendel ‘revolving thing’).409 To this group we add StY nitl and AlsY (Weill :) and SwY nitelnakht ‘Christmas’; compare Swabian Niedelnacht ‘any of seven evenings before Christmas.’410 Among other words whose meaning is similar in Yiddish varieties but not in German are {L}: EY shmeykhlen, DuY and WY shmeykheln ‘to smile,’411 NHG schmeicheln ‘to flatter,’ StY kugl, CzY (Ehrlich :) kügel, DuY koggel, and WY kugel ‘kind of pudding’ (NHG Kugel ‘ball’),412 and pan-Yiddish shnorer ‘beggar’ (NHG Schnorrer ‘cadger, scrounger’).413 The etymology of StY grayz ‘error’ {L} is uncertain. This word is well known in WY where its root vowel is also /aj/.414 As can be seen from Tables . and . in section ., such reflex implies the origin from either MHG î ou iu, or a special combination of Hebrew vowels in open syllables. Since no Hebrew etymon with this structure can be found, only the first of these possibilities is really plausible.415 It is important to stress that the meaning ‘error’ is not found in any German word that could be the basis for this Yiddish noun. As a result, independently of the exact etymology, here we are dealing with Jewish diffusion of a new word/meaning internal to Ashkenazic communities.
405 Beranek (:) cites it as used in FrY indicating that in CzY it appears as /tyk/. He relates it to MHG tucken ‘to sink, to submerge oneself.’ In DWB, such meaning is marginal for NHG (see the entry ducken). DWB also cites a related noun: Ducke ‘water conduit, water tube.’ 406 References to this meaning outside of EY and DuY are numerous: Weill : for AlsY, Rée : for Yiddish in Hamburg, and Weinberg : for WphY. The last two sources mention the form guter ort. 407 This meaning also appears in DuY and AlsY (Weill :). In NHG, Jahrzeit is a rarely used word having several meanings. One of them is close to the Yiddish one: ‘Christian religious yearly commemoration of the dead’ (DWB, see also WG :). The first reliable reference to this word in Jewish literature appears in the RESPONSA by Moses Minz, a rabbi from western Germany (fifteenth century) (Zimmels :). 408 This verb appears in BB, Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, and NH (TS ). 409 The StY form is derived from WY trendel (from MHG trendel ‘top’) via the folk etymological contamination by the StY verb dreyen ‘to turn’ (compare Herzog :). 410 The link between German dialectal Ni(e)delnacht (listed in DWB and SchwäbWB) and Yiddish nitl is due to MRPC. The word in question could not be borrowed by Christians from Jews because DWB cites for the same area of Alemannic dialects covering Swabia and Switzerland a series of other compound words with the same first part: niedelbrot, niedelhaut, niedelkelle, niedelmilch, and niedelpathe. In all of them, niedel means ‘milk cream.’ The earliest Ashkenazic reference appears in writings by Israel Isserlein, a rabbi from fifteenth-century Austria (WG :). Its spelling נידלconforms to the pronunciation of the Alemannic word mentioned above. 411 For WY, see Weinberg : (WphY), PhilogLottus :. 412 For WY, see Weinberg : (WphY), Weill : (AlsY), Fleischer : (SwY). 413 For WY, see Weinberg : (WphY), Weill : (AlsY). 414 See “Kreis” in Frankfurt (Tendlau :), and “krais” in AlsY (Weiss :). The form “Greis” is also mentioned by Wagenseil in (Frakes :). 415 Zunz proposed the Hebrew word ‘ ְּג ִריעּותreduction, removal’ as the etymon. This etymon explains neither the meaning, nor the root vowel. Grünbaum (:) criticized this conjecture because of the inappropriate semantics and the fact that the Hebrew word in question does not seem used by Ashkenazic Jews. Tendlau (:) linked this word to NHG Kreis (MHG kreiʒ ) ‘circle.’ Yet, such etymon would give LitY **kreyz, not grayz. As a result, for the idea of Tendlau to be acceptable, one should introduce an additional hypothesis: the word was brought by WY migrants to Eastern Europe only a few centuries ago, already with /aj/. Weinreich (:) suggests a link to two NHG words, Gereis ‘order, rule’ or, alternatively, Gereiße ‘tearing.’ Note that both of them are substantives of verbs that in MHG had î (rîsen and rîʒ en, respectively).
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The German component
Contrary to numerous forms cited in previous paragraphs, a number of semantically important words from the German component are not shared by WY and EY {L}. This is the case of SWY / WphY minikh / DuY minish ‘neither dairy, nor meat (food)’ and, most likely, related to MHG münich ‘monk.’416 In numerous early Ashkenazic sources, we find for ‘wedding’ various forms cognate with MHG brûtlouft (rare NHG Brautlauft). This is the case for Teh (participle גברױליפט of verb derived from this noun), LBr ()ברוײלופט, BZR ()ברױיליפט, BZP (ברײליפט, ברײלפטa).417 Several German Christian Hebraists from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—including Buxtorf ()ברײלפט, Wagenseil (brauloft),418 and Chrysander (:, breyleft)—mention variants of this word among peculiar Jewish lexical items. Selig (:) includes in his dictionary the word breilaft. We do not find any trace of this word in modern Yiddish varieties.419 The term hōlekrāsh/houlegrāsh is limited to SWY. It designates a ceremony of naming a child also known in the area of SWY only.420 The ceremony takes place on the Sabbath afternoon and consists in children lifting the baby into the air pronouncing a sentence that starts with this word and ends with the newly assigned vernacular name.421 The earliest known reference to it comes from the pen of Moses Minz, a rabbi from the BNEY HES area (fifteenth century) who suggests that in the expression קריישaהולa/ קרישa הולthe first part is from Hebrew ‘ חֹולprofane,’ while the second is derived from the German verb meaning ‘to shout’; compare NHG kreischen.422 Since the end of the nineteenth century it has often been considered that both parts belong to the German component.423
About this etymology see Weill :, WG :. For the geography of this word see BA . See the discussion of this word in Grünbaum :, Güdemann :, Sainéan :, TG , . The forms ברײליפטand ברײלופטappear in the translations of the whole Bible by Blitz and Witzenhausen, both printed in Amsterdam during s. 418 See Frakes :, . 419 In German dialectal dictionaries we find the following forms: bröl(e)ft/brölef/brülef in RhWB, brutlouf/brutlöf in SchwäbWB, and Brautlauft in BohWB. Only the first variant, known north of Cologne, sounds close to Ashkenazic forms. Also note that the form bruloft appears in the writings of von Harff, a German knight from the Cologne area, compiled in s (Groote :). As a result, this word may be one of the rare lexical elements of early WY that is of CF origin. On the other hand, the chronology of the use of this word by Jews excludes the possibility of its derivation from Dutch bruiloft ‘wedding’ (this etymology was suggested in Sainéan :). At the time of its earliest references in Ashkenazic sources Ashkenazic communities of the Netherlands were too small. 420 See BA , GGA , Weill :. 421 In modern times, it was applied, depending on place, either only to girls, or only to boys, or to both girls and boys (Lowenstein :–, ). For the seventeenth century, we are familiar with a statement on this topic by Rabbi Samuel ha-Levi from Bamberg who claims that this tradition is common in southern German-speaking provinces and applicable to girls and boys, while in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland it is unusual and applicable to girls only (Perles :). 422 This verb is known—according to DWB—only in CG. On the reference from Moses Minz see Güdemann :. 423 Perles (:) suggests a link between the first part and the name of the German pagan goddess Holle (various traditions related to whom survived in German rural folklore) and relates the second part to MHG kreiʒ / NHG Kreis ‘circle’ (compare the NHG expression Zauberkreis ‘magic circle’). Weinreich (WG :) postulates the provenance from (goddess) Holle + ‘(a) shout.’ The spelling קרייש, with double yod, as well as modern SWY realization /-kra:sh/ both imply that in the second part we are dealing with MHG ei. Consequenrly, MHG kreisch ‘(a) shout, cry’ is indeed a very plausible etymon for the second part (see also TG ). It is preferable to Perles’ ‘circle’ for semantic reasons and also because it provides a direct explanation for the final consonant /š/. On the other hand, no etymon suggested until now (the goddess Holle or forms proposed in Güdemann : such as holt ‘lovely’ or holde / hulde ‘grace,’ or the Hebrew root mentioned by Moses Minz) explains the vowel in the first syllable of the name of this ceremony. Indeed, to obtain /ou/ or /o:/ known in modern SWY, the vowel in the MHG etymon has to be either â, ô, or o (lengthened in the future). The Hebrew etymon does not explain the presence of the vowel e between the two parts. 416 417
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Orthography
.
ORTHOGRAPHY
A number of observations concerning links between various Ashkenazic traditions can be made analyzing the spelling used in sources written in Hebrew characters. The use of special diacritic signs over certain letters, unknown in other Ashkenazic sources {G}, characterizes SAB (caron over shin, double vav and gimel with raphe), CC (caron over shin, ṣ adi, and pe), R (gimel and daleth with raphe, two parallel dashes over shin, ṣ adi, pe, and double vav). Le has gimel with raphe and uses ḥ olem-vav and shureq-vav for stressed vowels to distinguish not /o/ from /u/ (as in other manuscripts), but vowels without umlaut (/o/, /u/ and diphthongs starting with them) from those with umlaut (/ø/, /y/), respectively.424 In contrast to other early sources, in Le, R, and Be, pronouns, articles, and prepositions are spelled together with a word they precede or follow, without any blank space between them {G}. A major criterion is related to the letter heth {G}. In a number of documents, it appears in place of MHG (word- or syllable-) initial or intervocalic h: SAB (Timm :), SSC (Timm :), CC (TG ), R and M (Heide :–), Le (Heide :, Röll .:), R (Röll .:), and Be (Röll .:). We never find this graphic convention in more recent Ashkenazic sources: they do not use heth at all in words of German origin including the writings of Elia Levita though his /h/-pronunciation of heth is well known. The pronunciation in question characterized, before the seventeenth century, Jews from western German-speaking provinces (BNEY HES), but was not valid for Jews from the town of Regensburg, Austria, and Slavic countries (BNEY KHES).425 To render the sound [s] in words of German origin, medieval BNEY HES generally used shin ( )שand only sporadically samekh ({ )סG}.426 The shin-spelling became so standard that during the first third of the sixteenth century several Christian authors from the western German-speaking provinces—such as Johannes Böschenstein and Sebastian Münster—write that samekh is not used by Jews in their transcription of German words.427 On the other hand, Slavic-speaking Jews from thirteenth-century Bohemia employed samekh quite regularly.428 For BNEY KHES from Germanspeaking territories, medieval references using Hebrew letters are rare and they do not allow us to draw any certain conclusion. However, a few known names with [s] all include samekh and not shin.429 This (cultural) factor makes plausible the genetic link between early BNEY KHES in Austria and the Slavic-speaking Jews from Central Europe. The shin-spelling coming from the West gradually supplanted this earlier Danubian spelling tradition. An illustration of this process can be observed in the oldest Jewish document from Eastern Europe known to us among those written in a
See Röll .: (R), – (Le). These two medieval groups of Ashkenazic Jews are discussed in detail in Chapter (especially section ..). 426 Illustrations for this rule can be provided by given names: female ( זושאfrom MHG suoʒ e ‘sweet’) and male ( זושקינטfrom MHG süeʒ ekint, suoʒ ekint ‘sweet child’) are invariably spelled with shin in sources from the Rhineland and Franconia (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). Another male name with the same German root is spelled either זושמןor ( זוסמןfrom MHG suoʒ eman ‘sweet man’), while samekh only appears in references to its hypocoristic form זוסליןand to the female name ( פעסליןmost likely derived from Hebrew Bathsheba ֶׁשַבעa)ַּבת. Yet, a few centuries earlier the graphic conventions in western Germany were different. As follows from the commentary by Rashi, during his time shin and samekh were used to express MHGs and ʒ , respectively (see footnote in section ..). 427 See Frakes :, . 428 See details in section ... 429 Compare female ( טרוסטלCarinthia, fourteenth century) from MHG trôst ‘consolation’ and several hypocoristic forms of biblical names in which samekh stays for the sound [s] that in the full form corresponds to either tav ( )תor sin : ()שׂa‘ ְקָהת > קהסלKohath/Kehath,’ and ‘ ִי ְשׂ ָרֵאל > איסרלןIsrael’ (both in Austria, fifteenth century), ָנָתן > נעסיל ‘Nathan’ (Hungary, circa ). 424 425
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The German component
German-based vernacular language: the “Oath of Peace” (Urfehdebrief ) compiled in in Breslau, the capital city of Silesia (EYT ). In that document, /s/ is regularly expressed via shin. The only word with samekh is ‘ בריסלאBreslau.’ Its spelling can be related to an earlier tradition. In other Jewish documents, we find the following distribution of graphemes used for /s/: (i) shin in SSC, CC, R, Le, R, Be, Mel, ShB, and Ox; (ii) a few examples of samekh (along with numerous cases of shin) are found in SAB, BB, Teh, PuV, and HiP; (iii) both shin (main form) and samekh appear in SD, DB, H, BZR, BZV, BZP, and Pr; (iv) only MM, Kr, and NH use samekh regularly.430 One can observe that by the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries samekh is rarely used in Prague. Its use is more regular in Kraków in the sixteenth century.431 During the following period, nevertheless, the use of samekh for [s] gradually became the norm in all dialects of Yiddish.432 This rule permitted avoidance of the phonetic ambiguity of shin: the latter became restricted to [š]. Earlier, a graphic convention of using zayin ( )זfor [s] and shin for [š] has been introduced at wordfinal position to facilitate a distinction between the two sibilants in question. The [s]-pronunciation of zayin was guaranteed because of the rule of final devoicing. Table . shows several examples of auxiliary words of this phenomenon {G}.433 As can be seen from Table ., the first known sporadic references are already found in the earliest sources from the area of BNEY HES such as CC, R, and Be, while no example of final zayin is found in SAB, SSC, R, and Le. Other, more recent, sources can be divided into three groups:434 . Those in which the final zayin is found in a very limited set of words (mainly words cognate to NHG als, bis, and ist): MM, H, HiP, BZR; . Those in which it is quite general:435 BB, SD, Teh, PuV, Ox, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr; . Intermediate group: Mel, ShB, DB, NH. During the following centuries, with the introduction of samekh, there was no need anymore to distinguish final /s/ and /š/. As a result, at least in Slavic countries the tendency that characterized works from the second of the above group was stopped and for a number of words it became customary to put samekh (rather than zayin) in the final position. NH represents one of the first works in which the convention was changed. In StY, traces of the older tradition survive only in a few auxiliary words listed in Table . and globally corresponding to the third group. In LitY and UkrY, in which the rule of final devoicing was lost, the final zayin is not just a graphic convention: it
See TG – for additional details. In H, only two words given in Hebrew characters have /s/. One includes samekh and another includes sin. 431 However, we cannot say that it was already the norm. For example, samekh is rare in a book published in (EYT –), while only shin appears in KrL and Br. 432 In Prague tombstone inscriptions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only samekh is used for [s] in such Yiddish given names as female Kresl, Sirke/Serke, Slave, Zisl(e) and male Iserl, Sender, Ziskind, and Zusman. However, the Yiddish possessive suffix -s was still spelled ש: the Hebrew spelling of numerous patronymic and matronymic surnames ends in this letter (Beider :–). In Frankfurt, during the same period samekh appears in the spelling of the female given names Serkhe(n) and Ziskhen and male Manis, Sender, Ziskind, and Zusman (see Horovitz ). In Amsterdam, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the use of samekh to express [s] was the norm in numerous Ashkenazic family names (see van Straten ). 433 A detailed analysis of Yiddish words ending in zayin can be found in TG –. 434 This classification is inspired by that suggested in TG (though it does not take the same criterion to define the last group). 435 Among additional examples are the neuter definite article and the forms cognate with NHG es ‘it,’ alles ‘all,’ aus ‘out,’ and was ‘what.’ 430
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Orthography
TABLE . Auxiliary words with final /z/ or /s/ StY word
MHG
NHG
Meaning
Sources using zayin
Sources using shin or samekh
az ()
als(e)
als
as
CC (rare), all others
SSC; CC (main)
az ()
daʒ
daß
that, which
BB, Teh (rare), PuV (main), Ox; Mel, ShB, and DB (rare), HiP (few), BZV (main), BZP, Kr, Pr
R, Be, Teh (main), PuV (rare); MM, Mel, ShB, and DB (main), H, HiP (main), BZR, BZV (rare)
biz
biʒ
bis
until
Be (rare), BB, SD, PuV, ShB, H, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, NH
SSC, CC, R, R, Le, Be (main)
dos
daʒ
das
the (neuter); this
PuV, Ox, BZV (rare), BZP (main), Kr (partly), Pr, NH (rare)
SSC, R, R, Be, Teh, MM, Mel, ShB, DB, H, HiP, BZR, BZV (main), BZP (rare), Kr (partly), NH (main)
es
ëʒ
es
it
BB, Teh, PuV, and Ox (main), Mel (partly), ShB (rare), DB; BZV (rare), BZP, Kr, and Pr (partly), NH
SSC, CC, R, R, Be, BB and PuV (rare), MM, Mel (partly), ShB (main), Ox (rare), H, HiP, BZR, BZV (main); BZP, Kr, and Pr (partly)
iz
ist
ist
is
BB, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, Ox, DB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP; H, Kr, Pr (all main), NH
SSC, CC, Le, Be; H, Kr, Pr (all rare)
undz
uns
uns
us
PuV, Mel, Ox (main), BZP (partly), Pr
CC, R, R, Le, Be, H, Ox (rare), HiP, BZR, BZP (partly), NH
represents the sound /z/. Among other modern Yiddish varieties, only in SwY do we find two distinct phonemes in final position: the lenis /z/ appears in words cognate to NHG aus, bis, das (article), and es, that is, similarly to sources of the second of the above three groups.436 The presence of voiced and /or lenis /z/ in the Yiddish verbs cognate to NHG lassen ‘to let’ and müssen ‘must’437 is related to the same phenomenon. Initially, /z/ appeared in forms ending in a sibilant (compare StY first singular loz, first and third singulars muz). Later, by analogy, this sound was acquired instead of /s/ by other
436 437
See Guggenheim-Grünberg :, :, TG . See the feature {C} in section ...
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The German component
forms too. Globally speaking, the consideration of the final zayin reveals a situation, rare in the history of Yiddish, in which the spelling influenced the phonetics.438 Early Ashkenazic sources show four possible graphic expressions for the initial consonant that corresponds to MHG v {G}:439 . double vav ()וו: SAB (with a raphe sign), R (partly),440 Be (rare); . veth ( )ֿבin various contexts: CC (rare), Le, Be (main), Ox; . veth ( )ֿבbefore vav (וa)441 and vav in other contexts: M, CC (main), R, BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM,442 Mel, ShB, H, HiP, BZR; . vav ( )וin various contexts: SSC, R (partly), DB, Pr (main);443 . fe ()ֿפ: H, Ox (rare), BZV; BZP and Kr (main);444 Pr (rare), NH. The possibilities , , and do not conform to Hebrew, a language in which no word starts with ֿב or ֿפ. To this factor can be due—at least partly—the choice of the fourth possibility. The first choice reveals a phonetical difference in comparison at least to the fifth one, namely a voiced (and/or lenis) and unvoiced (and/or fortis) consonant, respectively.445 The use of alef without any phonetic value (silent alef) in the word-final position represents another peculiarity of the Hebrew spelling by BNEY HES.446 For example, silent alef appears quite regularly after a final consonant in oldest sources: SAB, SSC, M, CC, Le, R, R, and Be {G}. In these cases, often the consonant in question has the diacritical sign shewa. In the same sources, we do not find silent alef after a vowel, for example, in words cognate to NHG die ‘the (feminine),’ du ‘you,’ and sie ‘she/they.’ They are generally spelled די, דו, and זי, respectively. In more recent sources, the situation is inversed. Silent alef is almost never used in words ending in a consonant.447 Yet, it is common after /i/ and the diphthongs ending in the glide /j/. It also appears in certain words ending in /u/.448 Table . illustrates this point {G}.
Note that, except for undzer ‘our’ related to undz, for words listed in Table . no inflected forms exist that could in principle strengthen the voiced/lenis pronunciation. 439 For the general discussion of this phenomenon see TG –. 440 In the same source, the equivalent to MHG w is expressed with double vav with two parallel dashes over it. 441 This vav corresponds to such vowels as /o/, /u/, /ø/, and /y/. However, in certain cases initial vav is retained and alef is introduced to separate this consonant and the vowel in question. 442 This spelling convention was changed in the reprinted versions of MM. For example, in the two excerpts from the introduction to MM appearing in Dubnov :–, we find the initial fe. We also find ‘ דזthat’ contrasting to דסpresent in the first edition (). These facts clearly show that the printed version used by Dubnov was not that of . 443 R is pointed and, as a result, this initial consonantal vav can be easily distinguished from /o/ and /u/ because these vowels have diacritic signs. DB introduces alef between the initial consonantal vav and vav that designates /o/ or /u/. Pr uses fe before /u/ and vav in other contexts (including the position before /o/ expressed in that source via alef ). 444 In some words, BZP and Kr also use vav (but never before /u/). 445 Compare with the feature {C} in section ... 446 The most detailed analysis of silent alef in Ashkenazic sources appears in TG – (covering reasons for the emergence of post-consonantal silent alef). 447 Known exceptions mostly end in /p/ or the affricate /pf/: this is the case for eight of the twelve references of postconsonantal silent alef in BZR (TG ), [* דמפפאdampf] ‘steam,’ [* צפפאtsopf] ‘plait,’ [* דיבאdip] ‘thief ’ and several other similar forms in SD whose MHG and NHG equivalents all end in a consonant; [* לייפאlajp] ‘body’ in H, and [* קופֿפאkopf] ‘head’ in Pr. 448 Mid states explicitly that final alef seen after a vowel represents no more than an embellishment of the script (EYT ). 438
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Orthography
TABLE . Final alef after vowels StY word
MHG
NHG
Meaning
Sources with alef
Sources without alef
di
diu
die
the (feminine article)
PuV (partly), Mel, ShB, H (main), BZR (main), BZV, BZP, Kr and Pr (partly), NH
H, BB, Teh, PuV (partly), MM, Ox, DB; H and BZR (rare); HiP; Kr and Pr (partly)
zi; zey
si(e)
sie
she; they
BB and Teh (rare), PuV (main), Mel, ShB, Ox (rare), H (main), BZR (main), BZV, BZP, Kr and Pr (partly)
H; BB and Teh (main), PuV (rare), MM, Ox (main), DB; H and BZR (rare), HiP; Kr and Pr (partly)
du
dû
du
you
PuV and Mel (rare), ShB, HiP, BZR (rare), BZV, BZP, Kr (partly), Pr (rare), NH
Teh, PuV and Mel (main), Ox, DB, H, BZR (main), Kr (partly), Pr (main)
tsu
zuo
zu
to
Kr (partly)
all
bay
bî
bei
near
all
DB (partly), Pr (rare)
Table . allows us to distinguish several groups: . those in which the final silent alef is non-existent or unusual: Teh, Ox, DB; . those in which it is quite general: ShB, BZV, BZP, Kr, NH; . intermediate group: PuV, Mel, H, BZR, Pr (for all of which alef appears in di and zi, but not in du), HiP (inversed situation). One can see that if within the first group one finds western sources, those from the second were mainly printed in Slavic countries. Yet, in the latter region at some moment this graphic convention was abandoned: the word-final silent alef is unknown in modern literary Yiddish. The use of alef (rather than vav)—with or without the diacritic sign qameṣ —to express the sound /o/ characterizes, thoroughly or partially, H and documents whose provenance from Bohemia and Poland is without question: BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, and NH. In other, western, early Ashkenazic sources and MM vav represents the standard way of rendering /o/, at least outside of the contexts when it follows /j/ {G}.449 However, gradually the spelling tradition from Central and Eastern Europe became standard for all Ashkenazic communities.450 Important changes occurred in the spelling of various /e/-colored stressed vowels. In the following list, the early sources are divided into several categories according to the graphic equivalents of the sounds corresponding to MHG ê, ë (in open syllables), and e (in closed syllables) {G}:451
See statistical information about some of these sources (as well a number of others) in TG . For example, in tombstones in Frankfurt during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we find alef for /o/ in local Yiddish names Fogel and Golde and male Kopel and Volf (Horovitz ) cognate with StY Foygl, Golde, Kopl, and Volf, respectively. 451 A detailed analysis appears in TG , –. 449 450
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The German component
. miscellaneous spellings: SAB, M, R, Le452 . yod for ê and e, ayin for ë: SSC,453 CC, R,454 Be (mainly)455 . yod for ê, ayin for e and ë: BB, SD, Teh, Mel, and ShB (all mainly),456 PuV, MM, Ox, HiP, H, BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, NH.457 The difference in spelling between, on the one hand, the first and the second, older, groups, and, on the other hand, the third, more recent, group reflects phonetical shifts.458 However, in both these groups, one can observe the presence of one basic graphic convention elaborated by BNEY HES: the use of ayin for /e/-colored vowels.459 This feature is valid for all modern Yiddish varieties. In works with no unrounding or partial unrounding, we find different ways of spelling the sound [y] equivalent to German ü {G}: . vav ()ו: SAB (partly), SSC, CC, Le, Be (main); SD and MM (both partly), Ox, DB (rare) . qibbuṣ ( ֻ ) – vav: SAB (partly), R (partly), R, Be (rare), Teh, H . vav – yod ()וי: R (partly; sometimes with qibbuṣ under the previous consonant); BB, SD, and MM (all partly), PuV, Mel, ShB, DB (main), H, HiP, BZR,460 BZV, Pr. In the first group (covering mainly the oldest sources), there is no difference between the graphic expression of MHG u and ü. The second group includes Teh and a few of the other oldest sources. Note that in Teh and Tish we also find a striking graphic peculiarity unknown in other Jewish documents: the front rounded mid-vowel /ø/, equivalent to NHG ö, is expressed via ḥ aṭefqameṣ ( ֳ ) – vav.461 The correlation between the two dots present in ḥ aṭef-qameṣ and those present in German umlaut is unlikely to be fortuitous. This factor influenced the choice of this Hebrew diacritical sign. In this context, the choice of qibbuṣ in the graphic expression of German ü was likely also due to the presence of several dots in this Hebrew diacritical sign.462 The third group encompasses sources with the spelling that became standard during the sixteenth century.463 This phonetic convention was also influenced by the German spelling in which (before the modern sign ü became the only expression) one also used combinations of signs u and e, with the second one placed either over the first one or after it, while in Jewish texts of that time /u/ was expressed via vav and /e/ via yod (BN ).464 Another series of graphic peculiarities is related to the expression of diphthongs. For the diphthongs [ej] (originally for MHG ei), the use of double yod ( )ײis pan-Ashkenazic: it appears
452 The exact graphemes are: (a) SAB: ṣ ere-yod for ê, various signs (mainly ṣ ere-yod or ṣ ere, but also ayin-ṣ ere-yod, segol-yod) for e, no examples for ë; (b) M: ṣ ere-yod for ê, ṣ ere-yod or ṣ ere-ayin for e, pataḥ -yod, pataḥ -ayin, or segol-yod for ë; (c) R: ṣ ere-yod or ṣ ere-ayin for ê, segol-yod or segol-ayin for e, segol-ayinor pataḥ -ayin for ë; (d) Le: segol-ayin, segol-yod, or segol for ê, e, and ë. 453 SSC uses: yod for ê; no sign, yod or ayin for e; ayin or (rare) yod for ë (Timm :). 454 R is pointed and has segol-yod for ê and e, pataḥ -ayin for ë. 455 In Be, one also finds a few double-yod for MHG ê. 456 In BB, yod appears in place of about ten percent of MHG e some of which are in closed syllables (TG ). SD and Teh also include examples of the similar kind. In both Mel and ShB, one also finds examples of (ṣ ere-)yod for MHG e; some of them appear in closed syllables (TG ). 457 NH is pointed and has ṣ ere-yod for MHG ê, segol-ayin for MHG e and ë. 458 See the discussion of the feature {V} in section ... 459 See section ... 460 In a few cases, qibbuṣ is placed under the consonant that precedes vav-yod in BZR (TG ) and H. 461 Mid states that vav – yod is a more accurate graphic expression for German ö than ḥ aṭef-qameṣ used by certain Jewish authors (EYT ). 462 See TG . During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Christian Hebraists from Western Europe write that for Ashkenazic Jews shureq and qibbuṣ correspond to /u/ and /y/, respectively (Birnbaum :–, :–). 463 See also Birnbaum :–, –, :–, –. 464 See the feature {G}.
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Orthography
already in SAB, SSC, CC, and other earliest sources. This expression was natural since in medieval Germany yod was used to express both /e/ and /i/. Later, with the shift from [ej] to [aj] in certain dialects, the same digraph became closely associated with the diphthong [aj] too. Moreover, the Ashkenazic spelling could be influenced by that of Jews from medieval northern France: numerous examples of double yod for Old French ei and ai appear in commentaries by Rashi. Since in earliest western sources, both /o/ and /u/ are expressed—exactly as numerous non-Ashkenazic traditions also—via vav, for the diphthong [ou] (originally for MHG ou) the most natural spelling would be via double vav ()וו. However, we find this digraph in SSC and CC only: indeed, the same sign was used already for the consonant /v/. Eventually, [ou] became mainly expressed via { ויG}. This approach, unknown in SAB, SSC, CC, Le, R, rare in Be, is common in R and all works from the sixteenth century onward. It allowed one to avoid the ambiguity caused by double vav and, moreover, to generalize the use of yod as the second element of various diphthongs. Yet, for a number of works this graphic convention created a new ambiguity: as discussed above the same digraph designates the rounded monophthong /y/ as well.465 Later, with the shift of the phoneme related to MHG ou from [ou] to [au] in certain dialects, the same digraph became closely associated with the diphthong [au] also. In various dialects, the diphthong derived from MHG û also gave [ou] or [au] and became therefore expressed via ויa.466 The same digraph also covers the diphthong [oj] found in certain Yiddish varieties. For the use of the trigraph וײin certain sources {G},467 one can distinguish several categories of documents: . those in which וײis common and used in place of numerous vowels: Be (for MHG iu, üe, uo, û, oe, öu, and ü), Ox (for MHG iu, û, üe, uo, and ou); . those with a moderate use of this sign: BB, SD, Teh, PuV, Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR (in all of them, only for words having MHG iu and öu), Pr (in certain words, for MHG û, iu, ou). Since the first vowels of diphthongs (or monophthongs) expressed via וײare normally rounded, this graphic tradition can be observed only in sources for the authors of which no unrounding took place. As a result, it cannot be found in sources from Slavic countries.468 Spellings present in SD include a number of trigraphs of other kinds, compare ‘ באויםtree’ and ‘ באויךabdomen,’ ‘ זאײףsoap’ and ‘ באײןbone,’ ‘ צויאןfence’ {G}. Withdrawing alef from all of them, we obtain spellings usually found in other documents; compare StY boym, boykh, zeyf, beyn, and tsam / tsoym, respectively.469 Other unusual trigraphs are: עײin M, אװand אײin H as variant spellings for MHG ei, ou, and î, respectively. Several variants of spelling have existed for unstressed vowels in non-final position {G}:470 • SAB (partly),471 SSC, CC, R, Be (mainly):472 shewa (in pointed texts) or no sign (if not pointed);
See the group for {G}. About the history (and reasons) of these spelling conventions see BN –, TG –, –. 467 A detailed analysis appears in Röll .:– (see also TG , –). 468 See feature {V} in section ... 469 Some of these examples include vowels that correspond to MHG ei (‘soap,’ ‘bone’) or ou (‘tree’). For Elia Levita, the author of SD, the pronunciation of these two diphthongs were transitional to /a:/ (see the discussion of feature {V} in section ..). The introduction of alef can be related to this phenomenon. However, in the two remaining words (‘abdomen,’ ‘fence’) the root vowel corresponds to MHG î. 470 A detailed analysis appears in TG – and Röll . (passim). 471 In that source, we also often find ṣere and ṣere-yod, the last spelling being common in the verbal inifitive ending -en. 472 In that source, we also find a number of posttonic ayin before /r/ and alef before final /n/ in verbal infinitive ending (Röll .:–). 465 466
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The German component
• Le:473 pretonic shewa; shureq ( )ּוin other places; • R: pretonic segol-ayin in der- / her-; shewa or no sign in other prefixes; various signs in other places (ḥ ireq, ḥ ireq-yod, pataḥ , pataḥ -yod, segol, no sign); • BB, SD, Teh, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP (mainly), BZR, BZV, BZP, Kr (mainly),474 Pr: pretonic yod in be- and ge-; no sign in der-; yod or no sign in other places; • NH: ayin in der-; ḥ ireq, or (ḥ ireq-) yod in other places. From the above list, one can observe the standardizing of the spelling during the sixteenth century using graphemes different from those present in texts of the previous centuries. Several graphic idiosyncrasies are related to the word got ‘God’ (MHG got, NHG Gott) {G}. Since in western sources both /u/ and /o/ are expressed via vav, a confusion between this noun and the adjective gut ‘good’ was possible in texts that were not pointed: both were spelled ( גוטTG ).475 One of earliest documents from that group, CC, resolved this graphic ambiguity by abbreviating got in many cases to ג׳a.476 The scribe of the translation of Psalms made by a Jew in for the leader of the St. Augustine order community in Rohrbach places in גוטan oblique dash over the initial gimel (EYT ). In a number of other documents (BB, Teh, Mel, ShB, Ox, H, HiP, BZV (partly), BZP), the noun acquires a horizontal line over all of its three letters or at least the first two of them.477 DB uses ית גוfor got, with a horizontal line over גוand raphe over tav.478 In other non-pointed texts (including BZR, BZV (partly), Kr, Pr), got is written גאט. Sometimes this spelling also uses a horizontal line over this word. This is the case for several manuscript prayer books: KrL and another from (see EYT ). Comparing these data to those present in the discussion above of feature {G}, we can observe that the spelling of this word in the three versions of the tale Beria ve-Zimra is quite peculiar. Indeed, in both BZV and BZP we find vav, while these sources normally use alef for /o/. In BZR, the situation is the opposite: instead of standard vav, the word got is written via alef (TG ). In sources in which vowels are pointed (R, R, Le, NH) the spelling of the word in question does not represent any exception to general rules. Only in a few sources, the spelling of both got and gut is the same: Be, SD, PuV. In a few early sources, we can observe the presence of graphic conventions that are directly based on the orthography of German. Since the Middle Ages, German uses post-vocalic “h” to designate the fact that the preceding vowel is long, while doubling of consonants marks the shortness of the precedeing vowel rather than the length of the consonant itself. We find no expression for postvocalic “h” in early Ashkenazic sources. Yet, double consonants can be found in CC and SD {G}. They also appear in a Jewish document from Silesia ().479 473 In a non-pointed Jewish document from Zürich () (EYT –), vav appears in various unstressed positions (including the transcription of vowels present in verbal prefixes equivalent to German be- and ge-). Quite unusually, it is also regularly placed between consonants where no vowel is known in various dialects: compare שוטאטand שובורעכון, whose cognate NHG forms are Stadt ‘town’ and sprechen ‘to speak,’ respectively. A sporadic use of vav for the unstressed reduced vowel is also known in GH (Landau :). 474 In HiP and Kr, the vowel of the verbal prefix der- is often expressed via ayin. 475 See the discussion above of the feature {G}. 476 An additional factor could be the tradition to use ׳הin place of ‘ השםthe Lord’ (personal communication with Andrey Rozenberg). 477 This spelling is also mentioned by Elias Schadäus (Frakes :). 478 In ית גו, both parts represent abbreviations: the first one of ‘ גוטGod’ and the second one of ‘ יתברךblessed be He.’ 479 In all these sources the doubling affects only lamed, nun, and resh (see TG for CC; in a document from Silesia we find double lamed only, see its text in EYT –). Among examples from SD are: ‘ העררlord’ (NHG Herr), ‘ רעננירrunner’ (NHG Renner), ‘ קעללערbutler, cellarer’ (NHG Keller). Even if their MHG forms all have double consonants, the spellings in question do not reveal a real length of the consonants in question: they are just influenced by the German spelling. These spellings can, in principle, be due to the editor Paul Fagius rather than to Elia Levita, the author of SD. To the same editor may be due certain other unusual graphic elements found in SD (see feature {G} discussed above).
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Given names
.
GIVEN NAMES
.. Pan-Ashkenazic names A consideration of traditional Jewish given names of Germanic origin used in various communities represents a powerful tool for the analysis of linguistic and genetic links between communities in various European provinces. For this, it is appropriate to identify the approximate time and general area where pan-Ashkenazic names480 are likely to have entered the Jewish corpus. The first category of names of Germanic origin covers those that were specifically Jewish. They were likely created by Ashkenazic Jews on the basis of their vernacular language. Here the largest layer corresponds to those the earliest references to which come from the medieval Rhenish communities such as Cologne, Worms, Mainz, and Speyer, or from nearby Frankfurt, or, rarely, from southwestern communities in Baden, Alsace, or Switzerland. Among them are the ancestors of the following StY forms: male Gotlib, Herts, Kalmen, Koyfman, Liber(man), Libkind, Lipman,481 Traytl, Zelik(man), Ziskind, and Zusman; female: Feyge,482 Glike, Hinde, Meyte, Mushkate, and Sheyne. The earliest references to the ancestors of male Zalkind and female Kreyne appear in Swabia. In Eastern Franconia, mainly in such communities as Würzburg, Nürnberg, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, are found the most ancient mentions of the ancestors of: male Fishl, Fridman, and Sheynman, female Blume and Shprintse. In Austria, we find the earliest references to Gutkind though the same name is also known in both the Rhineland and Franconia during the same first half of the fourteenth century. The second category encompasses names originally borrowed from German Christians. To this belong the following StY names the ancestors of which have been originally attested already in the medieval Rhineland: male Anshl, Falk, Getsl, Helman, Henzl, Karpl, Kopl, Leml, Leyb, Levin, Mendl, Note, Zalmen, Zanvl, and Zekl, and female Brayne, Eydl, Freyde, Frumet, Gele, Ginendl, Golde, Gute, Mine, Raytse, and Royze. It is in Franconia that we find the first traces of male Ayzik, Ber, Eberl, Gimpl, Hirsh, Volf,483 and Ziml, and female Ele, Hendl, Hitsele, Klore, Libe, Tile, Yute, and Zelde. Formally speaking, the oldest mention of a form directly related to the male name Merkl comes from Silesia (Merkelin, ). However, the same form is also found in Alsace in . Here we face an independent borrowing of the same Christian name in different areas. For the female name Toybe, the first trace is conjectured to be from a Hebrew transcription in Regensburg (). At the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we find reference to related forms in various Ashkenazic communities of Franconia, Austria, and the Rhineland. The above data show that the Rhenish part of the pan-Ashkenazic corpus is, by far, the largest one. Even for names whose earliest occurrences are not found in the Rhineland, there are often Rhenish references only several decades later. Consequently except for a few individual cases, there seems to be a basic pan-Ashkenazic set of names that were common throughout medieval Germany and whose elements or derived forms were found later in Slavic countries. 480 In this section, the expression “pan-Ashkenazic” is used for those names that were, on the one hand, known during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Eastern Europe and, on the other hand, appear in sources (at least medieval) of Western Europe too. 481 The reference to Liebmann in “Bavaria” (), firstly, comes from a doubtful source (note the standardized modern German spelling), and, secondly the source in question does not give any precision about the exact place. It can be from any area that in the mid-nineteenth century was inside of the Kingdom of Bavaria (including Franconia and eastern Swabia). The first clearly localized reference is that to Lyfmannus (Cologne, circa ). 482 A reference from Franconia dates from the same year. 483 The earliest reference (Woelflin in ) is from “Bavaria” that is not properly defined (see footnote ). The first clearly localized reference is from Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Franconia ().
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The German component
References to certain Rhenish names from the above list of specifically Jewish names already appear in sources from the eleventh century. This is the case for Kalman, the original form that gave rise to StY Kalmen. This name was constructed by Jews from Kalonymos, of Greek origin, by adding the German element -man ‘man’ (with a concomitant truncation of the stem). Among the lists of Jewish victims of the First Crusade (), one finds borrowed forms that were ancestors of StY Helman ‘healthy man,’ Brayne, Ginendl, Golde ‘gold(en),’ Gute ‘good,’ Mine ‘love,’ and Raytse (with the root meaning ‘rich’). The attractive semantics of a number of them was clearly important for their borrowing. These onomastic facts clearly indicate that during that period, the vernacular language of Rhenish Jews had a German (and certainly not Romance) basis. During the following two and a half centuries, that is, until the massacres of the time of Black Death (), numerous other given names were borrowed by Jews from Christians in western German-speaking provinces and their general proportion became significantly larger than in .484 For some of these appellations, we cannot be sure about the exact period of their borrowing. Their first known references may be much more recent than the actual time of their entering the Ashkenazic corpus. Yet, for certain other names we can be confident that their borrowing took place necessarily after the eleventh century simply because German Christians were not using them earlier. For example, it was only during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that numerous names of Greek or Romance origin, often borne by Christian saints, became widespread among German Gentiles. Examples: Philipp, Clara, Euphemia, Julia, Lilia, Mija, and Sophia. Their earliest available Jewish references correspond to the thirteenth century and, therefore, perfectly fit this chronology.485 Of particular interest for the cultural history of Ashkenazic Jews are those names that are derived from the German forms of biblical names. This group encompasses StY Ayzik and Zekl (both from Isaac), Eberl (from Abraham), Kopl (from Jacob), Note (from Nathan), Zalmen (from Salomon), Zanvl (from Samuel), Ziml (form Simon), and Yute (from Judith). The incorporation of these names into the Jewish corpus already in the Middle Ages and their widespread use can serve as evidence for the strong linguistic assimilation of Jews of medieval western Germany to their Gentile neighbors. Analysis of borrowings made by Ashkenazic Jews from the Christian population in medieval German-speaking provinces shows that they were very selective. For evident reasons, Jews did not take names with close connotations of Christianity such as Christian, Christoph, and C(h)ristina. The selectivity also concerned numerous other layers of Gentile names. For a large number of names frequently used by Gentiles not a single Jewish bearer is known in all of medieval Germany. Others were quite unusual for Jews.486
.. Names restricted to Central and Eastern Europe Appellations mentioned in the previous section cover an important part of the collection of base names of nineteenth-century EY. This corpus also included a number of names unknown in western Germany such as Gutman, Preydl/Freydman, and Zundl, male names with references to their related forms in Austria at the beginning of the fourteenth century, as well as Kune, a female name borrowed from Germans in Central Europe, with references in Silesia, western Poland, and Thuringia already during the fourteenth century. The above names are the only “survivors” of the corpus specific to BNEY KHES, that is, in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, eastern Compare the proportions in (Frankfurt), (Würzburg, Rothenburg, Nürnberg), and (Worms, Nürnberg) (Beider :). For example, in Worms, between and , the percentage of Germanic female names, of which a large number were borrowed names, grew from seven to fifty-three. 485 See Beider :. 486 See detailed analysis of this phenomenon in Beider :–. 484
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Given names
Germany, and western Poland. For a number of names of BNEY KHES no references are known after the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among them are the following: (a) Eckehard, Frenzlein, Hartwic, Jordan (common), and Toni/Tonemann, all male and borrowed from German Christians, (b) most likely created by Jews, male Swerzel/Swerzlein and its female equivalent Swarza, both from ‘black,’ (c) of uncertain Germanic origin: male Fink(e)/Finkel and Has(e)/Haze;487 (d) Iserl(in), derived from Israel, the German form of biblical ִי ְשׂ ָרֵאלa.488 The corpus of modern EY names also includes relatively recent forms unknown in western Germany such as Mayzl (male), Finkl and Nisl (female), all initially appearing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as Alter (male) and Alte (female), both apotropaic names created by Jews from the adjective meaning ‘old’ and both without any reference prior to the eighteenth century.
.. Phonological peculiarities The consideration of the phonetic variants of the same original name of Germanic origin often shows that forms brought by migrants were mainly adapted to the local pronunciation norms. For example, in the fourteenth century, in Vienna, we find the typical Upper German form Sundl (diminutive of ‘son,’ compare StY Zundl), while documents from Thuringia show its Central German equivalent Sonichen. Quite naturally, phonetic shifts in various dialects affected given names in the same way as words from the general lexicon. The oldest Rhenish and Franconian forms of the male name meaning ‘lion’ appearing in Christian sources—such as Löwe and Lewe—have two syllables with a fricative consonant present in the second syllable. This conforms to the Jewish pronunciation of the corresponding common noun.489 Yet, in Central and Eastern Europe for both the given name and the name of the animal we find monosyllabic forms ending in a stop; compare StY Leyb. For Heil(e)man/ Heylman (StY Helman), a name common in the medieval Rhineland and derived from MHG heilman ‘health’ + ‘man,’ we find the variant Halman in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. The same reflex /a:/ for MHG ei characterizes all of DuY. During the nineteenth century, Koyfman (related to StY koyfman, MHG koufman ‘merchant’) was a relatively common name in southern Poland. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Kafman was common in Prague where, generally speaking, we find /a:/ for MHG ou. Sources from thirteenth-century Cologne mention Cofman/Koifman (pronounced [ko:fman]), in conformity with the /o:/-reflex for MHG ou in the local Ripuarian dialect of German. The form Kaufman is common in various German provinces during the following two centuries. Its [au] corresponds, on the one hand, to the reflex posited in Table . for the vocalic chart underlying WY, and, on the other hand, to the standardized NHG. A rare form Keyfman, with the [ej] corresponding to the LitY realization of MHG ou was also found during the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe. Yet, a detailed analysis of the onomastic materials shows the existence of certain phonological phenomena that are limited to names and are not applicable to elements of the general lexicon. For example, we can observe that for names mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most common variants found during the nineteenth century in the Russian Pale of Settlement deviate from standard rules: instead of **Heylman (LitY) / **Eylman (UkrY) and **Koyfman (UkrY) / **Keyfman (LitY), the diphthongal forms one would expect knowing the MHG ancestors of the root vowels, one mainly 487
All names in this list are given according to their German spelling found in Christian documents. Contrasting with the hypocorisms of the same name most common during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Rhineland (Stral, Strale, Strahel) and Franconia (Strolin, Strolein, Strölein). Iserl is more likely to be derived from the German Christian rather than the Hebrew base form of this biblical name because of its initial accent. (The whole footnote is due to MRPC.) 489 See the table for feature {C} in section ... 488
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The German component
finds forms with monophthongs: Helman/Elman490 and Kofman. A number of additional illustrations for a similar phenomenon can be found in given names of Hebrew origin.491 The phonetic development of several male names was different from that of the words from the general lexicon on which they are based. Lipman is different from StY libman ‘beloved man,’ while both are ultimately related to MHG liepman. This difference is no big surprise. Indeed, because of the final devoicing the last consonant of the adjective lib is actually pronounced /p/ in Yiddish varieties others than LitY and UkrY.492 Herts, Hirsh, and Hersh are all ultimately related to MHG hirʒ ‘deer.’ In Eastern Europe, the geographic distribution of the two last forms roughly corresponds to the distribution of the phonetic forms of the EY word meaning ‘deer’: Hirsh/Hirs in LitY, Hersh in PolY, and (H)ersh in UkrY. Yet, Herts corresponds to the Hessian dialectal form.493 Its earliest references appear in Frankfurt during the second half of the fourteenth century. It was brought as a ready-made form by migrants from western Germany to Slavic countries. StY Zusman is the most peculiar example. MHG had two phonetic variants for ‘sweet man’: suoʒ eman and süeʒ eman. The name is ultimately related to the former, while StY compound name zisman comes from the latter. Oldest references to the name come from the Rhineland. The /u:/ in their root conforms to the reflex peculiar to local German dialects.494 As a result, here we face—as in the case of Herts—a rare situation of phonetic features of WCG dialects retained in a name used in Eastern Europe. Most curiously, /u/ in Zusman contrasts to /i/ found in StY Ziskind ‘sweet child.’ Yet, the latter also originated in the Rhineland. In medieval Christian references from western Germany, exactly as for the ancestor of StY Zusman, we find ‘u’ and not ‘ü.’ Most likely, Zusman and Ziskind came to Eastern Europe following two different routes: northern (through eastern Germany) for the first of them and southern (through Bavaria, Bohemia, and other provinces where the root vowel in the adjective meaning ‘sweet’ was either /i/ or /y/) for the second one. Note that in inscriptions from the old cemetery of Prague, ( זוסמןZusman) appears only once (), while ( זיסקינדZiskind) is found twelve times between and . On the other hand, in documents from Erfurt (Thuringia) dating from the second half of the fourteenth centrury, we find references to several persons called Sus(e)man / Susz(e)man, but no mention of any form cognate with StY Ziskind. Earliest traces of different reflexes in the two names on the same territory come from Brandenburg. Here German sources mention Susmann () and Sisskindt (). During the seventeenth century, documents from western Poland, Red Ruthenia, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania regularly show /u/-forms for Zusman and /i/-forms for Ziskind.
.
YIDDISH TOPONYMS OF GERMAN ORIGIN IN SLAVIC COUNTRIES
.. Previous studies Several linguists addressed Yiddish toponyms in order to shed more light on the development of Yiddish. The article by Beranek () represents the first serious attempt to study Jewish place names in Slavic countries. It provides an appropriate analysis of various processes internal to Jewish
490 The Christian sources in which such forms appear do not enable us to establish the length of the root vowel. As a result, the actual PolY reflex can be *Hēlman. 491 See sections .. and .., features {v} and {v}, respectively. 492 Moreover, /b/ in LitY and UkrP is likely to be an innovation resulting from the loss of final devoicing (see section .). 493 See the discussion of the common noun ‘deer’ in section .., feature {C}; compare WG :. 494 Even in the present day, /u:/ represents the main reflex in the Rhineland (see RhWB).
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
communities. Beranek also states (p. ) that if several languages were used by the Christian majority and German was one of them, EY mainly took toponyms from German. Among his examples are: Prūk ‘Prague’ < Prag, Oüvm < Ofen, Dants(k) < Danzig, Lemberik < Lemberg; compare Czech Praha, Hungarian Buda, Polish Gdańsk, and Lwów (Ukrainian Львiв, Russian Львов), respectively. For several unusual Yiddish toponyms from western Galicia, Beranek (p. ) reconstructs hypothetical German forms that, according to him, may represent the etymons for these toponyms: Brigl < *Briegel (Polish Brzesko), Rayshi < *Reschau (Polish Rzeszów). The most detailed study on EY toponyms was written by Stankiewicz (). His work deals only with the territory that during the inter-war period belonged to Poland. The author collected a comprehensive list of Yiddish toponyms and proceeded to make the first systematic analysis of their phonology, with special chapters dealing with their stress patterns, vocalism, and consonantism. Stankiewicz addresses the question of the possibility of the German etymons. Among names that, according to him (p. ), are clearly of German origin are: Lise < Lissa, Zamter < Samter, Lesle < Junges Leslau, Altlesle < Leslau, Pāzer < Peisern, Zaybish < Saibusch, Apt < Abt, Lemberik < Lemberg, Rayshe < Reichshof (Polish equivalents are Leszno, Szamotuły, Inowrocław, Wlocławek, Pyzdry, Żywiec, Opatów, Lwów, and Rzeszów, respectively).495 Stankiewicz also notes (p. ) that the city names Poyzn and Varshe may represent the Yiddish development of (more likely) German Posen and Warschau or (less likely) of Polish Poznań and Warszawa. He correctly emphasizes that to suggest the most adequate etymological analysis ideally one should trace the history of each Yiddish place name and of its Slavic and German equivalents. However, he is rather skeptical about this possibility because of the paucity of the historical studies of toponyms in all these cultures. Many pages of WG deal with Yiddish toponyms. Basically, Weinreich agrees with Stankiewicz. He complements the analysis of his predecessor by adding more details concerning certain particular toponyms from Poland and covering the place names from the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories that during the inter-war period were parts of the USSR. He also addresses the question of the possibility for Yiddish toponyms to have German rather than Slavic etymons. Here his approach is opposite to that of Beranek. Weinreich (WG :) is more than skeptical about the idea that the Yiddish toponyms are patterned after the German ones and more generally about the theory that EY is closely linked to the medieval German colonial language in Poland. To counter these ideas, Weinreich stresses that, unlike Jews, Germans in Poland do not have the shifts /a/ > /u/ (as in Yiddish Krūke, compare German Krakau) and /u/ > /i/ (as in Kitne < Kutno),496 or reduced syllables as in Varshe (compare German Warschau). Conversely, Yiddish has no analogue to a number of German names such as Salzberg for Bochnia and Großsalz for Wieliczka. Weinreich criticizes the hypothesis by Stankiewicz about the provenance of Apt, the Yiddish name for Opatów, from German Abt (WG :). He says that no German document is found that would demonstrate the existence of this German toponym. He suggests an alternative hypothesis: Jews coming from Western Europe to Poland created the name by making a calque from Polish opat ‘Abbot’ to their vernacular language; compare MHG apt/abt, NHG Abt. Weinreich finds “absolutely untenable” the idea expressed by the historian Raphael Mahler who considers that if a Yiddish toponym is similar to the German one, this means that Jews lived in the place at least to the sixteenth century because at that time there was still the German stamp on Polish cities (WG :). Weinreich stresses that among the hundreds of Jewish settlements in Poland there are many for which there is no evidence that there had ever been German colonists there. He mentions 495
Note that for the last toponym in this list his etymology is different from that suggested by Beranek. This argument is anachronistic. The fronting /u/ > /i/ took place in PolY well after the end of the Middle Ages (see the discussion of the feature {V} in section ..). 496
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The German component
a German map for Eastern Europe compiled in , where numerous town names have no German cognates among those for which Yiddish names are special. According to Weinreich, “in some places where Germans lived together with Jews for a time, the Jews could have been the first arrivals; since it was easier for recently arrived Germans to communicate with Jews than with Poles, it would have been natural that in some instances they adopted the name of a new settlement from the Jews.” Globally speaking, Weinreich’s approach lays particular emphasis on linguistic innovations internal to Jewish communities. As a result, he often suggests similarities between German and Yiddish to be due to parallel independent developments. As can be seen from the sentence quoted above, sometimes he even comes to a totally unusual hypothesis that reverses the direction of influences with respect to the most common point of view.
.. Toponyms in the Czech lands For numerous places in the Czech lands, their German names differ from their Czech names. In these cases, Yiddish toponyms are mainly related to the German ones. A sample appears in Table .:497 TABLE . CzY toponyms based on German CzY name
Old spelling
Region
Czech name
German name [Old name (Year) Source]
Brin
ברונא, ברון
Moravia
Brno
Brünn [Bruenna () Oesterley :]
Bym(e)sl
בומסלא
Bohemia
Mladá Boleslav
Jungbunzlau
Eyger
איגרא
Bohemia
Cheb
Eger [Egre, Egra (Middle Ages) Oesterley :]
Gaye
גייא
Moravia
Kyjov
Gaya
Heleshau
העלישוי
Moravia
Holešov
Holleschau
Hotseplots
האציפלאץ
Moravia
Osoblaha
Hotzenplotz
Kelīn
קעלין
Bohemia
Kolín
Kolin [Köllein (Middle Ages) Schwarz :]
497 The second column presents spellings mainly found in Jewish sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Taglicht , Beider , GJ). The final alef is present in old Jewish spellings for Brno (Brünn), Cheb (Eger), and Prague. As discussed in section . (feature {G}), the silent alef after a consonant was not peculiar to Jewish orthography in the Czech lands. Consequently, in all these cases, the alef expresses a final vowel. Note that archaic German names of all these cities also end in a vowel. This vowel is absent from modern CzY (and Bohemian German) names of these cities because of apocope (see feature {U} in section .).
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin TABLE .
Continued
Krymenau
קרומינוי
Moravia
Moravský Krumlov
Mährisch Kromau [ Chrumenaw () Beranek :]
Laype
לייפאa, לייפן
Bohemia
Česká Lípa
Böhmisch-Leipa
Mizlep
מיזלאב
Moravia
Miroslav
Mißlitz [Mislabs () Schwarz :]
Niklsporg
ניקלשפורג
Moravia
Mikulov
Nikolsburg [Nikolspurg () Schwarz :]
Poslbarg
בערגaפאסל
Bohemia
Postoloprty
Postelberg
Prostits
פרוסטיץ
Moravia
Prostějov
Proßnitz [Prosteys () Schwarz :]
Prūg, Prōg
פרגא, פראגה, פראג
Bohemia
Praha ‘Prague’
Prag [Prage, Braga (th century) Oesterley :)
Rēdesh
רעדיש
Bohemia
Mnichovo Hradiště
Münchengrätz [Grädis (th century) Schwarz :; Redisch () Beranek :]
Tausk
טויסקa, טויזק
Bohemia
Domažlice
Taus [Tavst () Schwarz :]
Trisht
טרישט
Moravia
Třešť
Triesch
Tsnām
זנוייםa, זנוים
Moravia
Znojmo
Znaim
Ytits
אוטיץ
Bohemia
Votice
Wotitz
From Table ., one can see that /e/ present in Yiddish Kelīn and Rēdesh (instead of Czech /o/ and /a/, respectively) can be explained by the umlaut vowels ö and ä present in the medieval German names of the corresponding places. The final /k/ appearing in CzY Tausk is derived from former /t/. It is unclear whether this change was limited to Jews or appeared initially among German Christians. The second possibility sounds more plausible. Note that a similar dissimilation of consonants /st/ > /sk/ occurred in several German toponyms from the same area.498 CzY Trisht retains the etymological final /t/.499 It is its vowel /i/ that reveals a German influence: the original Czech soft trill /ř/, a sound foreign to German, was substituted by /ri/. The final /p/ in CzY Mizlep corresponds to former /b/ that appears (instead of Czech /v/) in the old German name for this town. In the last examples, even if Yiddish toponyms have been influenced by German names, they are still different from them. This shows that at some moment the phonetic development of Yiddish
498
For example, the name Vsk (Usk) appears in the German documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for places called in Czech Sezimovo Ústí and Ústí nad Labem (Schwarz :, ). The modern German of the last town, Aussig, is derived from medieval Usk. 499 In the mid-fourteenth century, this town appears in various Christian sources as Trzest, Trzistye, or Trisch (Schwarz :).
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The German component
toponyms became autonomous from that of the German names for the same places. Moreover, a number of phonetic peculiarities found in CzY toponyms are unknown in the corresponding German toponyms. Consequently, they are likely to be due to processes internal to Jewish communities. For example, among them are the following phenomena observed in the CzY toponyms appearing in Table .: /st/ > /s/ (Postelberg > Poslbarg), /nts/ > /ms/ (Bunzlau > Bym(e)sl), /o/ > /e/ (Holleschau > Heleshau), /vo/ > /u/ (Wotitz > old form Utits, modern Ytits). Without any Christian analog the Jewish name remains ביאהfor the town (Nový) Bydžov in Bohemia, called Neubydschow in German.
.. Poland in the medieval period Table . presents information concerning Yiddish toponyms in Poland that are of medieval German origin. The first column provides variants from PolY, in their modern forms valid at least since the eighteenth century and the forms (given in square brackets) that were valid several centuries ago, before the PolY shifts /u:/ > /i:/, /o:/ > /u:/, /aj/ > /a:/, and /ej/ > /aj/ took place. If the town in question is cited in ACP, the Hebrew spelling in question is also shown in the first column.500 The second column indicates the region and uses the following abbreviations: GP = Greater Poland, Kuy = Kuyavia. LP = Lesser Poland, Maz = Mazovia, Pom = Pomerelia, RR = Red Ruthenia, Vol = Volhynia. (The same abbreviations appear in square brackets [] in the text of this section below.) The third column gives Polish names and, in braces, Ukrainian names, both according to their modern spelling. Note that the Polish names do not differ substantially from those used in the Polish language at the end of the Middle Ages. To illustrate this statement, the toponyms that appear in Latin documents of the fifteenth century are given in square brackets.501 They generally show the Polish forms. The last column presents medieval German names for the same places that were mainly extracted from the German sources of the fifteenth century.502 For those places for which German names phonetically different from the Polish ones were used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these names are given in square brackets. All toponyms quoted concern towns except for the region of Kie ‘Kuyavia.’ 500
For all quotes from ACP the corresponding page numbers are indicated. When using that book as a source for Yiddish toponyms from the period between and , one should bear several factors in mind. Firstly, the editor of ACP standardized a number of spellings given in the index. As a result, the actual spellings that appear on the pages to which the references are made in the index can be different. Secondly, the fact that the original documents were written in Hebrew (and, moreover, by learned Jewish scribes who were perfectly aware of the Christian toponyms) influenced in certain cases not only the spelling used but also the choice of the exact form among the variants known to Jews. Sometimes, the choice was done in favor of a form that corresponds to the official name used by Christians that could be different from the vernacular Yiddish form. For example, the town of Lubartów is called Levertev in contemporary Yiddish. This name is derived from Lewertów, the form used in Polish until when the town name was changed to Lubartów. As a result, the Yiddish name reflects an archaic Polish form. Yet, in ACP (pp. , ) during the s this town is referred to as לוברטוב, that is, according to the newly changed official Polish name. This issue is particularly acute for several cities mentioned in Table .. One can see that for Poznań / Posen, Hebrew documents whose text appears in ACP vary between the traditional Jewish form פוזנאand the forms reflecting either the German or the Polish names. The fact that for the city of Lwów / Lemberg ACP gives almost exclusively the form לבובcan, in theory, be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, it can result from the desire of the scribes to conform to the official Polish name, Lwów. Secondly, it can imply that the contemporary Yiddish Lemberik (based on German Lemberg) is only a few centuries old. However, the use of other Jewish sources precludes the second possibility. A Yiddish document written in the city in question between and calls it *Lemberig (Dubnov :). 501 For all references appearing in the second and the third columns the name of the source is followed by the page number. Latinized forms are given in the second column in brackets only if the non-Latinized ones were not found. A representative list of Polish toponyms found in medieval (principally Latin) sources appears in Malec . 502 See Appendix B for the description of Christian (Latin or German) sources of the fifteenth century.
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
TABLE . Oldest EY toponyms borrowed from German Modern PolY [early PolY]
Region
Polish [th-century Latin (source)] {Ukrainian}
th-century German (source) [th-century German]
Altlesle
Kuy
Włocławek503 [Antiqua Wladislavia (W )]
Leszlow (T ), Leszlouw (T ) [Leslau]
Apt(e) ( אפטאACP )
LP
Opatów504 [Opatowia (Cz )]
Abtau (Lück :),505 Gross Opathow (W )
Brisk
Kuy
Brześć Kujawski [Brzescze (W )]
Briszke (T , T , ), Bryskie (W ), Briske (T , KDL ), Briszk (T ), Bryszk (T ), Brisk (W ) [Brest]
Dantsk דאנציק (ACP ), דאנצק (ACP )
Pom
Gdańsk [Gdanzyg (T )]
Danczke (W , T ), Dantzke (Cz ), Danczk (T ) [Danzig]
Graydi(n)k [Greydik] גרידינג (Rubashov :)
RR
Gródek Jagielloński [Grodek (Cz )] {Городок}
Grödik (Cz , , ), Grödig (Cz ), Grödek (Cz )
Kie [Ku(y)e] ( קויאACP )
Kuy
Kujawy [Cuyawa (W )]
Cuya (T ), Koye (T ), Coye (T ), Coya (T ) [Kujawen]
Kolomay [Kolomey]
RR
Kołomyja [Colomia (Cz )] {Коломия}
Kolomei (Cz ), Colomey (Cz ) [Kolomea]
Kros
LP
Krosno [Crosna (Cz )] {Коросно}
Crosse (Cz , ), Crossen (Cz ) [Krossen]
Krūke [Krōke] ( קראקאACP )
LP
Kraków [Cracov (Cz )]
Croke (Cz , , ), Crocaw (Cz ), Crocav (Cz ), Crokow (ST , T , KDL p.) [Krakau]
Lemberik ( לבובACP , , ), לעמבורג (ACP )
RR
Lwów {Львiв}
Lemberg (ST , T ), Lemburg (Cz ), Lemborg (T ) [Lemberg]
Lesle
Kuy
Inowrocław [Junewladislaw (Malec :)]
Jungeleslaw (T ), Junge Leszlaw (T ) [Inowrazlaw, Hohensalza]
( קאלימיACP )
( לעסלאACP )
(continued )
504 Wlodislaw in (Malec :). Opatow in (Malec :). The form Abtau appears in German-language medieval documents of the Bishopric of Lebus to which Opatów belonged during that period. The existence of this form makes implausible Weinreich’s hypothesis about the Yiddish form resulting from an innovation internal to Polish Jews. On the other hand, no available source known to the author makes reference to the German form Abt mentioned by Stankiewicz. 503 505
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The German component
TABLE .
Continued
Modern PolY [early PolY]
Region
Polish [th-century Latin (source)] {Ukrainian}
th-century German (source) [th-century German]
Loutsk, Loytsk ( לויצקACP )
Vol
Łuck [Luczsko (Cz , ), Luczko (Cz ), Luczco (Cz )] {Луцьк}
Lauczke (Cz , , ), Lawczke (Cz , Cz , KDL ), Lawtzk (T )
Lintshits [Luntshits] ( לונטשיץACP , )
GP
Łęczyca [Lancicia Cz , Lunczicz Cz ]
Lunczicz (KDL ), Luntzitcz, Luntczicz, Luntschitcz (T , , ) [Lentschütz]
Mezrits
GP
Międzyrzecz [Medzirzecz (W , ), Myedzyrzecz (W )]
Mezericz (W ) [Meseritz]
Oshpitsin אוישפיצין (ACP )
LP
Oświęcim [Uswynczin (ST )]
Awswenczyn (Cz ) [Auschwitz]
Pāzer [Payzer]
GP
Pyzdry [Pizdri (Cz ), Pyszdri (W )]
Peyser (Cz ) [Peisern]
Poyzn
GP
Poznań506 [Poznania (W )]
Pozenow (T ), Poznaw (T ), Posenow (T:), Posenaw (KDL ), Pozenaw (W ), Poznaw (K ) [Posen]
Rayshi [Reyshi] ( רישאACP , )
RR
Rzeszów [Rzeschow (ST )] {Ряшiв}
Resche (Cz , W ), Resze (Cz )507
Ropshits ( ראפשיץACP )
LP
Ropczyce [Ropczicz (ST , , ), Robczice (ST ), Robszicze (ST )]
Robszicz (Cz ), Ropschicz (Cz , ST ), Ropszicz (ST ), Roppczitcz (Cz ) [Ropschitze]
Tsants, Tsans, Tsandz
LP
(Nowy / Stary) Sącz [Sandecz (Cz )]508
Czanse (Cz , T , T ), Czancze (ST ) [(Neu / Alt) Sandez]
Tsouzmer, Tso(y) zmer ( צויזמרACP ), ( צוזמירACP )
LP
Sandomierz [Sandomiria (ST )]
Czaudmer (Cz , ), Czawdmer (Cz ), Czawdemer (T , ), Czudemer (KDL p.), Czudimir (T ) [Sandomir]
( מעזריטשACP )
( פוזנאACP , , ), ( פוזיןACP , ), ( פוזנןACP , , )
Poznan in (Malec :). These references corroborate the idea by Beranek about the origin of the Yiddish Rayshe (see section ..). On the other hand, the form Reichshof suggested by Stankiewicz does not appear in any available source compiled before the twentieth century. Moreover, its root (compare MHG rîch) would give /a:/ in modern PolY instead of the observed / aj/. Actually, Reichshof was used for Rzeszów by Nazis in –. As can be seen from Table ., this assignment was done without any connection to the medieval German name of the city. 508 The form Sandecz was used in Polish until the eighteenth century (Malec :). 506 507
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin TABLE .
Continued
Vāslits [Vayslits ]509
LP
Wiślica [Wislicia (ST )]
Weyslicz (Cz , )
Zamter
GP
Szamotuły [Schamothuli (W , )]
Sampter (W ), Szampter (W ) [Samter]
The comparison of forms given in the different columns of Table . shows the existence of several phonetic shifts that occurred in German in comparison to the original Slavic toponyms. All of these phenomena are found in Yiddish toponyms too: () Diphthongization /ū/ > /au/ and /ī/ > /aj/. Examples: German [tsaud(ə)mər] from earlier [tsu:dimir] ‘Sandomierz,’ [lautskə] for Łuck, [vajslits] for Wiślica, [pajzər] for Pyzdry, and [ausventsin] for Oświęcim. These processes occurred during the fourteenth century in the Silesian dialect of German (basic for the colonial tongue in Poland)510 for MHG û and î, respectively (MV ). Yiddish speakers who came to Eastern Europe mainly from Central Europe borrowed from German colonists forms that were already diphthongized. This idea is corroborated by the fact that we do not find in EY any diphthongized forms for Slavic /i:/ or /u:/ outside of toponyms for which Germans precisely had diphthongized forms.511 Note that /ou/ and /a:/, found in the Yiddish toponyms in question, represent the EY equivalents for MHG û and î, respectively.512
WG : gives only the standardized form Vayslits. The vernacular PolY form *Vāslits is reconstructed here being based on the link of the root vowel in this toponym to the proto-vowel Iwhose reflex in PolY is /a:/. 510 See details in Appendix B. 511 Zaybish—derived from the German Saibusch that in turn comes from the Polish Żywiec [LP] (Stankiewicz :)—represents another Yiddish example. All examples “from the Slavic component of Yiddish” suggested in WG :, are unconvincing. The Vistula river (Polish Wisła) is called Weichsel in German, that is, with the same diphthong as StY Vaysl. The Yiddish name seems to be a compromise between the German and Polish forms. The information about the Yiddish name for the town of Wiślica appears in Table .. This Yiddish toponym can be either taken directly from German, or appeared by analogy to the name of the Vistula river. Yiddish tayster ‘purse’ is out of context: compare Polish tajstra, Ukrainian and Belarusian тайстра ‘bag, purse.’ No diphthongization took place in Yiddish: this word was borrowed from Slavic languages already with /aj/. Weinreich says himself that the Yiddish troyb ‘tube’ (compare Ukrainian труба) is unknown in PolY. Consequently, its diphthong is unlikely to be old. Most likely, it arose because of the contamination of the East Slavic etymon by the Yiddish word troyb ‘grape.’ For the Yiddish toponym Loytsk as well as for tsoyg ‘bitch,’ shoyb ‘fur-lined coat,’ and yoykh ‘broth,’ Weinreich speaks about a possible supposition of the intermediary of German that should be either accepted or rejected. Taking into account the information from Table . for Loytsk as well as the presence of the words Zauke, Schaube, and Jauche in German dictionaries (with exactly the same meanings as the respective Yiddish words), one should accept this supposition without hesitation. Geller (:) considers that StY praykhn ‘to pan, wheeze, puff ’ is derived from Polish prychać and/or Ukrainian прихати/пирхати ‘to snort.’ If this etymology is indeed correct, then here we are dealing with a unique case of diphthongization in Yiddish of Slavic /i/. 512 The case of Oświęcim /Auschwitz is of particular interest from the methodological point of view. Indeed, the contemporary Yiddish Oshpitsin looks much closer to the Polish form: the two forms share the initial /o/ and the same number of syllables (three), while the disyllabic German Auschwitz has the initial diphthong /au/. However, this similarity is purely superficial and partly fortuitous. From Table . one can see that a few centuries ago the Yiddish form was Oyshpitsin, with the initial diphthong (exactly as the German form), while the fifteenth-century German form was three-syllabic. The dissimilation /šv/ > /šp/ appears to be internal to Jews. The forms in all three languages underwent different developments: (i) in Polish, the variant with /u/ in the initial position disappeared ceding its place to the form with the initial /o/ (actually, the latter form is older, compare Malec :); (ii) in German, the internal /n/ and, later, the ending /in/ have been dropped; (iii) in Yiddish, the stress position was displaced from the first to the last syllable and later the initial /oj/ was monophthongized to /o/ in the syllable that became unstressed. 509
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The German component
() Change /s/ > /ts/ in the initial prevocalic position. Examples: German [tsan(t)sə] for Sąncz and [tsaud(ə)mər] for Sandomierz.513 This process is known in PolY in certain words of Hebrew and Slavic origin.514 However, it is far from being general515 and for this reason borrowing of ready-made German forms appears more plausible. () Rounding /ā/ > /ō/.516 Example: German [kro(:)kə] for Kraków. In principle, a similar process could occur internally in Yiddish; compare PolY Rūdem for the city called Radom [LP] ( ראדוםACP ) not only in Polish but also in medieval German (Cz ). However, the regular use of the letter “o” in the first syllable of the old German name for Kraków and the importance of the German-speaking community of this city in the Middle Ages both make more plausible the idea that Jews borrowed from German the form with the rounded vowel already. () Umlaut /o/ > /ø/ (sound corresponding to the letter “ö”). Example: German [grødik] for Gródek. This process is unusual: at that period, German dialects do not use umlaut without any particular reasons that do not seem to be applicable here.517 Yiddish Greydik clearly results from early Grēdik/Grēdek that has the change /o/ > /e/, that is, the unrounded equivalent of the process observed in the German form.518 In German texts in question, the digraph “cz” represents the standard spelling for the affricate /ts/. For example, one regularly finds the preposition “czu” (compare NHG zu ‘to’). The letter “z” mainly corresponds to /z/, while “tz” for /ts/ is rarely used. 514 See BA and feature {c} in section ... 515 Numerous toponyms that have initial /s/ in Slavic languages—such as Sanok, Sarnaki, Sejny, Serock, Sokółka, Sokołów, Sosnowiec, and Suwałki—also have /s/ in EY. The fact that their Jewish communities were established more recently than those from Sandomierz and Nowy Sącz is unlikely to be fortuitous. 516 This process was common in German dialects for MHG â (see section ..). On the other hand, “o” for MHG a is mainly known in medieval sources corresponding to Bavarian and Hessian (MV –, –). 517 All phonetic contexts in which one finds umlaut in German dialects at the end of the MHG period (see MV – ) are irrelevant here. Morphologic umlaut appears in diminutive and plural forms constructed following German patterns. 518 EY toponyms rarely look as though they have umlaut root vowels. Among the examples: (i) PolY Yerisle for Jarosław [RR]; (ii) PolY Reydim (earlier Rēdim) for Radymno [RR]; and () PolY Heylitsh (earlier Hēlitsh; האליטשin , ACP ; העליץin , ACP ) for Halicz [RR] (Ukrainian Галич); compare also the nickname of the family who established in Kraków in about Poland’s first Jewish printing house: Helic(z)/Helitz in Latin characters and ֶהֶעִליץin Hebrew letters (Frakes :), presumably derived from the town of Halicz. In all of them, the change of the root vowel is unlikely to be of medieval German origin. Variants of Jarosław with the initial Je- are known in both Polish (Jerezlauus in ; Stieber :) and Ukrainian (Jeroslav , Eroslavu ; Shevelov :) sources. In the fifteenth century, this town appears in Latin documents as Ieruslavia or Iaroslaw (ST , ), while German texts make references to it as Iarosla(w) (Cz ), Ioroslaw, or Iaroslaff (ST , ), all without an umlaut. The final reduced -e in the modern Yiddish name fits well with the ending of the form Jaroslau used in German documents of Galicia during the nineteenth century. Yet, Jewish references from the seventeenth and eighteenth century call this town ( יערסלבACP , , ) or ( יערוסלבACP ), invariably with the final /v/; compare also the spelling סַלב ְ ֶיערin NH. Radymno appears in Latin sources as Radimna (ST , , ), Radymna (ST ), Radimpna (ST , ), Radim (ST ), or Radime (ST ). The only reference found in a German text is Radymne (ST ). Not one of them has an umlaut, but in the general history of Polish phonetics the change of initial Ra- into Re- is well known (Stieber :–). Halicz is shown in German documents in a form that in no case could be the etymon for the Yiddish name: the German form has the initial /g/ and the final /ke/ (see Table . at the end of this section). Polish and Ukrainian names are much closer to the Yiddish form. However, no umlaut-form is found in any of these three languages. It is unclear whether the umlaut was internal to EY or, after all, results from some non-identified process in Ukrainian or Polish. The first possibility appears more plausible. Note that the town in Moravia is called Heleshau in CzY and Holleschau in German, that is, with a similar “umlaut-like” change of the root vowel (see Table . in section ..). We cannot exclude the possibility that its name influenced the Yiddish name for Halicz, the two toponyms sounding quite close. Bin-Nun conjectured that the Yiddish umlaut-forms for Gródek, Radymno, and Halicz were borrowed by Jews from German colonists (BN ). As can be seen from the information above, this statement is valid for the first of these towns and invalid for the last. The German origin of the Yiddish name for Radymno is more attractive than the Polish one not because of the umlaut but because of the absence in Reydim/ 513
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
() Simplification of the initial consonantal cluster (if it is non-existent in German) by dropping the first sound. Examples: /vl/ > /l/ and /gd/ > /d/ in German names for Włocławek and Gdańsk, respectively.519 We also observe this process in Ludmir/Lodmir, theYiddish name for the city in Volhynia today called Володимир in Ukrainian, Владимир in Russian, and Włodzimierz in Polish; in Jewish sources it appears as ( לאדמרDubnov : () and ACP ) or ( לאדמירACP ). For this reason, the Yiddish toponym in question is also likely to reflect the influence of German.520 () Change of the Polish ending with “w” and one or several vowels (examples: -ów, -aw, -awa, and -awy) into a reduced vowel. Examples: German [kro(:)kə] for Kraków, [re(:)shə] for Rzeszów, [kujə] and [kojə] for Kujawy. This change is rather exceptional in Yiddish. Indeed, among many dozens of Yiddish toponyms in Poland and Ukraine derived from towns with one of these endings a large majority end in -ev(e), -av(e), -ov(e), or -oyv. The list of forms in -e is small. To those shown in Table ., one can add only PolY Bresle for Wrocław [Silesia] ( ברסלאACP , ברעסליACP ), Varshe for Warszawa [Maz] ( װרשאACP , ; װרשיACP ), Yerisle for Jarosław [RR] (see footnote ), Tū(r)ne for Tarnów [LP] (טארני ACP , ; טרנאACP ), and Tarle for Tarłów [LP] ( טרלאACP ). The last locality represents a particular case: this town was founded in the mid-sixteenth century. All the others are either large cities or a region (Kuyavia) known since the Middle Ages from both Latin and German sources. In standardized German (NHG), the names for the cities in question end in -au. Yet, in early sources we often find German names with monophthongs (exactly as in Yiddish) in the final position; compare Croke, Resche (both listed in Table .), Warscha (Cz ) and Warsche (W ; NHG Warschau ‘Warsaw’), and Bresle (Cz ; NHG Breslau ‘Wrocław’).521 Also note the forms Coye/Cuya for Kuyavia. We find similar reduced final vowels in names of two areas that in the Middle Ages were countries: Yiddish *Maze (מאזי ACP ) ‘Mazovia’ (Polish Mazowsze), exactly as in the old German name for the same area,522
Raydim of the Slavic ending -no. Indeed, a similar effect can be observed in German and Yiddish forms for Krosno (see Table .) and Yiddish Lise derived from German Lissa (Polish Leszno) [GP] ( ליסאACP ). Also note that the Lithuanian city of Vilna (Polish Wilno) ( װילנאACP ) appears in German documents as Wyll/ Will (W ). Both Radim and Radime appear in ST, that is, the collection of documents in which German forms are particularly common in Latin texts (see footnote in Appendix B), and, therefore, it is plausible that after all these forms are German. 519 As seen in Table ., during the Middle Ages the Polish name for Inowrocław (Yiddish Lesle) included the cluster “wl” and not “wr.” 520 In medieval Latin documents it is mainly called Lodomeria or Ladimiria (compare also Ladimir in Cz ). However, Yiddish could not take the toponym directly from Latin. Alternatively to dropping the initial /v/ in the unusual cluster /vl/, both German and Yiddish had the possibility of changing this cluster into /bl/, common in the two languages. This phonetic shift can be observed in Ashkenazic surname Bloch from Polish włoch ‘Italian’ (references in Kraków, Frankfurt, and Prague during the first half of the seventeenth century, Menk :) and the Yiddish toponym Blodeve ‘Włodawa.’ According to WG : (without any reference), the form Blodau for the same place is occasionally found in German. However, for several reasons the German influence here is unlikely. Note the typically Slavic ending of the Yiddish form, the fact that this town was inside of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania where German presence was marginal, and the relatively young age of the locality: until the second half of the seventeenth century references to this small town in historical sources are rare. Moreover, in a Jewish document of the toponym appears with the initial /v/: ( װלאדאװיACP ). 521 For Tarnów, we do not find forms with the reduced final vowel in available German sources from the fifteenth century; compare Tharnaw (T ) and Tarnow (Cz ). During the last centuries, this city was called Tarnau in German. 522 We find a reference to Maze in a German document from the first quarter of the fifteenth century (Cz ). In other German sources of the same period the country name appears as Mazow (T , ) or Mazaw (T ). During the twentieth century, the NHG form was already Masowien, while Yiddish used mazovye.
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The German component
and Lite ( ליטאACP ) ‘(Grand Duchy of) Lithuania’ (Polish Litwa, Belarusian Litva, German Litauen).523 () German “bri(e)” for Polush “brze.”524 Example from Table .: German [briskə] for Brześć-Kujawski. Brzeg, a city in Silesia, appears in German as Brige (Cz ) and during the last centuries it was known as Brieg. Brzesko [LP] was also originally called Brzeg in medieval Polish. Diminutive forms Brzezek and Brzesko appeared during the fifteenth century (Malec :). Yiddish name for Brzesko, Brigl, corresponds to a diminutive of [bri(:)g]. It is unclear who created this diminutive: Germans (from whom Jews took a readymade form) or Jews. The former possibility is more plausible if, especially, we take into account the fact that Brzesko appears as Briegel in some German sources.525 Note also Yiddish Brishtshe for Brzeście [LP]. () German “r” for Polish “rz.” Examples: German names for Brześć, Międzyrzec, Rzeszów, and Sandomierz. The change of the palatalized Polish /r’/ into the affricate /rž/ has been known since the thirteenth century (Stieber :). Since both /rž/ and the palatalized /r’/ are foreign to German phonology, Germans choose the closest phoneme, /r/, available in their consonantal chart. In theory, the same scenario could be applicable—independently of German—to the speakers of Yiddish migrating from the west (Stankiewicz :). However, we can observe that the list of Yiddish toponyms having /r/ (and not /rž/ or /ž/) for Polish “rz” and covering places situated in ethnically Polish (and not Ukrainian or Belarusian) territories is rather short. In addition to toponyms mentioned in Table ., it also includes: Brigl for Brzesko [LP], Brishtshe for Brzeście [LP], Dobrin for Dobrzyn nad Wisłą [Maz], Kuzmir for Kazimierz Dolny [LP], Kuzmark for Kazimierz (suburb of Kraków) [LP], Laskarev for Łaskarzew [LP], Prūshnits for Przasnysz [Maz], and Vreshne for Września [GP].526 For many of them, the German intermediary between Polish and Yiddish is plausible.527 Note that the only toponym for which “rz” is regularly present in German sources of the fifteenth century is Przeworsk [RR]. It appears as Przeworsko (Cz , , ), Prziworske (Cz ), and Przeworsken (Cz , , ). In Latin texts, by far the most common spelling is Przeworsko (Cz , ST passim). In the Jewish sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it appears as פריװארסק, פרשעװארסק, and ( פשעװארסקACP , , ).528
523 In German documents from the fifteenth century, Lithuania is called Littowen (T , ), Littouwen (T ), or Littawen (T ). However, the ethnonym ‘Lithuanian’ appears as Lytt (W ), while the standard NHG word is Litauer. 524 Actually, the context in which German has /i/ or /i:/ instead of Polish /e/ is larger than just in place of “e” as appears in Polish Brze-. Similarly, we find German Pri- for Polish Prze- in Primkenau (Polish Przemków) in Silesia and Primsel (Polish Przemyśl, see Table .). Note a similar replacement of the original West Slavic combination (soft /r/ + /e/) by /ri/ in both the German and the Yiddish name for the Czech town of Třešť (see section ..). 525 As discussed in section .., Beranek reconstructs the form *Briegel. However, WG : states that such a form appears in German though he does not make explicit his source of information. 526 See Stankiewicz :–, WG :. 527 Even during the last centuries, Dobrin, Kasimir (suburb of Kraków), and Wreschen were standard German names for Dobrzyn, Kazimierz, and Wreśnia, respectively. These places have been known since the Middle Ages, compare references in old German sources to Dobryn (T ) and Kazmir (Cz ), but Polish-influenced Wrzeschna in a Latin text (W ). The toponym Przasnysz has a by-form with Pra- even in Polish and, for example, during the fifteenth century it appears in Polish sources as Prassznysz and Prasznisz (Malec :; see also the discussion of Prūshnits in section ..). For Brześc, Brzeście, and Brzesko see the above discussion of the German (and Yiddish) rendering of Polish Brze-. 528 Birnbaum (:) takes the fact that the PolY form Rayshe has /r/ (and not **/rž/ or /ž/) for the initial “rz” (known in Polish names for Rzeszów from the thirteenth century) as the argument for his assertion about Yiddish being introduced into southern Poland before the thirteenth century. As seen from our discussion, this argument is fallacious: actually Jews took the toponym not from Poles but from Germans.
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
Several phonetic phenomena in German forms mentioned in Table . (also shown in their Yiddish equivalents) are isolated rather than general: a diphthong at the end of the German name for Kołomyja, a special processing of the nasal vowel in [luntšits] for Łęczyca,529 the change /l/ > /r/ in /zamter/ from Szamotuły, and the change /tš/ > /š/ in the German name for Ropczyce. The simultaneous presence of the largest number of changes characterizes German [mezərits] for Polish Międzyrzecz. In addition to /r/ for “rz” mentioned above, one also finds: /ts/ for final /tš/, /e/ for nasal “ę” in the first syllable, /e/ for /i/ in the last syllable, and /z/ for /dz/. From Table ., it can also be seen that several medieval German toponyms have special forms in which the difference in comparison to Polish forms is not purely phonetic: [brisk(ə)]530 for Brześć, [krosə] for Krosno, one /n/ instead of two in the name for Poznań, Lemberg for Lwów, and the calque Abtau for Opatów. In all these cases, the corresponding Yiddish toponyms clearly had German etymons. The first of them is of particular interest. In Yiddish, the same name, Brisk, is applicable to two cities called Brześć in Polish: one in Kuyavia, and another in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (now Brest in Belarus, also known during the last centuries as Brest-Litovsk; בריסקACP , , בריסקאACP ). Weinreich suggested that Polish Jews when settling in Lithuania carried over the name of the place from Kuyavia to the local city since both of them were pronounced similarly by local Slavs (WG :). However, we can observe that Brisk—as the name for Brest-Litovsk—is found in the German document of (KDL ). As a result, the scenario proposed by Weinreich for Jews is actually likely to be valid for Germans. We have no evidence that a single Yiddish speaker was present in Lithuania at that early period. As a result, Jews likely borrowed from Germans the same name for both cities.531 We find in Table . several examples for the apocope of the final vowel; compare German names for Pyzdry, Szamotuły, Ropczyce, and Wiślica. Numerous other cases are found in the German documents of the fifteenth century: Bel(e)hoscz for Biłohorszcze (Cz , ), Glinan/Glynan for Gliniany (Cz , , , ), Stawczan for Stawczany (Cz ), Targowisch for Targowiszcze (Cz ), Schedlisk for Siedliska (ST ), and Wynik for Winniki (Cz ). Several rules appear to be general: () if a Polish toponym ends in -ice/yce, -icy/ycy, or -ica/ycy, its German equivalent ends in -itz; () German toponyms end in -n if the Polish end in -ny. The same rules are applicable for Yiddish, 529 The form Lunciz appears in the famous Latin-language bull issued by Pope Innocent III for the Archbishopric of Gniezno () whose numerous toponyms represent one of the most important sources for studies of Old Polish phonetics. A variant spelled Lunczicz is found in certain other old documents from Poland that are not German. Most likely, Germans borrowed this form from Poles and kept it during several centuries while for Poles the pronunciation of the toponym changed. 530 In the German texts in question, the digraph “sz” corresponds to the sound /s/, NHG ß. 531 Formally speaking, we cannot exclude the possibility that both cultures independently applied the name of the city in Kuyavia to that in Lithuania. Several etymologies were suggested for this Yiddish toponym. WG :– proposes a series of implausible phonetic shifts but admits that the problem remains unsolved. Beranek (:) considers that the final -sk might appear by analogy with numerous other Polish toponyms ending in -sk(o). Stankiewicz (:) suggests the idea about the back formation from the original adjectival derivative brisker based on Polish brzeski ‘from Brześć.’ His theory appears the most attractive though it deserves several amendments. One is fundamental: Stankiewicz actually suggested a plausible etymology for the name used by Germans. As for Jews, they borrowed from Germans a ready-made form. Another amendment is of less importance. Data in the last column of Table . show that the original German form was pronounced [briskə]. Consequently, there is no need to make an additional hypothesis about the back formation: [briskə] can directly represent the Germanized form of the Polish adjective brzeski. The same idea can also explain [galtskə], the German name for Halicz (see Table . at the end of this section), compare the Russian adjective галицкий. Note that in the Middle Ages both Brześć-Kujawski and Halicz were important political and economical centers, principal cities of a duchy in Kuyavia and an Old Russian principality, respectively. For this reason, Slavic adjectives derived from their names could enter German rather easily. (It is precisely the existence of a similar ending in the German name for Halicz, for which the possibility of a creation by analogy is non-applicable, as well as the status of both cities that make the above theory by Beranek less plausible than the general idea by Stankiewicz.)
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The German component
TABLE . Yiddish toponyms with uncertain source language Modern PolY [early PolY]
Region
Polish [th-century Latin (source)] {Ukrainian}
th-century German (source) [German th century]
Baytsh [Beytsh]
LP
Biecz [Byecz (Cz ), Byetcz (W )]
Beecz (Cz ), Becz (Cz ) [Beitsch]
Drubitsh [Drōbitsh]
RR
Drohobycz [Drohobicz (Cz ] {Дрогобич}
Drobitsch (Cz ), Drohobicz (Cz )
RR
Rohatyn [Rohatin (ST , ), Rogatin (, )] {Рогатин}
Rohatin (Cz , , , ), Roatin (Cz )
( דראהאביטשACP )
Rotin
compare PolY () Dembits ( דמביץACP ) for Dębica [LP], Zaleshits for Działoszyce [LP], and Gorlits for Gorlice [LP]; () Berzhan ( ברעזאןACP ) for Brzeżany (Ukrainian Бережани) [RR], Berzhin for Brzeziny [GP], and Zdin for Zduny [GP].532 Dropping of the final vowel of the Slavic toponym is not general in medieval German toponyms. Numerous forms end in a vowel (mainly -e). In addition to German spellings cited in Table . for Brześć, Gdańsk, Krosno, Łuck, and (Nowy/Stary) Sącz, compare Busko, Skole, Camyonka, Canczugy, and Belze (Cz , , , , and ) whose Polish cognates are Busk(o), Skole, Kamionka, Kańczuga, and Bełz [all RR], respectively. Moreover, in words from the general lexicon, an apocope is unknown for various ECG dialects including Silesian. As a result, here we are dealing with a rule that is not purely phonetic. In Yiddish, apocope is general in words from the general lexicon, but not in toponyms.533 From the above information, the existence of an influence of German on Yiddish in this context is plausible. For certain Yiddish toponyms, it is difficult to establish whether their direct etymons were German or Slavic. This is evidently the case when German and Slavic names are phonetically identical or quite close. Several examples of another kind are given in Table .. From Table ., we can observe the presence of diphthongs in both Yiddish and German Yiddish names for Biecz. However, both of them could develop independently from Polish /e:/. The absence of /h/ in the two other examples characterizes both Yiddish and certain German variants. Here again the development could be parallel. Intervocalic /h/ present in the Ukrainian names for these towns is foreign to both Germanic languages in question. The final stress in the PolY toponyms ending in[-i:n] (Lublin ‘Lublin,’ Garvolin ‘Garwolin,’ Knin ‘Konin,’ Bendin ‘Będzin,’ Dobrin ‘Dobrzyn,’ etc.) represents one of the striking idiosyncrasies of this EY dialect. Stankiewicz (:–) suggested that before the sixteenth century Polish toponyms generally had vocalic desinences. Consequently, the corresponding Polish 532
PolY Gline for Gliniany may be a secondary form derived from early *Glin(y)an. Here one of the two /n/ disappeared exactly as in the Yiddish and German forms for Poznań. 533 Compare Lentshne ( לענטשניACP ) ‘Łęczna’ [LP], Shinyeve ( שיניאװיACP ) ‘Sieniawa’ [RR], but Strel(i)sk ( סטרעליסקACP ) ‘Strzeliska’ [RR]. Moreover, in Yiddish toponyms cases of additional final vowel absent from the Slavic form (as it can be checked in Malec ) are present. Among them: P(e)remishle (Polish Przemyśl, Ukrainian Перемышль) and Shidlovtse ( שידלובציACP ) ‘Szydlowiec’ [LP]. These Yiddish forms could be either influenced by the presence of a vowel in oblique cases of the corresponding Slavic names, or created by analogy to numerous toponyms ending in a vowel in Slavic nominatives (Beranek :–). In certain cases, a form with a final vowel is definitely only a few centuries old. For example, Yiddish Ostreftse ( אסטראװציACP ) corresponds to Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski [LP]. Yet, at the end of the sixteenth century this locality was still a village called Ostrów, without the suffix -ec (Malec :).
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
toponyms would end not in -in but in -ino, with the penultimate accent. Once the final vowel was dropped, Polish shifted the stress to the new penultimate syllable, while in Yiddish it remained posited on the same vowel that had now become the final one. Stankiewicz also spoke about the fact that for the Polish forms ending in -in in the nominative case, in the oblique cases the /i/ appears already in the penultimate syllable. These oblique case forms could also influence the creation of the Yiddish pattern. As indicated by Weinreich, this theory contradicts the history of Polish phonetics (WG :). The penultimate stress became stabilized in Polish only at the beginning of the seventeenth century; between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries it was initial after being freely posited during the previous centuries (Stieber :, ). Weinreich himself paid attention to the fact that a similar pattern is found in German toponyms of Berlin, Schwerin, Küstrin, Köslin, and Stettin, all situated in a compact area covering the formerly Slavic territories of Brandenburg and Pomerania.534 He suggested that Jewish migrants from the area in question brought the pattern “place names ending in -in have the stress on the ultima” to medieval Poland. This theory is unsatisfactory also. It is unclear how a pattern for which one can find only a few examples in German could become so widely used by Jews in Poland. Moreover, we have no evidence about massive eastern migrations of Jews from the area mentioned by Weinreich. Most important, we find direct proof about the presence of the pattern in question in medieval Polish. The treatise about Polish spelling written circa by Jakub Parkoszowic, the rector of the Kraków Academy, provides a number of examples of Polish words with long vowels. Among them, in the list of words with the long vowel present in final closed syllables before a nasal consonant, the author mentions such toponyms as Bozaczyn, Prodoczyn, Coczyn (Stieber :).535 No information is available that could allow us to decide whether Polish Jews took this pattern directly from Poles or from Germans who lived in Poland in the Middle Ages. Actually we have no formal evidence that the latter ever applied the final stress in toponyms from Poland ending in -in. Yet, for several reasons, this sounds plausible. The existence of names following this pattern in Brandenburg and Pomerania is representative of them. In the form Lubleyn ‘Lublin’ (Cz ) we observe the diphthongization of /i:/ exactly as for MHG î.536 Also note that the names of numerous towns from Moravia ending in -ín in Czech appear in the German sources from the thirteenth century with the ending -ein. This factor implies their ultimate stress position and the same diphthongization. The same stress position was also the case in northern Bohemia.537 Numerous Yiddish toponyms in Eastern Europe clearly had Slavic and not German etymons. This is the case for a large majority of towns where no German community was in existence. However, it is also the case for places where the presence of an important German population is known from historical sources and/or whose names often appear in medieval German documents. A sample appears in Table ..
534
Today the last three cities are situated in Poland; their Polish names are Kostrzyn, Koszalin, and Szczecin, respectively. 535 This medieval Slavic pattern is likely to be responsible for the German toponyms in Brandenburg and Pomerania too. Also note that the Polish toponyms from the mid-fifteenth century do not end in a vowel (contrary to the idea by Stankiewicz that he actually took from a non-critical reading of a paper by Polish linguist Aleksander Brückner). Actually, an important number of Polish toponyms end in a consonant even in the oldest documents such as, for example, the famous Gniezno bull issued in (see footnote ); see also Malec . 536 However, this spelling is exceptional and its final element could be due to a contamination by the German diminutive suffix spelled -lein in NHG ( -lîn in MHG). Other variants present in German sources are Lublin (Cz , ), Loblin (Cz ), and Lobelyn (Lück :); one Latin source mentions Löblyn (Cz ). 537 See Schwarz :.
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The German component
TABLE .. Yiddish toponyms with Slavic etymons Modern PolY [early PolY]
Region
Polish [th-century Latin (source)] {Ukrainian}
th-century German (source) [German th century]
Bokhnye
LP
Bochnia [Bochna (Cz , Cz , , ST , )]
Boche (Cz , ST ) [Salzberg]538
Heylitsh [Hēlitsh] ( האליטשACP ), העליץ (ACP )
RR
Halicz [Halicz (Cz )] {Галич}
Galczke (Cz , , , Cz , ), Galczg (Cz ), Galcz (Cz )
Komenits (UkrY) [Kamenits] קאמיניץ (ACP )
RR
Kamieniec Podolski [Camenecz (ST , , Cz ), Camnicz (Cz )] {Кам’янець-Подiльський}
Camencz (Cz , Cz ), Kamencz (Cz )
Libetshoyv [Lubetshoyv]
RR
Lubaczów [Lubaczow (ST , )] {Л˛бачiв}
Lubetschaw (Cz ), Lubeczaw (Cz )
Moshtshisk מושציסק (ACP ), מאשטשינסק (ACP )
RR
Mościska [Moscziska ST ] {Мостиська}
Mosticz (Cz ), Mosczicz (Cz )
Petrikev ( פיוטרקובACP ), ( פיעטרקובACP )
GP
Piotrków Trybunalski [Pyotrkow (W ), Pyothrkov (T )]
Peterkaw (T ), Petirkaw (T ), Peterkow (T , ), Peterkau (T , , ) [Petrikau]
Pilzne
LP
Pilzno [Pilszno (Cz ), Pilszna (Cz ), Pilsno (ST )]
Pilzen (Cz , , , ST ) [Pilsen]
Premishle פרעמשלא (ACP , ), ( פרעמםלאACP , )
RR
Przemyśl [Przemisl (ST )] {Перемишль}
Primsel (Cz ), Prymsel (Cz ), Primzel (Cz ), Primpsel (Cz ), Primisl (Cz )
Ribishoyv [Rubishoyv]
RR
Hrubieszów [Rubeschow (Cz )] {Грубешiв}
Rubischaw (Cz ), Rubeschow (Cz ), Robeschow (Cz , ST ), Rubyeschewo (W )
Trebevle
RR
Trembowla [Trebowla (Cz , , )] {Теребовля}
Treble (Cz ), Trebil (Cz ), Treblow (Cz )
Zhidetshoyv, Zidetshoyv
RR
Żydaczów [Zudaczow (ST )] {Жидачiв}
Zaudeczaw (Cz ), Zawdeczaw (Cz ), Zawdaczaw (Cz ), Zawdiczaw (Cz )
( רובשובDubnov
:, ACP ),
( הרובשובACP )
538 German sources from the fifteenth century do not mention the form Salzberg. Similarly, Wieliczka [LP] (Yiddish Velitshke), often called Groß Salze in German sources of the last centuries, appears as Weliczke in German medieval texts (Cz ). This shows that the opinion of Weinreich about the names of these two towns (cited in section ..) can be anachronistic.
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
As shown in Table ., in Yiddish names for Bochnia, Halicz, Kamieniec Podolski, Mościska, Pilzno, and Piotrków, the ending is of definite Slavic origin, different from that found in medieval German toponyms. Moreover, for Halicz, Yiddish and German have different initial consonants. The German form for Trembowla lacks internal /v/. German forms for Przemyśl all start with Pri-539 which is not found in the Yiddish toponym. In the German form for Żydaczów, we can observe the diphthongization /u:/ > /au/ in the first syllable that was discussed earlier in this section.540 We do not find any trace of this process in the Yiddish toponym in which the accent is present in the final syllable. For the same reason, the Yiddish names for two other towns from the same general area (formerly Red Ruthenia), Lubaczów and Hrubieszów, are also of non-German origin.541 The non-German forms of certain Yiddish toponyms listed in Table . (namely, those different from the towns discussed in the previous paragraph all of which reveal phonetic features many centuries old) can in theory result from a Slavonizing during the last centuries of the former, Germanbased Yiddish toponyms.
.. Poland in the modern era Because of the existence of several periods when German linguistic influence was important in various parts of Poland (see Appendix B), it is sometimes difficult to establish the time when Jews borrowed certain Yiddish toponyms from Germans. Most likely, the German etymons of all Jewish toponyms mentioned in previous section entered Yiddish already in the Middle Ages. This is particularly true in cases when German medieval forms are distinctly different from those used in German during the last centuries. However, for certain places, German forms had undergone no major change since the Middle Ages. For them, the age of borrowing to Yiddish from German is difficult to establish. For instance, this is the case for Varshe ‘Warsaw’ and Poyzn ‘Poznań.’ For the latter city, the Yiddish name followed the same changes as the German name. Indeed, one can easily see the correspondence between the respective older forms (* פוזנאPo(y)zne and Posenaw/Posenau) and that between those used during the twentieth century (Poyzn and Posen). We do not know the chronology of the development of PolY Prūshnits ‘Przasnysz’ [Maz] that very likely had a German etymon.542 A similar problem exists for Ektsin, a compromise form between German Exin and Polish Kcynia [GP] and Sheps ‘Sierpc’ [Maz].543 On the other hand, Yiddish Lise for Leszno/Lissa ( ליסאACP ) certainly developed after the medieval period. The same is true for a number of other Yiddish toponyms from Polish territories taken by the Prussians during the partitions of Poland.
See footnote . Note that in this toponym—contrary to its modern name—the oldest Slavic and Latin sources have /u/ in the first syllable. 541 As seen in Table ., the change of the initial Ukrainian /hr/ into /r/ characterizes Yiddish, German, and Polish names for Hrubieszów (compare Polish alternate form Rubieszów). The consonantal cluster /hr/ is foreign to all of these three languages. 542 No old German reference to this town was found in available sources. However, during World War II Germans called it Praschnitz, that is, with final /ts/ instead of Polish /š/ and internal /š/ instead of modern Polish /s/ (though old Polish forms with /š/ are known as well, see footnote ). Both these peculiarities are present in the Yiddish form. This Nazi name is likely to be based on some earlier German name for the town. Note, however, that in some cases, the newly assigned names for Polish towns had nothing to do with old German names; see footnote . 543 This town appears as Scheps on a German map of Prussia by Gaspar Henneberg (), while in Polish sources from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries it is called Seprcz(e), Syeprcz, and Sieprcz (Malec :). Stankiewicz (:) suggested that the Yiddish name for this town appeared within the Jewish community because of the folk etymology that related it to Yiddish sheps ‘sheep.’ The existence of the identical German toponym makes this hypothesis more than doubtful. 539 540
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The German component
Yiddish Stanisle for Stanisławów [RR] (city built in only) clearly is among the most recent borrowings: Stanislau was the German name for this city in Galicia.544
.. Reasons for the German origin of toponyms in Eastern Europe The information taken from historical sources and arguments provided in sections .. and .. shows that a few dozen Yiddish toponyms in Eastern Europe are based on names used in medieval German that were different from the original Slavic names. This kind of situation can be decomposed into two separate phases: () creation by Germans of toponyms distinct from their Slavic etymons; () borrowing of these toponyms from German to Yiddish. Considering the list of toponyms in question, one can suggest several factors that appear to be determinant for these two phases. For both phases, no massive presence of local German-speakers was mandatory. The very awareness by Germans (living outside of the Slavic areas in question) of the existence of these places could be sufficient for the development of specific German toponyms, with important differences with respect to the corresponding Slavic toponyms. The more important a place was for Germans (economically, culturally, etc.), the higher were the chances of the German language having its own name for it. Two independent factors were important for the volume of these contacts. The first of them concerns the size of the place. Big cities that in the Middle Age played an important role in the economic and political life of the area had greater chances than smaller towns to appear in the category in question. The same is a fortiori true for names of countries and provinces. They were necessarily known outside of the area. The distance between the place and the area where a significant German-speaking population lived represents a second important factor. The smaller the distance, the tighter were the contacts and the more plausible the possibility of the development of a specific German toponym. Jews living in German-speaking provinces would naturally borrow from the Christian majority the German toponyms in question. As a result, during the formation of the Yiddish-speaking communities in Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Jews could migrate from western German-speaking areas eastward already having these German-based toponyms in their vernacular language as ready-made forms. Note that Poland (Polska, in Polish) and Red Ruthenia/Russia (Polish Ruś, Russian and Ukrainian Русь) are called Poyln ( פוליןACP ) and Raysn ( רייסןACP ) in EY, with an evident link to German Polen and Reußen, respectively.545 Other examples were discussed in previous sections. Yiddish uses German-based names for: (a) Mazovia, Kuyavia and, likely, Lithuania too, as well as for (b) the largest Polish cities including Warsaw, and (c) a few Polish towns—such as Sierpc and possibly Przasnysz—situated in the immediate vicinity of Prussian borders. There is no evidence of the existence of pre-Yiddish Jewish communities in various Polish provinces. Yet, in Ukrainian territories (Red Ruthenia) incorporated during the fourteenth century into Poland and Lithuania, Slavic-speaking Jewish communities (EAST CANAANITES) existed before the arrival of Ashkenazic migrants from the West. After the merger of the two Jewish groups, western migrants gradually established Yiddish as the new vernacular language of local Jewish communities. In certain cases, this shift to another language supplanted previous names used locally by Jews, replacing them by toponyms brought by Yiddish-speakers. Note that the most important cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—such as Brest, Luts’k/Lutsk, and maybe, also Volodymyr/
544
The Hebrew sources from the eighteenth century invariably use forms ending in /v/: ( סטנסלאבACP ) and
( סטאנסלוובACP ).
545 Compare, for example, the following medieval German references in T: Polan (pp. , , ), Polen (pp. , ), Reuszen (p. ), and Reussen (p. ).
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Yiddish toponyms of German origin
Vladimir (all formerly within the principality of Volhynia)—received Yiddish names based on German toponyms.546 The presence of important local German-speaking communities was evidently also highly favorable to the creation and/or strengthening of particular German names in Slavic territories. For medieval Poland, this factor was partly correlated with those discussed above. Indeed, numerous Germans in the Middle Ages lived in the biggest Polish cities, many of which were situated not far from German or Germanized provinces. It is for smaller towns that this factor was of particular importance. The reason is simple: these toponyms were unknown outside of their own geographic area. The information given in the previous sections shows that specific German names were much more common in areas where the presence of the German Christian population was particularly evident during the Middle Ages, namely, in Lesser Poland, Red Ruthenia, Greater Poland, and Kuyavia. For some of the localities in question, numerous Germans continued to live along with Poles and Jews in the modern era too. Yet, for the towns of Mazovia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania, where Germans were significantly less numerous or even not present at all, specific German toponyms are rare. Contrary to the names of provinces and large cities and some towns close to borders, Jews could borrow German names of small towns situated far from German-speaking provinces if both German Christians and Jews were local inhabitants. For this borrowing to take place, it was not necessary for Germans to constitute a majority in the towns in question. Since Yiddish was much closer to the dialect of German colonists than to the language(s) spoken by local Slavs, the former was more influential on Yiddish than the latter. In any event, the existence of such kinds of borrowings of names of places other than large cities constitutes a cogent argument for the thesis about the important influence that the language of German colonists exerted on the early development of EY. The fact that a number of other modern Yiddish toponyms show features which make it impossible for their derivation to be from the medieval German names for the same place (see Table .) can be interpreted in two ways.547 Firstly, we may be dealing with a situation in which a name borrowed from Germans at some moment of Jewish history was later Slavonized and, as a result, its modern form hides its German past. The smaller the local Jewish population, the bigger were the chances for Yiddish toponyms to become Slavonized in the Modern Era. Secondly, the Yiddish names of certain localities have always been related to Slavic names even if German names, different from the Slavic ones, also existed. Such a scenario could be realized if at the moment when the local Jewish community became significant, the German one had already declined. In other words, it was the relative chronology of the establishment and development of German and Yiddish communities in the same towns and their surroundings that was a determinant factor. One can imagine two opposite theoretical scenarios to illustrate this rule. In Scenario , German speakers are common in a town for a long period, but Jewish presence is marginal there during the same period. The odds are high that a Yiddish toponym will be based on the Slavic name. In Scenario , German speakers cover an important part of the Gentile population of a town over a short period, but it is precisely during that period that the Jewish community becomes firmly established there. In this situation, the German toponym can survive among Jews well after the total Polonizing of the local Christian population. Several concrete examples can be also proposed. In the list of Yiddish toponyms that are of Slavic rather than German origin 546 Vladimir appears as װלדימירin a document of the eleventh century (Neubauer and Stern :). This spelling perfectly fits the Old Russian name of this city and is independent of its modern Yiddish name. The use of the name Brisk for Brest was not established even during the first half of the seventeenth century. For this, we find direct evidence in the writings of Meir Katz (see the discussion in section ..). 547 The choice between them could be done only via the analysis of detailed historical sources, which are, unfortunately, unavailable.
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The German component
(Table .), the biggest cities are Piotrków Trybunalski and Kamieniec-Podolski (now Kamyanets-Podilsky, Ukraine). The first of them acquired an important status relatively late: it became a major administrative center during the second half of the fifteenth century only and was the site of the Polish Crown Tribunal between and . We have no information about the dwelling of Germans in this city. Moreover, during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Piotrków was several times granted the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis “non-toleration of Jews” that restricted the growth of its Jewish population. The story of Kamieniec Podolski is different. It the Middle Ages, numerous Germans lived in this city along with Ruthenians, Poles, and Armenians. On the other hand, its municipal authorities deployed numerous efforts to prevent Jews from settling there, with special laws promulgated in and . It is no surprise that the German toponyms for both places, purely official for the first and more vernacular but still not reaching Jews for the second, were not taken by Yiddish. The situation in other large cities, well known since the Middle Ages, with important German and Jewish populations (in the cities themselves or in their large suburbs), such as Kraków, Poznań, Sandomierz, and Lwów/Lemberg was totally different and we do find German-based names in Yiddish for them. Today, Horodok and Mostys’ka are both small towns in western Ukraine. However, in the Middle Ages the first of them (called Gródek Jagielloński in Polish) was an important center of economic activity with numerous references in German and Latin documents. Despite the privilege of de non tolerandis Judaeis that was in force from until the second half of the seventeenth century, its German-based Yiddish name survived until recent times. The second one, called Mościska in Polish, was a much smaller locality and only a few documents mention people coming from it to the neighboring cities of Lwów and Przemyśl. We do not know any details about its early Jewish community, but in any case, the source of its modern Yiddish name is Polish despite the demographic dominance of Germans there during the fifteenth century. Many elements in the history of Krosno and Pilzno appear to be similar. During the nineteenth century both of them were district centers in western Galicia and their population figures were close (about , inhabitants circa ). In both of them, the medieval German population was important as can be seen from the names of people coming from these towns to Lwów (Cz, Cz) and Przemyśł (ST) during the fifteenth century. Both Krosno and Pilzno received the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis during the second half of the sixteenth century. Yet, Yiddish names underwent a different development: they were German- and Polish-based, respectively. The difference can be explained by several factors. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Krosno was one of the most populous towns of Lesser Poland. Its first Jewish residents are mentioned in the fifteenth century, that is, precisely during the period when it was a flourishing commercial center of the region. At the same time, the economic and demographic importance of Pilzno was significantly smaller. No mention of Jews appears in the town records until the midsixteenth century.548 Even if—as shown earlier—the influence exerted by medieval German colonists in Poland was important for the development of Yiddish, it should not be exaggerated. Numerous toponyms were directly taken by Jews from Slavs, without the intermediary of Germans. For many places in Central and Eastern Poland, as well as in the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, the German presence was marginal. Moreover, we also find a number of Yiddish toponyms of Slavic origin for towns with a significant proportion of Germans. On the other hand, once taken from Germans, certain toponyms underwent important modifications during the history of Yiddish: shifts
548 The above rules also display exceptions. For Przemyśl, with a considerable German community in the fifteenth century and a Jewish street already known from the middle of the same century, Yiddish has a name that is of Slavic origin (that most likely replaced at some moment the older, German-based name).
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Selectivity in the German component
of stressed vowels (that were general for EY subdialects and affected the toponyms also), apocope, and certain consonantal changes as well.549
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SELECTIVITY IN THE GERMAN COMPONENT
If we compare standard dictionaries of Yiddish and German, we will immediately see that numerous words appearing in the latter are unknown in the former. To explain this difference, Weinreich suggests, as discussed in section .., making a distinction between three notions applicable to Yiddish: its “stock languages,” its “determinants” (that is, according to his terminology, parts of the stock languages that could, in principle, enter Yiddish), and corresponding components of Yiddish (elements that are actual parts of Yiddish). This consideration implies the existence of two independent gaps: one between a stock language and its determinant and another between a determinant and the corresponding component. The first of these gaps deals with German words that were never known to Jews. One reason for the existence of this gap is historico-geographical. Some of the words in question belong to dialects spoken by Gentiles in areas in which no Jewish community was established during the centuries of the initial development of Yiddish. For example, this is the case of the entire area of Low German covering northern German-speaking provinces where no Jews were known until the seventeenth century. When Jewish communities were formed in Courland, Hamburg, and Amsterdam, idioms used by local Gentiles were of little influence on the development of the Yiddish varieties even in these places and of no importance to other Yiddish varieties.550 Another reason is social: due to their professional activities, places of habitation, and their particular life style, Jews had no contact with words belonging to a large number of semantic domains. To this category Weinreich assigns words from numerous semantic fields including courtly life, agriculture, hunting, navigation, the military, large parts of flora and fauna, juridical and administrative terminology, and numerous terms related to the Christian religion (WG :). If there is no doubt that these domains were indeed marginal for Jews, Weinreich’s postulate as a whole remains at least questionable. On the one hand, for large masses of German Gentiles some of the enumerated domains were also marginal. On the other hand, individual Jews, from the richest strata of community, certainly had contacts with German nobility and thus to certain spheres of related activities. Moreover, we have no evidence that all Jews in various Germanspeaking provinces were exclusively urban dwellers. Jews living in the countryside certainly were aware of various German words from the domains of flora, fauna, and agriculture. As a result, this social argument appears significantly weaker than the historico-geographical one. It is the second of the two gaps mentioned above that is really fundamental in Weinreich’s theoretical constructions and deserves being discussed in more detail. To characterize it, the scholar uses the notion of SELECTIVITY. Here, he distinguishes two types of selectivity: inside of the same component and between different components. The first type deals with cases when only one among several synonyms present in a stock language is actually incorporated in Yiddish. For example, NHG has laufen and rennen ‘to run,’ schicken and senden ‘to send,’ Sache and Ding ‘thing,’ while StY has only loyfn, shikn, and zakh, that is, only forms cognate with the first elements of the above pairs. The
549 Examples from Table .: /z/ instead of /d/ in Tsouzmer ‘Sandomierz’ (most likely due to some kind of contamination rather than to a purely phonetic shift); internal /n/ in Graydink ‘Gródek’ and Moshtshinsk ‘Mościska’ (other toponyms from the same group are Linsk ‘Lesko’ and Ninsk ‘Nisko’; note that all four places in question correspond to the same geographic area). To a general EY innovation is due the affrication /s/ > /ts/ after /n/ or /l/ (see feature {C} in section ..). 550 See WG :. In GH, written at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by an author from Hamburg, we find no trace of Low German except for about fifty lexical elements (Timm :).
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The German component
second type corresponds to the choice of a word from one component rather than from another. For example, in StY we find zun ‘sun’ (compare MHG sunne, NHG Sonne), but levone (Hebrew )ְלָבָנה ‘moon.’ Yet, no form cognate with NHG Mond ‘moon’ or Hebrew ‘ ׁ ֶשֶמׁשsun’ appears in EY (WG :). This example is of particular interest for the history of Yiddish because the use of a word of German origin for ‘sun’ and the use of the Hebrew origin for ‘moon’ seems to be pan-Yiddish in the twentieth century. The same pair as in StY, zun and levone, characterizes EGY. In various dictionaries of western subdialects such as AlsY, SwY, and WphY, all of which mainly make reference to words of Hebrew origin, we regularly find forms similar to levone, but never those derived from Hebrew ׁ ֶשֶמׁש. In this and many other particular cases, it is difficult to provide an explanation about the reasons of the actual choice. However, one can observe that certain semantic fields are more “closed” to words from the German component than others: for them, Yiddish often retains words from the Hebrew component. Weinreich puts into this category words related to areas of religion, charity, dying, delinquency, and (partly) family. Among the examples of non-retained German items are words cognate to NHG segnen ‘to bless’ (StY bentshn, of Romance origin), Waise ‘orphan’ (StY yosem551), Witwe ‘widow’ (StY almone), Grab ‘grave’ (StY keyver), Dieb ‘thief ’ (StY ganef ), Hochzeit ‘wedding’ (StY khasene) (WG :, –). Here, according to Weinreich, in a considerable number of cases the impulse for selection or rejection could have been an ideological one: bearers of the Jewish life system rejected items that were too strongly reminiscent of the Christian life system. Details of the analysis suggested by Weinreich provide important clues for our understanding of the development of Yiddish. However, his global theoretical approach, with the examples of selectivity described in the previous paragraph considered as explanations for the gap existing between the German determinant and the German component of Yiddish are highly questionable. His approach would be appropriate only if the German elements belonging to this gap area (such as forms cognate to German words meaning ‘moon,’ ‘widow’ etc.) were not present in the Ashkenazic vernacular language(s) from its/their inception as idioms having system-level differences with respect to all contemporary German dialects. Yet, this is precisely false. In numerous Ashkenazic sources we find references to a word cognate to MHG mân(e) / NHG Mond ‘moon.’ Among them are not only earliest sources, such as M (*mon), R ()ְמונדא, Le ()ָמאנֹוְטא, R ()ָמא ְנא, Be (מונודאa),552 but also documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose link with modern varieties of Yiddish is beyond question,553 such as H (monit or manit), MM (*mon), Ox and HiP ()מונט, SD ()מון, Mel ( מוןand )מאן, Pr ( מונדand )מאנד, and NH ()ָמאנט. As a result, the pan-Yiddish choice of the Hebrew word for ‘moon’ appears to be relatively recent. It is due to mutual influences between Yiddish varieties and does not belong to a putative PROTO-YIDDISH. A participle cognate to NHG gesegnet ‘blessed’ (from the verb segnen ‘to bless’) appears not only in Le but also in BZR and Br, both compiled at the end of the sixteenth century.554 For ‘widow,’ we find ( װיטװאdirectly related to NHG Witwe) in Be, ( װיטװיןcognate with NHG Witwin derived from Witwe) in R, SD, and H, ורױאa( װיטcognate with another NHG derived form, Witfrau) in HiP and a similar form in Br. The plural ‘orphans’ (NHG Waisen) appears as ַװײִזיןin R and װײזןin HiP, H, and Br.555 For ‘grave’ 551
This and all the following StY words mentioned in this sentence are of Hebrew origin. Some of these forms (especially, those from Le and Be), can be related to MHG mânôt / NHG Monat ‘month’ for which StY has khoydesh, also of Hebrew origin. The forms from M and MM are taken from Grünbaum :–. 553 See section ... 554 Compare: ְגַזעְג ְנטin Le (Banitt (:)), גיזעגנטin BZR (TG , ), gebenscht das maint (‘that means’) gesegnet in Br (German transcription in Riedel :). 555 Compare “witvrauen un’ waisen” ‘widows and orphans’ (Riedel :). Note that the text of Br also includes forms of Hebrew origin for both ‘widow’ and ‘orphan.’ 552
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Selectivity in the German component
(NHG Grabe), we find ְג ַראֿבin R, גראבin SD and FF, and גרבin HiP and Pr. For ‘thief ’ (NHG Dieb): דיבאin SD, דיפאin HiP, דיבin H, but גנבin Pr. Even if no reference to a word cognate with NHG Hochzeit is found in EY, the form hokhtset was valid for EGY (along with khasene). Moreover, as discussed in section ., in numerous Ashkenazic sources, we find for ‘wedding’ various forms cognate not to Hochzeit but to its rarely used synonym Brautlauft. For numerous lexical elements for which StY uses words with Hebrew or Romance roots, we find their semantic equivalents of German origin in early Ashkenazic sources. For example, StY has malekh ‘angel’ and gehenem ‘hell,’ but no forms cognate with MHG engel / NHG Engel ‘angel’ and MHG helle / NHG Hölle ‘hell.’ Yet, forms equivalent to the above German items are well known in Jewish sources too, compare (a) for ‘angel,’ regularly in western documents compiled before the end of the sixteenth century: אינגילin SAB, אינגלin CC, R, and Be, אינגלאin Le, ענגילin R, SD, Mel, ShB, HiP, and ענגעלin DB; (b) for ‘hell’: R ()העל, R ()הילא, and SD ()היל. For the verb ‘to send,’ we find not only forms cognate with NHG schicken but also those related to senden. Among the examples are: גזענדין in R, זענדin Ox, זענדיןin HiP, גיזענטin H and Kr, and זענדןin Pr. It is important to stress that all the early Ashkenazic texts quoted in the previous paragraph were written for internal use within the Jewish communities only. Consequently, no doubt exists about the words in question being parts of the everyday language of their authors. On the other hand, this is not necessarily true for documents based on original German texts and/or compiled for contexts external to Jews. In these cases, a word appearing in the Jewish text can represent a direct transcription of a word present in the German original. Multilingual dictionaries providing equivalents in the Jewish vernacular language to words from Hebrew and certain other languages should also be addressed with particular caution. Indeed, the very fact that the lexical items of the “Ashkenazic” language of their authors is given along with their Hebrew translations, plus the consideration by these authors of this language being (a sort of) German could be responsible for the choice of words of German origin only. These words were not necessarily parts of the vernacular idiom but could be known to the authors in question as used by German Christians. To this particular factor can be due the form שװײן ‘swine, pig’ (compare NHG Schwein) found in both SD and NH. The presence of this form in the sources in question does not preclude the possibility that in everyday conversations with their fellow Jews the authors, Elia Levita and Nathan Hanover, were actually using a word from the Hebrew component related to StY khazer ‘pig.’556 There is no doubt that selectivity played an important role in the development of Yiddish varieties. Yet, the information provided earlier in this section shows that it should be understood in a way different from that suggested by Weinreich. For numerous words known in German dialects to have been spoken in territories where important Jewish communities have been established for a long time, the selectivity operated not between these dialects (“determinants,” according to Weinreich’s terminology) and the German component of the vernacular idiom of local Jews but inside of that Jewish idiom. In other words, early available Ashkenazic sources refute the idea about the existence of any important lexical gap between everyday languages spoken by Jews and their Gentile neighbors. As discussed in section .., it is in the domain of given names that we can really observe the process of strong selectivity. For words from the common lexicon, we are actually dealing with processes that characterize the historical development of any language including the
556 Nathan Hanover says explicitly that he put in the “German” column of NH mainly words from the Jewish vernacular and only a few items that are actually used by non-Jews (Weinreich :). To the last category certainly belong ָמ ְי ִזיסa‘ ּבּוךTorah,’ ‘ ִי ְז ַרֶאלIsraelite,’ ‘ ַקאְפַלאןKohen,’ and װין ִ ‘ ֵליLevite’ (see also Weinreich :). In the first three forms one easily recognizes German (non-Jewish) terms Buch Mosis ‘Book of Moses,’ Israel, and Kaplan/Caplan/Capellan ‘chaplain.’ The last word (German *Lewin) is obscure: the usual German word for Levite is Levit.
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The German component
disappearance of words related to semantic fields that are socially marginal or have become archaic, loss of some lexical elements in a series of synonyms (sometimes because of acquiring new loanwords), and semantic changes. A specificity of Yiddish lies in the wide choice that was presented to its speakers, with words coming from various German dialectal areas from which Jews were migrating to other places, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a number of Slavic languages. Numerous observations by Weinreich providing (at least partial) explanation for semantic fields in which lexical elements from one of the components had more chances of “winning” the competition with their semantic equivalents sound correct. One can also add that for colloquial German words, chances for their survival in Yiddish were undoubtedly bigger than for their literary synonyms. The former were well known to Jews due to contacts with their Gentile neighbors. The latter were marginal for Jewish culture. For example, several Christian authors from the second half of the eighteenth century state that the German verb schicken is regularly used in everyday life, while senden is limited to the written language.557 Above it was shown that a form cognate to senden was used by Jews in Western and Central Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The particularity of its use by Christians represents one of the most important reasons for its absence from modern EY.
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SYNTHESIS
.. Early Ashkenazic sources and German dialects In the above sections of this chapter, numerous references from early Ashkenazic sources were cited. The information provided allows for analyzing links that may exist between the sources in question and particular German dialects. For establishing these links, the importance of various elements considered above is of different degrees. It is clear that of least importance are items that involve only individual words the sole exception being basic family terms such as {L} (‘dad’), {L} (‘mummy’), and {L} (‘grandfather,’ ‘grandmother’). The interest of other individual items is particularly marginal when dealing with old sources because (a) we may be dealing with an error by a scribe; (b) we never know the exact geographic distribution of any particular word in various German dialects during the period under consideration; (c) authors of certain early sources were clearly copying certain words or even expressions from documents written by their predecessors.558 Globally, to this category, marginal for the analysis in this section, belong all lexical elements different from the above family terms, as well as numerous phonological reflexes in individual words and a few elements concerning suffixes and genders of isolated words also.559 Among the remaining 557
See the entry senden in DWB. See TG about the existence of the initial Jewish source to which BZR, BZV, and BZP (the three versions of the tale Beria ve-Zimra) are all related. Numerous interdependencies can be found in sources providing biblical translations or glosses. Among documents covered by Röll , Kr and Pr are particularly close. They include numerous similar long combinations of words; see, for example, in volume the glosses [], [], [], [], [], [], [], and []. Consider just one of these examples, namely [] (Röll .:). The Hebrew expression לֿאתראהa‘ חשךdarkness that thou canst not see’ (Job :) is glossed: מײנשטו וואש דו טושט אין דר פינשטרנש ניט זי װערט גיזעהןin Kr and מײנשטו ווש דו טושט אין דער וינשטרניש ניט זיא װערט גיזעהןin Pr. There is no doubt that either one of these sources copies from the other, or both of them copy from the same third document. However, despite these lexical and semantic similarities, the spellings of the cognate words used by the two authors differs significantly revealing their phonological and graphic peculiarities. 559 The exact list of non-lexical marginal items covers: {C–C, C–C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C–C, C, C–C, C, C–C, C, C, C, C–C, V, V–V, V, V, V–V, V– V, V–V, V–V, V–V, U, U, U–U, M, M, M}. 558
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Synthesis
items, the following are of particular significance because they are structural for the development of a dialect and often involve a large number of words: {C} (reflexes of Old German /p/), {C} (reflexes of Old German /d/), {C} (initial /p/ for Old German /b/), {C} and {C} (confusion between k, t, p and g, d, b; this feature is important especially for the modern era), {C} (reflexes of MHG internal st), {C} (prefix der-), {C} (reflexes of MHG hs), {V} (reflexes of MHG î and û), {V} (reflexes of MHG ie and uo), {V} (reflexes of MHG ei and ou), {V} (reflexes of MHG ô), {V} (unrounding), {V} (change /aš / > /eš/), {V} (lengthening in open syllables), {U} (apocope), {M} (diminutive singular suffix), {M} (two degrees of diminutives), {M} (diminutive plural suffixes), {M} (first singular of ‘to be’), and {M} (second singular of verbs). For these elements, crucial to our analysis, the dialectal geography either was already totally established before the early Jewish sources known to us were compiled (this is particularly true for consonants), or the chronology of changes in various German dialects is well documented. Later in this section, documents from a sample of early Ashkenazic sources will be discussed, taking into account primarily the elements in question.560 In this and the remaining sections of this chapter, when discussing links between various dialects, attention is paid to characteristics that make dialects distinct and not to those according to which the dialects look similar. The main advantage of this method consists in avoiding the construction of logically incorrect inferences. The following type of assertions represents a typical example of inappropriate logic: Since (Yiddish variety Y exhibits—according to a feature F—a behavior similar to that of German dialect G), one concludes that (Y descends from / is related to G). Actually, Y can, in principle, descend from another German dialect G that also shares the same behavior. This kind of logically inappropriate search for parallels between idioms is common in linguistics in general and in Yiddish studies in particular.561 The only context in which this approach can be tolerated is the case when a Yiddish variety shows a behavior similar to that of coterritorial German dialect and, moreover, nothing is known about the same feature in other German dialects. In this specific case, the influence of the German dialect in question on local Yiddish is quite plausible. The method of searching for characteristics according to which various dialects differ from each other also has one drawback. When measuring a difference between two dialects, the existence of a correlation between them according to some feature is not favored in comparison to the situation when the information about this feature in one of these dialects is simply lacking. Nevertheless, this drawback is less significant than the striking logical disadvantage of the alternative approach. The order of the presentation of Jewish sources in the list below is conventional, but mainly chronological: SAB: The following only elements do not conform to local Ripuarian dialect: {V} (one word), {C} (two words), and {C} (a few words). A comparison to other dialects reveals more important differences. Their number is small only for other WCG dialects: (a) for MF and Hessian, it also includes {C} but this is precisely the main criterion according to which Ripuarian is distinguished from other WCG dialects; (b) for PG, {V} and {V} should be added.562 560 Certain documents from our list are discussed in Staerk and Leitzmann . The authors generally assign sources under their consideration to one or several German dialects. However, in their book they do not present any argument to corroborate their opinion. As a result, in the text below their opinions are ignored. 561 Numerous cases of this kind of logic appear in Mieses , a pioneering work on Yiddish. He finds multiple parallels between Bavarian and EY including certain facts concerning a(n) (indefinite article, prefix) (pp. –), suffix -ig / EY -ik (p. ), verbal prefix der- (p. ). Contrary to Mieses, Eggers generally notes that similar developments exist in German dialects different from Bavarian. Still he regularly indicates that these facts found by Mieses represent strong evidence about Bavarian being the main source for EY (Eggers :, , –, respectively). The same approach represents one of the most striking characteristics of the studies by Wexler (, , ). 562 The analysis by Timm () also shows the direct link between SAB and Ripuarian.
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The German component
M: According to such fundamental criteria as {V, V, V, C, C}, this source can be CF only.563 However, Ripuarian is excluded because of the features {C}, {V}, and, less importantly, {C}. As a result, this document is well correlated with MF only. {C} only does not conform to MF (and CG generally speaking). Yet this contradiction is not crucial: see below the discussion of the same feature for Le. CC: The consideration of {C, C, C, V, V, M, M} eliminates all dialects except for two Alemannic subdialects: Swabian and HA, with only {U} that does not conform to both of them. Numerous other, less important, features also contradict CG, Bavarian, EF, Bohemian, and LA. Swabian is a better fit than HA according to {C} (but see the explanation below concerning R), {C}, and {C}. Yet, HA is preferable to Swabian according to {C, C, C, V}.564 R: According to {C, C, C, V, V, M, U} and a number of other less significant features, this document does not conform to any dialect except for PG or Hessian, that is, the two subdialects of RF.565 However, the element {V} clearly contradicts both of them. Certain other less important elements are also incompatible: {L} with both PG and Hessian, {V} with PG, {V, M} with Hessian, while {C} is only partly correlated with RF. Two alternative explanations may be valid to explain this situation. Firstly, R could appear in the area near the border of RF and EF where some features of EF were present: the diphthongization of MHG î and û {V} did take place and the prefix der- {C} was used. This scenario looks plausible: note that, as discussed above, (a) no diphthongization was present in the language of the pointer of the same document that presumably was from the same general area, 563
The analysis by Heide (:–)) points to the same dialectal connection. Several attempts to assign CC to German dialects were already made in the past. The most detailed one is that by Althaus () who took into consideration only one of the texts, the fable ‘An old lion.’ The author makes a summary of the results of his predecessors (p. ) who wrote about Hessian, EF or NB “connections.” He also proposes fifteen arguments to point to the linguistic origin in southern Thuringia circa (pp. –). Of these arguments: one (#) results from an incorrect quote from MV ; ## , , and are unreliable because the factual materials on which they are based can be interpreted in a different way; ## – deal with individual words. The approach by Weinreich is totally different. For him, this manuscript unambiguously testifies to the fact that even during the fourteenth century there was already a very marked fusion of German dialectal elements from distant regions in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews (WG :–, Weinreich a:–). To illustrate his idea he proceeds in several steps. Firstly, he postulates the existence of a few typical CG features. Here Weinreich refers to the form he ‘he’ that “appears interchangeably” with a more standard er. According to German dialectology, he is unknown in UG and southern part of WCG (compare KA ). Weinreich also gives a few examples of /d/ instead of /t/ that, according to him, also point to the northern part of WCG situated in the vicinity of the Low German area. Secondly, he mentions a number of UG traits. Here he deals with two general features (which in this chapter are designated {C} and {C}), as well as with a few individual words. One of them, the equivalent of the NHG modal verb sollen ‘should’ regularly starts with /š/ in CC. This fact reveals, according to Weinreich, its Bavarian origin. As a result, Weinreich thinks to show the presence of traits that are reminiscent of different corners of the German dialectal space. However, his arguments do not appear to be cogent. Indeed, the “Bavarian” feature in question was actually also typical of medieval EF and well known in Alemannic (MK ). Medieval references to /d/ instead of /t/ in the specific context after /l/ to which all his examples correspond characterize all of WCG and were commonly found in EF too (see footnote in this chapter). It suffices to look into the index prepared by Hakkarainen (:–, ) to see that the putative “interchangeability” of he and er in CC is an exaggeration. We find there many dozens of references to ‘ ערhe’ and only a few references to היthat often correspond not to the meaning ‘he’ but to the MHG hie ‘here.’ Moreover, a proper analysis designed to show the heterogeneous origins of the vernacular language of German Jews in the fourteenth century has to deal not with the collection as a whole but with individual poems: in theory, their authors could be independent. The statement by Timm about a German dialectal mixture apparent in CC (TG , ) is not corroborated by her own analysis but seems rather to be based on her non-critical approach to arguments suggested by Weinreich, Althaus, and other authors. 565 This result conforms to the conclusion given in the most detailed and adequate analysis of R already published, namely that by Röll (.:) who says that this document shows features of southern WCG. Heide (:–), who studied only vocalic features, also points, primarily, to RF. 564
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and (b) R also includes the prefixes er- and her-, a feature typical of a document from a transitional area. Secondly, R can represent one of the earliest Jewish sources that show a blending of elements taken from different German dialects. Le: This document shows numerous features that are not correlated with any dialect except for LA.566 Only the element {C} contradicts (modern) LA. Since this document behaves here as in MHG, while we have no direct references that would allow us to know the exact time when LA acquired its modern reflex, in this particular case, we can easily deal with a testimony about the reflex being valid for LA at the time Le was compiled.567 R: Taking into consideration {C, C, C, V, V, V, V, V, M} and numerous other elements show a close link to HA. The only exceptional element is {C}: in HA, one would expect to find traces of the affricate /kx/. However, this contradiction is not strong. The manuscript is written using the Hebrew alphabet that has no equivalent for this affricate, and therefore, based on the spelling only, one cannot give a judgment about the exact pronunciation of the sound expressed in R via ק. Be: Taking into account {C, C, C, V, U} and a number of other elements leave only NB, CB, EF, and Bohemian as potential donor dialects. However, such important features as {C, V, V} contradict both Bavarian dialects. {V} and minor {V} do not conform to Bohemian. {M} does not conform to either Bavarian or Bohemian. Only features concerning isolated words—{M, C, V, V}—do not fit EF. Similarly to the way R was considered above, two alternative scenarios may be suggested here to explain these exceptions. Firstly, the document may correspond to an area on the border between EF and NB (for example, the region of Nürnberg). Secondly, in principle, we can be faced in Be with an example of Jewish merging of elements taken from different German dialects. H: The consideration of such fundamental vocalic features as {V, V, V} leaves only EF and Bohemian. Many additional characteristics are not correlated with other dialects, the contrast being particularly strong in comparison to WCG. EF is eliminated because of {M, C} and, therefore, the source is closely related to Bohemian only. This result contradicts the opinion by Röll (:) who speaks about the northern part of the EF territory, and, more precisely, Henneberg Duchy. He bases his statement on the geographic distribution in German dialects of the three following lexical elements: nischt ‘nothing,’ pffert ‘horse’ (related to NHG Pferd and not to Ross), and aÿden ‘son-in-law’ (link to NHG Eidam rather than to Tochtermann or Schwiegersohn). Taking into account the isoglosses related to the first two words can indeed be useful for a rough identification of possible links with German dialects (see above the discussion of features {C} and {L}, respectively). Yet, the argument concerning the last word is anachronistic. The geography of this word has changed dramatically since the time when H was compiled (see the discussion of {L}). H: Application of {C, V, V} eliminates all except Swabian, CB, SB, and EF. {C} fits all of these dialects too. However, {V} is incompatible with Bavarian and is implausible for Swabian. {V} also excludes both Bavarian subdialects, but this feature is rather marginal: it deals with one word only. As a result, H conforms to EF only.568 Same conclusion appears in Banitt .:. Röll (.:) points to Alemannic, without being more precise. On the other hand, the analysis of the vocalism of Le made by Heide (:) ends up with an erroneous assignment of its language to Central Franconian / Low Hessian. Heide was misled by the unusual spelling system used in that manuscript. 567 Even in books printed during the sixteenth century in the area of LA one still finds the spelling blauwer ‘blue’ (MK ). 568 The information for the analysis of the language of H is taken in its totality from Heide (, ). Yet, that author himself links H to LA, RF, and EF and also speaks about the influence of NB and Swabian (thus announcing 566
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The German component
BB, SD, Teh, and PuV: These four works written by or related to Elia Levita have little correlation with any German dialect except for EF and Swabian. This follows from the consideration of criteria related to {C, C, C, C, V, U, M} and some others too. If we exclude a few elements that correspond to individual words, only {V} contradicts EF, while only {C, V} do not conform to Swabian. It is difficult to say whether the language of these works was due to a merging of EF and Swabian features realized by Jews or was simply due to a German dialect from an area intermediate between EF and Swabian. Note also the partial character of unrounding {V} in both PuV and BB, while unrounding is typical of Swabian and does not characterize EF. MM: Taking into account the elements {C, C, C, C, V, M, M} eliminates WCG, Thuringian, Alemannic, and EF. Silesian and UpS are problematic because of {V, U} and, less importantly, {C, V, V}. Bohemian is clearly the closest dialect. Mel: The application of such major criteria as {C, C, C, C, C, V, V, U, M} leaves only the following dialects with which Mel is correlated rather well: EF, Swabian, and Bohemian, for which important exceptions are {C, V}, {V, V, U}, and {V, V, V}, respectively. ShB: Numerous linguistic characteristics are shared by ShB with Mel. In theory, this property can be related (at least, partly) to their common editor. As for Mel, the combination of features {C, C, C, C, C, V, U} eliminates all dialects except for Swabian, EF, and Bohemian. ShB does not conform to these three dialects according to {V}, {C, V}, and {V, V}, respectively. {C} (pronunciation of ‘lion’) is among the rare features that distinguish ShB from Mel. Here, ShB conforms to Swabian, but neither to EF nor to Bohemian.569 Ox: Taking into account the elements {C, C, C, C, V, V, V, U, M} eliminates all dialects except for EF that does not conform to {V} only. DB: Only Swabian, EF, and Bohemian resist the application of such important criteria as {C, C, V, M}. For the remaining three dialects, the common presence of umlaut-forms {V} is compatible with EF only. Yet, for the author of DB unrounding was clearly ongoing. The feature {V} is compatible with Swabian, but not with two other dialects. {C} and, less importantly {C}, contradict Swabian. A number of features dealing with individual words do not conform to EF: {C, V, V}. H: Its language represents an example of a definite mixture of elements taken from various German dialects. For example, {M} is typically CG, while {C} cannot be CG. Still, some dialects are in a favored position in comparison to others. For example, in the list of major characteristics {C, C, V, V, V, U, M}, EF and Swabian contradict only one characteristic ({V} and {V}, respectively); all others do not conform to at least two characteristics. If we also take into account {U, M} and other features, we can globally see that EF is the closest dialect, while various CG dialects differ from the language of H most substantially. HiP: Taking into account the fundamental elements {C, C, C, V, V, V, M, M} eliminates all of subdialects of CG, as well as LA and HA, all of which contradict at least three of these features (with the contrast being particularly apparent in comparison to ECG and Ripuarian). Bavarian shows reflexes incompatible with those in HiP for {V} and {V} and a the presence of the dialectal mixture). The arguments he provides to explain these conjectured connexions (Heide (:–) are partly unclear, partly wrong. For example, he considers that MHG û, iu, uo, üe all have in H the same reflex /y:/ only because the same (actually, ambiguous) grapheme ( )ויis used for all of them. 569 These results are correlated with the assertion in TG about the poet of ShB being from the transitional area between EF and Alemannic.
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large number of less significant features (including {C, C, C, C, V}). Both Swabian and Bohemian do not conform only to one basic feature {V} plus a number of less important items such as {V}, {U}, and {M} for Swabian and {V} for Bohemian. No major feature contradicts EF. {C} is the only feature that deals with several elements and is not correlated with EF. Yet, the number of feature dealing with individual words—{C, C, C, V, V, V, V, U}—that distance HiP from EF is much larger than the number that distance this source from any RF subdialect. BZR, BZV, BZP: Taking into account such fundamental criteria as {C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, U} shows that the language of BZR fits EF and does not conform to all other dialects. Only {C, V}, and, less significantly, {V, V} are not compatible with EF. Note that all these exceptions are in line with Swabian, a neighboring dialect. On the other hand, if we apply the criteria related to {C, C, V, V, V} to the two documents from Prague, all dialects are eliminated except for Bohemian.570 Kr and Pr: The consideration of such features as {C, C, V, V, M} shows that Kr can be closely related to Bohemian (only {C} contradicts it) and, to a lesser extent, Silesian (with which {V} and most significantly {V, U} are not correlated). For Pr, numerous characteristics do not conform to CG571 and UG.572 Smaller but still apparent differences exist in comparison to EF: {C, C, V, V}. Only {V} and partially {V} are not compatible with Bohemian. NH: Only Bohemian “resists” the consideration of such elements as {C, C, C, V, V, V, V, V, M, M} and numerous others, less significant. However, this dialect does not fit with such fundamental characteristics as {C} for which the language of NH behaves as ECG. Summarizing the above discussion, one can see that the twenty-six early Ashkenazic sources taken into consideration in this section can be divided into three groups. The first of them encompasses the earliest manuscripts. They are linguistically extremely heterogeneous: SAB related to Ripuarian, M to MF, R to RF, CC correlated to Swabian, Le to LA, R to HA, and Be to EF and Bavarian. The second group includes western sources from the sixteenth century and all of them are primarily related to EF and, to a lesser extent, Swabian: four works by Elia Levita, H, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, and BZR.573 The third group deals with H and materials from the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century that were printed either in Prague or Kraków: MM, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, and NH. All of them show close similarities with Bohemian. It is important to note that these results were obtained only via a “neutral” comparison of the behavior of various linguistic features found in these documents to the corresponding features of German dialects: no extra-linguistic factor was taken into account. Additional available information of different kinds can be used in order to test its compatibility with the above links constructed theoretically. If we take into account historico-geographical factors then the corroboration is quite good: (i) SAB was compiled in the area of Ripuarian; (ii) Le includes not only Germanic glosses but also French Jewish glosses, while LA is peculiar to Alsace, an area See also TG –, –. {C} is not CG, {C} and many others are not WCG, {V} is not ECG, {C} is not Silesian, while {C, C} are neither UpS, nor Thuringian. 572 {C, U, M, M} are not Alemannic, {C, V} exclude LA and HA, and {C, C} are not Bavarian. 573 Note a correlation between this result and the statement by Christian scholar Elias Schadäus about Jews pronouncing German vowels in a coarser manner than Christians in Nürnberg or Franconia. This opinion (see its full text in Frakes :) is cited in numerous Yiddish studies including Weinreich : and TG –. Schadäus lived in Western Europe, his work was published in in Strasbourg, and therefore he clearly wrote about western Jewish communities. 570 571
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The German component
near the French border; (iii) Elia Levita’s native town is situated in the area of EF close to the border of Swabia; (iv) both Mel and ShB were originally published in Augsburg (eastern Swabia) and it is possible that they were edited by Paulus Aemilius, a converted Jew born in the area of EF; (v) we do not know anything about the life of Isaac Reutlingen, but his nickname is derived from the town of Reutlingen in Swabia; (vi) all books from Prague show similarities with the Bohemian colonial dialect of German. Here HiP occupies a special position. It was compiled by an author from the area of RF. Yet, it shows fundamental differences in comparison to RF. As a result, it represents the earliest manuscript for which we can be sure that its language is distinctly different from local German, but more closely related to EF, Swabian, and (most likely, by chance) Bohemian. However, as noted earlier, according to many surface-level features, the language of the author has closer similarities with local RF than with EF. Useful information can also be extracted by comparing different aspects of the Jewish sources in question not with German dialects but with each other. For example, considering the reflexes of MHG ht {C}, one can immediately see the specificity of all oldest documents (except for R) in comparison to others. One can also see that among the oldest manuscripts Be stands apart if we take into account {C} (GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS) and {C, C} related to it. This factor corroborates its geographic separation from other oldest sources suggested earlier without taking this criterion into account because for early periods it does not appear to be reliable. Graphical conventions discussed in section . can serve as an important complementary tool. Again, the oldest documents—SAB, CC, R, Le, R, and Be—differ significantly from other sources. All of them have explicit signs of their provenance from the BNEY HES area {G}, show peculiar reflexes for /e/-colored vowels {G}, do not employ yod for unstressed vowels {G}, and include cases of silent alef in words ending in a consonant {G} and no (or a few) instances of final zayin {G}. Moreover, these six sources do not represent a homogeneous set. They often use different graphemes and even within the same manuscript the spelling is often inconsistent. The use of the same peculiar graphemes {G} puts together SAB and CC (both with caron over shin). Le, R, and Be are close because their auxiliary words are spelled together with a word they precede or follow {G}. Other, more recent, documents can be divided into two groups, western and eastern. The latter covers books from Prague and Kraków for all of which one finds peculiar graphic conventions in comparison to other sources. MM, Kr, and NH are different from all others by their use of samekh {G}. In BZV, BZP, Kr, and NH, final postvocalic alef is common {G}. In H, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, and NH alef (rather than vav) expresses /o/ {G}. H, BZP, Kr, and NH all have initial fe {G}. According to the set of features cited above, that is, {G, G, G, G}, documents from the western group—such as BB, SD, Teh, PuV, Mel, ShB, Ox, DB, H, HiP, and BZR—are more or less homogeneous and different from those of the eastern group.574 The analysis of the presence of final zayin {G} allows us to distinguish three western subgroups: () those in which this graphic feature is particularly common (Ox and the four works by Elia Levita); () those in which it is unusual (H, HiP, BZR); () an intermediate subgroup (Mel, ShB, DB). Among individual western sources, one can observe a number of additional idiosyncrasies. Ox shows a few characteristics that are found in earliest manuscripts only. It is different from other documents by its particularly common use of the trigrpah { ײוG} and a regular presence of initial veth {G}. According to both these features, Ox is similar to Be and according to {G} to Le. SD includes unusual trigraphs {G} and double consonants {G}. Teh, in contrast to other sources,
574 Only MM, the oldest of eastern sources, shows a number of features that are usually found in western documents.
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Synthesis
employs special graphemes as equivalents of the German umlaut {G}. HiP stays apart because of its peculiar use of final postvocalic alef {G}. Unexpected distribution corresponds to the spelling of the word meaning ‘god’ {G}. Here, on the one hand, BZR behaves similarly to a number of eastern sources, while BZV and BZP have an opposite tendency: they follow a western tradition. Globally speaking, we can see that the analysis of graphical conventions yields results well correlated with those obtained earlier in this section, taking linguistic features into account. For Be, it makes any link to Bohemian totally implausible.
.. Modern Yiddish varieties and German dialects Table . synthesizes the information given in sections .–. listing elements of Yiddish varieties that are not compatible with various German dialects. Here only the features not connected with single words (except for basic family terms and forms of the verbs ‘to have’ and ‘to be’) are taken into account. The information shown in Table . allows us to see that EY is close to two German colonial dialects only: Bohemian and Silesian. These dialects are complementary. Bohemian is compatible with the main vocalic features and morphology of EY. However, several major consonantal features—reflexes of old German p {C}, absence of GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS {C}, and, less importantly, the reflex of MHG mp {C} and voicing /rš/ > /rž/ {C}—are typically Silesian. On the other hand, Silesian does not conform to EY for a number of morphological and grammatical features (double system of diminutives {M}, diminutive plural suffix -lekh {M}, and the disappearance of the preterite {M}), it shows no apocope {U}, and contradicts EY by its reflexes of MHG ô and o {V, V}. The only consonantal trait by which EY is distanced from Silesian is the introduction of /n/ between /j/ and /s/ or /š/ {C}. However, it affects only a few words and may be due, at least partly, to an internal Jewish innovation. Section . and Appendix B discuss the role of the Silesian dialect of German spoken in numerous medieval Polish cities and towns by a large part of the Christian population in the formation of EY toponyms. It is much more likely that the language of these urban Christians (and above all its consonantism) was determinant for the development of EY rather than the dialect spoken by Germans in Silesia proper. The influence of this language could also be important for the establishment of the root vowel length in certain words (see the discussion of links between EY and ECG in section ..) as well as for some peculiarities in the domains of unstressed vowels {U, U, U} (see section .) and the lexicon (see section .). Summarizing the above information, one can see that there were two stages in the development of EY during which it had important contacts with two different German dialects. During the first stage, the structural basis of EY was formed including its major grammatical features and the Proto-EY vocalism. This stage took place in the Czech lands, that is, in Bohemia and Moravia, the areas in which the Christian urban population spoke the colonial Bohemian dialect of German. During the second stage that took place in Poland, another colonial dialect of German, Silesian, exerted an important influence on EY with consequences for the phonetics (primarily in the domain of the consonantism), general lexicon, and local toponyms.575 575
This scenario is quite close to that suggested by Eggers (:) who also speaks about two stages. During the first (placed by Eggers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) Bavarian features via Prague were brought to Eastern Europe. These features were kept in LitY. During the second stage (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), Central German exerted an important influence on PolY and UkrY. Our scenario possesses several major differences with respect to the above ideas. Firstly, this book suggests that both stages (Bohemian and Silesian) are important for EY as a whole, that
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The German component
TABLE . Cross-references of incompatible features between Yiddish and German dialects German dialects
Yiddish varieties EY
CzY
EGY
DuY
SWY
. CG
C, M, M
C, M, M
. WCG
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, U, M
C, C, C, C, C, V, V, M, L
C, C, C, V, V, U, M
C, C, C, V, M
C, C
.. CF
C, C, C, C, V, V, M, M
C, C, C, V, V, V, M, M
C, C, C, V, V, V, M
C, C, C, C, V, V, V
C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, U, M
... Rip
C, V, V, V, M, M
C, V, V, V, M
C, V, V, V, M, M
C, V, V, V
C, C, V, V, M, M
... MF
C
C
C
C
.. RF
C, C, C, C, V
C, C
C, C, C
C, C, C
C
... PG
C, C, V, V
C, V
C, V
C, V
V
... Hes
V, V, M, M
V, M
C, V, M
V
V, U, M
. ECG
C, V, U, M
V, V, U, M
V, V, U
C, C, V, V, V, U, M
C, C, V, V, V, U, U, M, M, M
.. Th
C, C, C, C, C, V, M
C, C, C, M
C, C, C, C
C, C
C, C
C, V, M, M, M, L, L
is, in contrast to what was proposed by Eggers, LitY was also influenced by ECG. Secondly, the chronology suggested by Eggers is untenable: nothing suggests that Yiddish could be brought to Eastern Europe as early as the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. During that period, Jews in Bohemia were still Slavic-speaking. Thirdly, the consideration of Bavarian is unnecessary: the influence of Bavarian on Bohemian is a fact of German historical dialectology. For Yiddish, it is pre-historical. Finally, instead of speaking of Central German globally, it is more appropriate to lay emphasis on Silesian. As already mentioned in section ., both Blosen () and Krogh (:–) share an opinion about the important role that the Silesian dialect of the German urban population in Polish towns played in the development of EY. Contrary to our conclusions, these authors see the influence of Silesian as basic and primary for the formation of EY and not as secondary.
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Synthesis TABLE .
Continued
.. UpS
C, C, C, C, V
C, C, C
C, C, C, C
C, C
C
.. Sil
V
V
V, M
V, M
V, C, C
. UG
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, U
C, C, C, V
C, C, C, C, V, M
C, C, C, C, V, M, M
C, V, M, L
. Alem
C, C, C, V, V, U, M, M, M
C, C, V, V, V, M, M, M
C, C, V, V, V, M, M
V, V, M
V
.. Swab
C, V, M
V, M
C, V
C
C, C, V
.. LA
C, C, C, V, V, V, U, M
C, C, V, V, M, L
C, C, V, V, U, M
C, C, V, V
C, V, M
.. HA
C, C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, V, U, M, M
C, C, V, V, V, M, M
C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, , U
C, C, C, C, V, V, V
C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, M
. Bav
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, U, M
C, C, V, V, M, L
C, C, C, C, V, V, U, M
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V
C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, M, M, M
.. NB
C, C
C
C, C
C, C
C
.. CB
C, C, V
C, V
C, C, V
C, V
V
.. SB
C
C
C
C, C
C, C, C
. Intermediate
C, C, C
C, C
C, M
C, C, V, M
V
. EF
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, V, U, U, M, M
C, C, C, C, V, V, M, M, M
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, U, M
C, C, C, V, V, M
. Boh
C
C
C, C, V, M, L
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The German component
The analysis of toponyms given in section . shows certain features acquired by EY during the earlier period, that of the initial development of this language in medieval Poland. That period is of particular interest for the history of EY because it was crucial for the survival of this language. Indeed, in Jewish history we know of very few instances of Jewish communities that were speaking a vernacular idiom not based on the language of the local Gentile majority. The two most striking examples are Spanish-based Judezmo in the Ottoman Empire and German-based Yiddish in Eastern Europe that survived (and in many respects were even formed) for centuries in the linguistic environment in which the surrounding population was using languages belonging to other linguistic groups. For the first example, the fact that the Sephardic communities in the eastern part of the Mediterranean region appeared after a mass migration that followed the forced expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula during the s was certainly of paramount importance. Yet, we do not find any historical reference to mass migrations to Eastern Europe.576 Local Yiddish-speaking communities were formed much more gradually than the Sephardic ones in the Ottoman Empire. An uninterrupted influx of Jewish migrants (primarily from Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and eastern German territories) followed by internal Eastern European migrations, within the Polish Kingdom and from Poland to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, lasted several centuries. From historical documents, the important growth of local Jewish communities can be traced to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. By , the largest number of Jewish communities appeared in Lesser Poland, Greater Poland, and Red Ruthenia.577 In the same areas, precisely during the period of the formation of important Yiddishspeaking communities, new incoming Jewish families met large groups of urban Christians who were using in their vernacular life an idiom close to their own. Tight contacts with Germans who massively lived in Polish and Red Ruthenian towns exerted an important influence on the development of local dialects of Yiddish and became a major factor that allowed Ashkenazic immigrants not to shift from their vernacular language to Polish or Ukrainian. When the local German-speaking Christian population disappeared after a gradual merging with Poles (who shared with Germans the same Catholic religion), a number of important Yiddish-speaking communities were already firmly established in the area. For CzY, the closest dialects are also Bohemian and Silesian. Incompatible elements—nonSilesian {V, V, V, U, M, M} and non-Bohemian {C, C}—represent a subset of those listed above for EY. For {V} and {C}—two features that distinguish CzY from EY—CzY simply follows local German dialect. Figure . illustrates the development of the German component of EY and CzY. This scheme is divided horizontally into three parts, each of them dealing with one geographic area: Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), Polish Kingdom (including Red Ruthenia), and Grand Duchy of Lithuania (covering modern Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine). Vertically, this scheme illustrates the chronology of various developments, the upper layers corresponding to older periods than the lower ones. It shows that Bohemian German represented the basis for the creation of a proto-dialect (Jewish ethnolect of Bohemian) that represented a common ancestor for modern CzY and EY. During the following centuries, Bohemian German influenced only CzY. After migrations of Jews from the Czech territories eastward, this common Jewish idiom of Slavic countries was split into CzY (dialect of Jews who remained in Bohemia-Moravia) and Proto-EY (formed in the new, Polish territories). The latter was influenced by the colonial Silesian German dialect spoken by numerous Gentile urban inhabitants in medieval Poland. Later, Proto-EY split into PolY (spoken by Jews in Poland) and LitY (spoken by Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). PolY remained under the influence of Silesian 576
See sections C.–C.. In the last area, western newcomers gradually merged with their local Slavic-speaking coreligionists whose communities are known in the territories of modern Ukraine in the tenth to thirteenth centuries. 577
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Synthesis Polish Kingdom
Czech lands
Bohemian German
CzY
ProtoEY
PolY
FIGURE .
Grand Duchy of Lithuania
Silesian German
Jews’ Bohemian German
UkrY
LitY
Development of the German component in Slavic countries
German until the Gentile urban population became Polonized. Yet, LitY developed in an area in which no German dialect was spoken. PolY was important for the formation of UkrY.578 Finally, certain features common to CzY and PolY may result from their mutual influences. If we compare early Ashkenazic sources discussed in the previous section to modern Yiddish varieties, we can observe that all those printed in Prague or Kraków (and only those) are much closer to CzY than to any other modern Yiddish variety including EY, and, as discussed in the previous section, all of them are close to the Bohemian dialect of German.579 This should not be interpreted to mean that at the start of the seventeenth century EY was not yet existent. In principle, our small sample of early Ashkenazic sources may simply be unrepresentative for analyzing early stages of EY. Indeed, the only sources from the area that during the last centuries was a part of the EY territory are those from Kraków, that is, a city in the southwestern end of this territory whose Jewish community included a large number of Jews whose families came here from the Czech lands (Beider :). The authors of the books in question might simply be of Czech origin. Since Kraków Jewish typography was well known, the authors of the books in question were not necessarily local Jews. In principle, they could also be, for example, from Bohemia or Moravia.580 In some works, we can also be facing an attempt made by their authors to follow certain norms of Jewish speech peculiar to Central Europe. Moreover, we know of no details about the dialect spoken UkrY became a dialect separate from PolY only during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (see section .). Partly it is related to the way the information concerning CzY was extracted for this chapter. Indeed, the two main sources for CzY were: () Schnitzler , with an analysis based on books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that is, from the period that is close to that of early Ashkenazic sources in question; () BA (whose sources are unknown) can also be, at least partly, several centuries old. Yet, for other Yiddish varieties the information used in this chapter is more recent: the end of the eighteenth century for EGY and the nineteenth to twentieth centuries for EY, DuY, and SWY. 580 For example, Br, first published in Kraków, was written by an author from Prague. The printing house in question was founded in by Isaac ben Aaron Prostitz whose last name is derived from the Jewish name of the town in Moravia, called Prossnitz in German and Prostějov in Czech (Beider :). 578 579
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The German component
by German Christians who lived in Kraków. Their dialect could have been different from the version of Silesian whose features are known to us from sources of Silesia properly speaking. For a greater insight into the genesis of features of EY, it would be important to find early Ashkenazic sources from other places in the Polish Kingdom or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: Poznań (where—contrary to Kraków—the Silesian character of local German is beyond question and whose Jewish population was less closely related to Czech Jews), Lublin, Lwów, and especially Brest and other northeastern communities. It is also worth noting that, as might be expected, in comparison to other early Ashkenazic sources, Kr, that is the most recent source from Kraków studied in this chapter, shows the smallest number of features that distance it from modern EY581 and conforms to EY in a large number of other traits. The list of German dialects that are largely incompatible with both EGY and DuY encompasses CF, Bavarian, HA, and LA. EGY also shows important contrasts to EF, Swabian, and Hessian, and, to a lesser extent, PG, while the differences between DuY and these four German dialects are less significant. For both Yiddish varieties in question, Bohemian and ECG appear as the least remote dialects. Among their differences in comparison to these German dialects one distinguishes several groups: () those enumerated above for CzY: non-Bohemian {C}, non-ECG {V, V, U, M}, and non-Silesian {V}; () the diminutive suffix -khen {M} that contradicts both Bohemian and Silesian but is compatible with two other ECG dialects, Thuringian and UpS; () the /b/-reflex for intervocalic MHG b {C} that for both DuY and EGY contrasts to both Thuringian and UpS; () reflexes of old German /p/ {C} that for EGY is compatible with Bohemian and Silesian only, while for DuY it is non-Bohemian; () the /em/-reflex for MHG -em {C} that for EGY contrasts to both Thuringian and UpS; () the /št/-reflex of -st {C} that for DuY contrasts to both Bohemian and ECG, being a feature peculiar to westernmost German dialects only. Globally speaking, one can observe that (i) EGY is clearly related to eastern German dialects (ECG and Bohemian); (ii) DuY results from a fusion of elements that arose in distant areas, one part coming—as for EGY—from the East, but another part being of western origin. The information in Table . shows that SWY is very close to EF, the only significant difference being the umlaut /a/ > /e/ before /š/ {V}, a feature that is peculiar to all westernmost German dialects, that is, Alemannic and WCG. It could be due to the influence of (i) neighboring Swabian, the dialect to which SWY is also quite close but for a few fundamental features (especially vocalic {V, V}), and/or (ii) PG, the third closest dialect, whose major differences in comparison to SWY are consonantal {C, C, C}, morphological {M, M}, and vocalic {V, V}. In theory, some of the differences between SWY and PG—such as {M, M, C, C}—could be due to recent interference of coterritorial Alemannic dialects on SWY. However, the fact that for several major features—such as {M, C, C}—realizations similar to modern SWY are already found in HiP, a work compiled at the end of the sixteenth century in the PG territory, makes this idea unattractive. SWY has significant differences in comparison to LA (including basic vocalic characteristics {V– V}), Bohemian (especially in consonantism and morphology), and striking differences from Bavarian, HA, and all of the CG dialects other than PG. Note also that two basic vocabulary words of SWY {L} are typically EF. As discussed in the previous section, similarly to SWY, the same link to EF and, to a lesser extent, Swabian was found in early western Jewish sources from the sixteenth century. Among them, the language of works by Elia Levita, Mel, ShB, DB, H, HiP, and BZR, is particularly close to
581 This list encompasses the /en/-reflex of MHG -em {C}, an innovation {C}, and a number of other less important features such as {V, V, V}.
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Synthesis
modern SWY.582 Yet, for Ox links to modern Yiddish varieties are less evident to establish. If we count only the most significant features (all listed at the beginning of section ..), Ox appears to be closer to SWY than to other modern dialects. However, if we add to our comparison less important characteristics, it appears that the respective linguistic “distances” between that source and SWY, DuY, EGY, and CzY are not significantly different. Only EY is definitely situated quite far.583 The earliest Jewish sources—such as CC, R, Le, R, and Be—all have significant differences with respect to all modern Yiddish dialects; still they are much closer to SWY than to other Yiddish varieties. M is quite different from all modern dialects. Still it is closer to SWY than to others. SAB, the oldest and the northwesternmost of them, shows the largest number of elements contrasting to all dialects than other early sources. Its language is still closer to DuY than to any other modern Yiddish variety.584 This does not mean that there is any uninterrupted link between the Jewish communities of the medieval northern Rhineland and the twentieth-century Jews of Amsterdam. DuY acquired a number of northern German features rather recently. Both Weinreich (WG :) and Birnbaum (:–) point out that EY realized its own synthesis of elements originating in Upper German and Central German dialects. Globally speaking, their assertion is certainly correct. Yet, positing EF and Bohemian dialects as basic for the phonology of Yiddish varieties provides a more nuanced explanation. Both these German dialects possess a mix of features that are generally considered idiosyncrasies of Upper German or Central German. As a result, an important part of the synthesis in question might be realized not in Yiddish itself but already in the two donor German dialects in question. The importance of Bohemian for the development of EY is no big surprise taking into account the existence of numerous direct and indirect data concerning the arrival of Jews from the Czech lands to Eastern Europe.585 The preponderant role of EF for the formation of WY is more intriguing. During the period of initial development and stabilization of WY (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), the role of many German dialects could not have been important because the corresponding regions were marginal for the settlement of German Jews. In the Low German and Dutch regions, the Jewish presence was still exceptional. In the territories of both CF dialects, Ripuarian and MF, the number of Jews was very limited during the period in question after numerous expulsions, including those from the main Jewish communities of the area, Cologne () and Koblenz ().586 Major expulsions of Jews occurred in Upper and Lower Bavaria in and , respectively, in the city of Regensburg (), with a total prohibition of Jewish residence in Bavaria promulgated in , which remained in force for about years. During the fifteenth century, Jews were also expelled from Low Austria, Styria, and Carinthia. For these reasons, Jews would no longer be living in the region where Christians spoke Bavarian. In the area of Swabian (except for its eastern strip), Jews were not authorized to live after the global expulsion in from the Duchy of Württemberg. In the mid-sixteenth century, only a hundred Jewish families were living in the whole of Alsace. Their number increased dramatically during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of the stable
582
If we exclude the unrounding {V} that represents an innovation, the only important features that contradict SWY are {C} for Elia Levita’s works, {V, U} for both Mel and ShB, {V, M} to H, and {V} for BZR. Only a few features dealing with individual words of HiP do not conform to SWY. Yet, according to features taken into account in this chapter, no difference was found between DB and SWY. 583 As discussed at the end of section .., Ox shares certain spelling conventions with some of oldest Jewish sources. We can see that according to its distance from modern Yiddish varieties it also shows similarities with the earliest available documents. 584 For example, it fits with DuY but does not conform to SWY according to {V, V, M}. 585 See sections C.–C.. 586 The years of expulsions mentioned in this paragraph appear in GJ and Encyclopaedia Judaica. See section C.. for a more detailed coverage of this topic.
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The German component
situation resulting from the annexation of these territories by France (seventeenth century) and the arrival of migrants related to the Thirty Years’ War (–) and the War of the Austrian Succession (–).587 The Swiss Jewish communities were limited to a few places and even during the eighteenth century migrants (mainly from Alsace and Baden) constituted a significant portion of the local population (TG ). As a result, only three German dialects would really be important for the development of WY: PG (the region covering Mainz, Worms, and Speyer), Hessian (including the Frankfurt region), and EF (the areas of Nürnberg and Rothenburg).588 The linguistic victory of the last one over its two RF “competitors” may be related to several factors. First, EF is spread over a large area with numerous (often small) places where Jews lived along the rivers Main, Tauber, Neckar, and Pegnitz. Its southwestern part, usually called South Franconia (the area around Karlsruhe and Heilbronn) is situated in the immediate vicinity of Alsace and eastern Swabia and migrants from it could diffuse EF features to the regions in question. Secondly, the Thirty Years’ War devastated the area of RF and a part of the Hessian territory. The area of EF was less damaged and the area of South Franconia remained almost intact.589 Evidently, these events are irrelevant for the period before . Nevertheless, they could be important for the period after mid-seventeenth century. Thirdly, EF represents a dialect that, according to some of its aspects, is transitional between CG and UG, while RF is a subdialect of WCG. As a result, if emigrants from both RF and EF were to come to Alsace, Switzerland, and eastern Swabia, the EF features had greater chances of surviving than RF dialectalisms because somewhat similar characteristics were valid in the UG (Alemannic) dialects spoken in the new territories by local Christians. Fourthly, one cannot exclude the indirect role played by Jews from northern Italy. Populous Ashkenazic communities were created there by German migrants during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. We do not know from what places these migrants came. However, because of the geographic proximity, areas of UG and EF are more likely to be their donors than those from WCG. In these new territories in which local Christians spoke a different language, some kind of linguistic unification of Jews coming from different German dialectal areas was unavoidable. As discussed in section .., the language found in numerous documents compiled and/or printed in Italy during the sixteenth century is correlated in many respects to EF. Jews from northern Italy and their printing houses surely played an important role in the general cultural development of western Ashkenazic Jewry until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Their influence was wide in the development and diffusion of Ivre-taytsh, the language of biblical translations that in turn, as shown by Timm (TS), made an important impact on the development of all vernacular Yiddish varieties (including WY) because biblical translations were studied by every boy in Jewish elementary schools. Its influence mainly affected not the phonology but the lexicon, semantics, and, to a lesser extent, morphology.590
587 The demography of Jews in Alsace during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is covered in Weill :–; see also TG –. 588 As it can be seen from the historical information collected in TG , during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries the area in question (plus, partly, Alsace and eastern Swabia) constituted the cultural and administrative center of Jewish life in the German-speaking territories. 589 According to Stier et al. :, the diminution of population because of the war and epidemics of the period was more than sixty-six percent in the Rhine Palatinate and the Fulda area (Hessen); between thirty-three and sixty-six percent in East Franconia, Bavaria, northern Bohemia, and the remaining parts of Hessen; between fifteen and thirtythree in Alsace, one part of South Franconia, Moravia, and southern Bohemia; less than fifteen percent in the remaining part of South Franconia and northern Germany. 590 For example, the Ivre-taytsh tradition could contribute to the generalization of the diminutive plural -lekh {M} (TS –) and the verbal prefix der- {C} (TS –). EF is among German dialects that had both these features, while they are unknown in WCG as a whole, and, therefore, not found in RF.
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Synthesis
.. Age of Yiddish according to its German component In section .., the opinions of the main representatives of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH to Yiddish history were discussed. Max Weinreich, the scholar whose contribution is the most detailed and authoritative, always emphasizes the considerable age of Yiddish, positing the period of its inception as being in the ninth century. Surely, this chronology is primarily related to his idea about the vernacular idiom of German Jews representing a “fusion” language from the creation of the earliest Ashkenazic communities in the Rhineland. In that idiom—whose existence was conjectured by Weinreich—elements from the German, Hebrew, and Romance components merged together. However, even in his consideration of the German component, Weinreich regularly stresses the medieval origin of various Yiddish elements. Generally, he refers to MHG. However, for certain items, he traces their sources to OHG.591 For example, to explain the short vowel in EY vashn ‘to wash,’ leshn ‘to extinguish,’ makhn ‘to make,’ and vokh ‘week,’ he points to their OHG ancestors, waskan, leskan, mahhôn, and wohha, respectively, in which the vowels in question were present in closed syllables: this factor prevented their subsequent lengthening. Globally speaking, his reasoning here is not false: there is indeed a correlation between the shortness of root vowels in the Yiddish words in question and the closeness of syllables in their OHG cognates. However, here the link between OHG and Yiddish is indirect. Indeed, as discussed in section .., during the passage from MHG to NHG no lengthening occurred in open syllables for vowels situated before MHG sch and ch whose OHG ancestors were sk and hh, respectively. According to the opinion dominant among Germanists, this absence of lengthening during the Early NHG period is related to the closeness of syllables in the OHG etymons. The shortness of the vowels in MHG (waschen, leschen, machen, woche) and NHG (waschen, löschen, machen, Woche) forms is highly relevant for the analysis of the inception of Yiddish, while the OHG traits as well as the explanation—via OHG—of certain characteristics of MHG and/or NHG are irrelevant to the history of Yiddish. For Yiddish, these elements belong to its pre-history. Bringing the notion of OHG to the context of Yiddish studies is appropriate only for features Yiddish shares with OHG, but not with MHG and NHG. Yet, no cogent argument has been suggested until now to show the existence of at least one feature of this kind.592 For a better understanding of the historical phonology of Yiddish, Weinreich (WG :–) introduces a series of additional conventional signs designating certain peculiar proto-consonants he posits for early Yiddish (that is, according to his own paradigm, during the OHG period): • two /p/-phonemes: P (with zero aspiration) and PH (aspirated) • two /s/-phonemes: apical SA and dorsal SD. He discusses at length the actual reflexes found in Yiddish for these four consonants; for example, invariably /p/ for P and depending on context, either /p/, or /f/, or /pf/ for PH (the last reflex appearing in modern WY or during the early stages of EY). He also suggests complex formulas that include his terminological innovations. His new conventional signs do not really appear helpful, but instead misleading for Yiddish studies. As shown in section .. when discussing the feature {C}), for the /p/-/f/-/pf/ distribution, we do not find any idiosyncrasy that would be limited to Ashkenazic communities. All reflexes appearing in modern Yiddish varieties or present in early Ashkenazic sources are also known in German dialects. It is easier (and therefore, following OCCAM’S RAZOR, more appropriate) to derive Yiddish phonological features from the corresponding German dialectal
591 To avoid terminological ambiguities, he proposes to speak about “medieval German,” a term coined by him to cover both OHG and MHG (WG :). 592 See also in section .. the discussion of the inadequacy of the OHG etymon suggested by Weinreich for EY khoyzek ‘mockery.’
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The German component
characteristics well known for Early NHG rather than construct sophisticated schemes for the end of the Early Middle Ages or High Middle Ages. The consideration of sibilants shows the inadequacy of the approach suggested by Weinreich even more explicitly. Weinreich discusses the following reflexes found in EY: /s/ and /ts/ for SD, /s/, /z/, /š/, and /ž/ for SA. If we consider the phonetic development of the cognate words in German dialects,593 we can see that for all of them we find perfect equivalents in the vernacular speech by Christians of various regions. To discuss these features, actually we do not need to mention not only OHG but even MHG. The last of the aforementioned reflexes, /ž/, is clearly much more recent in comparison to the others. But even for that, as discussed in section .. for the feature {C}, we cannot be sure to be dealing with an innovation of EY: a similar development is found in Silesian German that was coterritorial with EY for a number of centuries and—as discussed in the previous section—certainly played an important role in the development of EY. Weinreich introduces his proto-consonants P, PH, SA, and SD mainly to provide a general explanation for the phonetic development of elements belonging to all components of Yiddish and not only the German one. However, even for this specific purpose these designations appear unnecessary, misleading, and sometimes even erroneous. To illustrate the /z/-reflexes of SD within the Hebrew component, Weinreich suggests a series of EY male given names such as Zalmen, Zanvl, and Ziml, based on the biblical names Solomon, Samuel, and Simon, respectively, all spelled with initial shin in Hebrew (WG :). However, as discussed in section .., all of these names are derived from the Hebrew names in question not directly but through the intermediary of German Christian forms of these biblical names. As a result, they actually belong to the German (rather than Hebrew) component of Yiddish. Weinreich also says that Hebrew and Romance elements had only P and no PH and, for this reason, we have today no EY word belonging to these components that starts with /f/: for example, ponem ‘face’ and (and not **fonem) and plankhenen ‘to lament’ (and not **flankhenen). Taking into account the exact chronology of various phenomena, it would be more appropriate to emphasize that the HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT that represents the basis of the /p/-/pf/-/f/ distribution in German dialects took place during the period (First Millennium CE) that predates either the creation of the first Ashkenazic communities in German-speaking territories, or, at least, the incorporation in the vernacular speech of German Jews of the corresponding words.594 It is exactly for the same reason that numerous MHG words of Romance (mainly late Latin and French) origin (and their NHG cognates too) also start with /p/ and not /pf/.595 The above examples are not isolated. On many other pages of WG, we find numerous discussions of various phonological phenomena that characterize Yiddish, with no explicit statement by the author that exactly the same phenomena characterize numerous German dialects too.596 Only in exceptional cases, Weinreich mentions facts about Yiddish elements being strictly identical to those found in modern German dialects spoken by Christians in areas with an important Jewish resident population as well.597 See features {C, C} in section .. and the whole section ... As discussed in section ., for words of Hebrew origin, one also needs to take into account the possibility of the renorming of their pronunciation to fit the spelling of their Hebrew etymons. 595 Examples: NHG Pein ‘suffering’ (MHG pine, this example is mentioned in WG :), Pause ‘break’ (MHG pûse), Planet ‘planet’ (MHG plânête), Platz ‘place’ (MHG pla(t)z). 596 For example, he emphasizes the contrast between, on the one hand, StY zen ‘to see’ and geshen ‘to happen’ (both without /x/), and, on the other hand, onzikhtik ‘conspicuous’ (historically the same root as in zen) and geshikhte ‘history,’ both with /x/ (the same root as in geshen) (WG :–). Yet, in these examples no Yiddish peculiarity can be discerned: compare the NHG cognate forms sehen, geschehen (in both, “h” is just a graphic indication of the length of the preceding vowel), ansichtig, and Geschichte, respectively. 597 See, for example, his examples of words in which EY and NHG share the same morphological and/or phonological peculiarities in comparison to their MHG cognates (WG :). 593 594
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If we want to evaluate the age of Yiddish avoiding the methods of the main proponents of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH (partly based on terminology and partly erroneous), we need to proceed with methods based on formal linguistic criteria. In section .., three such criteria were suggested. All of them deal with the comparison between system-level elements within the vernacular language spoken by Jews (JewLang) and the German dialect spoken by Christian neighbors (GermDial). We can say that JewLang represents an idiom (dialect, language) different from GermDial if we are confronting at least one of the following situations: . Presence in JewLang of elements unkown in GermDial but found in German dialects of other areas; . Shift in GermDial is not followed by JewLang; . Shift in JewLang is not followed by GermDial. For the analysis based on the first of the above criteria, it is appropriate to compare the language of various administrative documents written by Jews from German-speaking provinces in their vernacular language using the Hebrew alphabet to the documents of the same kind compiled by German Christians. Here of particular interest are the bilingual examples of “Oaths of Peace” (German, Urfehdebriefe).598 The earliest one is by Jedidiah ben Hezekiah of Zürich ().599 Its German text was not preserved. However, a study by Timm of other Christian documents of the same kind from Zürich from the same period shows the presence of a number of peculiar linguistic elements in the Jewish text that are unknown in German sources (TG ).600 The second “Oath of Peace” is from Frankfurt (), with both its versions, Christian and Jewish, available.601 A comparison between these versions shows that—but for minor differences—the latter represents a transcription in the Hebrew alphabet of the former. As a result, any peculiarity shared by both documents provides no information about the language of the Jewish scribe. It could simply be inherited from the German model text. On the other hand, observed differences can be of real importance. The transcription rules reveal features of a dialect phonetically different from Hessian of Frankfurt (in which the Christian document is written). Among peculiarities of the Jewish version are: regular /t/ instead of / d/, (partial) diphthongization of MHG î and û, and apocope of -e. Taken together, these features are compatible only with Bavarian, Swabian, EF, and Bohemian.602 The “Oath of Peace” from Breslau, the capital city of Silesia (),603 has also survived in its two versions, Christian and Jewish. The latter, signed by Jekuthiel Judah ben Benush, is directly based on the former without representing its direct transcription. Linguisitic differences between the two versions are somewhat minor. Among peculiarities found in the Jewish version are: the dative form of the masculine definite article appears as *dem ()דעמא, *darum ‘around it’ ()דרומא, the verbal prefix vor- ()ֿבור, to which correspond den, dorumb, and ver- (respectively) in the German text. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the first two characteristics of the German text are typical of ECG, the second is well known in the Silesian dialect of German in which the verbal prefix in question in the Middle Ages was more commonly spelled On the whole category of medieval “Oaths of Peace” see EYT –. See Guggenheim-Grünberg , EYT –. 600 Note the use of vav for unstressed vowels in this document. This convention is also found in Le (see the discussion of the feature {G} in section .), a source from Alsace. 601 See Guggenheim-Grünberg :–, EYT –. 602 See German dialectal distribution for features {C}, {V}, and {U}, respectively. Guggenheim-Grünberg (:) who was the first to observe these peculiarities pointed to EF only. Timm also suggested an influence of ECG because of the spelling of the equivalent of verbal prefix ver-/vir- (found in the German text) as if it were *vor(TG ). However, our discussion of the feature {U} in section . shows that here we are dealing with graphic conventions rather than with phonetic realities: the same spelling appears in numerous old sources from western Germany for which any link to ECG is totally excluded. 603 See its text in EYT –. 598 599
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The German component
vor-.604 Other traits of the Jewish text—including the initial /k/ for ‘against’ {C} and even certain graphic features605—are perfectly correlated to those of the Christian document. A court deposition from Regensburg (circa ) is also available in two versions, Christian and Jewish (EYT –). The latter represents—but for a few nuances606—a direct transcription of the former. No dialectal differences between the two texts can be discerned. The previous information concerning documents from Zürich, Frankfurt, and Breslau does allow one to draw any conclusion that local Jewish communities were speaking dialects different from those used by local Christians. Indeed, for Zürich we know that a portion of families from the local community came from the southern part of the WCG territory (Guggenheim-Grünberg :). The individual who wrote the Jewish text could be one of these (or other) recent migrants to Switzerland. The Jewish version of the document from Frankfurt is due to Rabbi Meir ben Baruch ha-Levi. In the document he is said to be of Erfurt. It is also known that the same person likely spent several years in Nürnberg (a city on the border between the areas of NB and EF) and certainly had close connections to Vienna (in the territories of CB).607 This geography explains the phonetic features of his dialect. As a result, nothing indicates that the linguistic features in question were shared by all members of the corresponding communities. Moreover, these features are not specifically Jewish and consequently nothing indicates that the dialects in question are from the same lineage as modern Yiddish varieties. On the other hand, comparing Jewish texts to each other, one can immediately see that they are related to different dialects of German.608 For the history of Yiddish, these documents are important primarily as linguistic testimonies about migrations of Ashkenazic Jews of that period, a phenomenon that was important for the formation of a specifically Jewish vernacular tongue. In the self-introduction in Latin characters by a Jewish physician Baruch ben Simson from Ahrweiler (northwest to Koblenz) written in the mid-fifteenth century (Perles :), we find: (i) meyschter ‘master’ and kunscht ‘art,’ both with internal /št/ that is known only in areas situated south to Ahrweiler (compare TG and {C}); (ii) several cases of initial or internal “d” in place of MHG t that conform to the local MF dialect (compare {C}), (iii) the toponym arwiler ‘Ahrweiler’ whose spelling shows the absence of the diphthongization of MHG î, also in agreement with MF of that period (compare {V}), and (iv) the given name of the author, Bendel, representing a hypocorism of Benedikt,609 with the suffix -el unknown in MF (compare {M}). Yet this information is insufficient to draw any conclusion about a dialectal mixture and, globally speaking, it is of little importance for the history of Yiddish. We cannot assert with certainty that the language of the sentence in question is specifically Jewish. We do not know the exact geographic distribution of the reflex /št/ during mid-fifteenth century: at that ime, it might have been valid for German in Ahrweiler also. We do not know the place of origin of this Jewish physician either. The suffix -el in the given See features {C} (section ..), {U} (section .), and {M} (section .), respectively. Compare ( פולאןwith alef for the unstressed vowel in the final syllable) and polan ‘Poland’ and the digraph אוin ‘ טאוזנטthousand,’ unusual in Ashkenazic sources (see {G} in section .). 606 A few adjectives have a grammatical ending (-en, -er) only in one of two texts. To the German form guten ‘good’ (dative plural) corresponds *( גוטםgutem) in the Jewish text. Three words in the German text end in -e (geverde, rate, gabe), while in the Jewish text this vowel is not present (גיוערד, ראט, )גאבshowing the phenomenon of apocope known in the local Bavarian dialect since the thirteenth century (see our discussion of {U}). One male given name has different diminutive suffixes in the two texts: compare Eberlein (with the suffix -lein standard for all southern Germanspeaking provinces) and ( עברלwith the dialectal suffix -(e)l typical of Bavarian). 607 On his biography see TG . 608 See the comparison of several cognate forms found in Jewish texts from Frankfurt and Breslau in GuggenheimGrünberg :. 609 For Ashkenazic Jews, Benedikt and its derived forms are traditionally used as vernacular equivalents (kinnuim) to the Hebrew name (shem ha-qodesh) Baruch (Beider :–). 604 605
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Synthesis
name is the most important diagnostic feature but it merely testifies to the fact that the form Bendel is due to migrations from the south. The information in section .. shows that nothing suggests any linguistic unity of the Jewish sources written before the sixteenth century. Globally speaking, their language is likely to have had the same dialectal peculiarities as those presented in the German dialects spoken by their Christian neighbors. Ashkenazic sources from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, such as SAB, M, Le, and R, can be assigned to different German dialects: Ripuarian, MF, LA, and HA, respectively.610 Certain other sources from the same period cannot be linked to one specific dialect only. Some of their features are found in one dialect, while some other traits are characteristic of another dialect from the area neighboring that of the first one: Swabian and HA for CC; RF and EF for R; EF and Bavarian for Be. The idioms of these manuscripts can be interpreted either as coming from zones transitional between the corresponding German dialects, or as the earliest references to the presence of the phenomenon of dialectal mixture in Jewish vernacular language in German-speaking provinces. As in the case of the bilingual documents discussed in the previous paragraph, these documents are not necessarily representative of the everyday speech of the corresponding Ashkenazic communities. Their linguistic peculiarities can be individual, related to the author and/or the scribe of these sources. However, contrary to the administrative documents, these texts were not based on the original Christian models. Moreover, they were written for internal Jewish use only. These two major properties make them much more relevant and important for the history of Yiddish than the available examples of “Oaths of Peace.” R, a document compiled at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is the only one of the above earliest western sources in which we find numerous morphological, lexical, and semantic Ashkenazic innovations that are also shared by the German components of modern WY and EY.611 Most importantly, however, is the fact that we do not find during this period any reference to Jews retaining archaic German elements and not following processes of phonetic change that were taking place for their Christian neighbors.612 Moreover, we do not see any unambiguous evidence about Jews mixing various German dialects. For sources known from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the situation is significantly different. They clearly fall into two groups: western (from northern Italy and western Germany) and eastern (from Prague and Kraków). Inside every group, sources show numerous similarities. However, linguistic differences between the two groups are important: they clearly had different
610 Weinreich also observed a close linguistic similarity between idioms used in certain earliest Ashkenazic documents and local German dialects. However, he insists that these written sources do not necessarily reflect the actual spoken language of the writers themselves, could also have resulted from stylization in the system of sounds, and, moreover, the Jewish writers and recorders in planning their work could have followed the speech habits of the coterritorial Germans (WG :). Even if such consideration makes real sense, it still sounds like an ad hoc speculation devised by Weinreich in order to save his purely theoretical constructions about Jewish vernacular speech having system-level differences in comparison to any other German dialect from the end of the First Millennium. A clear and specific early example of Yiddish phonology that began to diverge from that of coterritorial German comes from the discussion by Maharil of the initial /k/ in Bavaria, by Jews and non-Jews (MRPC; see feature {C} in section ..). 611 See {M, L, L}. 612 Weinreich (WG :) notes that in a sentence found in the Worms Mahzor (–), German “g” in the intervocalic and final positions is expressed via gimel with raphe and kof, respectively. Most likely, the first of them corresponds to a fricative sound (*[bətaγə] ‘may appear, become day’), while the second one implies final devoicing (*[tak] ‘day’). In other words, we have an alternation [γ] (fricative) ~ [k] (stop). To this observation, he adds—quoting from Žir –, —that German dialects have in these positions the following alternations: either [γ] ~ [x] (both fricatives), or [g] ~ [k] (both stops). Consequently, according to Weinreich, the sentence from Worms shows a phonetic peculiarity of Jewish speech unknown in coterritorial German. The above argument is untenable: the information concerning German dialects is inaccurate. Žir actually states that the combination (intervocalic fricative + final stop) characterizes a large part of Hessian, PG, and South Franconian. Note that Worms is situated in the area of PG.
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The German component
German dialects as primary donors. Definite traces of a dialectal mixture are found in BB, SD, Teh, PuV, HiP, and H, all from the sixteenth century.613 Of course, by itself, the presence of elements known in different German dialects is not direct evidence about the fusion phenomena in the Jewish vernacular language. In principle, it can be related to the particular life stories of their authors and/or editors. For example, Elia Levita was born in the area of EF but spent a large part of his adult life in northern Italy. A number of his works (including BB and SD) were edited in Isny (Swabia) by local Christian Hebraist Paul Fagius. Some of the works by Elia Levita (or related to him) differ from others both phonetically and (especially) graphically614 though, globally speaking, they reveal the same vernacular language underlying all of them. When dealing with sources available for us for the sixteenth century, it is also important to note that many of them were compiled in northern Italy. For that area, any comparison of the everyday dialect of Jewish communities to that of the Christian majority is unnecessary: local Gentiles were speaking (Romance) languages belonging to another linguistic group. In this context, of particular interest is HiP, a document compiled in the area of WCG by an author who was also born in the same area, but at the system-level showing a number of features unknown in WCG. Despite the concerns presented above, there are even other western documents from the sixteenth century that are totally relevant for the history of (Western) Yiddish. Contrary to documents from previous centuries, in all of them we are clearly confronting a predominance of structural features that are, on the one hand, common to all these Jewish sources, and, on the other hand, primarily related to only two German dialects from the same general area, namely EF and, to a lesser extent, Swabian, that is, exactly the same to which modern SWY is correlated. In other words, the Ashkenazic sources from the sixteenth century provide unambiguous evidence about the existence of a separate (western) Jewish idiom, the ancestor of modern SWY. Sources published in Prague and Kraków (such as MM, BZV, BZP, Kr, Pr, NH, all from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) provide evidence about another Jewish idiom that is, on the one hand, related to the Bohemian colonial dialect of German and, on the other hand, represents the ancestor of CzY. In the oldest of them, MM, we find numerous examples of Ashkenazic innovations, known in modern Yiddish varieties and for which earlier references appear in R. All arguments suggested in the previous paragraphs deal with historical documents written by Jews in their vernacular language(s). Another method of estimating the age of Yiddish corresponds to theoretical reconstructions. As discussed in section .., a number of basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts (from # to #) possess important peculiarities in comparison to dialects spoken by the Christian majority. For many of the changes in question, the corresponding reflexes were valid no later than the sixteenth century. As a result, here we are dealing with one of the criteria of separation between German and Yiddish formulated above. Information provided in section . shows that even if the Silesian dialect spoken by the German Christian urban population of Polish towns during the fifteenth century had an important influence on EY toponyms, it could not be fundamental for the formation of reconstructed proto-EY vocalism. Summarizing the results of the above discussion that combines both the empirical data related to early Ashkenazic sources and the theoretical results of linguistic reconstruction, we can see that, according to various criteria, the fifteenth century represents the most plausible period for the inception of both WY and EY.
613
No corroboration was found for a putative mixture of numerous German dialects in H and MM stated in Heide (also mentioned, without a critical analysis, in TG ). 614 Note different reflexes for MHG -em in SD and BB {C}, fronting only in SD and PuV {V}, absence of idiosyncrasies in the spelling of got ‘God’ in the same two works {G}, peculiar graphemes in SD {G, G, G} and Teh{G}.
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Synthesis
.. Classification of Yiddish varieties according to their German component Today the classification generally used in works on Yiddish distinguishes two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish: EY and WY. The latter encompasses (among others) dialects for which in this book the abbreviations SWY, DuY, EGY, and CzY are used. As discussed in section .., this classification was suggested in Landau () who based it on the reflexes for MHG ei and ou that in what he defined as WESTERN YIDDISH appear as /a:/. In this chapter, this feature is designated {V}. Without any additional analysis about genetic links that can exist between Yiddish varieties, this classification sounds purely conventional: it is not clear in which way the isogloss associated with these vowels is so significant that it can serve as an appropriate criterion for separating dialects. Table . summarizes the information given in previous sections listing linguistic elements that distance Yiddish varieties from each other. Only elements affecting series of words (plus the basic family terms) are included. The data in Table . can be represented by the following linear chain: SWY –– DuY –– EGY –– CzY –– EY. This chain illustrates the links that exist between various dialects: the closer the elements to each other within the chain, the closer the corresponding dialects. It is worth noting that the “distance” between neighboring members of the chain varies. It is the shortest between CzY and EY.615 It is, by far, the longest between SWY and DuY: here the “distance” is similar to that between DuY and EY, the latter being situated at the other end of the chain. This information shows that the standard classification is at least doubtful: CzY and EGY appear to be much closer to EY than to SWY, while DuY is significantly better correlated with EGY than with SWY. Moreover, as discussed in section .., SWY remains apart from the other four dialects studied in this chapter because of its close TABLE . Cross-references of incompatible features between Yiddish varieties EY
CzY
EGY
DuY
CzY
C, V
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
EGY
C, C, C, V, U, M
C, C, C, C, U, M, M, L
XXXXX
XXXXX
DuY
C, C, C, C, V, V, V, U, U, M
C, C, C, C, C, V, V, U, M, M, L
C, C, C, V, V, U
XXXXX
SWY
C, C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, V, U, U, M, M, M, M
C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, U, M, M, M, M, L
C, C, C, C, C, C, V, V, V, M, M, M
C, C, C, C, V, V, M, M, M
615
Johannes Buxtorf writes that Jews from Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland have translated their Hebrew books into “poor corrupted German” (Frakes :). This testimony from the beginning of the seventeenth century corroborates the idea about a relative closeness of EY and CzY in comparison to a dialect of the ancestor of modern WY spoken by Jews from Western Europe (compare to Frakes : where Buxtorf ’s words are interpreted as indirect testimony about the existence of important differences between EY and WY).
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The German component
relationship to EF, while other dialects show kinship with Bohemian and ECG. SWY also appears isolated from other varieties according to a set of major consonantal features {C, C, C}. For all of them, EY, CzY, EGY, and DuY share the same reflexes, different from those of SWY. For another important consonantal feature, {C}, only DuY shows similarity with SWY, while EY, CzY, and EGY reamain separate from them. Note that for these four features different reflexes appear already in early Ashkenazic sources: a clear-cut dichotomy exists here between western (western Germany, northern Italy) and eastern (Prague and Kraków) documents. Moreover, for both groups, we are not dealing with Jewish innovations but with the realizations known in local German dialects, western (WCG, EF, and Alemannic) and eastern (Bohemian and ECG), respectively. According to a group of fundamental vocalic features, {V, V}, again SWY appears isolated from the four other varieties in question, while {V} places it apart from EY, CzY, and EGY. A link between EGY and EY also follows from the earliest classification of Yiddish varieties known to us, that by Friedrich (:– ). The author says that his own dialect (named EGY in this book) characterizes not only Jews from the main part of the Kingdom of Prussia but also those from Greater Poland. A large number of lexical isoglosses also place SWY apart from EY, EGY, and CzY.616 DuY appears to be a transitional dialect that underwent influences from, on the one hand, the East (principally, Poland) and, on the other hand, Jewish speech from the southwestern German-speaking provinces.617 This intermediate position is closely related to the history of the Ashkenazic community of Amsterdam formed after migrations of Jews from various parts of Europe: western Germany, northern Germany, and Eastern Europe. In historical linguistics, genetic links between various dialects or languages are often established according to the criterion of shared innovations.618 If we take into account phonological features of Yiddish dialects that appear to be unrelated to those of surrounding German dialects, only one innovation seems to be pan-Yiddish: the merging of short reflexes of MHG æ, ä, ë, and e (basic shift #), but the absence of merging of long reflexes for, on the one hand, MHG ä and ë and, on the other hand, MHG e {V}. However, it is isolated from other phonological developments and its exact reasons and sources are obscure. Moreover, we know that it was not completed in western communities during the sixteenth century, while during that period system-level vocalic differences already existed between WY, CzY, and EY. As a result, it cannot be taken for a definite example of an innovation that took place among Jews of one particular region before spreading out to various parts of Europe. In any case, even if such common proto-development indeed took place, it affected only one part of the system of the stressed vowels. As a whole, such systems—as discussed in section ..—were different for Proto-EY and the ancestors of SWY (“Proto-WY”) and CzY. These systems represent the main phonetic innovations of Yiddish with respect to German dialects. The Proto-EY system implies such important features as merging of the reflexes of MHG ei and ê into one phoneme and those for MHG ou and ô into another phoneme {V}. The voicing /s/ > /z/ in StY verbs lozn ‘to let’ and muzn ‘must’ is also shared by CzY, EGY, and DuY {C}. Other innovations do not affect all Yiddish varieties either. All of them are relatively recent, dating from the period when Yiddish varieties seem to be already formed. The internal /p/ instead of /b/ {C} and peculiar consonants in entfern ‘to answer’ {C} are limited to CzY and EY. The change of the negative See, for example, BA , {L}, {M} and numerous other maps dealing with lexical elements from nonGerman components of Yiddish. Manaster Ramer (:–) makes a similar observation. In order to avoid misunderstanding provoked by inappropriate standard classification, he uses the terms “Westerly Yiddish” and “Easterly Yiddish.” The former covers (among others) SWY and DuY. The latter encompasses (among others) EY, CzY, and EGY. 617 Note that DuY uses, for example, words specific to SWY for ‘dad’ and ‘mummy,’ but a typical EY word for ‘grandfather.’ {L–L}. 618 Compare Lass :. 616
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Synthesis
prefix un- to um- {C} is shared by CzY and EY and is partly known in Alsace too. However, it is not found in DuY, EGY, and the main part of SWY and, moreover, is unknown before the seventeenth century. For a number of other innovations known in modern EY we find references in Jewish sources from Prague (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) {C, C, V} and no references in EGY, DuY, and SWY. Certain innovations seem to be limited to EY: {C, C, V, V, U}. The fronting /u/ > /y/ ( > /i/) {V} affected CzY only, one part of EY (namely PolY and UkrY), and is known from certain Jewish sources written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern Italy and western Germany. In a number of documents from Prague, we observe cases of the shift /h/ > /x/ {C}: these are unknown in modern Yiddish sources. To summarize the information presented above in this paragraph, one can say that the consideration of innovations realized by Jews in the domain of phonology demonstrates that there is no set of phonetic innovations that could be assigned to the putative PROTO-YIDDISH from which all modern Yiddish varieties would be descendants. This also allows us to show additional links between EY and CzY. No innovations are shared by SWY, DuY, and EGY. In morphology, the situation is slightly different. Yiddish varieties include a large number of nouns with no equivalent in German dialects, in which several German suffixes or prefixes are added to the root {M}. It is in the lexicon and in semantics that peculiarities of the German component of Yiddish in comparison to German appear to be most important. In this domain (as, partly, in morphology too) a large layer is due to the tradition of biblical translations internal to Jewish communities. Many of these characteristic elements appeared in the Middle Ages within the Rhenish communities and during the following centuries spread out from West to East {L}. Other peculiar elements—some of which are also of medieval western origin—spread out inside of Jewish communities due to numerous migrations of rabbis and religious teachers {L}.619 However, the importance of the lexical layer common to Yiddish varieties should not be exaggerated. Firstly, as shown in section ., numerous dialectal lexical differences can be observed too. In many cases, they are correlated with neighboring German dialects and, therefore, in principle, could correspond to relatively recent borrowings made by Jews from these German dialects. Still, for elements from the common layer too we do not find definite evidence about their old presence in the vernacular language of Jews from various parts of Europe. References to some of them in biblical glossaries printed in Prague or Kraków during the sixteenth century are good testimonies to the propagation of the Ivre-taytsh tradition from West to East. Nevertheless, they are insufficient to draw any conclusion about these words being already a part of the vernacular language.620 Moreover, the Yiddish variety in which are written early sources from Kraków correspond to that found in documents of the same time in Prague. In many aspects, these early works might be unrepresentative of the language spoken at that time by Jews who lived in the territories of central and eastern Poland, as well as in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Secondly, numerous features found in various modern Yiddish varieties and not present in the standard literary NHG immediately cease to look as purely Jewish idiosyncrasies once we open German dialectal dictionaries. As discussed above, SWY is closely related to EF, while EY to Bohemian and—during a more recent stage of its development—Silesian. These dialects are in many respects intermediate between CG and UG. Bohemian was formed after migrations to Bohemia and
To the same source one can assign the universalization of the form yid ‘Jew’ {V}. Note that specifically Jewish nouns with the suffix -ung are significantly less frequent in early Ashkenazic texts that are not directly related to the Bible in comparison to sources with biblical glosses and translations. Gradually, they penetrated literary Yiddish too (TS ) from Ivre-taytsh. 619 620
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The German component
Moravia of German colonists from the areas of Bavarian, EF, and ECG.621 Both EF and Silesian, in turn, were also influenced by Bavarian. In this situation, often a feature common to SWY and EY can actually be due not to the putative PROTO-YIDDISH but to the simple fact that they are (or were) present in both EF and Bohemian. Among the examples are {C, C, V, U, M}.622 Thirdly, a large number of elements shared by modern Yiddish varieties that look peculiar if we compare them to modern NHG appear not to be innovations made by Jews: rather they reveal features that became archaic in the written language used by German Christians {V, U, L}. Disappearance of some of them from NHG is due to the natural development of the standardized literary German language from which many forms judged to be too dialectal were gradually withdrawn and certain features of Low German were introduced. Other elements disappeared due to the extremely important role that the language of Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible () played in the development of modern German. Numerous characteristics of his language were due to his native UpS dialect, while the spelling of certain words was due to his conscious efforts of retrieving forms that he considered to be etymologically correct (TS –). A number of developments in written German (with certain dialects affected by them too) represent returns to old forms, while Yiddish kept and even generalized the new forms (TG ). Among the examples are the return to the /a/-quality for the reflexes of MHG â and the abandonment of unrounding {V}. Until the late eighteenth century in Western Europe and the start of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe Jews were not affected by these innovations in written German, and, as a result, many German archaisms are kept in modern Yiddish varieties. They should not be erroneously taken as evidence of the existence of PROTO-YIDDISH.
See Schwarz (map ), Mitzka :. To this, one can also add features {C, C, C, C, V, U, M} that are present in almost all High German dialects but absent from standard literary NHG. 621 622
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3 The Hebrew Component .
MAIN ISSUES
For the development of Yiddish, Hebrew has always played a role of paramount importance. Numerous Christian scholars who wrote major studies about the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews (that they considered to be not a separate language but rather a variant of German), paid attention to this fact. Elias Schadäus () writes that Jews “mix some Hebrew words that are in common use among them into their German (as also happens in German chanceries with Latin and French words).” Johannes Buxtorf () stresses that “German among them is never pure, but very often it intermingles Hebrew words.” Johann Christof Wagenseil () provides a similar opinion: “the Jews often mix Hebrew words into German.”1 Avé-Lallemant (:) points out that Yiddish in Germany represents a fusion language, with two components, German and Hebrew. The unity of the Hebrew component of Yiddish is not consensual. Its analysis is related to several substantive questions. Among them are: () What is the difference between Ashkenazic Hebrew and that of other contemporary Jewish communities? () Do the Hebrew components of modern Yiddish varieties have a common ancestry? () Did various Jewish communities that existed in the Middle Ages in German- and Slavicspeaking provinces use the same kind of Hebrew? If the answer is “No,” then to which one of them are modern Yiddish varieties related? () What is the relationship in the Middle Ages between Ashkenazic Hebrew and varieties of Hebrew used in non-Ashkenazic communities? () What is the relationship between Ashkenazic Hebrew and that of various dialects of Hebrew spoken in Antiquity? () What is the age within Yiddish of various elements of Hebrew origin? () How to classify traits within the Hebrew component into the following categories: (a) those inherited from ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews whose vernacular languages were not Germanic but Romance, Slavic, Greek, or Semitic; (b) those borrowed during Ashkenazic history from Hebrew; (c) those resulting from innovations internal to Ashkenazic communities and, within the last group, how to tell features borrowed by WY from EY (or vice versa) from those that might appear in the common PROTO-YIDDISH ancestor of these two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish (if such an entity existed in reality)? () What is the role of various norms (mainly based on Hebrew spelling) in the development of the pronunciation of words belonging to the Hebrew component of Yiddish? Similarly to the German component discussed in the previous chapter, any attempt to provide answers to questions of this kind faces serious methodological issues.2 Maybe the easiest is the first one if we limit it to a purely synchronous comparison. One of the first attempts to make an 1 2
See Frakes :, , (respectively), and the discussion in Katz c:. Some of these problems were already discussed in section ...
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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The Hebrew component
analysis of such a kind was made in the paper by Idelsohn (). He describes the main phonological features for the following varieties of Hebrew pronunciation in various Jewish communities: Yemenite, Persian, Daghestan (North Caucasus), Ashkenazic, “Babylonian” (Iraqi), Sephardic, “Moroccan” (inland of the country), and “Portuguese” (marrano communities in Italy and southern France). Idelsohn supplies comparative tables for all consonants and vowels. Similar topics are covered by Morag (), with a significantly deeper linguistic insight. He distinguishes three major groups: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite. For the second of the above questions, the positive answer is generally taken for granted: various authors mainly speak about characteristics of Ashkenazic Hebrew either without making a real distinction between various Ashkenazic groups, or, at least, without providing any comparative analysis aimed at showing the common or independent origins of Hebrew in Ashkenazic groups. Exceptions to this rule are rare. Being a strong advocate of the idea about a close genetic linguistic link between all modern varieties of Yiddish, Katz (a:–) suggests several arguments in favor of the unity of their German and Hebrew components.3 Timm’s writings about the Hebrew component (, TG –) show the existence of a number of idiosyncracies shared by WY and EY. The study by Klayman-Cohen () suggests a statistical analysis showing that in GH two thirds of , words from the Hebrew component are also known in EY (pp. –). Manaster Ramer (:–) includes in his list of pan-Yiddish peculiarities a number of elements belonging to the Hebrew component. The discussion of the third of the above questions necessarily entails addressing one particular topic of early Ashkenazic history. Historical sources and linguistic evidence combine to tell us about the existence in the Late Middle Ages of two different groups of Ashkenazic Jews: those from the Rhine area in the west and those from the Danube region in the southeast. On the one hand, they were distinguished in their religious customs following the so-called WESTERN and EASTERN rites, respectively. On the other hand, we know for sure that differences existed in their systems of the pronunciation of Hebrew. The most discussed linguistic feature concerned the phonetic value of the letter heth ()ח. For Rhenish Jews, it was a glottal [h], often reduced to zero if not preceding the stressed vowel, and so identical to the rendition of he ()ה. For Danubian Jews, it was velar [x], which therefore merged with the reflexes of khaf ()כ. In the rabbinical literature of the fifteenth century the two groups are called BNEY HES and BNEY KHES ( ְּב ֵני ֵחתin Hebrew), respectively, literally “people (sons) of hes/khes.”4 One of the first scholars to pay attention to this important element of Ashkenazic cultural history was Güdemann (:–). M. Weinreich () was the first among Yiddish historical linguists to describe some linguistic details of this phenomenon, including the only attempt to date to fix the boundary at a certain period between the two areas. He drew, however, few specific conclusions: due to his “broad” definition of the term YIDDISH, Weinreich assumed that both groups spoke the same language even though his discussion to a large extent seems to imply what Katz came to argue later on. In all modern Yiddish varieties, however, heth is velar: Yiddish inherits this feature from the language of BNEY KHES. From this observation concerning one specific phonological feature, it is reasonable to ask a more global question: to what extent Yiddish is related to the vernacular language(s) of the two Ashkenazic groups. Katz (, a, b, a:–, b) implies the existence of features peculiar to PROTO-YIDDISH (the supposed ancestor of both WY and EY) in the language of BNEY KHES only. He treats the idiom spoken by BNEY HES as an independent language that died out after the fifteenth century. For him, various features of this language are irrelevant for the history of Yiddish. See their discussion in section .. On the origins of these terms (including a possible biblical pun: the expression meaning “the Hittites” in Genesis ) see Katz b:–. 3 4
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Main issues
The most detailed analysis of medieval Ashkenazic Hebrew is due to Eldar (). This scholar studied Ashkenazic Hebrew manuscripts compiled before mid-fourteenth century that deal with a number of prayer books for the WESTERN rite (BNEY HES) and one for the EASTERN rite (BNEY KHES). Though his study does not directly deal with Yiddish, it provides an important insight into the question of the unity of the Hebrew component of Yiddish. A wide discussion of topics related to the fourth question in the above list appears in WG (:–). Weinreich addresses several periods and areas. The first of them corresponds to the seventh to tenth centuries when several Masoretic groups in the Middle East devised systems of diacritical signs for vocalizing (pointing) the biblical text. The most successful one (used until the present day) is called the TIBERIAN system.5 The second period corresponds to the pronunciation of Hebrew in various European communities during the first centuries of the second millenary CE. No work concerning the fifth question seems to ever have been written. Here of particular importance are studies of the phonology of ancient Hebrew based on the Greek and Latin transcriptions of Hebrew. Three major original sources are mainly used in this context: • Septuagint. This translation into Greek was done by Jews of Alexandria. The Torah had already been translated during the third century BCE. Other biblical books as well as a few additional Jewish texts were translated during the next centuries. • Hexapla. This is the name of the edition of the Bible by Origen of Alexandria, one of the most important Christian theologians of the third century CE. This book contains six columns. In addition to the original Hebrew text (first column) and that of the Septuagint (fifth column), he includes three other Greek translations (collectively known as ‘the Three’) made during the second century CE by Jewish authors, namely Aquila of Sinope (third column), Symmachus (fourth column), and Theodotion (sixth column), as well as transliterations from Hebrew into Greek (second column). This column—commonly called Secunda in scholarly literature—is either due to his own work with Jewish helpers, or it is based on some early unidentified (Jewish or Christian) source.6 • Vulgate, the late fourth century CE translation into Latin made by Jerome from the Hebrew text (but under the influence of information found in several columns of the Hexapla, primarily, the third and the sixth). For all these sources, except for the Hexapla’s Secunda, the phonological analysis can be achieved mainly according to the transcription of proper names. The most detailed discussion of the sixth question appears in Katz , Katz c, and TG – . For the seventh question, one should mention the paper by Mark () presenting a large series of Hebrew neologisms that appeared inside of Ashkenazic communities. Goldenberg and WG :– provide additional information concerning the same topic. The emphasis on the crucial role of phonetical renormings in the development of the Hebrew component of Yiddish (processes directly related to our eighth question) characterizes the approach by Alexis Manaster Ramer to the history of Yiddish.7 It was of paramount importance for a number of concepts proposed in this chapter. The following sections of this chapter address various aspects of the development of the Hebrew component that correspond to the questions from the above list.8 A particular emphasis will be
See the discussion of TIBERIAN vowels in section .. In this chapter, when the Hexapla is mentioned without indicating its particular columns, this generally means that the same feature characterizes both the Secunda and the Three. 7 Numerous details concerning this aspect appear in unpublished papers by Manaser Ramer and electronic letters sent to the author of this book in –. 8 The present discussion of numerous aspects of the Hebrew component of Yiddish could not be written without using results obtained in Birnbaum (exemplary pioneering study in this domain), BN –, and WG :–. Numerous examples of exceptional EY forms appearing in this chapter are directly taken from these three major works. 5 6
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The Hebrew component
placed on the second and the third questions, that is, on the unity of Hebrew underlying, on the one hand, modern Yiddish varieties and, on the other hand, the two medieval Ashkenazic groups (BNEY HES and BNEY KHES), considering in detail what is actually known about various features of the languages of these two groups. These questions are of paramount importance for the history of Yiddish. The synthetic answer to them appears in sections .. and .., respectively. Section .. also provides a global picture shedding light on the fourth question, namely the existence in the Middle Ages of links between the pronunciation of Hebrew by Ashkenazic and certain non-Ashkenazic communities. Section . deals with certain aspects of the sixth among the questions formulated above: the evaluation of the age of elements from the Hebrew component. Ashkenazic innovations (related to the seventh question) are discussed in sections .. and ... The importance of phonetic norms related to Hebrew spelling (the eighth question) is directly addressed in section . and is regularly discussed in sections . and ., with a synthesis in ... Globally, the structure of this chapter is similar to that of the previous chapter that deals with the German component. It primarily provides an analysis of both diachronic and synchronic aspects of phonology (consonants, stressed vowels, unstressed vowels). It also addresses, though with less detail, lexical, grammatical, and onomastic features. Similarly to the previous chapter, here numerous peculiar Yiddish features are designated using combinations of boldface letters and numbers placed in braces such as {c} or {v}. In this chapter, contrary to Chapter , lower-case letters are used.
.
CHANNELS OF TRANSMISSION OF HEBREW
.. Antiquity Most Hebraists generally agree that after the return from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE, large portions of the Jewish population, especially those Jews who lived in the Galilee and Samaria (the northern provinces of the Land of Israel), shifted in their vernacular speech from Hebrew to Aramaic. In the centuries that followed, Hebrew continued to be the primary spoken language in Judea, the southern province of the Land of Israel with the capital city of Jerusalem, although the role of Aramaic gradually increased there as well. Final traces of the use of Hebrew as the vernacular language date from the second century CE. Since then it continued to be used as a written language only, having been entirely displaced by Aramaic in everyday speech.9 Aramaic remained the primary spoken language in all of the Levant (an area that covered the territory of modern Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and several neighboring areas), for both Jews and non-Jews, from the last centuries of the First Millennium BCE until the Muslim conquests of the seventh century CE. It is in this language that a large part of the Gemara (one of the two components of the Talmud, in both its Babylonian and Jerusalem versions) is written. In the Land of Israel beginning with BCE when this territory was conquered by Alexander the Great, Greek also started to be used in numerous contexts. Its importance for a number of Jewish communities in the Diaspora during the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE is made evident by the Greek translations of the Bible, namely the Septuagint and “the Three.” Indirect evidence points to the fact that even if the translation was done from Hebrew to Greek, the role of Aramaic was also significant. For example, it is from the Septuagint that Greek (and later Slavic) languages borrowed the words for Passover and Saturday/ 9 See details in Sáenz-Badillos :–. Chomsky (:–) also provides a few examples from the Talmud that can be interpreted to mean that in Galilee and Babylonia even during the first centuries CE there still were certain Jews for whom Hebrew was their vernacular language.
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Channels of transmission of Hebrew
TABLE . Jewish given names in the Antiquity Written source
Mishna and other rabbinical works11
Jerusalem Talmud
Babylonian Talmud
Time period
st–nd centuries
rd–th centuries
rd–th centuries
Geographic area
Land of Israel
Land of Israel
Babylonia
Basis for calculations
Ilan
Ilan
Ilan
Biblical (standard spelling)
%
%
%
Biblical (different spelling)
%
%
%
Greek
%
%
%
Latin
%
%
%
Other (mainly Aramaic)
%
%
%
Total of persons
Sabbat. Both of them clearly came to the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria (where the Septuagint was compiled) through the intermediary of Aramaic and not directly from Hebrew; compare Greek åÆ and Æ, Aramaic פסחאand שבתא, Hebrew ֶּפַסחand ַׁשָּבת, respectively. The consideration of Jewish personal names allows for illustrating the general tendency of a gradual linguistic acculturation of Jews to their Gentile neighbors during the post-biblical period. Certainly the information based on onomastics should not be extrapolated to evaluate numerically the role of the corresponding languages: naming traditions are partly autonomous from the linguistic development of the population. Nevertheless, they can illustrate the existence of a certain trend that is eventually related to the vernacular language used. Table . shows the statistical distribution of given names found in the rabbinic literature of Antiquity.10 No statistical calculation can be made for female names: only a few women are mentioned in the sources in question. From this table, one can observe that in the same area, the Land of Israel, the proportion of biblical names decreases dramatically between the periods of the Mishna and the
10 Calculations are based on dictionaries compiled by Ilan (, , and ) who in turn extracted the relevant information from the concordances of the rabbinic literature compiled by Chayim Yehoshua Kasovsky (–) and his sons Benjamin and Moshe Kosovsky. Only names of men (whose Jewish religion is beyond doubt) mentioned for the precise periods and geographic area indicated in the table were taken into account. Thanks to explicit analytical details provided by Ilan, nicknames, second names, family names, and names of fictitious personages could be ignored. When making calculations, the notion of “Biblical names” was used in the sense different from that used by Ilan for her statistical tables. Only names whose spelling corresponds to the one present in the Bible plus a few diminutive forms of them were considered as “Biblical.” Yet, Ilan counts as “Biblical” any name that has a root cognate with that of an existing biblical name. For example, she counts as “Biblical” names all instances of אחאjust because the Bible includes the name אחי. However, the exact form of the name given in Tosefta, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, corresponds to the Aramaic word meaning ‘brother.’ There is no reason to conjecture any biblical connection in this case. (Note that the name ‘ אבאfather’ was also common.) For this reason, in this section the name in question was considered as Aramaic and not as “Biblical.” 11 Tosefta, Mekhilta, Sifra, Sifrei, Jerusalem Talmud, and Babylonian Talmud.
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The Hebrew component
Jerusalem Talmud. This change is correlated in time with the decline of Hebrew. For the first period, we still have evidence of the use of this language in everyday life. Moreover, the main sources for calculations, the Mishna and Tosefta, are mainly written in rabbinical Hebrew. For the second period, no information exists any further about the vernacular use of Hebrew. The Talmud (Gemara), in both its versions, is written in Aramaic. For the same period related to the redaction of the Talmud, biblical names are less common in the Babylonian Diaspora than in the Land of Israel. A few of the names found in the Land of Israel correspond to Greek forms of biblical names, such as Levitas ‘Levi’ ()לויטס, appearing in the Mishna, and Simon ( )סימוןin the Jerusalem Talmud. In Babylonia, more than one third of all biblical names are already non-canonical. Among them, Aramaic and Aramaicized variants are particularly common. For example, instead of biblical Joseph ()יֹוֵסף, Manasseh ()ְמ ַנ ּ ׁ ֶשה, and Ḥ ananiah ( )ֲח ַנ ְנ ָיהwe often find איסי/ יוסי, מנשיא, and חנינאa,12 respectively. As a result, from the linguistic point of view, forms from this category should be counted as Aramaic rather than Hebrew. Moreover, numerous biblical names are non-Hebrew also. Jewish characters mentioned in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles bear Aramaic names.13 The large number of bearers of certain Hebrew names was primarily related to the popularity of the corresponding biblical personages (Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel) rather than to the importance of Hebrew as a cultural language. During the time of the redaction of the Mishna, the popularity of certain names was clearly related to the popularity of six Hasmoneans—Matthathias and his sons Yoḥ anan, Simon, Judah, Eliezer, and Jonathan.14 Note also that post-biblical Hebrew names are practically nonexistent in the sources in question: no examples in the Mishna, three percent in the Jerusalem Talmud (due to the presence of Tanḥ um ‘consolation’ תנחום, Naḥ man ‘consolator’ נחמן, and Kohen ‘priest’ )כהן, and one percent in the Babylonian Talmud (almost exclusively related to Naḥ man). One can also see that in Babylonia, Aramaic non-biblical names are even more common than biblical names of all origins. Another illustration based on the same sources may be obtained by considering the most common given names (see Table .).
TABLE . Most common Jewish given names in Antiquity Source
Most common names (number of bearers)
Mishna and other works
Judah (), Simon (), Eleazar (), Yosi (יוסי, ), Yoḥ anan (), Joshua (), Ḥ ananiah (), Jacob (), Jonathan (), Menaḥ em (), Eliezer (), Joseph ()
Jerusalem Talmud
Yosi (יוסי, ), Abba (אבא, ), Isaac (), Jacob (), Yudan (יודן, ), Simon (), Samuel (), Ḥ ananiah (), Tanḥ um (תנחום, ), Judah (), Levi (), Ḥ iyya (חייא, ), Ada (אדא, )
Babylonian Talmud
Rabba (רבה, , and רבא, ), Isaac (), Ada (אדא, ), Aḥ a (אחא, ), Huna (הונא, ), Ḥ iyya (חייא, ), Samuel (), Abba (אבא, ), Joseph (), Papa (פפא, ), Ami (אמי, ), Ḥ ama (חמא, )
12 13 14
This form can also be derived directly from Aramaic ‘ ֲחנִי ָנאmercy,’ without any link to the biblical name. Those ending in -ai are especially common: Haggai, Shabbetai, etc. (Zunz :). See Ilan :.
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Channels of transmission of Hebrew
One can observe that, among the ten most frequently used names, the share of non-biblical forms increases: only one in the Mishna and related works (Yosi, an Aramaicized form of Joseph), four in the Jerusalem Talmud (Yosi and Yudan, variants of biblical Joseph and Judah, respectively, Aramaic Abba and Hebrew Tanḥ um ‘consolation,’ both unrelated to any biblical name), and seven in the Babylonian Talmud (all unrelated to biblical names, often coinciding with Aramaic common nouns such as Abba ‘father,’ Aḥ a ‘brother,’ Ḥ iyya ‘life,’ and Huna ‘proper conduct’). All these factors show that the role of Hebrew was constantly decreasing. Names considered above are not necessarily representative of the whole Jewish population of their time. Firstly, their bearers are only men mainly belonging to the religious elite, while naming traditions in various social strata and/or for different genders could be different. Secondly, they appear in the texts fundamental to Judaism: we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of stylization in their spellings. Thirdly, they are limited geographically to the Land of Israel and Babylonia, the two areas where links to traditional Judaism were particularly strong. For certain other areas, we also possess representative lists of names from Late Antiquity. They show a picture that is different from that discussed above and are well correlated with the Talmudic assertion (Gittin b) that the majority of Diaspora Jews have Gentile names. In Jewish inscriptions, dating mainly from the third and fourth centuries, found in the catacombs of Rome and its neighborhood, seventy-six percent are written in Greek, twenty-three percent in Latin, three in Hebrew, one in Aramaic, and two are bilingual, Greek–Latin and Aramaic– Greek. Five (or six, if we count one doubtful source) inscriptions using Greek or Latin characters also include the Hebrew words ‘ שלוםpeace’ or ‘ ישראלIsrael,’ or the expression ישראלaאלa‘ שלוםpeace on Israel,’ alone or added to the end of Greek or Latin sentences.15 Statistical information concerning these names appears in Table .:16 TABLE . Jewish given names in Ancient Rome Language of name etymon
Language of inscription
Gender
Greek
Latin
Men
Women
Some Latin
%
%
%
%
Some Greek
%
%
%
%
Some Semitic
%
%
%
%
Total of persons
15 The information about Rome appearing in this paragraph is taken from Leon :–. On the same topic see also Rutgers :– (with corrections concerning the dating suggested by Leon) and Frey :LXV–VII. 16 This table combines data shown in two tables given by Leon (:–) amending some of his incorrect percentages. Thirty men and sixty women in the source in question bear double names, while eight men and two women bear triple names. This fact explains why the sum of percentages in various columns is bigger than a hundred percent. Rows dealing with names of Latin, Greek, and Semitic (Hebrew and Aramaic) origin take a person into account if at least one of his/her names corresponds to the language in question. The sum of persons in the second and the third column is bigger than the sum of persons in the two last columns because for some individuals their gender is unclear.
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The Hebrew component
In total, about fifty-five percent of people have at least one Latin name, circa forty percent have a Greek name, and only fifteen percent have a Semitic name.17 The high percentage of Latin names for both genders implies that Latin was the main vernacular language of these Jews. On the other hand, Greek (and not Hebrew or Aramaic) was their main language of culture.18 This idea may explain the facts that the majority of inscriptions are written in Greek and that even numerous Latin names are spelled using the Greek alphabet. Note also that in the same sources, one finds direct quotes from the Greek translations of the Bible, the Septuagint and Aquila. This fact implies that local Jews used Greek during the ceremony in synagogues.19 A comparison of data in the last two columns shows that the onomastic acculturation of Jews to their Gentile neighbors was stronger for women than for men. Also we know that numerous female given names found for Jews were fashionable: they were particularly common among local Gentiles of the same time. This point is noted by Leon (:) who also indicates the following other factors implying a close integration of Jews with their Gentile neighbors: the use of names associated with pagan gods and adoption of compound names after the Roman manner. In the Arabian Peninsula, Arabic sources from the sixth century and the first half of the seventh century mention about Jewish men and very few women. Among the male names, eighty-four percent are Arabic, fourteen percent may be related to biblical names, and two percent have Aramaic roots. The most common names in this collection are Arabic ‘Umar and Zayd, both with nine bearers referenced.20 The above information shows that in Late Antiquity, the use of Hebrew names decreased in the Diaspora considerably in comparison to their use in the Land of Israel in biblical times. This phenomenon was directly related to the loss of Hebrew as the everyday language. Numerous names related to the new vernacular languages, Aramaic and Arabic in the East, Greek and later Latin in the West, became frequently used. Beginning with the first scholarly studies concerning Jewish names (Zunz ), different authors often considered that the non-Hebrew names appearing in various sources and often shared by Jews with local Gentiles were limited to contacts with Gentiles, while in the Jewish context these persons used specifically Jewish names. We find very few direct corroborations of this idea. The earliest examples come from the most recent biblical books and they deal with Jews from the Diaspora only. Esther was also known as Hadassah (Esther :). Her first name is of Old Persian origin, while the second is from Hebrew.21 Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, chosen for their intellect and
17 Examples of names counted as Semitic: Iudas ‘Judah’ ( references), Simon (), Sabbatius (), Sabbatis (gender unknown, ), Samuel (), Ionathan (), Maria (), Aster most likely a variant of Esther (), Sara (), and Rebecca (). The assignment of certain names from the above list to the category of “Hebrew names” is questionable. For example, Simon was a common Greek name independent of the biblical Simon (Rutgers :). Nothing suggests that Sabbatius is related to Shabbetai or to any other biblical name. This name was commonly used by non-Jews too: it is one of the names of the Roman emperor Justinian I. 18 As shown by Leon (:–), the usage of Latin and Greek by Roman Jews corresponds to the Gentile usage of these tongues. 19 This is noted by Frey (:LXVII) who also indicates that for Christians in Rome the ceremony was also in Greek until the third century. See also Simonsohn :– on Greek used by Hellenistic Jewry to the exclusion of Hebrew even in the regular recitation of the Scriptures and of worship in the synagogue. Of particular interest is the law by the Emperor Justinian I in (Novella ). It followed a dispute between two groups of Jews: Hellenistic and those trying to impose Hebrew for the recitation of the Scriptures in the synagogue (see details in Simonsohn :). It is unclear whether the aspirations of the second group reveal relatively new ideas for the area in question or have been a continuation of a hypothetical school opposed to the Hellenization that could have existed in the Mediterranean region already for centuries. 20 Calculations are based on data extracted from Ilan . 21 In the biblical text, nothing indicates that Hadassah was used internally among Jews, while Esther was used for contacts with Gentiles only. This is just a hypothesis based on the etymology of the two names (MRPC). In the Septuagint, the name Hadassah is not mentioned.
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Channels of transmission of Hebrew
beauty to be trained as advisors to the Babylonian court, were given the Babylonian names, Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, respectively (Daniel :). If, in the above example, the two names borne by the same person are linguistically unrelated to each other, in certain more recent pairs, the “Jewish” name, of Hebrew or Aramaic origin, is related to another, Greek or Latin, phonetically. The most famous example is Saul (Hebrew name), also called Paul(us) (Latin name), the Apostle (first century CE). Zunz (:–) speaks about links in meaning that appear in such pairs as Latin Justus ‘righteous’ for Hebrew Zadok/Zaddik, Greek Theophilos ‘beloved of God’ for the biblical Jedidiah, Theodoros ‘gift of God,’ and Theodotos ‘given by God’ for the biblical Matthias, Nethaniah, and Nethanel. However, in Jewish texts from Antiquity we do not find any direct indication that these links were really existent. In theory, Justus, common among Roman Jews, could be taken as a substitute for Zadok/Zaddik, or since its first consonants are the same as in Joseph, or due to its attractive semantics, or—maybe, the most plausible source—just because it was popular among Roman Gentiles. However, the most detailed study of names borne by Jews in the Land of Israel in Antiquity shows that links—phonetic or semantic—between biblical and Greek/Latin names were rather rare exceptions and certainly not the rule. In any case, we do not have any positive information to validate the existence of such cases.22 Also note that in Jewish religious texts of that time, primarily written in Aramaic, we also find numerous references to rabbis for whom only their Greek or Latin names are known. For example, among the names appearing in the Jerusalem Talmud are Alexander, Antigonus, Dorotheus, Dositheus, Nicomachus, and Tryphon (all Greek), and Crispus, Justus, Marinus, Patricius, and Titus (all Latin). We also know about heavily Hellenized Jewish communities in the Mediterranean area and Asia Minor, with numerous symbols of pagan (mainly Greek) origin and even figurative paintings found in synagogues during the first centuries CE.23 If the “non-Jewish” character of these names is on the surface, it is easy enough to make a methodological error considering numerous names based on the Aramaic lexicon to be more “Jewish” than the Greek and Latin names. Indeed, for about one thousand years the Aramaic language was the first language for various population groups in the Levant and a large number of Aramaic names were shared in this area by both Jews and Gentiles. The confusion of labeling Aramaic names “Jewish” that is frequently found in onomastic literature is related to several factors. Firstly, Aramaic and Hebrew are quite close: they belong to the same family of Semitic languages. Secondly, both languages use the same alphabet. This factor is particularly misleading since it was after the return from the Babylonian captivity, during the period of the Second Temple, that Jews abandoned their former spelling system customs in favor of the Aramaic script, another offspring of the Phoenician alphabet. It is precisely this Aramaic script that is in our modern day called the 22 See Ilan :, , . Leon (:–) also says that the possibility that, for example, Dativus and Donatus (names found for Jews in ancient Rome) are calques of Nathan (all of them have a root related to ‘gift’) is rather implausible. Because of the general ignorance of Hebrew, we can safely consider that most Jewish parents had no Hebrew equivalent in mind when assigning pagan names to their children. Rutgers (:) noted the existence of a dozen cases found in the sources from Antiquity when Jews have, according to him, a Hebrew name for internal use and another, Greek or Latin, name when dealing with non-Jews. The checking of the original sources in question (Frey :, , , , ; Tcherikover et al. :, , , ; Schwabe and Lifschitz :, , , ) shows that they provide no information that would corroborate his interpretation. In all cases, we are merely dealing with the formula “X also called Y.” This simply implies that two names were applicable for the same person but does not tell us anything about the exact areas of their use. One of the two names could actually be a nickname. In several cases, neither of the two names is Hebrew; compare, for example, Ł øæ ŒÆØ ˝ ªæ ‘Theodoros, also called Niger’ (Tcherikover et al. :) and ()ı Å ŒÆØ ØæØŒØ ‘Semnous, also called Sirikis (Schwabe and Lifschitz :). Moreover, even in cases when one name is indeed Hebrew (or derived from a biblical form) and another is Greek or Latin, neither a phonetic nor a semantic connection is apparent between the two. 23 See also Goodenough (especially, pp. –).
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The Hebrew component
“Hebrew alphabet.” Thirdly, the confusion can have an anachronistic basis, being related to the fact that Aramaic during the later period became one of the two cultural languages of Judaism in countries whose Gentile population was not using Aramaic at all. Globally speaking, the previous information shows that during Late Antiquity Jews of the Diaspora did not feel the necessity of a vertical linguistic and onomastic link to Hebrew and to the original Hebrew version of the Bible. We have no direct evidence that Hebrew words were really incorporated into their everyday speech. Yet, there is no evidence either that Hebrew was totally abandoned and that Jewish men, or at least religious erudites, were not able to read and/or speak it.
.. Early Middle Ages Little is known about the Early Middle Ages, a period that is also sometimes called the Dark Ages. Yet, it was precisely during that period that important changes occurred in Jewish culture in various regions of the Diaspora, changes that eventually put Hebrew in a particularly prestigious position. As discussed in the previous section, in earlier centuries, a large portion of Jewish religious literature was compiled in the Aramaic language by scholars who lived in Babylonia and the Land of Israel. These areas underwent progressive Arabization and Islamification following the Muslim conquests of the seventh century CE. As a result, the use of Aramaic among both Jews and Gentiles declined dramatically. Jews continued to study the Talmud in Aramaic of course, but in other aspects of life Hebrew was gradually reestablished as the main cultural language of Judaism. During approximately the same period that followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire and its collapse (second half of the fifth century), Hebrew also took on the same position in the Mediterranean Jewish communities, superseding Latin and Greek. We may speak, therefore, of a partial revival of Hebrew during the last centuries of the First Millennium CE. This process can be observed on several levels. It is apparent in the religious domain: Hebrew became firmly established as the language of the recitation of the Scriptures in the synagogue. The funeral inscriptions in various countries started to be written exclusively in Hebrew.24 It was during the same period that Masoretic systems of the vocalization of Hebrew were devised.25 No
24 In the territory of modern France, only five inscriptions correspond to the First Millennium. The four oldest (second to fourth centuries, two from the region of Lyon and two from Provence) are written in Greek () or Latin (). The inscription of Narbonne (–) is also in Latin but it includes the expression (known in the Rome catacombs too) ישראלaאלa‘ שלוםpeace on Israel’ (see Nahon :, , , , ). Those from the beginning of the Second Millennium are already written in Hebrew. In the territory of modern Spain, among the ten earliest undated inscriptions three are in Greek, five in Latin, and two (both from towns south of Barcelona) are trilingual Hebrew– Greek–Latin. Those dated, starting with the tenth century, are in Hebrew (Cantera and Millás ). For southern Italy, we have an example from Venosa. In that town, among fifty inscriptions found in catacombs (mainly from the fourth to the seventh centuries) sixty percent are in Greek, thirty percent in Latin, and ten percent in Hebrew, though only one is written entirely in Hebrew (year ), one is bilingual Hebrew–Latin (), several show a mixture of Hebrew and Greek, and one includes a Greek inscription written in Hebrew characters () (Leon :, ). In other words, there is no data implying the use of Hebrew before the second half of the sixth century. Beginning with the first half of the ninth century, in Venosa and other southern Italian towns such as Brindisi, Lavello, Matera, and Bari, Jewish funeral inscriptions are written exclusively in Hebrew; their style is often that of piytim (Simonsohn :). In Hungary, we find during the First Millennium CE only inscriptions in Greek (one from the third and another from the fourth centuries) and Latin, while Hebrew letters first appear on a ring from the eleventh century and in funeral inscriptions of the twelfth century (Scheiber :–). 25 See their discussion in section ..
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Channels of transmission of Hebrew
later than the first half of the ninth century, the first Hebrew literary productions of European medieval Jews came into existence. In southern Italy where Jews had strong contacts with the Land of Israel, Hebrew literature flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries.26 The development of Arabic literary culture and Arabic studies in grammar clearly made a great contribution to the eventual development of Hebrew as the language of Jewish religious literature and poetry by providing Jewish authors—well integrated into Arabic non-religious culture—an example to follow. This particularly important phase of the revival began in the Middle East and reached Western Europe no later than the tenth century, with the Mediterranean countries conquered by Muslims (including the territory of modern Spain) being the main channel of its propagation.27 Important changes appeared in the corpus of given names borne by Jews. Numerous biblical male names, never or only rarely used for centuries, were resurrected. For example, both Elijah and Israel are unknown in Antiquity. No mention of the names Abraham, Asher, Dan, David, Gabriel, Gad, Isaiah, Joel, Raphael, Samson, and Solomon appears in the Talmud. Only one Aaron and one Moses are known in the Babylonian Talmud and none in the Jerusalem Talmud and rabbinic literature of the time of the Mishna.28 Yet, during the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE, many names from the above list were among the most frequently used Jewish names in the Middle East, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.29 The establishment of the two formal categories of male names represents one of the most striking traces of the general revival of Hebrew. In ancient times, links between Hebrew names and names used in the vernacular were just beginning to develop. From the Middle Ages onward, these links became firmly established. Since then, in many countries of Asia, Europe, and northern Africa, a Jewish man normally has had two given names. All names based on languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as numerous colloquial, familiar, and pet forms were assigned to the category of kinnuim ‘secular names’ (singular: kinnui). A name of this category is for the vernacular contexts. Yet, every Jew also necessarily has a shem ha-qodesh ‘sacred name’ (plural: shemot ha-qodesh). This religious name is given to a baby boy on the day of his circumcision. He uses it at his bar mitzvah, when called upon to read the Torah in a synagogue and when he marries. It is used to record his death and the same name appears on his tombstone inscription. This group includes all biblical names, as well as all the post-biblical names of Hebrew or Aramaic origin. To the group of shemot ha-qodesh also belong, at least for Ashkenazic Jews, a small series of names of Greek origin inherited from the Greek-speaking Jewish communities: Alexander, Kalonymos, Parigoros, and Todoros/Todros (Theodoros).
See Simonsohn : and Sáenz-Badillos :. See a detailed discussion of this topic in Roth ; see also Sáenz-Badillos :. 28 As shown in detailed studies made by Ilan (:–; :, ; :, , :–), there were important differences between the use of certain names in the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. For example, Abraham had become common in Greek-speaking communities of Egypt already in Antiquity. 29 In theory, the mass “resurrection” of these given names can be partially independent of the medieval general “revival” of Hebrew as the only prestigious language of Jewish culture. Indeed, certain other biblical names (including Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Samuel, and Simon) have been commonly used without any interruption since Antiquity. The nonuse of the names of certain of the most important biblical figures (Abraham, Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon) was clearly related to some kind of superstitious belief (see Ilan :). However, the total abandonment of these beliefs, as well as the accrued popularity of many other biblical names, is clearly related to such global processes as the decline of Aramaic, Greek, and Latin as languages of supra-regional Jewish culture and the “revival” of Hebrew. 26 27
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The Hebrew component
.. High/Late Middle Ages and modern times If any doubts exist about the exact way of the transmission of Hebrew during the previous period, beginning with the High Middle Ages—that is the period when the prestige of Hebrew and the original version of the Bible was already beyond doubt—the situation now becomes much clearer. The transmission was certainly both textual and oral.30 In Yiddish historical linguistics it was often assumed that—since Semitic languages were not used in Ashkenazic vernacular speech for centuries—the influence exerted by Hebrew was due almost exclusively to texts. Consequently, the pronunciation of Hebrew underlying Yiddish essentially corresponded to the system of diacritics used for vocalization (pointing) in written documents. For example, this approach is mainly considered valid by Bin-Nun (BN –) and Weinreich (WG :, :).31 Birnbaum (:–), by contrast, states explicitly that some words were inherited by word of mouth and not through the medium of literature. Katz (, c) showed that an approach by his predecessors (others than Birnbaum) is in many respects unacceptable. He suggested that the pronunciation of words from the Hebrew component comes from the oral tradition brought to the Danube area by the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews whose colloquial language was (Judeo-)Aramaic. His latter idea does not appear attractive: between the two extremes—texts and colloquial language—numerous intermediate oral contexts also exist, such as discussions of religious subjects in the synagogue or various religious schools.32 Nevertheless, Katz’s general emphasis on the non-textual but, rather, oral origin appears to be correct. We know from massive amounts of manuscripts and published material that Hebrew was used for various types of written communication, including letters, court documents, treatises, and books on various topics. The range of topics is particularly evident from the RESPONSA literature, since the rabbis could, in principle, be asked to express their opinion on any subject, and from the frequent lengthy moral lessons contained in last wills, in which the testators expressed such opinions unbidden (MRPC). It is inconceivable that people who could write in Hebrew fluently on any and all possible aspects of life could not have been able to pronounce what they were writing. Moreover, one needs to keep in mind that only certain texts were available in pointed form (that is, with diacritical signs for vowels): for example, the Talmud (composed of the Hebrew language Mishna and the Aramaic language Gemara) was not ever pointed among traditional Jews, and yet it was read and discussed far more than the Bible. This correlates with the fact that various communities have distinct traditions of the Mishna reading issued from the distinct oral traditions that necessarily existed.33 Formally speaking, the two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, in which all major Jewish religious texts are written (including both the Bible and the Talmud), collectively came to be considered leshon ha-qodesh “the language of the holy” (LOSHN-KOYDESH in StY), distinctly different in prestige compared to vernacular idioms taken from Gentiles. Two fundamentally different approaches to the linguistic status of LOSHN-KOYDESH currently exist in Yiddish studies. The first is Fishman (:) observes that “rabbinic literature, enormously extensive and attentive to every detail of daily life, and particularly to the consequences of culture change, pays almost no attention to intergenerational language discontinuity as either an individual or communal problem.” He relates this medieval phenomenon to the continuity of the literacy tradition based on Hebrew and Aramaic “with its emphasis on sanctified texts, commentaries and responsa.” If his thesis sounds plausible for the period following the Early Middle Ages, the information provided in the two previous sections makes its application problematic for the previous period. 31 See the discussion of views of these and certain other scholars in Katz :–, c:–. 32 Various details given in section .. about the revival of Hebrew in Early Middle Ages refute the idea by Katz of Aramaic being the everyday language of (Danubian) Ashkenazic communities before they shifted to Yiddish. 33 See Morag :–. Additional factors for the non-textual origin of numerous Hebrew elements in Yiddish are discussed in section .. 30
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Channels of transmission of Hebrew
due to Weinreich. He asserts that this language results from a merger that occurred between Hebrew and the Aramaic used by Jews (whose development in the past was in turn influenced by Hebrew). This fusion was made easy by the structural proximity of these two Semitic languages.34 As a result, in his works, Weinreich generally speaks about the LOSHN-KOYDESH component of Yiddish. Sometimes he also calls this component “Hebrew-Aramaic,” or—conventionally, in order to make the expression shorter—just “Hebrew.” Katz (:–) criticized this approach stressing that the merger in question never took place in reality. From the linguistic point of view, Hebrew and (Jewish) Aramaic are two different languages. He points out that many leading Talmudic Ashkenazic scholars used these two languages in a functionally complementary distribution: Hebrew for a commentary on the Bible and Aramaic for Talmudic studies.35 Following his general idea about Aramaic being the colloquial language of Jews from the Danubian area before they shifted to Yiddish, a language with a German basis created by them, Katz suggests that Weinreich’s LOSHNKOYDESH component is actually mainly inherited from Aramaic (in which, in turn, there was a Hebrew substratum). For this reason, in order to avoid placing emphasis on Hebrew, Katz systematically uses in his work the expression “Semitic component” coined by him. This change in terminology does not appear to be attractive. One objection is purely semantic. The adjective “Semitic” can lead to a misunderstanding because in linguistics this term covers other languages than just Hebrew and Aramaic, while, for example, Arabic or Amharic are irrelevant in the context in question. Another objection is substantial. If we take into consideration the development of Jewish culture in various European countries from the tenth century, we can observe that within this pair of languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, the role of the former was by far more important. It is using this language that the main bulk of religious treaties, liturgical and literary works, tombstone inscriptions as well as documents related to various kinds of transactions have been composed.36 Masoretic systems of vocalization introduced diacritics into the Hebrew text of the Bible, but not to the Aramaic texts of the Talmud.37 From the end of the twelfth century, we also have the direct testimony of Maimonides, who in the preface to Mishneh Torah writes that he decided to compile this code of Jewish religious law in Hebrew and not in Aramaic because the latter was not widely known among Jews.38 The actual corpus of shemot ha-qodesh used by traditional Jews from the Middle Ages until the modern day retains very few post-biblical Aramaic names; a large majority are either biblical or post-biblical names of Hebrew origin.39 The number of Yiddish and Judezmo words of Hebrew origin is significantly larger than that of Aramaic origin. Moreover, Aramaic lexical elements in questions are usually given in Hebrew dictionaries.40 Numerous grammatical 34 See WG :–. Goldenberg (:) points out that Hebrew most thoroughly mixed with Aramaic was written in Poland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 35 For example, the influence of Aramaic is fairly restricted in Rashi’s commentary on the Bible. However, in his commentary on the Talmud, the amount of Aramaic acquired a status comparable to that of Mishnaic Hebrew (Goldenberg :). 36 Among exceptional Aramaic texts are Kol Nidre (a declaration recited in the synagogue before the beginning of the evening service on every Yom Kippur) and the Zohar, the foundational book of Kabbalah. The exact period of their creation is unknown though none was known in Antiquity. 37 This is true for the Gemara part of the Talmud. For the Mishna, mainly written in Hebrew, we have evidence for the existence of pointed manuscripts in the Middle Ages (Chomsky :). 38 Maimonides (–) was a native speaker of Arabic and his previous works were written in Arabic. 39 Among these rare Aramaic examples are: Abba, Akiva, Hanina, and Shraga. The last of them, derived from the word meaning ‘candle,’ first appears in sources from medieval Germany. Among Aramaic names whose earliest references appear after the shift of Jewish communities in the Levant from Aramaic to Arabic, are Natronai and Sherira. These names in the eighth to tenth centuries were borne by heads of the rabbinical academy of Pumbedita (Babylonia). 40 This is at least true for the contemporary period though, of course, the matters here are complicated because of the influence of Yiddish on Modern Hebrew.
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The Hebrew component
elements in the LOSHN-KOYDESH component of Yiddish are purely Hebrew.41 As a result, a scenario opposed to that suggested by Katz appears attractive: the LOSHN-KOYDESH component of modern Yiddish is, to a great extent, directly due to Hebrew. It includes a number of adstratal elements borrowed by Hebrew from Aramaic during different periods: in Antiquity (loanwords to biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew), and during the Middle Ages (borrowings by Medieval Hebrew, a language that appeared after the “revival” described in the previous section). However, for isolated features a direct borrowing from Aramaic (without the intermediary of Hebrew) is also plausible.42 For the reasons exposed above as well as in order to avoid long or ambiguous expressions, in the text below the word “Hebrew” is mainly used rather than “Hebrew-Aramaic,” “Semitic,” or LOSHNKOYDESH. Unless specified explicitly, “Hebrew” should often be understood here as “Hebrew and/or Aramaic.”
.
WHOLE HEBREW AND MERGED HEBREW
Various Jewish communities in the Diaspora generally had several registers of Hebrew.43 In the context of the phonological history of Yiddish, it is particularly helpful to make a clear distinction between at least the two following entities: WHOLE HEBREW and MERGED HEBREW, following the terms introduced and discussed by Weinreich (WG :–).44 The former designates the Hebrew language used in religious contexts. It is not only written but also pronounced, for example during the Torah reading in the synagogue. The latter corresponds to the Hebrew component incorporated into the vernacular language of the Jewish community. In the context of the last centuries of Ashkenazic history this language was Yiddish. A similar dichotomy was also posited by Bin-Nun, who distinguishes between two kinds of pronunciations: SACRAL HEBREW and that of the everyday Hebrew component of Yiddish (BN –). The most detailed phonological analysis of WHOLE HEBREW appears in Katz a where its author, instead of using Weinreich’s terminology, calls this entity (FORMAL) ASHKENAZIC. Table . summarizes the information provided by these three scholars concerning major synchronous phonological differences between WHOLE HEBREW and the Hebrew component of Yiddish:
41 Plural markers constitute one of the most striking examples: compare -im, found, mainly for masculine nouns, in both Hebrew and the LOSHN-KOYDESH component of Yiddish, and its Aramaic equivalent -in, inoperational in Yiddish. 42 Maybe the most striking example is provided by the Yiddish feminine suffix -te related to Aramaic ( ָּתאsee feature {m} in section ..). However, medieval Hebrew texts compiled by Ashkenazic authors should be checked before making any categorical statement on this topic. Only if the pattern of using this suffix of Aramaic origin cannot be observed in them, will we be sure of dealing with a direct borrowing from Aramaic. 43 See a comprehensive coverage of this question in Alvarez-Pereyre . See also Katz a:– on FORMAL ASHKENAZIC and (varieties of) POPULAR ASHKENAZIC, both well distinguished from the SEMITIC (Hebrew-Aramaic) component of Yiddish. 44 Morag () uses the terms CLASSICAL CORPUS and INTEGRATED CORPUS, respectively, for similar (but not totally identical) notions. In certain areas of Western Europe, the dichotomy in question does not cover all Jewish linguistic entities directly related to Hebrew. We learn, for example, about the existence of the so-called Loshnekoudesh, based on Yiddish (or German) but involving a massive replacement of German-origin lexical elements by Hebrew-origin vocabulary words. This was a secret language devised for internal communication between rural (cattle) traders and still in use during the first half of the twentieth century (see Matras ). Note also the presence of a large number of Hebraisms in several non-Jewish European secret languages, for example the thieves’ argots used in Germany (Rotwelsch) and Russia.
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WHOLE HEBREW and MERGED HEBREW
TABLE . Main differences between WHOLE HEBREW and Yiddish Feature
WHOLE HEBREW
Yiddish
References
Example45
. Reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables
No
Yes
WG :, BN , Katz a:
(LitY) sóro/sórə ‘Sara’
. Different reflexes of stressed vowels in closed and open syllables
No
Yes
BN , Katz a:–
. Final devoicing
No (partly)
Yes (PolY, WY)
Katz a:
(PolY) dūvid/dūvit ‘David’ ָּד ִוד
. Stress on ḥ aṭef-vowels is possible46
No
Yes
BN
(PolY) xalójm/xūlim ‘dream’ֲחלֹום
ׂ ָשָרה
(UkrY) doyv/dov ‘Dov’
ּדֹובbut (UkrY) dvóyru/ dvóyrə ‘Deborah’ ְּדבֹו ָרה
The information in Table . shows that the most striking characteristic of WHOLE HEBREW consists in the direct correspondence between the pronunciation and the spelling of words, with vowels coming from the standard TIBERIAN pointing. This global trait explains the first three features of Table . of which the first two are the universal markers of WHOLE HEBREW in various Ashkenazic communities. Bin-Nun paid attention to this and suggested a series of additional cogent arguments that clearly show that the WHOLE HEBREW pronunciation cannot be considered as inherited from ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews (BN –). Only the realizations found in MERGED HEBREW (that is, within Yiddish) can be truly inherited.47 Those of WHOLE HEBREW are secondary in comparison to them and primarily result from a series of simple conventional norms introduced at some moment of Ashkenazic history by grammarians who fully adhered to the system of TIBERIAN diacritics. Indeed, modern 45
The information in this column is structured as follows: (Yiddish dialectal area) phonetic form in WHOLE HEBREW / phonetic form in Yiddish ‘English equivalent’ Hebrew spelling. In this chapter, for any word from the Hebrew component of Yiddish, the spelling of the corresponding Hebrew etymon is given, with the diacritical signs corresponding to its vowels according to the TIBERIAN pointing. The differences between the Hebrew spelling and that used in StY for the corresponding word are small. Firstly, StY spelling includes a smaller number of diacritical signs. Secondly, and in direct link to the first feature, in order to avoid ambiguity in reading, StY often uses the plene spelling, with letters instead of Hebrew diacritical signs: yod ( )יfor ḥ ireq ( ִ ), ḥ olem-vav ( )ֹוfor ḥ olem ( ֹ ), shureq ( )וּfor qibbuṣ ( ֻ ). 46 Table . does not reflect the most recent development concerning the stress position. Beginning with the late eighteenth century, there was a tendency in WHOLE HEBREW of various Ashkenazic communities to place the accent on the final syllable (WG :). This position is standard in contemporary American Jewish orthodox communities whose speech is recorded in Katz a:–. However, even during the first half of the twentieth century WHOLE HEBREW at least in the mouths of PolY speakers would still retain the traditional Ashkenazic penultimate stress position (BN ). 47 Katz is one of scholars who do not share this opinion. For him, both WHOLE HEBREW and Yiddish pronunciations are due to the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews, or, at least, to the first generations of Jews who lived in German-speaking lands. Both have the same source. As a result, when he describes differences between the two pronunciations, he regularly speaks about phonetic shifts that influenced all components of Yiddish (including the Hebrew one), but not WHOLE HEBREW, which “resisted” these phonetic changes (Katz a:–). For several reasons, this opinion is erroneous. The phonetic change is regular, and consequently if we find several different reflexes in similar (or even identical) contexts, we must assert that most probably the source vowel in the words in question was not the same. In the Hebrew component of Yiddish we find numerous exceptional forms whose pronunciation does not conform to the TIBERIAN pointing. Moreover, historical documents reveal that the TIBERIAN system could not be the original vocalic system underlying Ashkenazic Hebrew (see section ..).
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The Hebrew component
reflexes of WHOLE HEBREW can be automatically obtained if one follows the following two global rules: . The same TIBERIAN grapheme should always be read in the same way in all words and in all positions (BN ); . Different TIBERIAN graphemes should all be read differently.48 Since at the moment these rules were introduced, the reflexes of all seven Tiberian full vowels (pataḥ , qameṣ, segol, ṣere, ḥ olem, shureq/qibbuṣ, ḥ ireq) were apparently already different in open syllables in words of Hebrew origin used in everyday speech, these reflexes were generalized and became applicable to closed syllables too.49 Once these general norms had become firmly established, during the subsequent stages of Ashkenazic history, WHOLE HEBREW phonetic reflexes would naturally follow various vocalic shifts that affected stressed vowels present in open syllables and were common to all components of Yiddish. As a result, in WHOLE HEBREW used in different dialectal areas we find exactly the same mergers as those that occurred in the vernacular language. For example, in Lithuania, reflexes of ṣere and ḥ olem merged into /ej/, exactly as did the reflexes of words from the German component whose MHG cognate forms had ei and ô, respectively. In PolY, reflexes of shureq and ḥ ireq merged into /i:/. A similar merger characterizes the reflexes of words from the German component whose MHG cognate forms had uo and ie, respectively. MERGED HEBREW, that is, words and expressions of Hebrew origin incorporated into the everyday idiom, has always existed throughout Ashkenazic history though the number of its elements was variable. Since a part of the lexicon in any language has a general tendency to disappear, one can easily conceive that throughout the centuries some words of Hebrew origin ceased to be used in the vernacular. The opposite development was more common: many new words were incorporated into Yiddish as loanwords from WHOLE HEBREW. Their phonetics were determined by the pronunciation norms peculiar to WHOLE HEBREW at the period when the borrowing took place. Once fully incorporated into the vernacular Ashkenazic speech, they would automatically undergo posttonic reduction, a phenomenon that represents a feature general in Yiddish. As a result, for numerous biblical words borrowed into the Hebrew component their phonetic forms in Yiddish varieties are predictable: we can construct their vowels knowing the TIBERIAN pointing of their etymons, the conventional rules of WHOLE HEBREW, with or without applying the rule of reduction, while their consonants are directly determined by the biblical spelling. We can also recognize some of these forms in cases where they have the reflex of the stressed vowel in closed syllables that in other Yiddish words normally appears in open syllables only. Moreover, in certain cases, a word that has existed in Yiddish for centuries can undergo normative changes that are due to WHOLE HEBREW rules because the latter are considered to correspond to a Hebrew that is “more correct,” socially prestigious.50 Numerous forms whose phonetics are due to WHOLE HEBREW, either relatively recent borrowings or resulting from renorming, appear in lexicons for various WY subdialects. For example, we find in WphY the following variants: aus/os ‘letter of the alphabet’ (Hebrew )אֹות, mokaum/mokem ‘place’ ()ָמקֹום, raush/rosh ‘head’ ()ֹראׁש, sholaum/shōlem‘peace’ () ׁ ָשלֹום, and tauv/tov/tof ‘good’ ()טֹובa,51 sheym/shem 48
The strict application of these rules characterizes only formal WHOLE HEBREW. In real life, other registers of Hebrew, those influenced in some way by the vernacular Yiddish forms, are used during the Torah reading, resulting in occasional deviations from the rules in question. For example, the pronunciation of ‘ ַי ֲעֹקבJacob’ can be Yankoyv instead of Yaakoyv, while ‘ ַמ ֲעֵׂשרtithe’ can be pronounced mayseyr instead of maaseyr (Idelsohn :); compare StY Yankef and mayser, respectively. 49 The only difference between realizations in WHOLE HEBREW of the same TIBERIAN grapheme in open and closed syllables, namely the short realization of qameṣ in closed syllables and long in open syllables (Katz a:), most likely results from a more recent innovation (see section ..). 50 See the sociolinguistic statistical analysis of this phenomenon in Katz :–. 51 All these phonetic forms are due to the WHOLE HEBREW rule applicable in the area of WphY that states that every ḥolem should be read as /au/. For the vernacular reflexes of Hebrew vowels in WphY, see Tables .–. in section ...
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Consonants
‘name’ () ׁ ֵשם, and khavruse/khafruse/khafrutse/kafrutse ‘society’ (Aramaic )ַחְברוָּתאa.52 In the above list, the first forms correspond to WHOLE HEBREW, while the others are either old vernacular forms used for centuries, or variants that are due to “natural” phonetic changes. WHOLE HEBREW is clearly responsible for WphY tarnegaul ‘cock’ ()ַּת ְר ְנגֹול, compare LitY tarnegl. A majority of AlsY and CzY lexemes appearing in Weill and Tirsch , respectively, and those present in PhilogLottus , Tendlau , and Weinberg are spelled according to WHOLE HEBREW. In this situation, any form whose phonetics do not conform to the rules of WHOLE HEBREW deserves particular attention. Generally, this reveals phenomena whose understanding may be important for the history of Yiddish. For example, for words spelled in Hebrew as ‘ הֹוָסָפהsupplement,’ ‘ הֹו ׁ ַשְעָנאwillow branch or twig (related to the Sukkoth holiday),’ and ‘ הֹו ָצָאהexpense’ certain Yiddish dictionaries (including Niborski and Vaisbrot ) give two possible pronunciations: hesofe/hoysofe, heshayne/ hoyshayne, and hetsoye/hoytsoe, respectively, all with stress on the penultimate syllable. The second forms in these pairs are most likely due to WHOLE HEBREW: in Yiddish, diphthongs in unstressed vowels are almost non-existent. Hebrew חֹובgave rise to StY khoyv ‘dept,’ ‘duty.’ In this word, ḥolem is present in a closed syllables and for that reason, a more appropriate form would be *khov. The pronunciation khof is indeed found in AlsY (Weiss :) and as a variant form in PolY.53 It corresponds to the older layer of the language, while khoyf is an innovation that appeared under the influence of WHOLE HEBREW.
.
CONSONANTS
.. Heth According to results of comparative analysis of Semitic languages, the letter heth ( )חcorresponds in the Bible to two different unvoiced fricative phonemes. In a majority of cases, it is /ḥ / (pharyngeal sound [ħ]), but sometimes it also represents /ḫ/ (velar sound [x], or maybe, uvular [å]). As seen in the Septuagint, this phonological dichotomy for the same Hebrew grapheme was still valid during the third century BCE in Alexandria.54 However, the additional Greek columns from the Hexapla show that in several Jewish centers of the eastern Mediterranea, both phonemes had merged.55 Since the Greek alphabet does not have any equivalent for [ħ] and [h], we cannot deduce the exact Hebrew pronunciation of that time based on the Greek transcriptions only. However, the fact that the standard technique in the Hexapla is to ignore heth, we can be sure that the reflex, if any, was weak and guttural (pharyngeal or glottal), but certainly not velar. The information about Sephardic communities shows that both during the medieval period (Garbell :–) and modern times, in areas dominated by Arabs, heth was pronounced as a pharyngeal consonant: a similar sound exists in Arabic too. Yet, in other areas—because of the absence of pharyngeals in languages of neighboring Gentiles—heth was never pronounced as a pharyngeal fricative. In modern times, for Sephardic Jews 52 The source used (Weinberg ) deals with specifically Jewish elements used in Westphalia during the first third of the twentieth century by Jews whose first language was German. As a result, formally speaking, they cannot be called Yiddish but rather belonging to JEWISH GERMAN (see section ..). In that language, an ethnolect of German, some elements were clearly of WY origin. However, some others could, in theory, be innovations that were not necessarily used in the past by native speakers of WY. 53 See BN. The author considers that the diphthong in khoyf is due to the analogy with the plural form khoyvis. 54 The results of the statistical analysis of names appearing in the Septuagint made by Wevers (:) are eloquent. They show that if we disregard all names with uncertain or unknown etymologies, then (a) for names with Proto-Semitic /ḥ /: are not rendered and three are rendered via å or Œ; (b) for seventy-one names with ProtoSemitic /ḫ/: nine are not rendered and sixty-two are rendered via å or Œ. See also Blau :. 55 Only one example of non-zero rendering of heth appears in the Secunda, while in the Three, such rendering is exceptional (Sáenz-Badillos :). See additional details in Steiner :–.
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The Hebrew component
from Turkey and the Balkans (Bunis ), heth is velar, exactly like another Hebrew consonant, khaf ()כ. In the Middle Ages, in the Iberian Peninsula, heth was rendered in the same way as another Hebrew consonant, the glottal he ()ה. The same merger between heth and he characterizes both southern and northern France (ZARFAT),56 and, as already mentioned in section ., also Ashkenazic Jews from the Rhineland (BNEY HES). Velar heth was rather exceptional. In addition to BNEY KHES from the German-speaking areas on the Danube, it was also valid for WEST CANAANITES from Bohemia. For example, several Old Czech glosses found in works by the thirteenth-century Bohemian rabbis Abraham ben Azriel57 and Isaac ben Moses58 both use mainly heth as the phonetic equivalent of Czech “ch” [x]. Another reference comes from ‘Ein ha-Qore by Jekuthiel ha-Kohen who writes that some Jews from CANAAN (that is, Slavic territories) conflate heth with khaf, whereas some German/Ashkenazic Jews pronounce heth as he.59 This Jewish scholar is thought to have lived during the first half of the thirteenth century. That he was Ashkenazic is beyond doubt because his vernacular given name was Zalman ()זלמן, which is of German origin (while Jekuthiel was his religious name).60 Most likely, he lived in the town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Franconia).61 For medieval Italy, the analysis is complicated by the fact that the Italian language has no sound for /x/. As a result, in major sources published by Cassuto () and Sermoneta () in which medieval Italian texts are written using Hebrew letters, neither heth nor khaf is found. However, in certain medieval Hebrew documents from Italy we find cases of khaf used instead of heth, implying the identical pronunciation of these consonants.62 56 For ZARFAT, examples of heth used to render aspirated /h/ are found in the Vitry Machzor compiled circa (WG :) as well as in a document written at the beginning of the fourteenth century in Burgundy (Loeb :). In a document from Champagne from the first half of the thirteenth century, one finds cases of heth omitted (Banitt .:). This fact clearly testifies to the fact of a guttural rather than velar pronunciation of this consonant. Note that in various transcriptions of biblical Mordecai ( )ָמ ְר ֳדַּכיfound in both northern and southern France khaf /x/ is never omitted but expressed via “c,” “q,” “ch,” or “k” (compare Seror :–). Joseph Yuspa from Frankfurt (– ) provides a discussion of the glottal pronunciation of heth in medieval northern France and the Rhineland (see Katz b:). In southern France, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we find references to variants of Isaac ( ִיְצָחקin the Bible) in which heth is omitted: איצקand ( יצקBeider :). See additional references concerning France in TG . 57 ( חבושתישצוOld Czech chvostišcˇ e ‘broom’), ַחַלַסהa( רוְסקוOld Czech rozkochalasa ‘(she) had a good time, was delighted’) (Urbach :IV:). 58 ( בילחאCzech belcha, Old Czech blcha ‘flea’) and ( פדוחאCzech pazucha ‘armpit’) (Markon :, ). 59 See Yarkoni .:. 60 The etymology of Zalman is covered in detail in Beider :–. In his poems, Jekuthiel places the letters of Jekuthiel Kohen and Zalman ha-Kohen as acrostics (Yarkoni .:, , ). His coreligionists called him Zalman ha-Naqdan, that is, ‘the vocalizer’ as noted by Elia Levita (Ginsburg :). Yarkoni (.:, note ) points out that actually he used the word ‘ נֹוְּק ִדיםthose who point’or the expression ‘ ַחְכֵמי־ַהִּנּקוּדsages of vocalization’ but never the word naqdan (( ) ַנְק ָדןMRPC). 61 Elia Levita writes that he has heard that Jekuthiel/Zalman was from Prague (Ginsburg :). As discovered by Manaster Ramer (MRPC), in the collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the British Library (, Fol.a) we find, however, a mention of two short treatises, one of them dealing with accents and another with the letters shin and sin; both date from the thirteenth century. On the lower margin of the page, one finds the name of the author: Rabbi Zalman ha-Naqdan from Rothenburg ()רוטנבורק. It is difficult to believe that two people with the nickname Zalman haNaqdan had lived in Germany during the thirteenth century. The list of Jewish victims from Rothenburg murdered by the Rindfleisch mobs in (Salfeld :–) provides additional significant corroboration for this hypothesis. This list covers more than people and a few of them are of Kohen origin: in addition to only five others we find here the families of Jacob ben Jekuthiel and Meir ben Jekuthiel. The latter was an eminent scholar and one of the two rabbis of the community; he died together with a pupil. If we take into account the dates, the small proportion of Kohanim in the Jewish population, the fact that Ashkenazic scholars often formed dynasties, and the relative rarity of the given name Jekuthiel in Germany at that time (see Beider ), then it becomes clear that the odds are high that the Meir in question (and, perhaps, Jacob too) was a son of the author of ‘Ein ha-Qore. 62 See examples in Ryzhik : where it is also stated that during the ghetto period (that is, starting with the sixteenth century) both heth and khaf corresponded to the same palatal fricative sound. Freedman (:) concludes from his analysis of texts from the sixteenth century that in Italy heth was pronounced as an aspirate, exactly as khaf, while he was not pronounced.
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Consonants
We have no direct testimony concerning medieval Greece. However, in Greek texts in Hebrew characters compiled during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Greek letter å is transcribed via khaf ()ֿכ, not via heth.63 This implies that, most likely, the Greek tradition was different from the Bohemian one. For an analysis of origins of Yiddish, the most important question dealing with heth concerns the history of the medieval dichotomy between the two groups of Ashkenazic Jews: BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. The fact that they pronounced heth as /h/ and /x/, respectively, is explicitly mentioned in several works by Jewish authors.64 Maharil (circa –) contrasted the children of the Rhine (as a part of BNEY HES) to children of Austria (as a part of BNEY KHES) saying that the pronunciation in Regensburg is similar to that in Austria. In Terumat ha-deshen by Austrian rabbi Israel Isserlin (–), we find a question (#) about the correct spelling in divorce documents of several given names (יוכל, יכנט, )מיכל, with the choice between khaf ( )כand heth, in Austria and other lands where these two consonants are pronounced in the same way. He suggested using khaf in order for Rhenish Jews to escape any confusion. Joseph ben Moses, the author of LekY and a pupil of Israel Isserlin, also spoke about the distinction between Rhenish and Austrian Jews. From the fact that he himself pronounced heth as [h], one can conclude that his native town of Höchstädt an der Donau (Swabia) was inside the BNEY HES area. Moses Minz, a rabbi from western Germany who was a contemporary of Israel Isserlin, relates Saxon Jews to the /x/-pronunciation tradition, though in this context the notion of “Saxony”—a province in eastern Germany or Low Saxony—is not defined precisely (Domb :). The most recent explicit mention of BNEY KHES comes from an epigraph to a prayer book printed in Prague in / that applies this term to Bohemian and Polish Jews (Brann :). Additional information concerning the BNEY HES / BNEY KHES dichotomy can be extracted from indirect sources of several kinds. The first references come from Ashkenazic Hebrew manuscripts. Eldar (:, ) studied prayer books compiled before the mid-fourteenth century. Almost all of them correspond to the WESTERN rite and only one to the EASTERN. In the first group of documents, heth is glottal, interchangeable with he. In the last book, dated from the second part of the thirteenth century, it is velar, interchangeable with khaf. This information defines one of the earliest mentions of BNEY KHES, though it does not provide any geographic precision concerning their localization (Germany, Austria, or Slavic countries). The famous Jewish polymath known as Elia Levita (– ), born in Ipsheim (Middle Franconia), was of BNEY HES. This can be seen, for example, from his rhyme of גלח: מכלה: ַבלע, presumably [gálə] : [məxálə] : [bálə], in the poem Ha-mavdil () and his explicit mention in Tish of the zero articulation of certain internal heth by ‘Ashkenazic/German Jews’ (M. Weinreich :–). The author of PuV, either (most likely) Elia Levita or one of his pupils, was also of BNEY HES (Timm and Gehlen :). Documents and glosses written by Ashkenazic Jews in their vernacular language(s) represent another important indirect source. It appears that all the earliest sources of this kind (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) known to us were actually compiled by BNEY HES: SSC (Timm :), CC (TG ), Le (Heide :, Röll .:), R (Heide :, ), R (Röll .:), and Be (Röll .:). As discussed in section .., they come from the following German dialectal areas, respectively: Swabia or Switzerland, Alsace, (Rhine or Eastern) Franconia, Switzerland, Bavaria, or Eastern Franconia. Their belonging to BNEY HES follows from the fact that heth appears in place of MHG (word- or syllable-)initial or intervocalic h in these manuscripts. On the other hand, for the scribe of H, the pronunciation of heth was clearly velar. Indeed, in his list of Hebrew
63 64
See De Lange :, :. References to various Jewish authors mentioned in this section are taken from Güdemann :–.
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The Hebrew component
letters, its scribe transcribes the name of the final khaf ( )ךas ָחףthus implying the phonetic equivalence in his pronunciation of khaf and heth. Some information relevant to our problem can also be extracted from works of early Christian Hebraists. Henricus de Hassia (alias Heinrich Heynbuch von Langenstein) was born circa in a small Hessian town. He studied and taught in Paris until the beginning of s, but from the mid-s he worked in Vienna where in he prepared a work on Hebrew. The names of letters ה, ח, and כare spelled by him as he, ches, and chaf, respectively (Walde :). Most likely this way of pronouncing Hebrew was learned by him in Vienna, from local (converted?) Jews who were clearly representatives of BNEY KHES. Another testimony about the language of BNEY KHES comes from the tractate Modus scribendi secundum hebraycos aut kaldeos, by an anonymous author from the second half of the fifteenth century.65 He calls the same three consonants he, hes, and haf, respectively, but says explicitly that the first consonant was pronounced as German ‘h,’ while the two last as German ‘ch’ (Walde :). The initial h (and not ch) in the names of these two letters is due to the absence of the initial “Ch” in German. The bishop of Brandenburg in –, Stephan Bodeker, provides two names used by contemporary Jews for the letter heth: ches in “lower lands” (most likely his own country) and hes in “upper lands” (southern German-speaking provinces?) (Walde :).66 In the names of Hebrew vowels that start with heth (Walde :–), he clearly follows the pronunciation of BNEY KHES: chirrik for ḥ ireq ( ִחי ִריקor )ִחיֶרקand cholim for ḥ olem ()חֹוֶלם. Data based on BNEY HES informants appear in works of certain other Christian authors. In the description of Hebrew made during the second half of s by the knight Arnold von Harff, a pilgrim from Cologne to Jerusalem, we find the letters חand הcalled heth and hee, respectively. As noted above, by itself, the name of the first of these letters does not necessarily reveal its glottal pronunciation. It is the analysis of certain other words whose Latin transcription von Harff presents that shows that he learned them from BNEY HES who lived at that time in Jerusalem: Note the absence of any rendition for heth in meela ‘salt’ ( )ֶמַלחand maritz ‘bathhouse’ ( ))ֵּבית( ֶמ ְרָחץand the presence of intervocalic h (and not ch) in lehem ‘bread’ ()ֶלֶחםa.67 In his book published in , the theologian and humanist Conrad Pellicanus (–), or Konrad Pelikan, designates the letters חand ךas ‘hes’ and ‘chaff,’ respectively (Walde :). These spellings correlate with the fact that he lived in areas populated by BNEY HES: Alsace and Switzerland. Johannes Böschenstein (western Germany) writes in that both he and heth are pronounced as [h]. He learned Hebrew from the Jewish scholar Moses Möllin from the Franconian town of Weißenburg (see Frakes :, ). The Dominican theologian Peter Nigri, born in Bohemia circa in a German family called Schwarz (of which Nigri is a Latinized form) did his studies not only in Germany but also in the universities of Montpellier (southern France) and Salamanca (Spain). It was in Spain that he learned Hebrew following lessons together with Jewish children, although he was an adult. Once his education was finished, he returned to Germany and lived mainly in the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Regensburg, where he also learned Hebrew spoken by German Jews. During the last ten years of his life (he died circa ), Nigri went several times to various other places in Germany (including Frankfurt, Worms, and Nürnberg), often with special ecclesiastic missions, preaching to local Jews
65
Later in this chapter, this work is quoted as Modus scribendi. On “upper lands” and “lower lands” see footnote below. The text by von Harff is taken from Groote :–. It includes the Roman alphabet transcription of various Hebrew words and their translation into Latin. The Hebrew spelling of these words that are regularly provided in this chapter when quoting from von Harff mainly represent hypotheses by Manaster Ramer (MRPC); a few of them appear in Gumpertz :. The factors that demonstrate the Ashkenazic origin of von Harff ’s informants will be discussed later. 66 67
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and challenging rabbis to a disputation (Walde :–). For the questions discussed in the present chapter, Peter Nigri remains apart from all the other Christian authors discussed earlier. Knowledgeable in both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions of Hebrew pronunciation, he sometimes (but not always) specifies in his writings that this or that feature is peculiar to Spain or Germany. Moreover, contrary to the aforementioned authors, he was an important theoretician and some of the information provided in his main works (written in and ) should be considered more like “ideal” schemes constructed by a scholar with linguistic interests and influenced by norms stipulated by certain rabbis rather than direct testimonies about the languages of Jews contemporary to him. In his transcriptions, he uses the same sign “h” for three Hebrew letters, not only הand חbut also ע. On the other hand, he systematically uses “ch” for ך. He calls these four letters he, het, hain, and chaf respectively (Walde :). Nigri explains the difference between the three sounds designated by him via “h” in the following way: (i) הcorresponds to soft /h/ said from the upper part of the mouth; (ii) חshould be read from the chest with full breath; (iii) עis to be pronounced from the throat (Walde :–). The glottal character of heth, described by him, is therefore, evident and consequently the description of the normative Hebrew pronunciation made by him is closer to the language of BNEY HES than that of BNEY KHES. Onomastic data provide the best insight for our topic. Numerous manuscripts compiled by Germanspeaking Christians make reference to Jewish given names of Hebrew origin whose original spelling includes heth. If this letter is transcribed via “ch” or “k” then we can be sure we are dealing with the velar character of heth. The guttural pronunciation follows from the spelling “h” in a position other than initial or the absence of any consonant in place of heth. Several Hebrew spellings of names of German origin can also be useful. If we find heth used for MHG h then we can also be sure that heth was guttural. Onomastic analysis shows that the only forms typical of BNEY HES appear in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in western communities such as Frankfurt and Worms; compare Binhes, Bynnes, and Pinnes for biblical ‘ ִּפי ְנָחסPhinehas,’ female צימאderived from the Hebrew ‘ ִׂשְמָחהjoy.’ On the other hand, the only particular BNEY KHES forms are known for the same period in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper Saxony, Braunschweig, Brandenburg, Poland, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that is, a large part of Central and Eastern Europe that was populated at that time by Jews whose vernacular language was at that period either Germanic or Slavic. Among examples are male and female forms derived from Hebrew ‘joy’ (such as Symcha(h), Zymcha, and Симха), Pinkas, Pinnekatz, Pincus, and Pincas ‘Phinehas,’ Nachman ()ַנְחָמן, Nachem and Nachim, derived either from ‘ ַנחוּםNahum’ or from ‘ ְמַנֵחםMenahem,’ Chanko ‘Hanukkah’ ()ֲח ֻנ ּ ָכה, Nechama and Nichama ()ֶנָחָמה, Petzak and Peszak ‘Pesach’ ()ֶּפַסח, Ghanoch ‘Enoch’ ()ֲחנֹוְך, Cheskl and Chazkel ‘Ezekiel’ ()ְיֶחְזְקֵאל. The last of these references comes from Silesia () and is the earliest known direct evidence of the velar pronunciation of heth in Europe. Thuringia represents a transitional zone. In documents from the fourteenth century from Erfurt, its capital city, one finds, typical BNEY KHES like Nachman and Nachym, Elchanan and Chanan ‘Elhanan’ ()ֶאְלָח ָנן, Ychil ‘Jehiel’ ( )ְיִחי ֵאלliving alongside definite BNEY HES like Bynhes/Pinaz ‘Phinehas.’ Actually, the heterogenous roots of the local community are made explicit by indications of the towns of origin of various Jews that are commonly found in the sources in question.68 As a result, these names do not allow us to establish the pronunciation of heth that was dominant at that period in Erfurt. Franconia is mainly characterized by the [h]-forms. The earliest example is Zimea (Würzburg, ), from the Hebrew ‘ ִׂשְמָחהjoy.’ Another variant of the same name, צימהא, with he instead of heth, appears among the names of victims of the Rindfleisch pogroms (). In the same source,
68 For example, Elchanan/Chanan, Nachman, and Nachym all originated from Upper Saxony, Bohemia, or Silesia, while Bynhes was from Low Saxony.
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The Hebrew component
one also finds female names ריכחיטand ליבחייטthat correspond to Richheit and Liebheit borrowed from German Christians. Both of them use heth to express [h] in the MHG suffix -heit. A number of BNEY HES forms are found in Nürnberg, the southernmost community of Franconia: הינאfor biblical ‘ ַחָּנהHannah’ (), Iczek ‘Isaac’ ( ִיְצָחקa)69 and Nehmi ‘Nehemiah’ () ְנֶחְמָיה, both in . During the fourteenth century, one also finds several references to Pinher/Pyner, most likely derived from ‘ ִּפי ְנָחסPhinehas.’ However, in the same city we also find two unique BNEY KHES forms known in Franconia: ( בלחינט) and Channan ().70 In small communities of neighboring Upper Palatinate (a part of Bavaria), we find guttural heth; compare אדלחייטfor Adelheit (Berching, ) and Hedyum for Hebrew ‘ ַחִּייםHayyim’ (Weiden, ). In Regensburg, the principal city of the area, we also find several /h/-forms of Hayyim (Atschim/Hatschim, –) as well as Rehel for ‘ ָרֵחלRachel’ () contrasting with the [x]-form Nachem (). Moreover, as mentioned earlier in this section, we have a direct testimony from the beginning of the fifteenth century about Regensburg’s Jews being BNEY KHES at that time. Consequently, the exceptional occurrence of Rehel most likely corresponds to a recent migrant from the BNEY HES territory.71 The reference to Atschim may be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, it can be taken as evidence of the [h]-pronunciation of heth in Regensburg at the end of the thirteenth century, while the [x]-pronunciation would be established there later, after a renorming. Alternatively, this given name may belong not to a local Jew but rather to a migrant from an area where heth was pronounced as [h]. The velar pronunciation of heth was gradually established in the former BNEY HES territories during the sixteenth century.72 Information given in works by Christian Hebraists may illustrate this statement. Paulus Fagius (, Swabia) and Elias Schadäus (, Alsace) call the letter חcheth and chet, respectively. From this spelling, it is clear that both already associated it with [x]. Similarly, Buxtorf (who lived in western Germany and Switzerland) always transcribes heth as ‘ch’ in his book published in .73 In modern WY, rare relics of the [h]-pronunciation are primarily found in AlsY where hanige ‘Hanukkah’ (Hebrew )ֲח ֻנָּכהis used alongside khanige (Zuckerman :). Several traces are also found in the corpus of traditional EY names. Among them are female Sime ()ִׂשְמָחה and (rare) Rele ‘Rachel.’74
A phonetically identical form, Iczeck, is known in in Swabia and used for a migrant from Alsace (GJ ). 70 In the former name, heth cannot correspond to /h/: it is the first letter of the German dialectal word cognate with MHG kint ‘child’; compare another female name found in the same list from Nürnberg: ( אדלכינטMHG Adelkint). The /x/-pronunciation of heth in בלחינטcan also be deduced from other spelling variants of the same name: Belechinda (Würzburg) and ( בילכינטNürnberg). Channan (with initial /x/) represents a hypocorism of a biblical name, either ֶא ְלָח ָנן ‘Elhanan’ or ‘ יֹוָח ָנןYohanan, John.’ 71 Note the presence of /e/ in the first syllable of Hedyum and Rehel that testifies to the fact of E-EFFECT, another idiosyncrasy of BNEY HES (see section ..). See also the discussion of (H)atschim and other related forms in section ... 72 The word “masar” appearing in in a document from Frankfurt for ( ַמֲחזֹורStY makhzer) ‘prayer book for the Jewish holidays’ (M. Weinreich :) represents one of most recent references to the guttural (or zero) pronunciation of heth. 73 See the original texts in question in Frakes :, , . 74 These two names appear in the list of onomastic relics of BNEY HES given in M. Weinreich :–. Other elements of the list—StY Henekh, Ayzik, and Itsek—are doubtful: we cannot be sure that they were really inherited from BNEY HES. The form Henoch was used in German along with Enoch as Christian forms of this biblical name, and so Henekh could be of German origin. Ayzik is clearly derived not directly from the Hebrew form of Isaac but from Isaak/Isaac, the German form of this biblical name (WG :, :, Beider :). Consequently, here the pronunciation of heth by medieval Ashkenazic Jews is irrelevant. The popularity of Itsek/Itsik in Eastern Europe can also be due to the existence of the Slavic diminutive suffixes -ek and -ik. Moreover, these forms can be (at least partly) due to the non-existence of the consonantal cluster /tsx/ in Slavic languages and its simplification to /ts/. As a result, EY 69
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Consonants
If we summarize this information, we may observe that during the fourteenth century the only regions from German-speaking areas for which we have information about the velar pronunciation of heth by local communities in the Middle Ages are Austria, the town of Regensburg, eastern Germany, and Braunschweig.75 Nothing is known, however, about the preceding period even for these regions.76 It appears that for both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES three Hebrew letters ה, ח, and כgave rise to two sounds, the pronunciation of the middle one merging with either that of the first (in the BNEY HES area) or the last (in the BNEY KHES area). As a result, if we take into account only the sounds in question, the phonemic systems of both Ashkenazic groups were similar; both had /h/ and /x/. Since Hebrew was not a vernacular tongue, the decision to pronounce a particular letter in a specific way might directly result from standards for the WHOLE HEBREW pronunciation introduced by rabbinical authorities. In theory, we cannot exclude the possibility that BNEY KHES in Germanspeaking territories would originally pronounce heth as a /h/ and their /x/ results from a renorming.77 Contrary to Katz (b:), there are several reasons why such a renorming would not necessarily lead to the creation of numerous hypercorrect forms. Firstly, at the time of this renorming the number of words with heth in the Jewish vernacular German-based language could be small, and words that were not vernacular at the time would more likely end up being pronounced correctly. Secondly, we know that the velar pronunciation of heth was gradually established in the West during the sixteenth century, that is, not immediately after the Black Death—when numerous massacres were perpetrated in the area of BNEY HES—but about two centuries later. Such chronology implies that there is no particular historical reason to follow Katz’s assumption that the language of BNEY HES simply died out and was replaced by the Danubian language. In the Rhine area the velar pronunciation of heth clearly results from a renorming. We find, nevertheless, during the last centuries, a very small number of hypercorrect forms in that area such as AlsY khespet ‘eulogy’ ( )ֶהְס ֵּפדand lekhiper ‘to the contrary’ ()ְלֶהֶפְך, both noted in Catane :. Consequently, a similar process could, in principle, have taken place in the Danube area a few centuries earlier, also without necessarily yielding numerous hypercorrect forms. Another illustration of the same idea can be found in the history of the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew. As discussed at the beginning of this section, in the medieval documents from Christian Spain, heth was clearly a glottal sound often interchangeable with he. In the modern Judezmo (Ottoman Empire) pronunciation heth is invariably [x], while he is not pronounced. This means that at some point in Sephardic history a renorming of the pronunciation Itsek can, in theory, be due to the convergence of several independent sources, one local (note the form Hiczak in western Poland circa ) and another inherited from BNEY HES. 75 This information conforms to the idea that another cultural dichotomy, that between ָהֶעְל יֹוןa‘ ָּגִל ילthe upper region’ and ַהַּתְחּתֹוןa‘ ָּגִל ילthe lower region,’ was internal to the BNEY HES area. Indeed, Jacob Weil, a German rabbi from the first half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the first area encompassed the part of the Rhineland that lies south of Koblenz, plus Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria, excepting Regensburg, while the second area was situated north of Koblenz (Katz b:–). Though the distinction in question was primarily juridical, some linguistic differences existed between the two areas as well. For example, Moses Minz, a contemporary of Jacob Weil, discusses how to spell the third consonant in the Jewish male given name Zelikman: in ‘the lower region’ it should be with kaf ([ )כx], while in ‘the upper region’ it should be with qof ([ )קk] (Güdemann :). Here the distinction concerns the German component of the Jewish vernacular languages. It corresponds directly to the dialectal peculiarities of the German dialects spoken by Christians in the corresponding provinces; compare Middle Low German selich/salich ‘blessed’ and its MHG equivalent sælic/sælec. 76 For Bohemia, we know that the [x]-pronunciation has been uninterrupted since at least the thirteenth century, but this applies to Czech-speaking Jews. During this period, we know that Jews of this province began shifting from Old Czech to a vernacular language based on German. For Silesia, the velar heth is recognized since the start of the thirteenth century. However, for that area too we have no proof that local Jews were German-speaking at that time. 77 The merging of /h/ and /x/ into a sound spelled “ch” in the area of Central Bavaria (which covers northern Austria and southern Bavaria) during the second half of the thirteenth century (PMG ) could also be a factor in the definitive choice of the phonetic value of heth by local Jews.
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The Hebrew component
of heth took place, which would have been similar to the renorming for the history of Ashkenazic Hebrew. Yet, we know of no hypercorrect forms in Judezmo. The motivation of Ashkenazic Jews for starting to pronounce heth as a velar consonant (or to see this kind of pronunciation as more “correct”) is not totally clear. Most important seems to be the fact that, since heth occurs in numerous words of the Hebrew component in various environments, in many words its actual pronunciation would tend towards zero, especially in intervocalic and syllable-final positions. Several German phonetic shifts could also be important for our topic. BNEY HES started to pronounce heth as [x] before [t] much earlier than in other positions: here they followed the shift ht > cht in German.78 For Christians, word-final MHG h had also often turned into ch [x]. The cases of the [x]-reflex for heth in syllable-final position in documents written in the twelfth century by certain BNEY HES79 may be related to this phenomenon. In the presence of the alternative method—offered by BNEY KHES—of reading heth the same way independently of the context, the articulation by BNEY HES from western German-speaking territories, inconsistent and often not pronouncing heth at all, had every chance of being considered “worse” than that of BNEY KHES. This consideration was particularly important in the environment, typical of Jewish scholars of that time, in which there were so many attempts to re-establish the “correct” pronunciation of Hebrew (MRPC). Onomastic data show that among Jews who lived during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the BNEY KHES area, a large percentage belonged to families that originated in the Rhineland among BNEY HES.80 They brought to the Danube area a significant number of given names. The newcomers, nevertheless, did not change the local pronunciation of heth; quite on the contrary, they adopted it themselves. Indeed, a number of given names used by Rhenish Jews include this letter: ְנֶחְמ ָיה ‘Nehemiah,’ ‘ ְמ ַנֵחםMenahem,’ ‘ ַח ָוּהEve,’ ‘ ָרֵחלRachel,’ ‘ ִּפי ְנָחסPhinehas,’ etc. However, we do not find in Eastern and Central Europe in later centuries any trace of **Ne(e)mye and **Menaem/ Meneem that would be descendants of the BNEY HES forms for the first two names in this list. Rele ‘Rachel’81 and Pines ‘Phinehas’82 were rather exceptional, especially the latter. In Poland, the form Eve started to be used by Jews rather recently (most likely during the nineteenth century only) and there is no doubt that it represents a Yiddishized form of Polish Ewa. Again, we do not find any hypercorrect form. See feature {C} in section ... In the translation of Magnificat we find such forms—mentioned at the beginning of section ..—as ruech and samyech (with ‘ch’ for heth in word-final position), as well as rechmaf, with ‘ch’ in preconsonantal position. The author clearly belonged to BNEY HES because of the presence in the same text of (i) numerous forms with E-EFFECT (including all words above, see section ..), (ii) several words with intervocalic heth expressed via h and not ch such as mispahoz ש ּ ָפחֹות ׁ ְ ‘ ִמfamilies, generations’ and iannihum ‘ ָיִנָחםhe will cause them to lie down.’ For several reasons, German phonetic shifts mentioned in this paragraph could affect heth but not he. Firstly, in Hebrew there are very few cases of he in the syllable-final position, while heth is commonly present there. Secondly, for the velar pronunciation of he there is no parallel in other Jewish traditions of the pronunciation of Hebrew (contrary to heth). Consequently, even if at some point there was a tendency for he to be pronounced as [x] in certain environments (due to the influence of German), the glottal character of he had the opportunity to be restored later in a normative way. 80 See Beider :– and section ... 81 The female given name spelled Rech(e)lin in Latin characters and רכליןin Hebrew characters appears in numerous documents from the BNEY HES area dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For several reasons, this phonetic form [rex(e)lin] is more likely to be derived from Rachel, the German form of this biblical name, rather than from the original Hebrew ָרֵחל. Firstly, note that this hypocorism does not use heth. Secondly, in the variant Rechelin, the consonant expressed via ‘ch’ is intervocalic, the position in which for BNEY HES no other example of the velar rendition of heth is known during this early period. Thirdly, Moses Minz writes that people around him do not realize that רעכליןis derived from ( רחלDomb :). This statement is easily understandable for BNEY HES for whom the Hebrew form gave rise to Re(h)le, while the Christian form yielded Rech(e)lin (MRPC). 82 In WphY, we also find a common noun pines ‘fool,’ presumably derived from the same given name (Weinberg :). Also note that Bynhes/Pinaz is mentioned in the s in Erfurt, the capital city of Thuringia (Süssmann :, ). 78 79
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Consonants
TABLE . Pronunciation of heth Period (source)
Jewish traditions with distinct pronunciations Pharyngeal [ħ]
Glottal [h]
Velar [x]
rd century BCE (Septuagint)
Partly (majority of words)
Partly (minority)
nd century CE (Hexapla)
Yes
No
Medieval
Sephardic (Arabic countries)
Sephardic (Christian areas), southern French, ZARFATIC, BNEY HES
WEST CANAANIC, BNEY KHES, Italian
Modern83
Persian (partly), Sephardic (Arabic countries), western Yemenite
Persian (partly), eastern Yemenite
Ashkenazic, Sephardic (Ottoman Empire), Italian, Georgian
Table . presents a summary of the information given in this section {c}.
.. Sibilants Biblical Hebrew had several sibilants: unvoiced shin ׁש/š/, sin ׂש/ś/, samekh ס/s/, voiced zayin ז/z/, and emphatic tsadi צ/ṣ/ (Blau :). Greek translations such as the Septuagint and “the Three” columns of the Hexapla all use zeta (Ç) for zayin and sigma () for the four other sibilants.84 From this, we cannot be certain that shin, sin, samekh, and tsadi were pronounced identically by Jews who wrote these texts. Even if all of them or at least some of them were phonetically distinct, they could be rendered via the same Greek letter just because the Greek alphabet had no grapheme to express these differences. In the Middle Ages, important differences existed in the pronunciation of the Hebrew consonants in question in various Jewish communities. A marriage settlement (, Asia Minor) written in Hebrew and including several transcriptions of Greek words regularly has samekh in place of Greek sigma /s/, though shin is also used. Yet, another document of the same kind (twelfth century) mainly uses shin and only once samekh in this context.85 No mention of tsadi is made in these two sources: for the transcription of Greek, this Hebrew grapheme was not needed. Bohemian Jewish scholars from the thirteenth century generally use shin for [š], samekh for [s], and tsadi for [ts], all three sounds in question being present in their vernacular language. Among the examples are: חבושתישצו for Old Czech chvoštišcˇ e ‘broom,’ ַחַלַסהa רוְסקוfor Old Czech rozkochalasa ‘(she) had a good time, was delighted,’ אֹוְסֵביִטיִטיַסאrelated to Old Czech osvietiti ‘to light’;86 אשקרובדאfor Old Czech škrovada, skrovada ‘frying pan,’ ( וישcompare Czech veš ‘louse’), ( סרובדקאcompare Czech 83 For the modern pronunciation of Hebrew, the general information appearing in this chapter comes from Morag , with details concerning Judezmo taken from Bunis . 84 Consider the following examples from the Septuagint: ¯ºÆÇÆæ for ‘ ֶאִליֶעֶזרEliezer’ and ‘ ֶא ְלָע ָזרEleazar,’ ¯ºØÆØ for ‘ ֱאִלי ָׁשעElisha,’ ı ø for שְמעֹון ׁ ִ ‘Simon,’ ÆææÆ for ש ָרה ׂ ָ ‘Sarah,’ çøæÆ for ‘ ִצּפֹ ָרהZipporah,’ and Æ øŒ for ‘ ָצדֹוקZadok.’ For the Hexapla, see Sáenz-Badillos :. 85 See De Lange :, , ; :. 86 All these glosses appear in Arugat ha-Bosem by Abraham ben Azriel (see Urbach .IV:).
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The Hebrew component
syrovátka ‘whey’), קרבושקאfor Old Czech kraboška ‘mask,’ ( גוביציcompare Czech hubici ‘sponges’), מקוביצהfor Old Czech makovicě ‘poppy head,’ ( נוגביציcompare nogavice ‘trouser leg’).87 In thirteenth-century Italy, both shin and samekh were pronounced /s/ and were phonetically different from tsadi.88 In medieval Christian Spain, the situation was different (Garbell :–). The letter tsadi was usually rendered there via “ç” or “z” and its pronunciation was in a state of transition between the affricate [ts] and the fricative [s]. In the main part of the country, Spanish sources invariably render shin with “s” and the most plausible pronunciation is /s/. In areas influenced by the Catalonian language, Jewish names having shin in their Hebrew spelling use “s,” “z,” or “ç.” For southern France, texts by David Kimhi (–) and several other authors include numerous words in which shin remains for Occitan /s/, while tsadi likely designates an affricate.89 Yet the same scholar mocks his coreligionists from ZARFAT for their inability to pronounce /š/.90 In manuscripts from medieval ZARFAT shin and sin correspond to /s/, while tsadi is realized as /ts/.91 In medieval Christian sources dealing with Ashkenazic Jews, we find numerous affricate reflexes for tsadi—spelled ‘z,’ ‘tz,’ ‘c,’ or ‘cz’—for both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. For example, all Christian authors mentioned in section .. write the name of the letter tsadi with one of these graphemes. Among other examples from von Harff are: “betzim” ‘eggs’ ( )ֵּביִציםand “hometz” ‘vinegar’ (חֶמץ ֹ ). The diacritical sign qameṣ ( ָקֶמץ/ )ָקֵמץis called camecz by Henricus de Hassia, qamez by Nigri, and cometz by Pellicanus (Walde :, , ). Onomastic data confirm this rule. For example, in sources from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries the biblical name ִצּפֹ ָר הis mentioned as Cyppure in Cologne and Zipora in Alsace, while ָצדֹוקappears as Zadoc in Alsace and Czadak in Silesia. Today, the affricate realization for tsadi is peculiar to Ashkenazic and Italian pronunciation. Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire mainly pronounce it as [s]. Table . presents a summary of the information available for tsadi {c}.92 TABLE . Pronunciation of tsadi Period
Jewish traditions with distinct pronunciations [ṣ]
Medieval
Sephardic (Arabic countries)
Modern
Sephardic (Arabic countries), Yemenite
[s]
[ts] WEST CANAANIC, Sephardic (Christian areas), BNEY KHES, BNEY HES, southern French, ZARFATIC, Italian92
Sephardic (Ottoman Empire), Persian
Ashkenazic, Italian
87 All from Or Zarua by Isaac ben Moses (see Markon passim). Also note the Slavic female names סלווא (*Slava) and *( סירקאSirka/Serka) in mid-fourteenth-century Brandenburg. 88 Italian texts in Hebrew characters published by Sermoneta () include numerous cases of both shin and samekh being interchangeable graphemes for transcribing Italian /s/, for example, singular ‘ פשיאוןpassion,’ but plural ( פסיאוניp.); compare Italian singular passione and plural passioni. See examples of use of tsadi to express the consonant (affricate) of the Italian letter combination “cia” in Sermoneta :–. During the following period, /š/ (shin) and /s/ (sin, samekh) were clearly distinguished (Ryzhik :). 89 See, for example, Kimchi :, , , , (all with shin), , (both with tsadi); Neubauer and Meyer (:–). 90 See Banitt .:. 91 See Timm :, Banitt .:, Banitt :, Lambert-Brandin :VII. 92 This medieval distribution shows that Weinreich’s consideration (WG :) of the affricate realization of tsadi as being due to the Babylonian influence is erroneous.
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Consonants
The affricate [ts] rendering of the initial samekh or sin {c} is peculiar to Ashkenazic Jews only and can be connected directly to the absence of initial /s/ in many German dialects. Nigri uses zsamech or zamech for samekh, and zegol for the name of the diacritical sign segol (( )ֶסּגֹולWalde :–). Von Harff writes tzus ‘horse’ ( )סוּסand zatan ‘devil’ ()ָׂשָטן. In the Rhineland and Franconia, we find at the end of the thirteenth century female given names that either represent hypocorisms of Sara ( ) ָׂש ָרהsuch as צריט, צרליף, צערלין, and צורליןor are derived from Simha ( )ִׂשְמָחהsuch as צימהא, צימחא, and צימלין. In the late fourteenth century, Zara and Czara ‘Sara’ are mentioned in Vienna, while a man called Zadia ‘Saadiah’ ( )ַסַע ְדָיהappears in Regensburg. The chronology and the frequency of the above references, as well as certain other linguistic and historical factors imply a western origin of this phenomenon. This means that it appeared in the area of BNEY HES before spreading to the region of BNEY KHES.93 Several forms related to the above female names (Tserle, Tsirle, Tsiml, Tsimke) survive in modern EY. In common nouns of Hebrew origin, this effect was particularly in evidence in Central Europe, namely in CzY and EGY. Examples are also found in northern Germany and the western part of PolY.94 Similar forms are also well known in WphY and SwY.95 However, apart from given names (brought by migrants from other areas), initial /ts/ for samekh or sin is not known either in EY or DuY. Most likely, instances that existed in the past were “corrected” (renormed) based on the Hebrew spelling of the corresponding words and also because of the existence of the initial /s/ in the vernacular languages—Slavic for EY and Dutch for DuY—of the local Gentile majority. A different pronunciation of shin by medieval BNEY HES and BNEY KHES represents an important element separating these two medieval Jewish groups. The confusion between [s] and [š] characterized the speech of the former group: Jekuthiel ha-Kohen speaks about this confusion among Ashkenazic Jews who pronounce heth as he.96 As pointed out by Katz (b:), the actual absence of [š] in the pronunciation by BNEY HES can easily explain the well-known fact that a single grapheme שwas used for both historical [s] and [š] in texts written by Jews in medieval western Germany using the German-based Jewish vernacular language.97 Most convincing arguments come from onomastics and they also corroborate the same general idea. Until the end of the fifteenth century, we do not find in the Rhineland or Franconia a single form of Moses (Hebrew מ ֶׁשה ֹ ) with an unquestionable [š]. For example, in manuscripts from the fourteenth century we find Mosse in Nürnberg, Mosse and Musse in Swabia, Moisse in Baden, Mors(z)e in Frankfurt. On the other hand, numerous references to the [š]-forms (such as Musche, Musch, Moische, Muschlin, Muschlein, and Muschel) appear during the same century in documents from Austria, Regensburg, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Silesia, and Poland, that is, in the area of BNEY KHES.98 For Shalom () ָש ׁלֹום, we See Beider :. See Beranek : (numerous examples for CzY), BA , LCA , and WG :. Examples from EGY: tsider ‘prayer book’ ()ִסּדוּר, tsof ‘end’ ()סֹוף, tsimkhe ‘joy’ () ׂ ִשְמָחה, tsukes ‘Sukkoth’ ()ֻסּכֹות, and tsoten ‘devil’ () ָׂשָטן (Friedrich :, , , , ). The form tsukes is also known in Hamburg (GGA ). 95 Numerous variant forms with initial /ts/ appear in Weinberg :–, –). Among them are, for example, tsamekh ‘name of the letter samekh’ ()ָסֶמְך, tsof ‘end’ ()סֹוף, and tsus ‘horse’ ()סוּס. We also find tskhōre ‘ware, goods’ ( )ְסחֹו ָרהin SwY. 96 See Yarkoni .:. 97 This argument is far from being totally convincing. Note that in the biblical text, before pointing was introduced by the Masoretes, there was no graphic distinction between shin and sin despite the existence of the phonetic distinction between them (Gesenius :–). The same grapheme, without any diacritic, is the rule for medieval Jewish documents from various European countries: no distinction is made between shin and sin. The same is generally true even for sources that include diacritics to indicate vowels. A northern French manuscript from the thirteenth century represents one of rare exceptions. It also uses only one grapheme but with a dot between the first and the second vertical strokes of the grapheme ( שLambert-Brandin :VII). 98 The distinction between the pronunciation of shin and sin in the Danube area is also corroborated by the study of Hebrew prayer books written in that region (Eldar :). 93 94
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The Hebrew component
know about Schalaun in Vienna () and Schalom in Silesia (), while in the Rhineland the earliest reference to Schalam dates from the end of the fifteenth century. For Solomon (מה ֹ ֹ )ְׁשל, the earliest [š]-forms appear in western Germany only during the sixteenth century, while we find Schlomlein and Schlumel in Austria as early as the second half of the fourteenth century. In the same period, however, we find a [š]-form Schmul for Samuel ( )ְׁשמוֵּאלin Swabia and Switzerland, that is, among BNEY HES. In this connection, useful information can be extracted from the comparison of corpuses of names in several communities for which available sources are representative: Cologne (–) and Frankfurt (fourteenth century and first half of the fifteenth century), both populated by BNEY HES, and Vienna (second half of the fourteenth century and the first two decades of the fifteenth century), from the BNEY KHES territory. In western Germany, we find only [s]-forms for Hebrew names: Girsanus () ֵּג ְרׁשֹון, Smarge and Smarion ()ְׁשַמ ְרָיה, Musse (מ ׁ ֶשה ֹ ), Slomo and Sloman (מה ֹ ֹ ) ׁ ְשל, Smoel and Smohel ()ְׁשמוֵּאלa.99 On the other hand, Vienna documents mention Schalam () ׁ ָשלֹום, Musch (מ ׁ ֶשה ֹ ), Schymon () ׁ ִשְמעֹון, Schlomlein (מה ֹ ֹ )ְׁשל, Schaull () ׁ ָשאוּל, Scheftlein ()ַׁשְּבַתי, and Hoschlein ()ְיהֹו ֻׁשַע. The absence of [š]-forms for BNEY HES cannot be attributed to any peculiarity of local German dialects: in the same sources we find a number of Germanic names of Jews with [š]: Schone, Schonewif (both already during the s), Schonemannus, and Schonelin in Cologne, and Bischof, Fischlin, Gadeschalch, Hirsch, Schona, Schoneman, and Schonewip in Frankfurt.100 The differences in the pronunciation described above are (at least partly) related to the phonological peculiarities of the local Gentile languages. In French, [š] has appeared only since the thirteenth century (Fouché .:). In German dialects, this sound also appeared only in the Middle Ages when Jewish communities in both the Rhine and the Danube areas were already in existence. On the other hand, when the first Jewish settlements appeared in the Slavic provinces of Central Europe, the languages spoken by the Gentile population there included [š]. Pace Katz (b:–), the above factors are insufficient to make any claim about the distinct sort of Hebrew that would underlie the language of BNEY HES and Yiddish, whose modern dialects are not generally characterized by the sibilant confusion. The distinction, absent from a language during the medieval period, could, in principle, be introduced at some period of the history of a language from the same lineage. This theoretical position can be illustrated by the history of Judezmo. Today, its phonemic system possesses both /s/ and /š/ (Bunis ) despite the fact that for the ancestors of the modern speakers of Judezmo—who lived in medieval Spain—the two sounds had merged. The subsequent redifferentiation between words with /s/ and /š/ in both cultures, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, could have been introduced at some stage of their historical development under the influence of the WHOLE HEBREW rules based on the spelling of the corresponding Hebrew words and names in the TIBERIAN pointing system that established the pronunciation norms. The information contained in texts written by medieval German Christian authors indirectly testifies against Katz’s main thesis. Except for Bodeker (who writes sin or syn), all authors mentioned in the previous section use transcriptions like schin (or schyn) for the name of the consonant ש. This means that all of them knew the possibility (at least a theoretical/normative one) of pronouncing this as /š/. However, for various authors, who may unambiguously be related to one particular Jewish pronunciation, the name of the letter ( רHebrew )ֵרׁשis either res (Henricus de Hassia, the author of Modus scribendi, Pellicanus), or resz (this graphic equivalent to modern reß is used by von Harff); in other words, it ends in /s/ and not in /š/.The /s/-reflex of the final ׁשis not When dealing with medieval German sources we cannot be sure whether in the letter combinations ‘Sl’ and ‘Sm’ the first letter corresponds to [s] or to [š]. 100 In the BNEY KHES territory we also find a number of [s]-forms as, for example, such variants of biblical Gershon/ Gershom as Gersam, Gersom, Chersam, and Gersan, mentioned during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Carinthia, Styria, and Kraków. 99
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Consonants
TABLE . Pronunciation of shin Period
Jewish traditions with distinct pronunciation of shin [s]
[š]
Medieval
Italian, Sephardic (main part), ZARFATIC, BNEY HES
WEST CANAANIC, BNEY KHES, (maybe) southern France
Modern
Northern Italian
All others
Ashkenazic in one part of the area of LitY, Moroccan (partly)
limited to this word. For example, Henricus de Hassia, who provides information related to BNEY writes dages for ‘ ָדּ ֵגׁשdiacritical sign “ ּ ,”’ chames for ‘ ָחֵמׁשfive,’ and s ches for ‘ ֵׁשׁשsix.’ In non-final positions, but for a few exceptions, he transcribes the consonant in question as ‘sch’: thescha ‘ ֵּתַׁשעnine,’ scheva ‘ ֶׁשַבעseven,’ schischim ‘ ׁ ִש ׁ ִּשיםsixty.’ It seems that for both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES, /s/ was at that time the standard reflex of shin in the final position {c}.101 Note also the spelling “humas” for (‘ ֻחָּמׁשfive books of) the Torah’ in Nürnberg (second half of the fourteenth century; Stern :). In different varieties of modern Yiddish we find the form shames ‘sexton in a synagogue’ (Hebrew ) ׁ ַש ָּמׁשa.102 It is unclear whether its final consonant results from the dissimilation [š] > [s] or is related to the medieval phenomenon in question.103 Among modern Yiddish varieties, only LitY is (partly) characterized by the merger of shin and sin/samekh into a single phoneme phonetically, corresponding to a sound between [s] and [š]. However, no evidence exists that could point to the medieval origin of this idiosyncrasy that is commonly called sabesdiker losn in Yiddish linguistics. Moreover, the medieval sibilant confusion by BNEY HES concerned only the pronunciation of Hebrew, while sabesdiker losn characterizes all of LitY independently of the component. As a result, in the two cases we are clearly dealing with two independent phenomena.104 Table . presents a summary of the information available for shin {c}.
KHES,
.. Tav and daleth In biblical Hebrew, the letter tav ( )תrepresents the unvoiced equivalent of the voiced daleth ()ד. In Proto-Semitic, both of them were dental stops. At some moment in the history of Hebrew situated between BCE and the period of the Masoretes, both of them underwent—under the influence of 101 Only the “normative” author Nigri writes resch but even he uses the spelling dagges for ( ָּד ֵגׁשor )ַּדֵּגׁש. The information about Christian authors presented in this paragraph is taken from Groote : (for von Harff ) and Walde (for others). Note also that the name res for the letter רwas maintained in the West during the whole of the sixteenth century: Sebastian Münster (), Paulus Fagius (), and Elias Schadäus () all use this form (see Frakes :, , ). Of course, their spelling cannot be considered to be a direct testimony regarding the pronunciation of Jews contemporary with them since this spelling could be traditional, borrowed from works of earlier Christian Hebraists. Yet, Paul Helicz (western Poland, ) uses the spelling resch, while his transcription of Hebrew letters clearly reflects local Jewish pronunciation (see Frakes :). 102 This StY form is also known to exist in DuY, AlsY (Weiss :), and WphY. 103 U. Weinreich (:) speaks about the dissimilation. In Judezmo, the form shamas appears sporadically (for example, in Sarajevo), though the main phonetic variants are shamash and samas (Bunis :). 104 For this reason, explanations of the sabesdiker losn via the inheritance by LitY of the medieval feature of German origin (BN ) has no factual basis. See section ..
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The Hebrew component
Aramaic—a spirantization giving rise in postvocalic position to allophonic aspirated variants [th] and [dh] that later turned into fricatives [Ł] and [ð], respectively.105 In TIBERIAN Hebrew, the distinction between stops and fricatives is made by using the sign dagesh ( ּ ) for the former: ּתfor [t] and ּדfor [d]. In linguistic literature, these consonants are often called hard tav and hard daleth and are distinguished from soft tav תand soft daleth דboth of which have no dagesh. The Septuagint does not distinguish between hard and soft variants and mainly uses theta (Ł) for tav and delta ( ) for daleth.106 Among the most striking examples are ŁÆŁØÆ ‘Matthias’ ()ַמ ּ ִתְתָיהוּ and ˜ÆıØ ‘David’ ( ) ָדּ ִו דin which both hard and soft variants of the same Hebrew letters appear. The spelling conventions found several centuries later in “Secunda” of the Hexapla are the same. Similarly, the Vulgate has only “th” for tav and “d” for daleth. Yet, in “the Three”—compiled in the period between the Septuagint and the Hexapla—we find cases of dual realizations, especially for those consonants from the bgdkpt-series that have dagesh.107 A Greek document from the twelfth century written in Hebrew characters (De Lange :) has soft tav and soft daleth for theta and delta, respectively. However, it employs hard daleth for the consonant combination . According to the analysis by Garbell (:–), in medieval Spain soft tav is expressed via several Latin characters: “ç,” “z,” “s,” “t,” and “d.” Sometimes it is left untranscribed. This indicates that we are dealing with a sound unknown in Spanish or Catalan of the time, most likely the interdental /Ł/. In the final position, daleth is mainly expressed via /t/, though in certain texts from Catalonia it is omitted (like Davi ‘David’). This means that it could not be a stop. In southern France, we find such forms of Matthias as Matafia/Matofias and Matacias/Matassies (whose combination indicates /Ł/ as the most plausible pronunciation of soft tav), Davisius ‘David,’ Assanellus ‘Nethanel’ () ְנַת ְנֵאל, and Nasan ‘Nathan’ () ָנָתן. In medieval Italy, both soft daleth and soft tav were pronounced differently from their hard equivalents. The Latin spelling of several Jewish names of biblical origin in southern Italy leaves no doubt about the fricative pronunciation of soft tav; compare Matassia ‘Matthias’ and Nasan ‘Nathan’ (Ryzhik :). In ZARFAT, soft tav during the first half of the thirteenth century was an affricate close to /ts/ and turned into /s/ during the second half of the same century.108 No information is available for WEST CANAANITES. Several kinds of sources help us to identify the pronuniation of Hebrew by medieval Ashkenazic Jews. Transcriptions in Latin characters of names of letters from the Hebrew alphabet are particularly useful because soft daleth is present in final position of ‘ יוּדyod’ and ‘ ָלֶמדlamed,’ while soft tav appears in ‘ ָדֶּלתdaleth,’ ‘ ֵּביתbeth,’ ‘ ֵחיתheth,’ and ‘ ֵטיתteth.’ Christian authors who wrote about Hebrew before the sixteenth century render the six letter names in question in the following way: • Henricus de Hassia (BNEY KHES): iod, lamech, dales, bes, ches, tes (Walde :); • the author of Modus scribendi (BNEY KHES): iot, lamed, daled, bes, hes (to be pronounced as ches), tes (Walde :); • Pellicanus (BNEY HES): iots, lamech, dalets, bets, hes, tes (Walde :); • von Harff (mainly BNEY HES): joth, lamed, delech, bath, heth, thech;
105 This phonetic change is a part of the general spirantization of the so-called bgdkpt consonants (see SáenzBadillos :). 106 Among the rare exceptions is ÆØÆ ‘Pethahiah’ ()ְּפַתְחָיה, with plosive tau for soft tav. 107 See the discussion of this topic in Sáenz-Badillos :– (with literature). 108 Banitt (.:–) bases this assertion on sources compiled in Champagne. He relates the phonetic change in question to the change /ts/ > /s/ that took place during the same period for the French consonant “c.” Also note that when Elia Levita explains in Tish the derivation of Ashkenazic ( ְקרֹוֶבץs.v.) ‘special collection of Jewish liturgical poems’ from Hebrew ְקרֹובֹות, he posits the affricate realization of the final consonant to Jews from ZARFAT (WG :). MinP provides an old reference to an Ashkenazic form of the same word, with the final tsadi (Kosover :, TG ).
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Consonants
• Nigri (partly normative, partly BNEY HES): jotˉ, lamed, daletˉ, betˉ, het, tet (Walde :). In another place, he writes that תis actually pronounced as a lisped kind of [t], and transcribes this variant of the letter name as tsaf (Walde :). Several conclusions can be drawn from the above data. Firstly, it is clear that the final daleth and tav were pronounced by both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES using sounds foreign to German. This idea can explain the variety of their renditions: s, d, t, th, ts, and even ch (several times in independent sources).109 Secondly, a pronunciation close to the affricate [ts] seems to be limited to BNEY HES. It appears in the spelling “ts” present in the works by both Pellicanus (who also transcribes ַּפַתח ‘(diacritical sign) pataḥ ’ as patsah) and Nigri. In his work of , Hans Folz, a Christian author from Nürnberg, transcribes as “ts” or “tz” the final tav in several Hebrew words quoted by him (TG ).110 Thirdly, it also seems that the fricative (and not plosive) pronunciation of the final daleth was more characteristic of BNEY HES than of BNEY KHES. This fact is well correlated with the geographic distribution of unique traces of this reflex found in our time: (i) words yus/yūs ‘ten’ in the German dialects of Swabia and Hessen and lammes ‘thirty’ in Hessen, both clearly borrowed in former times from local Jews (BNEY HES) and derived from the numerical values of the Hebrew letters yod and lamed, respectively;111 (ii) SwY and AlsY word yūserle ‘coin of the value of ten’ is derived from the Yiddish name for the letter yod (WG :); (iii) variants yūd and yūs, both meaning ‘ten,’ are known in WphY (Weinberg :); and (iv) AlsY has lameser ‘coin of thirty sous’ (Weill :). Fourthly, in StY the names of six Hebrew letters in question are: yud, lamed, dalet, beys, khes, and tes. It appears that the distribution of the final sounds in these words is a perfect fit only to the transcription found in Modus scribendi. Note that this includes not only the forms whose pronunciation is predictable from the WHOLE HEBREW norms applicable in modern times (that posit that תshould be read as [s] and דas [d]) but also unusual daled (phonologically equivalent to StY dalet) instead of **dales or **doles that one could expect from its Hebrew etymon ָדֶּלת. The final consonant in daled could appear only in ancient times, when both final tav and daleth were fricatives pronounced close to each other. This /d/ can be explained either as hypercorrect (removing the final “devoicing”) or as influenced by the semantics of this word: ָדֶּלתdesignates the sound /d/. Independently of its origin, this phonetic form, together with others, demonstrates that during the second half of the fifteenth century (some) BNEY KHES in Central Europe had already acquired the pronunciation that was later to be retained in Yiddish varieties. In all of them, the name of the letter in question ends in /t/ {c}.112 The earliest Jewish reference to the whole set of particular Ashkenazic letter names under discussion appears in H whose author uses the following spellings: ‘ ֶטסteth’ (instead of )ֵטית, ‘ ֶחסheth’ (instead of )ֵחית, ‘ יוּדּyod,’ ‘ ַלֶמדlamed,’ ‘ ָדֶּלדּdaleth’ (instead of ) ָדֶּלת, and ‘ ֵביתbeth.’ Additional support for our analysis comes from the domain of onomastics. For the name ‘Batshsheba’ ( ׁ ֶשַבעa )ַּבת, in the period before the Black Death, we have references only to the forms like Bethseva and Batseyfe in Cologne in the mid-thirteenth century. In both, the reflex of tav cannot be [s] yet; together with the following shin it forms an affricate [ts]. Similarly, in Baczawa, a variant of the same biblical name mentioned in in Silesia, we also observe the affricate
Faber and King (:, see also Faber :–) suggest that the change in the pronunciation of soft tav from /Ł/ to /s/ in Ashkenazic Hebrew has been influenced by the OHG consonantal shift from /t/ to /s/ in some contexts. The information provided in this section shows that their idea is anachronistic and cannot be correct. 110 Yet, the word “schemos” (for Hebrew )שמות, that is with “s” for the final tav, appears in Latin characters in a document from Nürnberg (circa , Stern :). 111 These words can be conceived only as a reflection of a former interdental pronunciation [ð] for soft daleth (WG :). 112 See the corresponding entry in Table . in section ... 109
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The Hebrew component
rendition of the same combination tav-shin. However, since we are dealing with the BNEY KHES area, shin yields [š] and together with tav they produce another affricate: [tš].113 In sources from the second half of the fourteenth century and from the fifteenth century, one finds references to the [s]forms in the territories populated by BNEY HES (the Konstanz area) and BNEY KHES also (Regensburg, Austria, Silesia, Moravia). Among the examples are: Kussiel in Silesia (; Jekuthiel, )ְיקוִּתיֵאל, Nasson/Nassan/Nazzon in Konstanz (), Austria (), and Silesia () and Nassa/Nasse in Konstanz (before ), Regensburg (), and Silesia () (all of these forms are related to biblical Nathan; ) ָנָתן. The situation with reference to various forms of Shabbetai ( )ַׁשְּבַתיis more complex {c}. One can classify them into three groups. Firstly, one finds Sapsa in Regensburg (), with [s] for soft tav. The initial consonant, most likely, corresponds to [s] and not [š] (that—as discussed in previous section—would be expected for shin in the area of BNEY KHES). This means that perhaps we are dealing with a migrant from the BNEY HES area. Secondly, Christian sources from Silesia, Moravia, and western Poland (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) mention Schabda(y) or Sabda(y), that is, forms with [d] for tav that seems to result from a progressive assimilation [bt] > [bd] (or [bŁ] > [bd]). The initial [š] spelled Sch cannot be due to a Christian form: we are necessarily dealing with the pronunciation peculiar to local Jews and it is different from the modern Ashkenazic pronunciation. Thirdly, the hypocorisms Scheftelin, Scheftlein, and Scheft(e)l appear in Moravia (), Hungary (), Vienna (), and Bohemia (numerous references during the first half of the sixteenth century). The cluster [ft] is also likely to come from [bŁ] (or less likely [bt]). The contrast between, on the one hand, the second and the third series and, on the other hand, Sapsa may reveal a difference of realization of soft tav by BNEY HES and BNEY KHES in some contexts. In modern Ashkenazic pronunciation soft tav is [s] and it is different from the modern Sephardic pronunciation: in Judezmo we find either [ð], or [t], or zero (Bunis ). Table . presents the summary of the above discussion {c}. Among the rare exceptions to the rules shown in Table . one counts StY leykhets ‘phlegm’ derived from Hebrew ֵלחֹותor { ֵלחוּתc}. Its final consonant recalls the affricate realization of the final soft tav by BNEY HES.114 In different varieties of modern Yiddish, soft tav undergoes a special phonetic development when it follows a sibilant such as shin [š] or samekh [s], both with a shewa. In this case, as a result of dissimilation, tav hardens and gives [t] instead of [s] {c}. For example: StY TABLE . Pronunciation of soft tav and soft daleth Period
Jewish traditions with distinct pronunciations of (soft tav + soft daleth) /Ł/ + /ð/
Medieval
ZARFATIC and BNEY HES (close to affricates), BNEY KHES, Sephardic, southern French, most likely Italian
Modern
Yemenite
/t/ (or /ð/) + /d/
/s/ + /d/
/ts/ + /d/
Sephardic (main), Italian, Persian
Ashkenazic
Moroccan (partly)
113 These forms cannot be directly related to Christian forms because of their last consonant, /f/ or /v/ (and not /b/ as in German Bathseba and French Bethsabée). 114 On this word found in ZuR see Neuberg :.
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Consonants
shtike ‘silence’ ( )ְׁשִתיָקהappears as shtīke in WphY and shtīge in SwY (also compare AlsY shtikene ‘to maintain silence,’ Weiss :); stam ‘without a good reason, ordinary’ ( )ְסָתםis known in StY, CzY, and DuY; in both StY and CzY we find shtadlen ‘intercessor’ ( )ְׁשַת ְדּ ָלןand shtie ‘drink’ ( ;)ְׁשִת ָ ּיהalso note StYstire ‘contradiction’ ()ְסִתי ָרהa.115 These examples of the plosive realization of a consonant instead of the fricative reflex required by classical Hebrew grammar are not unique to the bgdkpt-series of consonants. Note that a [k] instead of [x] occurs in the StY form teykef ‘immediately, at once’ () ּ ֵתֵכף. Variants of the same form, with /k/, are known in Tish (s.v.),116 modern WY (PhilogLottus : teikef ), and CzY {c}. Among other examples of /k/ instead of /x/ are: bekoved ‘honorably’ ( )ְּבָכבֹודand lekoved ‘in honor of ’ ({ ) ִלְכבֹודc}. They are found in many Yiddish varieties including EY, WphY, and DuY. However, here we are dealing with a different phenomenon: the addition of prefixes does not change the (formerly) initial consonant.117 In a few cases, one has the opposite effect: fricatives instead of stops. The Hebrew correlate of the first part of the compound StY and CzY verb miskhavn ( )ִמְתַּכ ֵוּןzayn ‘to intend’ has /x/ instead of /k/. The Hebrew equivalent of the plural form StY dafim (ordafn) / CzY dafin ‘pages’ is ַדִּּפים, with /p/ and not /f/.118
.. Yod with dagesh The reflex of yod with dagesh ( ) ּיor double yod ( )ייrepresents an additional distinctive feature among various medieval systems of the pronunciation of Hebrew. In Spain119 and Bohemia120 it was pronounced as a semi-vowel /j/ or the vowel /i/, that is, the same way as in Antiquity. Yet, we have ample evidence that in Italy,121 southern France (partly),122 northern France,123 as well as in western Germany, it was pronounced as the affricate [dž]. This development is correlated with the phonetic changes that took place in both Italian and French for word- and syllable-initial Latin “i.”124 In Ashkenazic prayer books studied by Eldar (:–), the reflex of yod with dagesh, most likely, was an affricate [dž] or [tš] in the manuscripts corresponding to the WESTERN rite. Eldar did not find any evidence for this in the prayer books themselves: he quotes from a report from several Spanish medieval rabbis who testify that German Jews and those from northern France pronounce
115 This series is mentioned in Birnbaum :. Meyer Wolf (personal communication) noticed the existence of the form khtikhe ‘piece’ ( )ֲחִתיָכהthat implies that the rule is applicable not only to sibilants but to fricatives generally speaking. However, note the form khsime ‘signature’ ()ֲחִתיָמה, not *khtime. 116 Tish gives both spellings, with and without a dagesh, that is, with /k/ and /x/, respectively. Since the latter is grammatically correct, the former must be from the native speech of its author, Elia Levita (MRPC). 117 On this phenomenon see Jacobs :. 118 For PolY, Birnbaum (:) mentions not only miskhavn and dafim but also a few other forms (absent from WY, DuY, and CzY sources) in which we find /f/ instead of /p/, /p/ instead of /f/, and /k/ instead of /x/. 119 See Garbell :–. 120 ( ייליטוOld Czech jelito‘intestines’) appears in Or Zarua (Markon :). 121 The grammarian Abraham de Balmes speaks explicitly about the affricate reflex in Italy in the early sixteenth century for the initial and intervocalic yod (Blondheim :CXXIX). See also Cassuto : and numerous cases in Sermoneta (for example, ‘ יינרציאוןgeneration’ (p.), ‘ יינרליgeneral’ (p.), ‘ ראייוray’ (p.), אממיינאציאון ‘imagination’ (p.); compare Italian generazione, generale, raggio, and immaginazione, respectively. 122 The grammarian Profiat Duran (circa –) speaks explicitly about the affricate reflex in the initial position, but a different (most likely [j] or [i]) reflex for geminated and intervocalic yod (Blondheim :CXXVIII). 123 The earliest reference to [dž] in ZARFAT appears in a document from Chartres compiled in the tenth century which transcribes as “gippolu” the word ‘ ִיְּפלוּfall’ from Psalms : (Blondheim :CXXVIII, WG :–, .). On [dž] in the works by Rashi see TG –. See also Blondheim :CXXVII–VIII, Banitt :, :. 124 Blondheim (:CXXVII) was one of the first authors to pay attention to this fact. Note that the Latin letter “i” (modern “j”) shifted from [j] to [dž] in the Early Gallo-Romance (or even Late Latin) period. During the thirteenth century it had already acquired its modern realization as [ž] (Fouché .:).
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The Hebrew component
yod with dagesh as an affricate in initial and medial position. On the other hand, in initial position in the only medieval prayer book of the EASTERN rite (BNEY KHES) he studied, Eldar considers that it corresponds to the semi-vowel [j], as in modern Yiddish. To corroborate this hypothesis, he lists a group of cases in which the scribe used non-Tiberian pointing, placing under the initial yod a ḥ ireq instead of shewa, as, for example, in ‘ ְיָתִמיםorphans.’125 His argument is not attractive: it is unclear how a peculiarity of initial yod without dagesh can be extrapolated to the pronunciation of yod with dagesh. Transcriptions found in Christian sources for the common given name Hayyim ( )ַחִּייםprovide additional details concerning medieval pronunciation. In Spanish sources, it appears as Chayim, Ayin, Hayem, Aym, Haym, Hayn, Hahym, and Hahim (Garbell :). Nothing indicates here the presence of any affricate. Yet, in Christian sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dealing with Jews from northern France, we also find numerous forms of this name with the affricate [dž]: Hagin, Hagyn, Agin, (H)aigin, Hagym. In Franconia, Thuringia, and the Netherlands in the fourteenth century we also find mention of forms with [dž] or [tš], such as Hedgim, Hedzim, Hetzgym, Hedigym, and Heczhym. Most likely, the affricate reflex came to these BNEY HES communities from France. Documents from Regensburg, Vienna, Carinthia, Styria, and Silesia, all dating from the fourteenth century, also show a large number of forms like (H)atschim, Haydgim, Chatschim, Chadgym, Kchaydim, Kadczim, etc. The earliest forms, (H)atschim, were already mentioned in section .. among rare examples of the /h/-rendition of heth in the BNEY KHES territory. Note that even these early forms contrast by their root vowel [a] to the [e]-forms mentioned earlier as common among BNEY HES. (H)atschim can have three possible origins. Firstly, this form can result from the renorming [e] > [a] of the original *(H)etschim.126 This renorming would occur in the Danube area among Jews who were BNEY HES. Secondly, (H)atschim could appear in Regensburg after the migrations of BNEY HES who introduced into the local pronunciation of Hebrew the glottal rendition of heth and the affricate reflex for yod with dagesh, but kept the root [a] that was already used locally following the TIBERIAN norms. Thirdly, the form (H)atschim could be due to migrants from an area where the root vowel was [a] and the affricate [dž] was present. It would be a name that has arrived in the Danube area directly from France rather than being brought by BNEY HES from neighboring western Germany. The large number of references to various forms of this name during the fourteenth century among BNEY KHES implies that the name could not be due simply to a few individual migrants who brought it from France at the end of the thirteenth century (and who, moreover, by chance are mentioned in available documents). Most likely, at the start of the fourteenth century this name was well established in the Danube area and the odds are high that [a] (contrasting to [e] of BNEY HES) was of local, Danubian, and not French, origin. As a result, here the third of the above scenarios sounds implausible. It is also worth noting that the frequency of use of the name Hayyim by BNEY KHES was significantly larger than for BNEY HES (see section ..). This factor places the second scenario in a favorite position in comparison to the first. Independently of the scenario accepted, this given name apparently underwent in Regensburg a renorming of its initial consonant from [h] to [x] (and later sometimes to [kx] and [k]) as can be seen from the existence of forms with the initial “Ch,” “Kch,” and “K.” The latest mention of Ashkenazic phonetic variants of Hayyim that have an internal affricate date from the sixteenth century: Atschem in Hessen, Хатзим and Хаджим in Volhynia (now a part of
125 This feature is also found in the so-called PALESTINIAN and BABYLONIAN systems of pointing of Hebrew texts, as well as in the Ben Naphtali variant of the TIBERIAN system (Morag :). 126 On this renorming see section ... The idea of a detailed analysis of spelling used for Hayyim is due to MRPC.
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Consonants
TABLE . Pronunciation of yod with dagesh Period
Jewish traditions with distinct pronunciation of yod with dagesh Affricate
No affricate
Medieval
Italian, southern French, ZARFATIC, BNEY HES, BNEY KHES
Sephardic, WEST CANAANIC
Modern
Northeast Italian (some communities)
All others
Ukraine). Modern Yiddish varieties do not have any trace of medieval [dž]127 that was present in both the BNEY HES and BNEY KHES areas. This factor shows that a renorming of the pronunciation gradually took place in all Ashkenazic communities. This argument demonstrates the weakness of Katz’s general approach that outlines the irrelevance of the medieval language of BNEY HES to modern Yiddish only because some of the phonetic features of these tongues differ. Table . presents the summary of the above discussion {c}.
.. Veth and vav Both veth ( )בand vav ( )וare realized as voiced consonants—mainly [v] and in certain areas [b]—in various non-Ashkenazic systems of reading Hebrew. Yet, in numerous medieval Christian sources dealing with Ashkenazic Jewry, these Hebrew consonants are rendered by the letter “f.”128 Materials by von Harff include: eufasa ‘goose’ ()ַא ָוּ ָזה, befinna (most likely, a typo for *gefinna) ‘cheese’ ()ְּג ִבי ָנ ה, tefen ‘straw’ () ּ ֶתֶבן, laufen ‘white’ () ָלָבן, and ferrohatz ‘to bathe,’ derived from the biblical expression ‘ ְו ָרַחץand he shall bathe.’129 Nigri mentions schefa ‘diacritical signs shewa’ () ׁ ְש ָוה. A Hebrew alphabet by Bavarian author Johannes Sakch—published, together with various other alphabets, during the first half of the fifteenth century—spells the name of the letter vav (Hebrew ) ָווas faff. An anonymous author from the same province and the same century calls the letter in question fof (Walde :, , ). In medieval Christian sources, one can also observe the presence of a number of Jewish given names of Hebrew or Aramaic origin where “f” results from vav or veth. Among these are: () Akiba () ֲעִקיָבא: Kyfe (, Frankfurt), Kiffl (, Low Austria); () Avigdor ( ְגדֹורa)ֲאִבי: Afidor (, Styria); () Abraham ()ַאְב ָרָהם: Affra(ha)m, Aferham (, Vienna); () David () ָדּ ִו ד: Defflein (, Salzburg), Teflin (Frankfurt); () Reuben () ְראוֵּבן: Ruffen (, Switzerland); () Bathsheba ( ׁ ֶשַבעa)ַּבת: Batseyfe (circa , Cologne); () Eva ()ַח ָוּה: Heffo (, Erfurt); () Ziviah ()ִצְב ָיה: Syfia (, Switzerland) and Cyfia (, Erfurt); () Yochebed ()יֹוֶכֶבד: Jochafet (, Hungary). As can be seen from this list, the spellings in question were peculiar for both the BNEY HES (Frankfurt, Switzerland) and BNEY KHES (Austria, Hungary) areas. During the sixteenth century, Christian authors from various parts of Europe (Switzerland, Alsace, Swabia, western Poland) when discussing the Jewish vernacular language write explicitly that both veth and vav are phonetically equivalent to the German letters “f” and “v,” while fe ( )ֿפcorresponds to “f(f)” and double vav ( )װto “w.”130 According to German spelling At the start of the fifteenth century, Maharil mentions the affricate rendition (not entirely clear whether voiced or voiceless) of yod with dagesh in such words as ‘ ַּו ִי אֹוֶמרand he said,’ ‘ ַּה ִיֹוםthe day, today,’ and the given name Hayyim noting also its derived form ( חטשלSatz :). He does not give any geographical information, so it is unclear whether he is speaking about BNEY HES or BNEY KHES. However, we know independently that Hetschel—corresponding exactly to the חטשלmentioned by Maharil—was a form used exclusively in the BNEY KHES area. 128 The suggestion to study the reflexes of these letters is due to MRPC. 129 See the discussion of this form in section .. (feature {m}). 130 See Frakes :, , , , . 127
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Pronunciation of vav and veth Period
Jewish traditions with distinct pronunciation of vav and veth Unvoiced and/or fortis
Voiced and/or lenis
Medieval
BNEY HES, BNEY KHES (at least, from Austria and Hungary)
All others
Modern
SWY
All others
traditions of the period in question, only “w” represents a voiced (and/or lenis) consonant, other graphemes denote unvoiced consonants. In the twentieth century, however, this devoicing has survived only in AlsY and SwY where one finds Dōfet/Dūfet ‘David’ () ָדּ ִוד, khafer ‘friend’ ()ָחֵבר, eyfed ‘servant’ ()ֶעֶבד, lefaye ‘funeral’ ()ְל ָוָיה, lefone ‘Moon’ ()ְלָב ָנהa,131 khefre ‘brotherhood, association’ ()ֶחְבָרה. In other dialects of Yiddish, we see no traces of this effect.132 This means that at some point of their development, certain dialects (at least those from Austria, Hungary, and northern and central parts of western Germany) underwent a renorming re-establishing voiced/lenis [v] in words whose Hebrew etymons had either vav or veth.133 Note that in sources from the first half of the nineteenth century we still find “f” or “v” in Franconia134 and the Rhineland.135 Table . presents the summary of the above discussion {c}.
.. Other consonants Contrary to heth whose reflexes—as discussed in section ..—vary in different communities, the realization of two other biblical gutturals, alef ( )אand he ()ה, is more uniform. In numerous Jewish traditions, alef (formerly an unvoiced guttural) has had no phonetic value since Antiquity.136 The spelling “lfono” appears in writings by Hals Folz from Nürnberg () (TG ). Compare BA and GGA . Ashkenazic pronunciation of vav and veth—both realized as voiced [v] in various non-Ashkenazic systems of reading Hebrew—seems to be directly related to the specific development of MHG v in German dialects described in section .. (see the discussion of feature {C}). Most likely, at an early period the phonetic rendering of these two Hebrew letters, as well as [v] in other Jewish vernacular non-Germanic (Romance and Slavic) words, became associated with that of German [v̥]. This sound could be the closest to [v] among the sounds available in the phonetic chart of coterritorial German: [f] was fortis, while the letter “w” was at that time still expressing a bilabial [w] and not [v] (peculiar to NHG). As shown in TG –, during the following period (and before the eighteenth century) in words whose German ancestor had [v̥]: (a) in the word- or root-initial position, western Jewish sources use vav or veth, while those from Bohemia and Poland use fe (( ;)ֿפb) in the internal position, we generally find veth, with a variant double-vav ( )ווstarting to be used in Eastern Europe. (See also the discussion of feature {G} in section ..) 133 For the part of the former BNEY KHES territory covering Czech and Polish territories we do not have any direct evidence about the unvoiced character of veth or vav. They could, in principle, always correspond to [v]. On the one hand, in the intervocalic position, in the German component the sound whose ancestor was Germanic f/v was realized [v]. Consequently, in the Hebrew component the [v]-pronunciation for veth or vav is likely to have been always valid. On the other hand, veth is never present in the initial position, while vav is quite rare there. As a result, the renorming (if it ever took place in this area) was easy to perform: only a few words were affected, those whose Hebrew etymon would start with vav. 134 See details in Beranek :; compare also Afru(hu)m (‘ )ַאְב ָרָהםAbraham’ and Lefuna (‘ ) ְלָב ָנהMoon’ in Stern :; . 135 Compare viverach ‘to run away’ (this word is discussed in section .., feature {m}), Affroumche, a hypocoristic form of Abraham ()ַאְב ָרָהם, Reivach ‘profit’ (( )ֶר ַוחGilardone :, , ). On this Christian author from Speyer see section ... Also note the spelling chavruse (‘ )ַחְברוָּתאsociety’ in Tendlau :, a source dealing with Frankfurt. 136 See WG :, :, TG –. 131 132
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Consonants
The letter he (in biblical times, the voiced equivalent of alef ) is not pronounced by modern Sephardic Jews at all. For Ashkenazic Jews, one can distinguish several categories of words, all of them found in both EY and WY {c}. The main rule corresponds to the position of the stressed vowel. When followed by a stressed vowel, he gives /h/; compare StY and SwY beheyme ‘cattle’ ()ְּבֵהָמה, StY yehudi and WphY yehūde ‘Jew’ ( ;)ְיהוּ ִדיStY lehakhes and SwY lehakhles ‘in spite’ ( )ְלַהְכִעיסand words in which /h/ is in the initial position such as pan-Yiddish Hilel (‘ )ִה ּ ֵללHillel’ and StY hekdesh, SwY hekdish (‘ )ֶהְק ֵדׁשalmshouse.’137 In other cases one observes the absence of the articulation. Examples are: LitY kol and SwY kāl ‘people of the community’ ()ָקָהל, LitY mineg and SwY minig ‘rite’ ()ִמ ְנָהג, LitY Avrom and AlsY (Zivy :) Afrōm ‘Abraham’ ()ַאְבָרָהם, LitY Orn and WphY Ārn ‘Aaron’ ()ַאֲהֹרן, StY ave ‘love’ and EGY āve ()ַאֲה ָו ה, StY yandes ‘Judaism’ ()ַיֲהדוּת, as well as all words in which he appears in the final position. Since no /h/ exists in German before an unaccented vowel or at the end of a word, while /h/ is clearly retained before a stressed vowel, we cannot exclude the German influence in this Yiddish phenomenon. The phonetics of certain words contradicts the above rule. On the one hand, in LitY tilim and WphY tilem ‘Psalms’ ()ְּתִה ּ ִלים, /h/ disappeared before the stressed vowel. Most likely, in this case we have the trace of an old oral form in which the shewa was silent and post-consonantal /h/ disappeared quite naturally: /thilim/ > /tilim/. A similar effect characterizes WphY yerōtsen ‘May it be your will’ (a prayer) ( )ְיִהי ָרצֹוןand SwY/DuY kile ‘Jewish community’ ()ְקִהָּלה. The /h/ appearing in their StY equivalents yehi-rotsn and kehile are, most likely, due to a normative introduction of /ə/ in place of shewa with the restoration of the /h/.138 On the other hand, in StY and EGY zohev ‘golden coin, gulden’ ()ָזהוּב, /h/ remains before an unstressed vowel. Yet, it disappears in AlsY (Weiss :) zōf / zof and DuY zōf. As a result, we cannot exclude the possibility that /h/ was at some stage reintroduced into EY and/or EGY.139 In biblical times, ayin ( )עwas the voiced equivalent of heth. In modern times, it has no consonantal value except for Jews in Arabic countries. In medieval northern France, this sound was still pronounced. For example, in a transliteration to Latin characters of Psalms and that appears in a document from Chartres (tenth century)140 one regularly finds “a” in place of ayin, while alef has no graphic expression. The author of LekY writes that for Jews expelled from France at the end of the fourteenth century ayin was pronounced ‘from the throat.’141 For Jews from western
137 A partial loss of the articulation of the initial he in UkrY does not represent an idiosyncrasy of the Hebrew component. It is valid for /h/ in that dialect globally. There are also other cases of the Hebrew consonants that are pronounced differently in Yiddish dialects that are due to the phonetic peculiarities of these dialects that are not limited to the Hebrew component. Since they are valid for words from the German component too, there is no reason to speak here about any idiosyncrasy in the pronunciation of Hebrew. A number of WY examples from this group appear in BA , –. 138 Less likely, one can imagine a distinct Hebrew tradition. In principle, a similar process of restoration may be responsible for forms like beheyme and yehudi (instead of *beyme and *yudi) (MRPC). See section . on the elision of mobile shewa. Distinguishing two cases (depending on the position of the stress) when speaking about the internal he and the explanation for StY tilem were suggested in MRPC. Jacobs (:–) considers that intervocalic /h/ is lost if the preceding vowel is short and retained if it is long. In fact, both theories yield the same results. Indeed, on the one hand, according to principles established by Leibel (see section ..), a long vowel (or a diphthong) necessarily takes the stress and, as a result, the following he is given before an unstressed vowel. On the other hand, a short vowel preceding he corresponds to a mobile shewa that is unstressed and consequently he appears before a stressed vowel. However, Jacobs needs an additional rule to explain the disappearance of postconsonantal he (as in StY mineg ‘custom’). 139 The forms zohov/zohof ‘gold’ ( ) ָזָהבappearing in StY, CzY (Tirsch :), and WY (PhilogLottus :) are directly due to WHOLE HEBREW. 140 This document appears in Gumpertz :–. 141 See Gumpertz :; see additional information about ayin in Gumpertz :–, TG –, and WG :.
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The Hebrew component
Germany, we have indirect proof that at least during the thirteenth century ayin was not a consonant any longer. Indeed, at that period this Hebrew letter had already started to be actively used as a graphic equivalent for the /e/-colored vowels.142 Weinberg (:) considers the originally consonantal ayin to be responsible for the initial consonant in WphY neveyre/nevēre ‘sin’ ()ֲעֵב ָרהa,143 as well as WphY neshīres ‘wealth’ (שירוּת ׁ ִ )ֲעa.144 This theory is doubtful. Alternatively, the original /n/ could be derived from the Yiddish indefinite article an;145 compare LitY forms (n)am ‘nurse,’ (n)ol ‘awl,’ (n)ovnt ‘evening.’146 Also note AlsY nemune ‘faith’ ( )ְאֶמוּ ָנהand AlsY nekhone and SwY nekhoune ‘preparation’ ()ֲהָכ ָנה, both with initial letters different from ayin {c}.147 If we follow Weinberg, we need to consider these forms as hypercorrect. Among unusual forms shared by all Yiddish varieties is yontef ‘holiday’ ()יֹום טֹוב, with the regressive assimilation of consonants: [mt] > [nt] {c}.148 In StY yonkiper/yinkiper ‘Yom Kippur’ (ִּכּפוּרa )יֹוםwe also find /n/ instead of /m/ present in the Hebrew etymon. Yet, AlsY (Weiss :) yumkiper and CzY (Kulke :) and DuY yomkiper retain /m/. Geminated consonants (designated in classical TIBERIAN pointing by dagesh forte) are unknown in EY and certain subdialects of WY and have no phonemic role in other subdialects {c}.149 Yet, they are found in the modern Sephardic communities of Arabic countries and Italy (Morag :–). In the Middle Ages, gemination of consonants is known in Italy and northern France.150 Yet, it was either irregular or even absent from medieval Spain (Garbell :). We have no direct information concerning the pronunciation in medieval Ashkenazic communities. It is the historic reconstruction that shows that the Hebrew pronunciation underlying modern Yiddish varieties was also characterized by gemination caused by dagesh forte.151
.
NON-ASHKENAZIC VOCALIC SYSTEMS
During the seventh to tenth centuries various Masorete groups devised several independent systems of diacritical signs for vocalizing (pointing) the biblical text. The three best-known schools are called BABYLONIAN, PALESTINIAN, and TIBERIAN.152 These systems use distinct conventional sets of diacritics. Both BABYLONIAN and PALESTINIAN are usually called superlinear: all their diacritics are placed above consonants. Diacritics of the TIBERIAN system are placed under consonants but for a few exceptions.
See details in section ... Compare SwY (Fleischer :) and AlsY nefēre, PolY nivayri (Zuckerman :). 144 Compare AlsY neshires (Zivy :). 145 This possibility (suggested in Weinreich :) is also mentioned but rejected by Weinberg, without providing arguments. 146 All of them are present in Harkavy . 147 Both AlsY forms are taken from Catane :. 148 This form is known, for example, in StY, AlsY (Weiss :), SwY, WphY, DuY, and EGY. 149 We do not find geminated consonants in the study of AlsY by Zuckerman (). On the other hand, numerous forms with geminate consonants appear in Weinberg and Guggenheim-Grünberg . However, in their examples the preceding vowel is always short. Most likely, following a convention in German spelling, geminate consonants are used by these authors precisely to show the quality of the precedeing vowel (see also TG ). 150 The source for northern France corresponds to a document from Chartres (tenth century) that regularly transcribes Hebrew words having dagesh forte with geminated Latin characters. See the exact references in WG :– (with a series of examples concerning modern Yiddish that can be understood only if we take into account the doubling of consonants in previous periods), :–. 151 See Table . in section ... 152 See their short description in WG :– and detailed description in Sáenz-Badillos :–. The exposal given in this section is based on the latter source. 142 143
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Non-Ashkenazic vocalic systems
More importantly, the three systems in question clearly reflect the existence of Hebrew dialects, those spoken in Babylonia, southern and northern parts of the Land of Israel, respectively. The most distinctive feature concerns the number of full vowels. Table . presents the seven full letters of the TIBERIAN system providing their qualities, names, and the exact graphemes: TABLE . TIBERIAN full vowels Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq ◌ִ (or ) ִ◌י
/u/ shureq ( ּוor qibbuṣ ◌ֻ )
/e/ ṣere ◌ֵ
/o/ ḥ olem ֹ (or )ֹו
// segol ◌ֶ
/ɔ/ qameṣ ◌ָ /a/ pataḥ ◌ַ
The stress usually falls on the last syllable: it is the so-called milra pattern. Segolates are the exceptions: they have penultimate accent (milel pattern).153 The vowel length depends on the stress position and the type of syllable. Under the stress all seven full vowels are long. In unstressed position, all vowels are long in open syllables and short in closed syllables.154 The system also includes the three so-called ḥ aṭef-vowels: ḥ aṭef-pataḥ (sign ◌ֲ ), ḥ aṭef-qameṣ (sign ◌ֳ ), and ḥ aṭef-segol (sign ◌ֱ ). The word accent never falls on any of them. They are often considered to be ultra-short equivalents of the corresponding full vowels.155 The exact phonological nature of the sound designated by the shewa (sign ◌ְ ) is uncertain: it can be another (ultra-)short unstressed vowel and/ or serving to show the zero sound156 or an (ultra-)short reduced vowel. The BABYLONIAN system includes six full vowels: it has only one sign in place where the TIBERIAN system employs segol and pataḥ . Table . shows the vocalic chart of this system showing the names of the corresponding TIBERIAN vowels:
153 The term is related to the fact that both vowels of these nouns correspond to segol, compare ‘ ֶּב ֶגדgarment’ and ‘ ֶּדֶרְךway.’ However, if the middle consonant is guttural, the vowel becomes pataḥ , compare ‘ ַנַחתpleasure’ and ‘ ַּפַחדfear.’ 154 See Blau :, Khan :, . 155 However, in the medieval Karaite Bible manuscripts written in Arabic characters and revealing the TIBERIAN pronunciation of Hebrew the ḥ aṭef-vowels are as short as their full equivalents in unstressed syllables (Khan :–). 156 Several authors including Birnbaum (:) stressed that the fact that the grapheme for shewa is unique most likely indicates that for scholars who created the TIBERIAN pointing system there was only one type applicable to all contexts, namely the absence of any sound (silent shewa). However, a deeper analysis shows that the historical reality was more nuanced. Shewa—depending on the context—corresponded to the zero sound or a short vowel, that is, the two realizations were no more than allophonic variants of the same phoneme. The length of the vocalic shewa was equivalent to that of short full vowels in closed syllables. However, a consonant together with a vocalic shewa did not constitute a syllable. See details in Khan .:–.
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The Hebrew component TABLE . BABYLONIAN full vowels Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq
/u/ shureq + qibbuṣ
/e/ ṣere
/o/ ḥ olem /ɔ/ qameṣ /a/ pataḥ +segol
TABLE . PALESTINIAN full vowels Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq
/u/ shureq + qibbuṣ
/e/ ṣere + segol
/o/ ḥ olem + qameṣ qatan /a/ pataḥ + qameṣ gadol
Babylonian scholars elaborated two systems of pointing that are usually called by Hebraists Simple and Complex. The former is the older of the two. It has an additional, seventh grapheme that appears in certain words where the TIBERIAN system uses shewa. In the Simple BABYLONIAN system, this sound was clearly a non-zero vowel (mobile shewa). Yet, in other instances where the TIBERIAN system also uses the same grapheme, the Simple BABYLONIAN pointing uses no sign. Here we are dealing with a zero sound (silent shewa). More recent documents, those using the Complex BABYLONIAN pointing, show significantly less consistency in spelling shewa. Certain of them—exactly as the TIBERIAN system—apply the same grapheme for the shewa of both kinds. The oldest known PALESTINIAN texts (eighth and ninth centuries) have only five full vowels. The same grapheme is used for both elements of the following pairs of the TIBERIAN pointing system: () segol and ṣere, and () pataḥ and one part of qameṣ (usually called qameṣ gadol). Another part of the vowels appearing in places where TIBERIAN has qameṣ (so-called qameṣ qatan or qameṣ ḥ atuf) have the same quality as TIBERIAN ḥ olem (see Table .). There is no consistency in the use of graphemes that correspond to TIBERIAN shewa. In order to understand the pronunciation of Hebrew vowels during the period that precedes the time of the Masoretes, several methods are usually applied. In the Bible itself, a number of words have variant spellings that can be assigned to two groups. One group—the so-called defective spelling—includes only signs for consonants. Another group—the so-called plene spelling—uses certain consonantal graphemes to render a vowel. These vocalic correspondences of letters, originally meaning only consonants, are designated by Hebraists by the term matres lectionis. This approach is ambiguous because the same letter can be used for several sounds. For example, vav (( )וin addition to its consonantal value [v] or [w]) may also render both /u/ and /o/. Comparative analysis of Semitic languages represents another method of establishing vowels of
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Non-Ashkenazic vocalic systems
ancient Hebrew.157 Additional information can be extracted from Greek biblical translations. In the Septuagint, we find the following correspondences to TIBERIAN vowels: qameṣ à alpha (Æ) and sometimes omicron (); both pataḥ and segol à alpha (Æ) or epsilon () or, occasionally, omicron (o); ṣere à eta (Å); ḥ olem à omega (ø) or omicron (o); ḥ ireq à iota (Ø); qibbuṣ and shureq à omicron-upsilon (ı).158 A detailed statistical analysis of vowels of Origen’s Secunda was made by Brønno (). The main correspondences for full vowels are as follows: pataḥ à alpha or (less common) epsilon; qameṣ gadol à alpha or (less common) no vowel; qameṣ qatan à omicron; segol à epsilon or (less common) alpha; ṣere à eta; ḥ olem à omega; ḥ ireq à iota (if long) and epsilon (if short); shureq à omicron-upsilon. For reduced vowels, we find ḥ aṭef-segol à epsilon; ḥ aṭef-pataḥ à alpha or (less common) epsilon or no vowel; mobile shewa à no vowel or (less common) alpha or epsilon; silent shewa à no vowel.159 From the above correspondences, it can be seen that the systems of the Septuagint and Secunda are different from all three Masoretic systems created more than one thousand years after the Septuagint and five to seven centuries after Origen. In the Middle Ages, the TIBERIAN pointing system became universally accepted and the diacritics of the other two schools disappeared. However, certain oral traditions persisted even after older graphemes were abandoned. As a result, for a number of medieval and modern systems of pronunciation of Hebrew one can establish direct links to one of the above three medieval systems. According to certain references, Persian pronunciation at the beginning of the twentieth century followed the TIBERIAN norms concerning vowels: it had different reflexes for all seven TIBERIAN full vowels. Yet, it was characterized by the penultimate stress pattern.160 Modern Yemenite pronunciation is heir to the BABYLONIAN system. It distinguishes between qualities of pataḥ and qameṣ, while segol is pronounced exactly as pataḥ . Because of the conservative character of Yemenite Hebrew and its major differences in comparison to other modern systems, it is reasonable to conjecture that medieval Yemenite pronunciation was quite similar to modern. The penultimate (and in some words antepenultimate) stress pattern is another peculiarity of Yemenite Hebrew. An available medieval Greek document written in Hebrew characters is related to the PALESTINIAN system.161 The same pointing system held sway in medieval Italy.162 Rare pointed glosses found in the works of Czech rabbis use neither qameṣ nor segol. Consequently, they are compatible with all of the three Masoretic systems.163 Yet, taking into account the PALESTINIAN-like system in Italy, Greece, and (as shown later in this chapter) in medieval Germany too, that is, in all the territories situated relatively close to the Czech lands, it is logical to conjecture that the vocalic system of Hebrew in medieval Bohemia was See Blau :–, –. See Sáenz-Badillos :. Compare also the following names from the Hebrew Bible / Septuagint: ְיהֹוָנָתן/ IøÆŁÆ ‘Jonathan,’ קב ֹ ַי ֲע/ IÆŒø ‘Jacob,’ ְראוֵּבן/ PıÅ ‘Reuben,’ ֶּפֶרץ/ Ææ ‘Peretz,’ ַנְפָּת ִלי/ ˝çŁÆºØ ‘Naphtali,’ ַמְלִּכיֵאל/ ºåØź ‘Malchiel,’ ֶאִליֶע ֶזר/ ¯ºÆÇÆæ ‘Eliezer,’ ֶא ְלָעָזר/¯ºÆÇÆæ ‘Eleazar,’ ָד ִנּיֵאל/˜ÆØź ‘Daniel.’ 159 The exact statistical figures can be found on pp. , , , , , , , , , , , , , . The number of occurrences of ḥ aṭef-qameṣ and qibbuṣ is too small to provide any statistics (pp. –, –). 160 This information is taken from Idelsohn :, . Morag (:–) mentions no difference between segol and ṣere and emphasizes that a distinction between pataḥ and qameṣ characterizes only some Persian communities. 161 In this manuscript we find the following correspondences: ḥ ireq (with or without yod) à (eta or iota); (ṣere, segol, and mobile shewa) à epsilon; (pataḥ and qameṣ) à alpha; ḥ olem à (omega or omicron); shureq à omicronupsilon (de Lange :). Also note the statement by al-Qirqisānī, a Karaite scholar of the first half of the tenth century about Jews from Greece not pronouncing qameṣ as [ɔ] (WG :). 162 An Italian elegy composed at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries using Hebrew characters has the following correspondences: ḥ ireq à e or i; (ṣere and segol) à e; (pataḥ and qameṣ) à a (mainly in closed and open syllables, respectively); ḥ olem à o; shureq à u (Cassuto :). 163 In Old Czech glosses appearing in Arugat ha-Bosem by Abraham ben Azriel we find the following correspondences: ḥ ireq à i; ṣere à e; pataḥ à a; ḥ olem à o; shureq à u (see Urbach .IV:). 157 158
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The Hebrew component
similar to that of the PALESTINIAN system. The same system also underlies Sephardic pronunciation.164 Indeed, all known documents related to the Hebrew of Sephardic communities, both medieval and modern, despite their formal use of the TIBERIAN graphemes, distinguish only five full different vocalic qualities, the same as those that were distinct for the representatives of the medieval PALESTINIAN school. For Sephardic Jews, there are two kinds of qameṣ (gadol /a/ and qatan /o/) and, in the domain dealing with vowels that are not full two kinds of shewa (mobile and silent). Metrical analysis of poetry shows that Jews in medieval Spain displayed no quantitative differences between various full vowels.165 The most well-known theory of phonological distinctions among Hebrew vowels was developed by the Kimhis, the family of grammarians who dwelled in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Following the theoretical conclusions formulated by its most renowned representative, David Kimhi, one distinguishes the full vowels shown in Table .:166 TABLE . Full vowels according to David Kimhi Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq; /i:/ ḥ ireq with yod
/u/ qibbuṣ; /u:/ shureq
/e/ segol; /e:/ ṣere
/o/ qameṣ qatan; /o:/ ḥ olem /a/ pataḥ ; /a:/ qameṣ gadol
In addition to these ten vowels, he wrote about ultra-short reduced vowels, namely mobile shewa and three ḥ aṭef-vowels. It should be stressed that there is no proof of the existence of any Jewish community whose pronunciation of Hebrew would conform to the Kimhi scheme.167 Medieval sources from ZARFAT reveal a number of peculiarities of local pronunciation with respect to the vocalization in southern France or Spain. The author of Mahzor Vitry, a prayer book from eleventh-century northern France, states that there are three pointing systems: TIBERIAN, PALESTINIAN, and “our own.”168 Yet, numerous sources from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries imply that the vocalic system used had only five full vowels and, therefore, was, at least in this respect similar to the PALESTINIAN one (WG :–). Several documents from the thirteenth century imply penultimate stress in Hebrew words.169 In the glosses from the northwestern part of that area, segol is not used, qameṣ corresponds to French posterior [ɑ:], and pataḥ to [a] (Banitt :, ). Similar contrast between qameṣ and pataḥ can be observed in the eastern part of ZARFAT. However, here the role of
164
As a result, modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation is also mainly based on it. For details on medieval Spain see Garbell :–. 166 This scheme gives only the general rules. However, Kimhi also presents a list of contexts in which short vowels are lengthened. This includes: pataḥ and segol in penultimate stressed syllable, qibbuṣ before a consonant followed by ḥ aṭef-pataḥ . Kimhi also uses several particular terms. For him, qameṣ qatan and pataḥ qatan are alternative names for ṣere and segol, respectively (while the qameṣ corresponding to /o/ is called qameṣ ḥ atuf). (See the original text by Kimhi in Chomsky :–.) 167 Chomsky (:) suggests that the system with ten vowels (posited already by Joseph Kimhi, the father of David) could be influenced by the phonetic system of medieval Occitan, the vernacular language spoken in southern France. However, he does not provide any details about this possible link. 168 See the text by Kahle in Bauer and Leander (:). 169 See detailed arguments in Banitt :–, :. 165
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Stress position
segol is different. In two documents, ṣere is used for both closed /e/ and open // (compare French “é” and “è,” respectively), but segol appears only for // or /:/.170 The situation with Ashkenazic pronunciation, both medieval and modern, is the most complex and it will be considered in detail in sections . and ..
.
STRESS POSITION
.. Middle Ages Onomastic data clearly show that during the thirteenth century the Hebrew of BNEY HES contained words (having nothing to do with segolates) with penultimate accent. The earliest indirect testimony comes from Cologne. Here a Christian document of mentions a Jew called Leive. Comparing various documents from the same collection, one may conclude that this form represents a Latin character spelling of Hebrew ‘ ֵל ִויLevi.’ The grapheme ei (used in this area to designate the long sound [e:]) and the final e (resulting from the reduction of original [i]) both demonstrate the penultimate stress in this word (TG ). During the last quarter of the fourteenth century we find mention of Borich ‘Baruch’ ( )ָּברוְּךin Frankfurt and Loser ‘Eleazar’ ( )ֶאְלָעָזרin Alsace, both with the final reduced vowel that was therefore necessarily unstressed. Forms such as Smol(l)/Schmol(l) and Schmul ‘Samuel’ ( )ְׁשמוֵּאלregularly appear in documents from Zürich dating from about . Schmul is also found around in Augsburg, Swabia. In the lists of martyrs of , the name צורליןappears more than ten times in the towns of Würzburg, Bamberg, Rothenburg, and Nürnberg. This form represents a hypocorism created from the Jewish form of biblical Sara ( ) ׂ ָש ָרהwith the addition of the diminutive suffix ‐lin. The letter vav, present in the root, represents the sound [ɔ] or [o]: this rendition of the original qameṣ implies that it was stressed because it was only in stressed syllables that qameṣ became rounded. In unstressed syllables, various vowels became reduced in Yiddish. The oldest mention of Kussel dates from and involves a migrant from Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Franconia) who played an important role in Bingen (Hessen).171 This is a Yiddish hypocorism of Jekuthiel ()ְיקוִּתיֵאל, and it must have had antepenultimate stress before the elision of the posttonic vowel [i]. Two transcriptions made by von Harff likely reveal an antepenultimate stress position: eitzelga ‘with you’ ( )ֶאֶצְלכהand plonosa ‘so-and-so (feminine)’ ()ְּפלֹו ִניָתאa.172 Indirect evidence about the penultimate position of stress can also be found in the writings of Jekuthiel haKohen. One of his “warnings” about Ashkenazic pronunciation is stated in terms of the Hebrew
The first of these works is discussed in Banitt :–. When transcribing French words using Hebrew letters, the first of the two main pointers uses pataḥ and ṣere, but neither qameṣ, nor segol. The second pointer uses only pataḥ for French [a] and alef, with either qameṣ or pataḥ under the preceding letter to express [a:] or [ɑ:]. Segol appears about fifty times, and, but for a few exceptions, for the second of two pointers of the manuscript. Lambert and Brandin () are the editors of the second document. In their conventional rules for transliteration of the original Hebrew graphemes, they have always used the sign é for ṣere and è for segol. For segol, they give the example ‘ ֶאי ְרְּבאherb’ (Old French erbe, modern French herbe) (p.VIII). However, all other references to the same Old French word include ṣere (p. ). 171 We have no direct confirmation that at that time Rothenburg was in the BNEY HES territory. However, there are several indirect lines of argumentation based on the information discussed in section ... Firstly, Rothenburg seems to be the native town of Jekuthiel ha-Kohen who was one of BNEY HES and lived in the thirteenth century (see footnote above). Secondly, almost a century after the reference to Kussel of , we find that such towns as Ipsheim and Höchstädt, both situated east of Rothenburg, were still inside the BNEY HES territory (MRPC). 172 The letter combination “ei” present in the first syllable of the first word corresponds to the long sound /e:/. Consequently, this syllable was stressed. The accent in the second word cannot be penultimate: otherwise, the transcription would be plonisa (MRPC). It is unlikely to be ultimate either because von Harff clearly records the pronunciation of Ashkenazic Jews; compare, for example, “mispa” (and not *mispo) ‘fodder’ ()ִמְסּפֹוא. 170
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The Hebrew component
accentual grapheme meteg ‘ֽ.’ An analysis of his examples implies that Ashkenazic Jews of his time were most likely displaying accents in positions where they were placing meteg.173 Data collected by Eldar (:–) can also be taken to illustrate the Ashkenazic use of the meteg to designate the stress position. In one medieval prayer book of the WESTERN rite, Eldar found numerous cases of meteg, usually on penultimate syllable, rarely on the final one.174 173
In TIBERIAN usage, meteg does not occur on the accented syllable or that immediately preceding the accent. Jekuthiel warns, however, that Ashkenazic Jews have become accustomed to placing the meteg on the vowel preceding the accent (where in the TIBERIAN tradition this is marked by one of the three cantillation marks). He gives several types of examples. In the first, he deals with a meteg in open syllables: ( ָהׂרֽוֶמ ֶשֹ ׂתGenesis :), ( ְוָהָיהExodus :), ָאַֽמר (Esther :), שוּ ׂ ֽ ַח ָּט ֽאָתם ֲאֶׁשר ָע-( ֶאתNumbers :), ְיֽהוּ ָדה ְלִמְׁשְּפֽחֹוָתם-( ְב ֵניNumbers :), ִי ְׂש ָרֵאל ִלְפ ֻק ֵֽדיֶהם-( ְּב ֵניExodus :). The first of these examples is the only one in this corpus where the meteg falls on an antepenultimate syllable: the others are all penultimate. The second type involves a meteg on a vowel followed by a consonant with dagesh (in this case, a mark of gemination): ( ָהִאָּֽׁשהGenesis :), ִֽיֵּתן-( ִמיDeuteronomy :), ( ְוַֽעָּתהGenesis :), ֲאֶׁשר ִּתֽ ַּגע (Leviticus :), ַהֽ ָדּם-(ֶאתLeviticus :), and ַֽה ָּגן-( ְּבתֹו ְךGenesis :). The third series of examples covers words where a meteg is placed on a vowel followed by a consonant that takes a shewa: ָה ְּבכֹור-( ּ ָכלDeuteronomy :), ִַוּיְּֽתנוּם (Exodus :), ( ְמַצֽ ְוּ ָך ַהּיֹוםDeuteronomy :), ( ַֽהְיאֹורExodus :), and ( ֹלא ַֽיְב ִדּילLeviticus :). In the last two words, the shewa is silent in various known traditions of the Hebrew pronunciation. (The presence of pataḥ in the first syllable—before a consonant that can be in principle geminated—testifies to the fact that this syllable was formerly closed. Since the following consonant—veth or yod—is non-geminated, only the silent shewa could be responsible for this.) In the other words cited, the status of the shewa is uncertain. Normally, in the words in question it reflects an earlier vowel in open syllables that has been reduced. This shewa was (and is) pronounced in the Sephardic tradition (at least as far back as the time of Kimhi), but not (or not consistently) in the Ashkenazic tradition. The fact that these words appear in the same context as the last word, tends to suggest that Jekuthiel did not pronounce the shewa in all these words, a phenomenon consistent with his Ashkenazic background (see section ..). Jekuthiel also mentions that sometimes Ashkenazic Jews place the meteg on a shewa or a ḥ aṭef-vowel in a penultimate syllable. To illustrate this statement, he offers a fourth series of examples that include disyllabic words whose shewa or a ḥ aṭef-vowel in the first syllable become extended and acquires the meteg: ‘ ְֽו ֶזהand this’ (Deuteronomy :) and ‘ ֲֽעֵלהget thee up!’ (Deuteronomy :). This makes it clear that by meteg he means specifically the lengthening of an otherwise short vowel, a point that becomes even clearer when he says that Hebrew penultimate-accented words are pronounced by Ashkenazic Jews with a final accent so that the first vowel can acquire the meteg and be lengthened: ( ֶֽז ַרעGenesis :), ( ֶֽטֶרםGenesis :), and ( ְו ָֽכ ָכהExodus :). It might seem at first glance that this fifth series of examples contradicts the hypothesis of Ashkenazic (ante)penultimate accent. However, that would be ignoring the phonemic principle, according to which how a person perceives/analyzes the sounds of speech depends on the phonemic system of the language(s) he/she speaks (which in turns depends, as we know, largely—though not exclusively—on contrasts). What actually follows from this statement then is that Hebrew penultimate- and final-accented words were not distinguished in the kind of pronunciation Jekuthiel is condemning here. This means that phonologically we have precisely the situation known from later Ashkenazic sources, namely, the lack of the accentual contrasts that exist in the classical TIBERIAN system: the ultimate stress in the general case and the penultimate one in special series of words (segolates). Most likely, the words noted by Jekuthiel were pronounced with one kind of prominence (definitely including length) on the penult (or antepenult) and also some sort of prominence on the final syllable. This is consistent with (ante)penultimate-accent speakers attempting to speak with prestigious “correct” TIBERIAN accents and hence having two accents, their native one as well as the TIBERIAN one. The examples from the fifth series correspond to hypercorrect “TIBERIAN” accent on the final syllable. It is also important to stress that Jekuthiel’s placement of the meteg in all the series of examples mentioned above conforms to stress rules in the pronunciation of the words from the Hebrew component of Yiddish discovered by Leibel (see the next section). Leibel says nothing about words having more than three syllables. The only example from those suggested by Jekuthiel that has the meteg on a syllable different from the penult is the first one: ‘ ָהֽרֹוֶמֶׂשתthe creeping one’ (feminine singular). In this word of four syllables, the meteg is placed on the antepenult because the first syllable—that corresponds to the definite article—is treated here as a separate word. In the fourth series presented by Jekuthiel we find examples of stress (or, at least, lengthening) of ḥ aṭef-vowels (conforming to Leibel’s rules) or shewa (exceptional for Leibel’s rules but still known among Ashkenazic Jews, see the next section). [The whole footnote is due to MRPC. The text by Jekuthiel ha-Kohen and the connections to the Bible are quoted here from Yarkoni .:–.] 174 Eldar cites Bar-Asher’s findings of a similar usage in the Paris Mishna (Ms. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris – = Ancien fonds –), a manuscript executed in the Italian city of Cesena between and , according to the catalogue of Taschereau . Eldar takes his data to be proof of the absence of the Ashkenazic stress shift, saying that if there had been such a shift, then one would expect (i) the meteg to be used precisely the opposite of the way that it is, namely, normally on the ultima, to emphasize that that is a correctly accented syllable which Ashkenazic Jews tended
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Stress position
The information given earlier in this section concerned BNEY HES only. For BNEY KHES, in Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia we find, during the second half of the fourteenth century, several specifically Jewish forms of names that undoubtedly reveal the non-ultimate stress position: Cheskl, a vernacular form of Ezekiel ()ְיֶחְזְקֵאל, Musch for Moses (מ ׁ ֶשה ֹ ; with the final vowel apocopated), Schalam (; ׁ ָשלֹום the ultimately stressed form would necessarily have had [o] in the second syllable). Sources from Austria also provide several references to the male given name derived from ‘ ֲחֻנָּכהHanukkah’ with stress on the antepenult, exactly as in modern Yiddish. In principle, the earliest references, dating from – and showing the spellings Hanyko, Haneko, and Haniko, could be ultimately stressed. Yet, this possibility is excluded for Chanko and Hank(h)o appearing in –: they show the total elision of the posttonic vowel. This fact implies that the early trisyllabic variants had initial stress. Berach, related to modern Yiddish Beyrekh, is mentioned in Vienna in . That form demonstrates the antepenultimate stress in the pronunciation of biblical Berechiah ()ֶב ֶרְכָיה. Yiddish names Kusl/ Kisl (from Jekuthiel; )ְיקוִּתיֵאלand Hoyshie (from Yehoshua; )ְיהֹוֻׁשַעare among the other colloquial forms of biblical names that received antepenultimate stress. The earliest documented form found in Christian sources for the former appellation is likely to be Chysel, mentioned in in Carinthia. For Yehoshua, we find in documents from Austria, Bavaria, and Thuringia, all dating from the fourteenth century, such hypocorisms as Hoeschel, Hoschel, Hoschlein, and Höschlein.175
.. Main modern Yiddish patterns In modern Yiddish, the stress in polysyllabic words from the Hebrew component most often falls on the penultimate syllable. This general rule distinguishes this component from the German one in which—exactly as in German—the first root syllable is mainly the stressed one. It also places Yiddish apart from the Sephardic pronunciation in which the final accent dominates. For these reasons, the stress position of the Hebrew component represents a real idiosyncrasy of Yiddish, shared by both EY and WY. Several illustrations of this general rule are shown in Table .. to leave unaccented, (ii) discover traces of confusion of vowel qualities in final, unaccented, syllables. These arguments do not appear to be attractive. For the first one, the explanation given in the previous footnote when interpreting Jekuthiel’s writings appears preferable. As for the second argument, it involves three separate issues. Firstly, the shift of accent to the (ante)penultimate position need not have been immediately connected with the reduction of the unstressed vowels in Ashkenazic MERGED HEBREW. This is apparent from the treatment of thousands of foreign words in various dialects of German, in English, and in other languages with a similar accentual system: the accent shift to the left is almost always earlier than the vowel reduction. Secondly, we know that to this day there is no vowel reduction in WHOLE HEBREW, only in MERGED HEBREW, and we can show the same kind of diglossia at least as far back as the time of Elia Levita. Since the texts studied by Eldar were all WHOLE HEBREW, there is no reason to expect them to reflect this feature of MERGED HEBREW even if it had already arisen there. Thirdly, neutralizations in a spoken language need not always show up in the written texts. The persistence of the qameṣ/pataḥ , ṣere/segol, and many other graphemic distinctions in Hebrew in traditions where they have never (or not for thousands of years) had any phonetic reality is the best evidence for this. When we do find spelling errors, this is of course highly significant, but when we do not, it proves nothing. [This footnote is due to MRPC.] 175 These forms have typical German morphology because they include German diminutive suffixes -el and -lein. Since in German the stress is placed on the root’s first vowel, in theory, one can question the relevance of these examples for this context. Their stress position could have been influenced by German rather than reveal features of the pronunciation of Hebrew by Jews. A detailed analysis shows, nevertheless, that in various Ashkenazic hypocorisms, with or without suffixes, the stress is normally posited in the same position as in the base full form. We have, for example, Púre < Tsipúre ‘Zipporah,’ Avréml < Avróm ‘Abraham.’ The counter-examples such as Íserlin from ‘ ִיְׂש ָר ֵאלIsrael’ and Péltlin from ‘ ַּפְלִטיֵאלPaltiel’ are rare. For some of them their specific structure could be responsible for the stress shift: note that, in both counter-examples, (i) the final root consonant [l] coincides with the first consonant of the diminutive suffix; (ii) the root includes a cluster of two consonants, [sr] and [lt] respectively. They could also be derived from Christian forms of biblical names: this source is particularly plausible for Íserlin (from German Ísrael plus the suffix -lin).
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Sample of Yiddish words with penultimate stress StY form
WphY form
Meaning
Hebrew
mishpokhe
mishpokhe
family
ִמְׁשָּפָחה
yerushe
yerōshe, yerūshe
inheritance, heritage
ְירוּ ׁ ָשה
kapore
kapōre
fowl representing scapegoat (StY), destruction (WphY)
ַּכָּפ ָרה
avoyde
avaude
worship, divine service (StY), service, work (WphY)
ֲעבֹו ָדה
matone
matōne
gift
ַמ ָתּ ָנה
melokhe
melōkhe
craft (StY), work (WphY)
ְמ ָלאָכה
menukhe
menūkhe
peace, rest
ְמנּוָחה
TABLE . Stress position in various Jewish traditions Period
Jewish traditions with distinct stress patterns Mainly ultimate (milra)
Mainly penultimate (milel)
Medieval
Sephardic, southern French, Italian
ZARFATIC, BNEY HES, BNEY KHES
Modern
Sephardic
Ashkenazic, Persian, North Caucasian, Yemenite
Table . summarizes the information on stress position {v}. The general rule given in the table has a number of exceptions. Most numerous are the forms with antepenultimate stress. A few of them appear not only in EY but also in WY dialects or DuY. They are presented in Table . {v}:
TABLE . Sample of Yiddish words with antepenultimate stress Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew
StY, CzY (Ehrlich :), DuY, WphY, and SwY khásene (also BA )
wedding
ֲחֻת ָּנ ה
StY khánike, SwY khánige, DuY kháneke (also BA )
Hanukkah
ֲחֻנָּכה
StY óylemes, old WY oulemes176
worlds
עֹו ָלמֹות
StY óytsres, SwY outsres (Bollag :)
treasures
אֹוָצרֹות
176 Grolman (:) mentions the word oulemes ‘land’ in German Rotwelsch, undoubtedly of WY origin. (References from Grolman, Bollag, and Weinberg appearing in this chapter are known to me thanks to MRPC.)
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Stress position TABLE .
Continued
StY tóys(e)fes, DuY tousfes, WY tousfos (PhilogLottus :)
medieval commentaries on the Talmud
תֹּוָספֹות
StY tóykhekhe, DuY toukhekhe
vituperation
תֹּוֵכָחה
StY á(ha)ve, DuY áhave, EGY āve177
love
ַאֲה ָוה
StY and WphY shútfes, DuY shótfes
partner(ship)
ֻׁש ָתּפוּת
StY ákhren, WY ákharaun (Weinberg :)
last
ַאֲחרֹון
StY Khávkuk, WY Khávakuk (Weinberg :)178
Habbakuk (prophet)
ֲחַבּקוּק
StY bókherim, WYbókhrim (PhilogLottus :)
lads
ַּבחוּ ִרים
AlsY, SwY, and DuY kóunem, FrY kōnem, UkrY kóyenim, LitY kéyenim (TG )
members of the Jewish priestly caste (Kohanim)
ּכ ֲׁהִנים
In EY, we find several dozen examples. Among them are: bóg(e)res ‘adolescent woman’ ()ּבֹו ֶג ֶרת, óylemes ‘forever’ ()עֹולֹוִמית, yókhsin ‘genealogy’ ()יֹוָחִסין, póyteke ‘large sum of money’ ()ִאּפֹו ִתִּקי, names of Talmudic tractates géyrushin () ֵגּרוּ ׁ ִשין, hóyreyes ( )הֹוָריֹותand éyruvn ()ֵערוִּבין, masculine given names Yóykhenen ‘Johanan’ ( )יֹוָח ָנןand Yóynesn ‘Jonathan’ ( יֹו ָנָתןor )ְיהֹו ָנָתןa.179 Their absence from most of the existing WY glossaries may, in theory, reflect nothing more than the fact that by the time these were compiled the language was moribund. The information in section .. shows that in the Middle Ages both groups of Ashkenazic Jews— BNEY HES and BNEY KHES—shared similar stress patterns, namely the rules—with penultimate and antepenultimate stress position—that characterize modern Yiddish varieties. The unique reliable heuristic explanation of the stress position in words from the Hebrew component is due to Leibel (:–). He postulates the following two basic rules: () disyllabic words are penultimately stressed; () the same stress position is valid for trisyllabic words too if and only if the vowel of their first syllable was—at the moment when the modern distribution of the stress position came into being—shorter than that of the second syllable, otherwise they are antepenultimately stressed. When formulating his second rule, to determine the length of various Hebrew vowels Leibel implicitly uses the Kimhi scheme.180 Its application can explain the position of the stress in a large majority of words belonging to the Hebrew component of Yiddish.181 In addition, Leibel also seems to consider—again implicitly—that (contrary to Kimhi’s principles) the ḥ aṭefvowels are not ultra-short but equivalent in length to their full counterparts. Indeed, it is only with this supplementary assumption that his rules can be applicable to the cases when antepenultimate stress is acquired by the ḥ aṭef-pataḥ :khásene, khánike, and Khávkuk, all mentioned in the previous Selig (:) mentions another variant form of this word: “aiwa” used in the Yiddish of eastern Germany. Weinberg (:) also mentions WY ákharey ‘after’ ()ַאֲח ֵרי. 179 Some of StY words mentioned in this section (shutfes, oytsres, yokhsin) currently show penultimate stress position: it was, however, antepenultimate in the past, before the total elision of the vowel from the second syllable took place. The most representative collection of StY words with antepenultimate stress appears in Leibel :–. A few additional examples are given in WG : and BN . 180 See Table . in section .. 181 An approach alternative to that of Kimhi and according to which the number of exceptions from Leibel’s rules turns out to be smaller is discussed in the next section. 177 178
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The Hebrew component
paragraph. Reformulating Leibel’s rules in different terms, one can say that the stress in the Hebrew component falls on the first syllable when the vowel is long. If no single long vowel is present then the stress falls on the initial syllable. To this we should add two more conditions. Firstly, the exceptional character of the mobile shewa prevented it from taking the stress.182 It is difficult to say whether this indicates that the vowel in question was absent183 or ultra-short, or this phenomenon was due to its special status of reduced vowel. Secondly, due to some special metrical characteristics of the last syllable, it was not eligible for the stress position. This second condition was clearly less critical than the first. For this reason, one regularly finds the final stress in words whose first vowel was a mobile shewa. StY examples are gmar ‘conclusion’ () ְגָמר, klal ‘public, rule’ ()ְּכָלל, ksav ‘writing’ ()ְּכָתב, prat ‘detail’ ()ְּפָרט, pshat ‘meaning’ ()ְּפ ׁ ָשט, skhus ‘merit’ ()ְזכוּת, gvir ‘rich man’ () ְגִביר, yeríd ‘fair (a noun)’ ()ְי ִריד, kedéy ‘so that’ ()ְּכ ֵדי, and kedáy ‘worth’ ()ְּכַדאי. On the other hand, in words ending in any Hebrew vowel, independently of its length, and for which at least one of their previous vowels was different from shewa, the stress never became ultimate. Several irregularities concerning the stress position characterize both EY and certain Yiddish varieties from Western Europe {v}. For some words whose Hebrew etymons have exactly the same structure, we observe a different position for the accent (MRPC): penultimately stressed StY, SwY, AlsY (Weiss :), and DuY retséyekh, WphY retséyakh ‘murderer’ ( )רֹוֵצַחcontrasts with StY óyrekh / SwY ōrekh and áurekh / DuY óurekh (‘ )אֹו ֵרַחguest’ that had antepenultimate stress before the elision of the second vowel. Unusual stress falling on the Hebrew prepositional prefix can be found in EY bímkem ‘substitute’ ()ִּבְמקֹום, bíshleme ‘granted’ (Aramaic )ִּבְׁש ָלָמא, and bítmiye ‘expression of wonderment’ ()ִּב ְתִּמָיהa,184 but also in DuY bímroumof, literally ‘in His celestial heights’ ()ִּבְמרֹוָמיוa.185 Ultimate stress in StY khshad / SwY and DuY kheshád ‘suspicion’ ()ֲח ׁ ָשד and StY meshugás / WphY meshugās / DuY meshogās ‘madness’ ( )ְמֻׁש ַ ּגעתalso characterizes both major subdivisions of modern Yiddish.186
.
STRESSED VOWELS
This section has three parts. The first (..) describes the main synchronic rules valid for the stressed vocalism of modern Yiddish varieties and the link between vowels in words from the Hebrew and the German components. The second (..) deals with the history of Ashkenazic vowels. It also presents a scheme of PROTO-YIDDISH monophthongs covering vowels from both components in question. The third (..–..) addresses exceptional reflexes in modern Yiddish, that is, those whose behavior contradicts basic rules formulated in the first part. Both the second and the third parts also address another important topic: establishing—when reliable information is available—links between, on the one hand, rules and exceptional forms, and, on the other hand, the stressed vocalism of the languages spoken by BNEY HES and BNEY KHES.
See the discussion of exceptions in section ... On the elision of mobile shewa see section .. The initial stress is bitmiye is mentioned in Leibel :, while in available Yiddish dictionaries this form appears as penultimately stressed. The form bishleme is taken from Harkavy :, while Leibel’s variant bishloyme, with the diphthong oy in the place of unstressed qameṣ, is somewhat doubtful. 185 It appears in the expression ouse sholem bimroumof (Beem :) used in the sense of ‘to scram, to clear off ’ because it represents the first words of the last sentence of the Kaddish prayer, and one takes a few steps back when reciting this line. Weinberg (:) confirms this meaning in WphY and cites the same expression as used in the form of ause sholaum bímraumov that mixes WHOLE HEBREW and Yiddish pronunciations. 186 See the entry meshugas in Table . (section ..). 182 183 184
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Stressed vowels
.. Main reflexes in modern Yiddish The ascendance of Ashkenazic Hebrew is controversial. If we take into account only the number of different full vowels, it can be seen that modern Yiddish dialects are correlated better with the TIBERIAN than with other systems. Table . illustrates this statement, providing the main reflexes of various vowels in Yiddish words in open syllables. It can be seen that—contrary to the BABYLONIAN system—there is no merger between segol and pataḥ , while—contrary to the PALESTINIAN system— modern Yiddish varieties have distinct reflexes for segol and ṣere, as well as for pataḥ and qameṣ. Yet, exactly as in the TIBERIAN tradition, all seven full vowels have distinct realizations {v}. TABLE . Main reflexes of Hebrew vowels in open syllables TIBERIAN vowel ḥ ireq
ṣere
segol
Protovowel I
E
E
Main reflex
Example
WphY
LitY
Hebrew
Meaning
WphY
LitY
i:
i
ֲאִכי ָלה
eating
akhīle
akhile
ְמ ִדי ָנה
country
medīne
medine
ֵחֶלק
section, part
kheylek
kheylek
ְנֵקָבה
female
nekeyve
nekeyve
ֶּד ֶרְך
way, path
dērekh
derekh
ֶק ֶרן
main capital
kēren
kern
ey
e:
ey
e
ḥ aṭef-segol
E
e
e
ֱאֶמת
truth
emes
emes187
pataḥ
out
a:188
a
ַנַחת
pleasure
nākhes
nakhes
ḥ aṭef–pataḥ
A
a
a
ֲחמֹור
ass
khamer
khamer
ֲחֻתָּנה
wedding
khasene
khasene
ָחָכם
sage, wise
khōkhem
khokhem
ָּפִנים
face
pōnem
ponem
ֲעבֹו ָדה
worship
avaude
aveyde
סֹוֵחר
merchant
saukher
seykher
ּבוּ ָׁשה
shame
būshe
bushe, buse
ְסעוּ ָדה
repast, feast
sūde
sude
qameṣ gadol
ḥ olem
shureq
A
O
U
o:
au
u:
o
ey
u
Compare also the short /e/ in PolY elil ‘Jewish month Elul’ ( )ֱאלוּלand edim ‘Edom (biblical region)’ ()ֱאדֹום (Birnbaum :) whose StY equivalents are elul and edem, respectively. 188 Note, however, that the number of examples known for WphY is small, while the WphY form cognate to StY merakhem zayn (zikh) ‘to take pity’ has a short /a/ appearing in place of pataḥ in ְמ ַרֵחם. As a result, for this vowel the word ‘main’ given in the title of Table . is an oversimplification. 187
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The Hebrew component
As seen in Table ., in open syllables one can distinguish several idiosyncrasies of the pronunciation of the words from the Hebrew component that are, on the one hand, shared by both EY and WY, and, on the other hand, are not present in the Sephardic pronunciation. The first one consists in different reflexes for ṣere and segol: the former is usually expressed via a diphthong while the latter corresponds to a monophthong that is long in dialects that distinguish the vowel length such as WY and PolY. The second peculiarity consists in different reflexes for pataḥ and qameṣ: the former generally has the /a/quality while the latter always corresponds to back vowels. Among other particularities shared by EY and WY one can also cite the diphthongal realization of ḥ olem and ṣere. We obtain a dramatically different picture if we consider reflexes in closed syllables (see Table .). If we compare the information appearing in Tables . and ., we can observe several peculiarities of Yiddish. Firstly, in closed syllables the number of different realizations is significantly smaller than in open syllables: only five, exactly the same as in the PALESTINIAN system and modern Sephardic pronunciation {v}. Pataḥ and qameṣ (gadol) are not distinguishable; the same rule applies to ṣere and segol and ḥ olem and qameṣ qatan. Secondly, for all seven TIBERIAN full vowels, their WphY reflexes in closed syllables are always different from those in open syllables {v}. In the first context they correspond to short monophthongs, in the second these reflexes are either long vowels or diphthongs. For LitY (and hence StY also) reflexes in open and closed syllables are distinct only for ḥolem, ṣere, and qameṣ. For other vowels they are independent of the environment because of the loss of vowel length distinction in this dialect.189 In PolY, however, the quantitative distinction is also TABLE . Main reflexes of Hebrew vowels in closed syllables TIBERIAN vowel
Protovowel
Main reflex
Example
WphY
LitY
Hebrew
Meaning
WphY
LitY
ḥ ireq
I
i
i
ִּכיס
purse, scrotum
kis
kis
ṣere
E
e
e
ֵמת
dead body
mes
mes
ֵמם
name of the letter מ
mem
mem
segol
E
e
e
ֶאְפ ׁ ָשר
perhaps
efsher
efser, efsher
pataḥ
A
a
a
ַמְלָּכה
queen
malke
malke
qameṣ gadol
A
a
a
ָים
sea
yam
yam
ְׁשָבט
Jewish month Shebat
shvat
shvat
qameṣ qatan
O
o
o
ָחְכָמה
wisdom
khokhme
khokhme
ḥ olem
O
o
o
ּכֹוס
goblet, cup
kos
kos
shureq
U
u
u
מוּם
defect
mum
mum
189 At the moment of this loss, in open syllables ḥ olem and ṣere were already realized as diphthongs, while qameṣ was /o:/ (differing therefore from its realization in closed syllable, /a/, not only by quantity but also by quality). For these reasons, for all of them the contrast was maintained.
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Stressed vowels
maintained for ḥ ireq, segol, and shureq/qibbuṣ: in all these cases, exactly as in WphY, corresponding vowels are short in closed syllables and long or diphthongs in open syllables.190 Compare the following pairs of PolY forms: [ḥireq] din ‘law’ ( – ) ִדּיןdīnim ‘laws’ ([ ;) ִדּיִניםṣere] ger ‘proselyte’ ( – ) ֵגּרgayrim ‘proselytes’ ([ ;) ֵגּ ִריםsegol] hespid ‘funeral eulogy’ ( – )ֶהְס ּ ֵפדbeygid ‘garment’ (;)ֶּב ֶגד [ḥolem] os ‘letter of the alphabet’ ( – )אֹותoysiis ‘letters of the alphabet’ ([ ;)אֹוִתּיֹותqameṣ] klal ‘rule’ ( – )ְּכ ָללklūlim ‘rules’ ([ ;)ְּכ ָל ִליםshureq] mim ‘defect’ ( – )מוּםtkīfi ‘period’ () ְתּקוָּפהa.191 On the other hand, the existence of a quantitative distinction for pataḥ in PolY remains questionable. Bin-Nun (BN ) and Birnbaum (:) attest to the short /a/-realization in open syllables. Katz (:–), however, points out that some PolY subdialects sporadically show the long /a:/. Actually, this reflex could be either due to relatively recent borrowings from WY, or it can reveal the original reflex (this is Katz’s opinion).192 In addition to the form nākhes mentioned in Table ., Katz also gives the following subdialectal examples for PolY: lākhesh ‘magic speech’ (ש ׁ )ַלַח, and pākhed ‘fear’ ()ַּפַחדa.193 Several vowels are also found in syllables that are open in modern Yiddish but were closed in the past, as testified by the presence of dagesh forte (sign ◌ּ ) in the following consonants.194 This sign designates formerly geminated consonants. Table . provides several typical examples. TABLE . Main reflexes of Hebrew vowels in formerly closed syllables TIBERIAN vowel ḥ ireq
Protovowel I
Main reflex
Example
WphY
LitY
Hebrew
Meaning
WphY
LitY
i
i
ִגּּבֹור
strong man
giber
giber
ִחּלוּף
exchange
khilef
khilef
ִגֶּּמל
name of the letter ג
gimel
giml
segol
E
e
e
ֶה ֵ ּזק195 a
loss, damage
hezek
hezek
pataḥ
A
a
a
ַגָּּנב
thief
ganev
ganef
ַּכָּלה
bride
kale
kale
ַּדּלוּת
poverty
dales
dales
ַח ָזּ ן
cantor in synagogue
khazen
khazn
ֻסּכֹות
Sukkoth (Jewish holiday)
sukes196
sukes
qibbuṣ
U
u
u
190 Birnbaum (:–) was among the first scholars who paid attention to the different distribution in open and closed syllables of the same TIBERIAN vowels in PolY. The information presented in a synthetic table compiled by him (:–) is in many respects similar to that given in Tables . and .. 191 These phonetic forms are taken from Birnbaum :–. 192 If we follow Katz, the eventual shortening to /a/ would result from an innovation due to the fact that the sound /a:/ had been unusual for PolY before the diphthong /aj/ turned into /a:/ in this dialect (most likely, during the seventeenth century, see section ..). For a few exceptional reflexes see section ... 193 The last form (together with nākhes) is also known in DuY and SwY. 194 See the discussion of geminated consonants indicated by dagesh forte at the end of section ... 195 In Yiddish dictionaries and glossaries the usual spelling is היזק. 196 This word is pronounced tsukes in EGY (Friedrich :) and the Yiddish of Hamburg, siges in SwY, siges/ seges in AlsY, suges/siges in the Yiddish of the Rhine Palatinate and Hessen (GGA , LCA , Weill :, BA ).
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The Hebrew component
To a similar category can be assigned batim ‘cases of the phylacteries’ ()ָּב ִתּים, with a short /a/ in PolY (Birnbaum :) and WY (PhilogLottus :).197 In the Yiddish word derived from Hebrew ‘ ֹשֹׂו ְנִאיםenemies,’ the syllable was formerly closed because of the consonantal character of alef at the moment when the rules formulated in Tables .–. came into being (Katz a:). For this reason, ḥ olem gave rise here to short /o/; compare PolY sonim and DuY/WphY sonem {v}.198 The same idea explains the short /o/ in PolY poshim ‘sinners’ (Hebrew )ּפֹו ְׁשִעיםa.199 It is not clear whether the consonantal character of alef was responsible for the short /o/ in pan-Yiddish tomer ‘if, in case’ (תּאַמר ׁ ) {v}.200 Here the shortening of ḥ olem in open syllables may be due to a particular secondary role of this word in a sentence (MRPC). The information given in Tables .–. is almost consensual among all major scholars in the domain of Yiddish studies. The only exception relates to one particular aspect in the approach by Weinreich. Globally speaking, he considers that the opposition open~closed syllables induces the opposition long ~ short vowels for ḥ ireq and shureq/qibbuṣ and can also explain a number of modern reflexes of pataḥ , qameṣ, segol, and ṣere. For closed syllables, he suggests correspondences identical to those shown in Table . with one exception: for qameṣ he refers to /o/ (WG :–) while Table . speaks of /a/. In fact, Weinreich himself provides a large list of forms where qameṣ in closed syllables corresponds to /a/ {v}. Among them are StY dag ‘fish’ () ָדּג, dam ‘blood’ () ָדּם, gmar ‘conclusion’ () ְגָּמר, lav ‘no’ () ָלאוa,201 navenád ‘homeless’ ( ְו ָנדa ) ָנע, prat ‘detail’ ()ְּפָרט, pshat ‘meaning’ ()ְּפ ׁ ָשט, and yad ‘pointer, hand’ ()ָיד. Similar behavior is exhibited by forms in which according to general rules the stress position has to be penultimate. Yet, it is the last syllable that takes the stress: khshad ‘suspicion’ ()ֲח ׁ ָשד, khshash ‘apprehension’ ()ֲח ׁ ָשׁש, m(e)khak ‘shortage’ ()ֶמָחק, nedán/nadán ‘dowry’ () ָנ ָדןa,202 shlal ‘a great deal’ () ׁ ָש ָלל, skhar ‘reward’ () ׂ ָשָכר, and vlad ‘fetus’ ({ ) ָו ָלדv}.203 Weinreich considered, nevertheless, these forms to be exceptional taking them for remnants of an archaic pronunciation inherited from the early Ashkenazic vocalic system related to the PALESTINIAN scheme. Actually, the number of /a/-reflexes for qameṣ in closed syllables is significantly larger than the number of /o/-reflexes. Among the few examples of /o/ are biblical male names God ‘Gad’ ( ) ָגּדand Don ‘Dan’ () ָדּן. Even in these cases, however, we are likely to be dealing with a late renorming of the pronunciation influenced by the rules of WHOLE HEBREW in which qameṣ in closed syllables is pronounced /o/. Indeed, the two appellations in question were rarely used in the Middle Ages and the oldest references to the forms with /o/ known to us date from the eighteenth century.204 An additional corroboration of that idea comes from the StY expression dan zayn ‘to judge’ whose first element is derived from Hebrew ָדן. It testifies to the fact that the regular Yiddish form for the given name would also be *Dan and not Don. As a result, it is more appropriate to assign qameṣ in Note that in H the same Hebrew word (though in the sense ‘houses’) is written with pataḥ instead of qameṣ. In SwY, we find two variants: sunem (certainly colloquial) and sounem (influenced by WHOLE HEBREW norms). 199 Birnbaum (:) was the first scholar to explain in this way the short reflex in PolY sonim and poshim. 200 AlsY tomer is cited in Weill :. Also see the discussion of tomer in Birnbaum : and Neuberg :–. RESPONSA by Solomon Luria (Rubashov :), HiP, and ZuR include some of the earliest references. 201 This form was not listed by Weinreich. 202 This form is valid for LitY, CzY, and the Yiddish of Hungary. Yet, nadn dominates in PolY and UkrY (LCA ). 203 Several words in this list have construct forms with shewa and pataḥ , for example ְש ַׁכרand ְׁש ַלל. It would be inappropriate, however, to make these forms responsible for the Yiddish pronunciation: this explanation does not work for others and, moreover, we do not find in Yiddish any expression that would include these constructs and whose use would be more common than that of the word alone. Also, all the exceptions seem to have only one feature in common: the vowel that retained the final accent is qameṣ that is followed by a consonant. The same rule could, in principle, explain why one finds relatively recent mentions of the /a/-forms for ‘ ָח ָכםwise’ and ‘ ָנָתןNathan,’ compare ַחַכםin BZR (TG ), Nasan (Hungary, ), and Nassan (Red Ruthenia, ). These forms might correspond to archaic *khakhám and *Nasán (Nesán), respectively, their modern StY variants being khókhem and Nosn. 204 See details in the entries Don and God in Beider . 197 198
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Examples of similar treatment of vowels Examples from the Hebrew Component LitY-AlsY ‘meaning’ (Hebrew)
Examples from the German component LitY-AlsY ‘meaning’ (MHG form)
Protovowel
kharote-kheroude ‘regret’ ()ֲחָרָטה
nodl-noudl ‘needle’ (nâdel)
A
eyme-eyme ‘fear’ ()ֵאיָמה
eybik-eyvig ‘eternal’ (êwic)
E
erev-ēref ‘eve’ ()ֶע ֶרב
mel-mēl ‘flour’ (mël)
E
medine-medīne ‘region’ ()ְמ ִדי ָנה
brider-brīder ‘brothers’ (brüeder)
I
reyfe-roufe ‘physician’ ()רֹוֵפא
reyt-rout ‘red’ (rôt)
O
gvure-gf yre ‘strength’ () ְּגבוּ ָרה
bruder-bryder ‘brother’ (bruoder)
U
closed syllables to /a/ rather than to /o/.205 The /a/-reflex for qameṣ in closed syllables is not limited to EY. In can also be observed in WphY where (in addition to yam and shvat mentioned in Table .) one also finds kefár ‘village’ ()ְּכָפר, and shmaden/shmaten( StY shmadn) ‘to convert to Christianity’ (from the root ) ׁ ְשָמד. In EGY206 and DuY, we also find dam ‘blood,’ yad ‘hand,’ shmaden ‘to convert to Christianity,’ and yam ‘sea.’ The last two forms as well as kefar ‘village’ appear in CzY as well. Similar forms are found in SWY: compare SwY dam ‘blood,’ yad ‘hand,’ and AlsY gfar ‘village’ (Zuckerman :), dam ‘blood,’ khashad ‘suspicion,’ yad ‘hand,’ yam ‘sea,’ navenad ‘homeless,’ skhar ‘reward,’ and shmade ‘to convert.’207 Also note that one of BNEY HES, Elia Levita in SD, places pataḥ instead of qameṣ in such words as ‘ ְּכַפרvillage,’ ‘ ַידhand,’ and ‘ ׁ ְשַבטJewish month Shebat.’208 The same kind of non-TIBERIAN spelling appears in H for words meaning ‘hand’ and ‘blood.’ An additional illustration of the unity of the stressed vocalism of the Hebrew component of EY and WY can be found in the following synchronic phenomenon. If a word from the German component possesses the same phoneme as a word from the Hebrew component in WY, then their cognates in EY (if attested) will also mainly have only one phoneme (not necessarily the same as WY) {v}.209 Table . presents several examples taken from LitY and AlsY; for the latter the reflexes are taken from Zuckerman .210 Information similar to that shown in Table . can be given for other Yiddish varieties too (see sections ..–..).
.. Schemes for ancient Yiddish Schemes suggested by various Yiddish scholars for vocalic features of the Hebrew pronunciation in early Ashkenazic communities that underlies modern Yiddish differ significantly. The main differences concern the length of Hebrew vowels in medieval Ashkenazic pronunciation. Bin-Nun (BN ), Birnbaum (:), and Katz (a:, a:) all consider /a/ to be the rule. See Friedrich :, , , . 207 See Zivy : (last example) and Weill :, , , , (other words). 208 Since Elia Levita was an outstanding Hebrew grammarian and knew not only the vernacular pronunciation by Ashkenazic Jews but also the one used by their Sephardic coreligionists, these spellings may show that during his time placing a pataḥ rather than qameṣ in some monosyllabic words was considered the norm (MRPC). 209 This argument is similar to Katz’s idea of “analogous fusion” discussed in section .. 210 The last column corresponds to designations of Yiddish “proto-vowels” introduced by Weinreich (see Table . in section .). 205 206
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The Hebrew component
Birnbaum (:–) observes the PALESTINIAN-like character of vowels in closed syllables and extrapolates this property to early reflexes in open syllables. This extrapolation is inappropriate since it cannot explain the split between the reflexes of segol and ṣere, as well as between pataḥ and qameṣ gadol. Another argument suggested by him concerns the reflexes of shureq and ḥ ireq in open syllables. Birnbaum (:) says that if during the Middle Ages they were pronounced as long vowels /u:/ and /i:/, they would necessarily undergo the same diphthongization as the reflexes of MHG û and î, respectively. This assertion is not convincing either. It takes for granted the idea that the German and the Hebrew components of the Ashkenazic vernacular idiom were already fused at the moment of the diphthongization in question. Yet, this hypothesis is not necessarily verified. If the system of vowels of Ashkenazic Hebrew was still independent of the development of German vowels there was no reason for Hebrew /u:/ and /i:/ to become diphthongs.211 Bin-Nun (BN ) posits the TIBERIAN origin of Yiddish vocalism. He points out that the TIBERIAN system distinguishes only qualities, not quantities, but posits that the Hebrew vowels were already long in open syllables during the PROTO-YIDDISH period. His approach involves several steps. Firstly, he postulates general correspondences between Hebrew and MHG vowels: (a) long: qameṣ gadol = â; ṣere = ê; ḥ ireq with yod = ie; ḥ olem = ô; shureq = uo; (b) short: pataḥ = a; segol = ë; ḥ ireq without yod = i; qameṣ qatan = o; qibbuṣ = u (BN –). Note that the author accepts the validity of the Kimhi scheme212 for the pronunciation of Hebrew vowels by medieval Ashkenazic Jews. Secondly, his detailed analysis of the stressed vocalism of the Hebrew component of Yiddish reveals numerous exceptions to these correspondences. Generally, he suggests the exact environments in which these exceptions occur (BN –). Finally, Bin-Nun explicitly formulates two additional general rules, both of which, according to him, are due to similar phenomena in early NHG: () the shortening of long vowels in closed syllables that redefined the correspondences to the MHG vowels in another way: qameṣ gadol = a; ṣere = e; ḥ ireq with yod = i; ḥ olem = o; shureq = u; () the lengthening of short vowels in open syllables (BN –). In Hebrew manuscripts using TIBERIAN diacritics compiled in the Rhineland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and in some sources from the fifteenth century also, one finds numerous cases of confusion between qameṣ and pataḥ as well as between ṣere and segol.213 Yet, since the end of the fourteenth century, a majority of Ashkenazic manuscripts are already pointed according to the TIBERIAN norms. Taking this information into account, Weinreich postulates that the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew underwent, during the thirteenth century, a conscious renorming from a system having five vowels (PALESTINIAN) to one having seven vowels (TIBERIAN). He suggests that this normative change is linked to the influx of scholars from Babylonia (who at that time had already abandoned the BABYLONIAN system in favour of the TIBERIAN one). For this reason, he speaks about the hypothetical BABYLONIAN RENAISSANCE that took place at that period in Ashkenazic communities (WG :–). The TIBERIAN system underlies modern Yiddish as a result of this process. Weinreich posits that for early Ashkenazic Jews who switched to the TIBERIAN norms, all seven full vowels had seven distinct qualities but the same quantity: they were short in all positions (WG :). For him, the lengthening in open syllables occurred later, under the influence of a similar phenomenon in the German component. During this lengthening, dagesh forte still had a phonemic role designating geminated consonants. When this role ceased, the lengthening in open syllables was no longer operative (WG :–). This theory allows one to explain the data in Table .. Figure . summarizes the general views of Weinreich on the history of the vocalization of Hebrew.
211 212 213
See a more detailed discussion of this issue at the end of this section. See Table . in section .. See details in Yalon , WG :–, TG –, Eldar :–, and Morag :.
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Stressed vowels
Biblical Hebrew
Palestinian system
Sephardic Hebrew
Tiberian system
Early Ashkenazic Hebrew
Babylonian system
Babylonian Hebrew 1250
Babylonian Renaissance Hebrew determinant of WY and EY
FIGURE .
Yemenite Hebrew
History of Hebrew vocalization according to Weinreich
Katz (a:) demonstrated the internal incoherence of Weinreich’s idea about the shortness of all Hebrew vowels in the pronunciation of medieval Ashkenazic Jews. Indeed, if one takes into account the modern reflexes of qameṣ in open syllables, one can see that in both EY and WY they are similar—as already noted by Bin-Nun—to the reflexes of MHG â. Yet, the reflexes of this vowel have always been long in Yiddish and German dialects distinguishing vowel length. Similarly to Bin-Nun, Katz (a:–, a:) supports the idea that the Kimhi scheme was not contrived but reflected a phonetic reality. He suggests the following two principal traits of the Hebrew pronunciation underlying PROTO-YIDDISH: () in open syllables: the ten vowels of the Kimhi scheme (five short and five long); () in closed syllables: only five short vowels resulting from the pre-Ashkenazic shortening of formerly long vowels and their merging with their short counterparts: qameṣ with pataḥ , ṣere with segol, and ḥ olem with qameṣ qatan. The classical Kimhi scheme of ten vowels implies only five different qualities. As a result, by itself it cannot provide any explanation for the existence of the qualitative distinctions between (a) ṣere and segol and (b) qameṣ and pataḥ , while these distinctions are observable in Yiddish. To compensate for this, Katz introduces additional hypotheses, absent from the Kimhi scheme. In the Hebrew in question, the quality of long and shortened ṣere was different. The former corresponded to [e:], while the latter (as well as all reflexes of segol) corresponded to []. According to Katz, similar qualitative differences between long and shortened qameṣ existed as well. The former corresponded to [ɔ:], while the latter (as well as all reflexes of pataḥ ) corresponded to [a]. Katz’s global scheme of Hebrew vowels underlying Yiddish is presented in Table ..214
214 Katz himself presents a table with qualities and quantities for various Yiddish proto-vowels without giving the exact correspondences between the proto-vowels and the Hebrew vowels. Correspondences presented in Table . mainly come from Katz’s text: several of them he discusses explicitly, others (those concerning the /i/- and /u/qualities) are added here based on Katz’s acceptance of the Kimhi scheme.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Pre-Ashkenazic Hebrew vowels according to Katz Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq in closed syllables /i:/ ḥ ireq (with yod) in open syllables
/u/ qibbuṣ and shureq in closed syllables /u:/ shureq in open syllables
/e:/ ṣere in open syllables
/o/ ḥ olem in closed syllables and qameṣ qatan /o:/ ḥ olem in open syllables
// ṣere in closed syllables and segol
/ɔ:/ qameṣ in open syllables /a/ qameṣ in closed syllables and pataḥ
According to Katz (a:), throughout Yiddish history short vowels in open syllables underwent lengthening under the influence of a similar process in German. As can be seen from Table ., only two vowels were really affected: segol and pataḥ . In its main aspects, this scheme is almost identical to that suggested by Bin-Nun. The only major difference concerns the chronology of the shortening of long vowels in closed syllables. For BinNun, this occurred during Ashkenazic history under the influence of similar phonological phenomena in German. Yet, for Katz this scheme was valid earlier: he considers that the shortening in question predates Ashkenazic history. Note also that, unlike Weinreich, Katz explains the passage from five to seven vowels in open syllables as a phenomenon resulting from a natural (rather than normative) change. Several aspects of Katz’s and Bin-Nun’s approaches are questionable. Firstly, their acceptance of the basic Kimhi scheme contradicts several important characteristics of Yiddish vocalism. When analyzing modern Yiddish reflexes of words of Hebrew origin one cannot discern any differences in the treatment of (a) two kinds of ḥ ireq, with or without yod,215 and (b) shureq and qibbuṣ,216 which suggests that the nature of the differences between the elements of these two pairs is orthographic rather than phonetic, exactly as in the case of ḥ olem, with or without vav.217 Secondly, both scholars combine the seven TIBERIAN qualities with the Kimhi scheme proposed for PALESTINIAN/Sephardiclike pronunciation with only five qualities. Thirdly, Katz’s scheme is asymmetrical in several places. Fourthly, the difference between the qualities of the same letters in open and closed syllables (postulated by Katz for ṣere and qameṣ) seems to be ad hoc. Finally, the existence of the long reflex of pataḥ in open syllables postulated by Katz, though known in several Yiddish varieties of Western Europe, is controversial for EY.218 Katz posits the Danubian origin of the Yiddish difference in the treatment of the same TIBERIAN Hebrew vowels in open and closed syllables. In this instance, his evidence is far from being 215 Examples of words with PolY short /i/ in place of ḥ ireq with yod can be found in BN . Among them: bris ‘circumcision ceremony’ ()ְּב ִרית, yirit ‘fair (a noun)’ ()ְי ִריד, and din ‘religious law’ () ִדּין. 216 Examples of words with PolY short /i/ in place of shureq can be found in BN . Among them: gif ‘body’ ()גּוּף and psil ‘blemish’ ()ְּפסוּל. 217 One also notices that there is only one name for both kinds of ḥ ireq. Likewise, before the term shureq was introduced in the Middle Ages, there was no terminological distinction between the two graphemes of the second of these pairs: both were called qibbuṣ. In the TIBERIAN vocalization tradition, the grapheme qibbuṣ is an allograph of the shureq: both letters correspond to the same phoneme. (Also see the discussion of the term פוםa מלאin section ...) 218 See the discussion of this topic in section ...
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Stressed vowels
convincing. To illustrate the validity of his conclusions, he quotes from a festival prayer book completed in Hebrew in by Judah ben Samuel *Zeltman219 which—according to Katz—was supposedly traceable to the Danube region. Firstly, Katz shows that in several cases of closed syllables segol and pataḥ were interchangeable with ṣere and qameṣ, respectively. However, one may note that it is clear that such a kind of confusion was also found in any system that did not distinguish these vowels in any environment, and therefore this fact shows no specifically Yiddish idiosyncrasy. Secondly, he observes the correct (with qameṣ in the second syllable) pointing of the plural ‘ ַגּ ָּנִביםthieves’ and an error—pataḥ instead of qameṣ in the second syllable—in the singular ‘ ַגַּּנבthief.’ From this, Katz (a:)—who considers that at that time the stress was still ultimate—concludes about the corroboration of his argument. For him, this example shows the merger of both pataḥ and qameṣ in closed stressed syllables. It is more plausible, however, that the stress should already be penultimate, in which case the pataḥ may simply result from the reduction of the unstressed vowel. Most important is, however, the fact that the affiliation to the Danube region of the document in question—in which Katz found systematic differences of treatment in open and closed syllables—appears to be doubtful. The same source was also studied by Eldar (:) who explicitly links it to the WESTERN (Rhenish) and not the EASTERN (Danubian) Ashkenazic rite. Moreover, the manuscript includes much discussion of the religious customs (minhagim) of Worms, so much so that it has been taken for granted by some scholars that the author was in fact from that city.220 Table . summarizes Katz’s (a:–, :) chronology of various phonological phenomena in Hebrew underlying Yiddish, all of these phenomena directly or indirectly affecting vocalic features.221 To refute some elements of the chronology outlined in Table ., one may consider the series of Yiddish words that, on the one hand, are unrelated to segolates, and, on the other hand, have a long non-final stressed segol, pataḥ , or ḥ aṭef-pataḥ . According to the Kimhi scheme accepted by Katz, in pre-Ashkenazic times the vowels in question could not have been long. Following Katz’s relative chronology they would receive the stress after the German-inspired lengthening. Consequently, if Katz’s approach were valid, the stressed vowels of these words would continue to be short in all modern dialects since no known process could really contribute to their lengthening. Yet, we find long vowels in the following series with: • segol: SwY ēkhed and WphY ēkhad ‘one (masculine)’ ()ֶאָחד, as well as in PolY subdialectal ākhes ‘one (feminine)’ ( )ַאַחתand ākher ‘last, after’ ()ַאַחר, not found in isolation but attested in such compounds as binshime-akhes ‘in one breath’ and kilakher-yad ‘carelessly, nonchalantly’ (Weiss :)222 • ḥaṭef-pataḥ: StY kholem ‘dream’ ()ֲחלֹום, khotse ‘half ’ ()ֲח ִצי, and oder ‘Jewish month Adar’ ()ֲא ָדרa.223 The previous examples show that at least one of Katz’s two major positions—() the Kimhi scheme and/or () German-influenced lengthening predating the stress shift—is wrong. Another illustration 219 As seen from the catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, manuscript Mich / ), the original Hebrew spelling of the vernacular given name (kinnui) of the author (and not his surname because at that period hereditary family names were still non-existent) was זלטמן. 220 See details in GJ , , . This reference is known to me thanks to MRPC. 221 In this table, as pointed out by Katz himself, the relative chronology of processes and is impossible to determine because they concern mutually exclusive contexts: gemination of consonants involved closing preceding syllables while lengthening of vowels occurred only in open syllables. 222 These examples are due to MRPC. In certain WY dialects (including AlsY) one can observe the secondary lengthening of [a] before [x] (Zuckerman :). A similar, relatively recent, process could also, in principle, be responsible for the presence of long [a:] in ākhes and ākher. This explanation does not work, however, for ēkhed: no secondary lengthening of [e] before [x] is mentioned in the available sources. 223 See dialectal forms with long vowels and their discussion in section ...
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Chronology of Ashkenazic phonological phenomena according to Katz Process
Period
. Establishment of a system with: • Seven TIBERIAN qualities • Length of vowels as in the Kimhi scheme • Ultra-short ḥ aṭef -vowels • Geminated consonants if dagesh forte • Consonantal character of ayin and alef • Penultimate stress in segolates, ultimate stress in other contexts.
Pre-Ashkenazic
. Loss of the ultra-short character of ḥ aṭef -vowels
Pre-Ashkenazic
. Shortening of vowels in closed syllables
Pre-Ashkenazic
. Loss of the consonantal character of ayin and alef
After process
. Lengthening in open syllables under the influence of German
th century
. Degemination of consonants with dagesh forte
Most likely, before process
. Stress shift to the penultimate position
th century
of the general weakness of the chronology suggested by Katz comes from the consideration of the exact distribution of the stress position in words from the Hebrew component of Yiddish. Katz ignores words having stress in antepenultimate syllables. Yet, as discussed in section .., their number is large and the only reliable explanation of the existing dichotomy between the penultimate and antepenultimate positions—that of Leibel ()—lies in the length of the Hebrew vowels. This length is determined according to internal Hebrew properties, totally independently of the lengthening/shortening processes in medieval German. Moreover, German phonetic phenomena in question affected stressed syllables only, while for rules discovered by Leibel to be applicable before the stress shift vowels were already necessarily long or short in both stressed and unstressed syllables, a situation impossible in German phonetics. As a result, the shift stress conditions were internal to Ashkenazic Hebrew and, therefore, the consideration by Katz of this process in relationship to German phenomena appears inappropriate. Globally speaking, Katz (:–, a, b) insists that for understanding adequately the systems in which in open syllables qameṣ and ṣere are identical to or different from pataḥ and segol, respectively, one needs to speak not about different time periods (as was done by Weinreich) but about two geographically separate groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews: () BNEY HES, with a Sephardic-like system comprising five different vowels, and () BNEY KHES, with seven vowels. According to him, modern Yiddish pronunciation inherits the pronunciation of Hebrew from BNEY KHES. Figure . summarizes the main aspects of Katz’s theory. Katz himself provides no argument to illustrate his idea that in open syllables, since early times, Danubian BNEY KHES (contrary to Rhenish BNEY HES) has pronounced pataḥ and segol distinctly from qameṣ and ṣere, respectively. A possible indirect corroboration of such an idea can be found in Eldar . It is only in the prayer book for the EASTERN rite, from the BNEY KHES area, that Eldar finds four instances of ḥ olem used instead of qameṣ, three of them occurring in open syllables. This testifies to
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Stressed vowels
Biblical Hebrew
Palestinian system
Tiberian system 1 000 years ago
Sephardic Hebrew
Hebrew of Bney Hes
Hebrew of Bney Khes
Hebrew determinant of WY and EY
FIGURE .
History of Hebrew vocalization according to Katz
the fact of the similarity of the phonetic values of these vowels, a phenomenon that was not noted in WESTERN prayer books. This distinction could be, however, related to the specific developments of the German dialects in the two regions and hence it does not necessarily prove that for BNEY KHES the qualities of pataḥ and qameṣ were already different at that period.224 Eldar (:–) also reveals that in the prayer book for the EASTERN rite, that of the BNEY KHES area, numerous confusions between ṣere and segol, qameṣ and pataḥ were found. As a result, for both groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews early systems of Hebrew pronunciation consisted in five (and not seven) full vowels. Yet, early Christian Hebraists explicitly mention as accomplished facts the differences between pataḥ and qameṣ and between ṣere and segol.225 They demonstrate that by the end of the fourteenth century and during the fifteenth century, at least normatively, the vocalic systems of both BNEY KHES and BNEY HES already consisted of seven qualities. Henricus de Hassia gives the following correspondences: pataḥ = A, qameṣ = “thick” A, ṣere = E, segol = “thick” E. In this context, the sense of the word “thick” is ambiguous; maybe he meant “comparatively more back,” if we use modern phonological terms. Explanations provided by Nigri and Pellicanus are less obscure. Both of them say that for German Jews pataḥ is a ‘clear A,’ qameṣ is a ‘dark A,’ a sound between A and O. For Nigri, it resembles the way A is pronounced in Swabian German. For Pellicanus, it corresponds to the sound expressed by the grapheme “å” in some German texts. Both authors also say that segol is a ‘clear E,’ while ṣere is a ‘dark E,’ the difference between the two last vowels being the same as between the phonetic values of vowels in the two German words spelled me(e)r and meaning ‘narration’ (with ‘e’ like segol) and ‘sea’ (with ‘e’ like ṣere). These words correspond to MHG
224 In Bavarian, the dialect spoken by Christians in the area where BNEY KHES dwelled, MHG â was raised earlier than in other High German dialects. As a result, even in Hebrew that does not distinguish between pataḥ and qameṣ but treats both of them as MHG a in closed syllables and as MHG â in open syllables, qameṣ could have been raised more often than pataḥ since, due to the specific distribution of Hebrew vowels, qameṣ is much more often found in open syllables than pataḥ . 225 See Walde :, , .
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The Hebrew component
mære and mer, respectively; compare NHG Mär and Meer. In their transcriptions of words that include qameṣ, the aforementioned Christian Hebraists mainly use “a” and rarely “o.”226 A consideration of qameṣ qatan represents another argument for the same thesis. In modern Yiddish, its reflexes in closed syllables are different from those of qameṣ gadol.227 This distinction (as well as the similarity between qameṣ qatan and ḥ olem) characterizes various systems of pronunciation of Hebrew (PALESTINIAN, Sephardic) that distinguish five vowels only.228 On the other hand, in the TIBERIAN system the same grapheme is used for both qameṣ qatan and qameṣ gadol and—contrary to the Ashkenazic pronunciation—these two vowels have the same quality in closed syllables. In the Middle Ages, both BNEY KHES and BNEY HES seem to make a distinction between the two kinds of qameṣ. Eldar (:) found that the EASTERN prayer book (compiled by BNEY KHES) almost always uses ḥ olem instead of qameṣ qatan but not in place of qameṣ gadol. On the other hand, the WESTERN prayer books often use qameṣ or ḥ aṭef-qameṣ for qameṣ qatan (Eldar :–). It is the use of ḥ aṭef-qameṣ that reveals the /o/-pronunciation. Moreover, in the Rhineland, we also find the substitution of ḥ olem for qameṣ qatan in the given name that appears in the Bible as ָעְתִניֵאל: in several Jewish sources from the second half of the thirteenth century (one of which is from Cologne) it is spelled עותניאל. Onomastics furnishes ample additional information contradicting Katz’s thesis. In numerous sources from the BNEY HES area dating from the late fourteenth century one regularly finds the Latin letter “o” for stressed qameṣ. There are Zorline ( ; ָש ָׁרה) and Boruch/Borich (;ָּברוּך –) in Frankfurt, Loser (from ;ֶאְלָעָזר) and Sora ( ; ָש ָׁרה) in Alsace, Boroch ( )ָּברוּךin Rothenburg and Augsburg (–s). In CC, the qameṣ in ‘ ַאְבָרָהםAbraham’ also rhymes with [o] (WG :). On the other hand, Austrian Christian sources of the second half of the fifteenth century mention Aschir ()ָאֵׁשר, Jaer ()ָיִאיר, Nechama ()ֶנָחָמה, Ruchama ()רוָּחָמה, Schalam () ׁ ָשלֹום, and Thamar () ָתָּמר, all with “a” and not “o” for qameṣ. As these Hebrew names were not used by Christians, it is clear that these spellings reflect their pronunciation by Jews. These examples show that the kind of phonetic differentiation between pataḥ and qameṣ that we find in modern Yiddish likely became valid for BNEY HES earlier than for (Austrian) BNEY KHES. To be sure, we cannot tell whether what is involved is the existence of any contrast between these two vowels (that is, the introduction of the TIBERIAN vowel system in place of the earlier five-vowel one) or specifically the rounding of the vowel presenting the qameṣ (MRPC). In either case though this phenomenon is unlikely to be due to peculiarities of local German dialects. Indeed, the raising of MHG â229 (whose phonetic development could, in theory, influence the rendition of qameṣ) took place in Bavarian during the twelfth century. This change reached Low Alemannic and East Franconian during the thirteenth century and WCG dialects only later. The preceding chronology of the development of German dialects (the area of BNEY KHES affected before that of BNEY HES) is in direct contrast to the chronology of the references to the [o]-reflexes of qameṣ. For the Jews of medieval Austria, the phonetics of Hebrew words was still independent of that of their vernacular language, namely the Bavarian dialect of German. 226 Note the transcription “lfono” ‘Moon’ ( ) ְלָב ָנהby Hans Folz from Nürnberg () (TG ). Numerous ways of transcribing qameṣ appear in writings by von Harff: (i) “a” in “zatan” ‘devil’ ( ) ָש ָׁטןand “aschara” ‘ten’ () ֲע ָש ׁ ָרה, (ii) “o” in “ferrohatz” ‘to bathe’ () ְו ָרַחץ, (iii) “oi” in “boissar” ‘meat’ ()ָּב ָש ׁר, (iv) “au” in “laufen” ‘white’ () ָלָבן, (v) “ae” in “daegim” ‘fish (plural)’ () ָדּ ִגים. Some of these reflexes may result from misinterpretation or typographic errors: erroneous spellings are clearly to be found in the publication in question. 227 See Table . in section ... On the other hand, no distinction is found for exceptional cases of qameṣ qatan in open syllables; compare StY kod(o)shim, PolY kūd(i)shim (Birnbaum :) ‘Kodashim, the fifth order in the Mishna’ (literally: ‘holy things’) ()ָק ָד ׁ ִשים, with reflexes similar to those of qameṣ gadol (compare Table .). 228 See section .. 229 It corresponds to the basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift # in Table . (section ..).
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Stressed vowels
Jacobs (:–, :–) shares Katz’s idea about the pre-Ashkenazic character of shortening in closed syllables and its independence of a similar process in German. Indeed, one can observe that in the Hebrew component, a single consonant is generally enough to close a syllable, while in the German component two consonants are needed. For example, he notes that we have PolY sod ‘secret’ (Hebrew ) סֹוד, not **soyd; but broyt ‘bread’ (MHG brôt), not **brot. In contrast to Katz and Bin-Nun, Jacobs (a) makes no use of the Kimhi scheme and (b) suggests that in Hebrew the vowel lengthening in open syllables could also be pre-Ashkenazic and independent of a similar process in German. He considers the example of StY tokhes ‘buttocks’ ()ַתַחת. If in this noun the lengthening of pataḥ were of German origin we would normally obtain **[a:] in WY, while the AlsY form of this word has [o:]. However, Jacobs (:) states explicitly that this example does not necessarily reveal a general rule; in theory, it can represent an exception. If we summarize Jacobs’ views making only one amendment, namely considering his last example as exceptional and positing either /a/ or /a:/ for pataḥ in open syllables, we obtain Table ..230 The symmetry of the obtained scheme makes it particularly attractive.231 TABLE . PROTO-YIDDISH Hebrew vowels Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq in closed syllables; /i:/ ḥ ireq in open syllables
/u/ qibbuṣ and shureq in closed syllables; /u:/ shureq in open syllables
/e/ ṣere and segol in closed syllable, ḥ aṭef-segol; /e:/ ṣere in open syllables
/o/ ḥ olem and qameṣ qatan in closed syllables; /o:/ ḥ olem in open syllables
// -; /:/ segol in open syllables
/ɔ/ -; /ɔ:/ qameṣ in open syllables /a/ pataḥ and qameṣ in closed syllables, ḥ aṭef-pataḥ ; /a/ or /a:/ pataḥ in open syllables
230 Jacobs does not present his ideas in this way. He copies the scheme for Yiddish proto-vowels from Herzog :– and adjusts the reflexes of two proto-vowels, [e] (in open syllables) and [a:], proposing for them [æ:] and [å:], respectively. Jacobs does not give the exact correspondences between the proto-vowels and the Hebrew vowels. However, correspondences presented in Table . (except for the reflex of pataḥ in open syllables) can be deduced from his text. The use by Table . of the signs and ɔ instead of Jacobs’ signs æ and å, respectively, is purely conventional and has no importance from the phonemic point of view. 231 As discussed in section .., in his book about Yiddish (), Jacobs—similarly to Weinreich, Katz, and other advocates of the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH—places the inception of Yiddish to the initial period of the Jewish presence in German lands. This seems to contradict his earlier texts (Jacobs :) where he explicitly says that Yiddish acquired at its inception a German component which had already undergone both close syllable shortening and open syllable lengthening, while similar processes took place in post-TIBERIAN Hebrew in pre-Yiddish times independently of the German phenomena. From this, one can deduce that he was positing PROTO-YIDDISH vocalism not at the beginning of Ashkenazic history but inside of it.
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The Hebrew component
As discussed in detail in section .., the lengthening in open syllables and shortening in closed syllables was only a global tendency in medieval German dialects. The number of exceptions was large and the general rules influencing them depended on the dialects. For example, short vowels in open syllables before MHG sch, ch, m, and t mainly remained short. In a number of cases, this even led to the shortening in open syllables of formerly long vowels. Yet, we do not observe any phenomenon of this kind in the Hebrew component of Yiddish. For example, diphthongs (at previous stages long monophthongs) are present in various Yiddish dialectal forms whose Hebrew etymons have ḥ olem in open syllables: StY shoykhet ‘ritual slaughterer’ ()ׁשֹוֵחט, Moyshe ‘Moses’ ()מ ֶׁׁשה, Shloyme ‘Solomon’ (מה ֹ )ְׁשֹל, and shoyte ‘simpleton’ ()ׁשֹוֶטה. This general feature provides an additional argument in support of the independency of the length of Hebrew vowels in Yiddish and processes of lengthening/shortening in medieval German dialects. Jacobs (:) also notes the following additional factor that implies that German lengthening was of no influence on the Hebrew component: we do not find in the Hebrew component any instance of lengthening by analogy to inflected forms in which the vowel was present in open syllables, a phenomenon that was common in German dialects and is typical of the German component of Yiddish.232 He gives the following example: PolY din (and not **dīn) ‘religious law’ ( ) ִדּיןversus dīnim () ִדִּנים, the plural form of the same noun. Table . presents a vocalic chart in which seven TIBERIAN vowels have seven different reflexes in open syllables and only five in closed syllables. This distribution reveals the same structural peculiarity as the reflexes given in section .. in Tables . and . for modern Yiddish. As a result, Table . can easily explain vocalic charts for both EY and WY. Yet, the fact that in open syllables it distinguishes between qameṣ and pataḥ , as well as between ṣere and segol, goes against—as discussed above in this section—what is known to us about the pronunciation of Hebrew by both medieval Ashkenazic groups: BNEY KHES and BNEY HES. To explain this apparent contradiction, it is appropriate to assert—following the general idea suggested by Weinreich—that at some point in Ashkenazic history new norms were introduced changing the number of full vocalic qualities from five to seven. Before this normative change, the vocalic system corresponded to that of Table .. TABLE . Early Ashkenazic Hebrew vowels Front
Central
Back
/i/ ḥ ireq in closed syllables; /i:/ ḥ ireq in open syllables
/u/ shureq and qibbuṣ in closed syllables; /u:/ shureq in open syllables
/e/ ṣere and segol in closed syllables, ḥ aṭef-segol; /e:/ ṣere and segol in open syllables
/o/ ḥ olem and qameṣ qatan in closed syllables; /o:/ ḥ olem in open syllables /a/ pataḥ and qameṣ gadol in closed syllables, ḥ aṭef-pataḥ ;233 /a:/ pataḥ and qameṣ in open syllables
See section ... Several words in H have pataḥ instead of TIBERIAN ḥ aṭef-pataḥ : ‘ass’ ()ַחמֹור, ‘pig’ ()ַחִזיר, ‘Hanukkah’ ()ַחֻנָּכהa. 232 233
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Stressed vowels
The scheme shown in Table . corresponds to the PALESTINIAN system in which for non-ḥ aṭefvowels the distribution (long vowels ~ short vowels) is entirely determined by the dichotomy (open syllables ~ closed syllables), this phenomenon being of non-German, and, therefore, most likely preAshkenazic origin. Scholars who share the idea of the normative (rather than natural) passage from five to seven vowels propose different explanations for this phenomenon. As mentioned earlier, Weinreich labels BABYLONIAN RENAISSANCE the transitional period in question. For several reasons, his approach sounds problematic. We have no documented evidence about hypothetical migrations of any group of influential scholars from Babylonia to medieval Germany during the thirteenth century.234 On the other hand, we have strong evidence about various Jewish groups from Western Europe accepting during the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE TIBERIAN diacritics as the only “correct” way to point biblical texts. Yet, only Ashkenazic Jews eventually acquired seven vowels in their pronunciation of Hebrew. For example, Sephardic Jews continued to have only five vowels, making a distinction between qameṣ and pataḥ , as well as between ṣere and segol only graphically. Yet, the influence of scholars from Babylonia on Sephardic Jewish culture was by far stronger than on Ashkenazic culture.235 Timm points to the existence of certain distinctions between vowels in the two pairs in question among Jews of northern France. Consequently, she considers that the Ashkenazic pronunciation took its roots in medieval ZARFAT (TG ). Yet, as discussed at the end of section ., the existing (indirect) evidence shows that the distinction in this region during the thirteenth century was only partial with respect to Ashkenazic development. For Ashkenazic Jews, even if some external influence from the Middle East and France cannot be excluded, the idea of the local innovation appears the most attractive. Several Hebraists—such as Morag (:), Eldar (:–), and Kutscher (:), all giving credit to Yalon (:) as being the author of this original idea—claim that the differentiation of the vowels in question in Ashkenazic Hebrew and Yiddish arose as a result of the influence of the German component of Yiddish. They do not suggest any detail describing the way this influence could be exerted. Also, they do not provide any explanation of why or how, in a system that did not distinguish qameṣ from pataḥ and ṣere from segol, such developments could have affected precisely the qameṣ and ṣere but not the pataḥ and segol. Figure . presents certain major aspects of the development of Hebrew pronunciation according to the opinion of the scholars in question. Figure . presents links existing between various pronunciations of Hebrew as suggested in this book.236 The scheme shown in Figure . is a (partial) synthesis of several major ideas on the part of scholars who wrote about this topic in the past: • Katz’s point about the importance of taking into account the existence of the two groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews, BNEY HES and BNEY KHES; • Weinreich’s idea of normative change (renorming) from the system with five vowels (descending from the PALESTINIAN one) to the one with seven vowels (TIBERIAN); • Yalon’s and Morag’s consideration about the phonetic development of the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews playing a major role in the passage from the system with five vowels to the one with seven vowels. If we compare Table . to Table . of section .., which presents monophthongs of the German component underlying all Yiddish dialects, we can observe a close similarity of their structures. Both of 234 Examples of Jews from western Germany during that period whose names are—according to Weinreich— “orientally-colored,” are unconvincing (see the general discussion of Oriental names in medieval Germany in Beider :–). 235 See Goldschmidt :– on the liturgy. 236 In Figure ., exactly as in various schemes in Chapter , horizontal two-corner dashed lines designate interborrowing between various Jewish idioms.
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The Hebrew component Biblical Hebrew
Palestinian system
Sephardic Hebrew
Tiberian system
Early Ashkenazic Hebrew
Babylonian system
Yemenite Hebrew
Ashkenazic Hebrew
FIGURE . History of Hebrew vocalization according to Morag
Biblical Hebrew
Palestinian system
Sephardic Hebrew
Tiberian system Canaanic Hebrew
Early Ashkenazic Hebrew
Hebrew of Bney Hes
Hebrew of Bney Khes
Babylonian system
Yemenite Hebrew
13th–16th
Renorming
Hebrew determinant of WY
Hebrew determinant of EY
FIGURE . Suggested history of Hebrew vocalization
them have seven (TIBERIAN) qualities in common. Moreover, both are asymmetrical in the same way: neither has a short equivalent for [ɔ:] and [:]. These shared fundamental features likely were important elements for provoking the passage to the system of Hebrew pronunciation with seven vowels. In other words, at the moment when normative tendencies related to the TIBERIAN system were spreading in Western and Central Europe, the phonological structure of the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews was—by pure chance—extremely well adapted to accepting the new norms not only in spelling but also in the pronunciation of their Hebrew. Table . presents a vocalic chart valid for all Proto-Yiddish
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Fusion of Hebrew and German monophthongs Front
Central
Back
[i] short MHG i and ḥ ireq in closed syllables; [i:] MHG ie, lengthened MHG i, and ḥ ireq in open syllables;
[u] short MHG u, qibbuṣ, and shureq in closed syllables; [u:] MHG uo, lengthened MHG u, and shureq in open syllables;
[e] short MHG e, ë, and ä, ṣere and segol in closed syllables, ḥ aṭefsegol; [e:] MHG ê, lengthened MHG e, and ṣere in open syllables;
[o] short MHG o, ḥ olem, and qameṣ qatan in closed syllables; [o:] MHG ô, lengthened MHG o, ḥ olem in open syllables;
[] -; [:] MHG æ, lengthened MHG ë and ä, and segol in open syllables
[ɔ] -; [ɔ:] MHG â, qameṣ in open syllables [a] short MHG a, pataḥ , and qameṣ in closed syllables, ḥ aṭefpataḥ ; [a] or [a:] pataḥ in open syllables; [a:] lengthened MHG a
dialects that resulted from the fusion of Hebrew and German vowels.237 The vocalic system of the German component (covering by far the largest part of the vernacular language) represented the basis during the merging. In this situation, the fact that the vocalism of the Hebrew component did not contain a single phoneme unknown in the German component was also important. The scheme in Table . can also be presented using Weinreich’s designations for Yiddish protovowels. In that event, we will obtain Table . of section ... The seven PROTO-YIDDISH qualities appearing in Tables . and . are theoretical: they result from a linguistic reconstruction. It is also important to see their correlation with empirical information provided by the consideration of historical sources. In comparison to the scheme with five 237 The list of MHG vowels in Table . is incomplete. It does not include reflexes corresponding to MHG rounded vowels (ü, ö, üe, œ). Yet, their unrounding to reflexes identical to those of MHG i, e, ie, and ê, respectively— basic Ashkenazic shift # in Table . (section ..)—could, at least in some areas, be older than the fusion of German and Hebrew monophthongs. Also, Table . does not mention equivalents to MHG ei, ou, î, û, iu, and öu. Yet, as discussed in section ., in WY works written during the sixteenth century, we find examples of the monophthongization of MHG ou and (less often) ei to [a:] (= basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift #c), while in the same works we do not yet observe the raising of MHG short ë and ä from [] to [e] (= basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift #) appearing in Table .. Consequently, for making a scheme that can correspond to a historical reality, Table . can be compared not to Table ., but to Table . that corresponds to the period before the above raising. Alternatively, for several phonemes given in Table ., the list of the corresponding MHG vowels should be enlarged. This was not done in Table . deliberately. The principal aim of this table consists in illustrating the fusion between the German and Hebrew vowels. For this specific purpose, only the list of German phonemes appearing in this table is of real importance, while the correspondences to exact MHG vowels are secondary. On the other hand, this simplification allows for illustrating pan-Yiddish phonetic phenomena without considering WY, EY, and CzY separately.
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The Hebrew component
qualities shown in Table . valid for Ashkenazic Jews until (at least) the thirteenth century, the scheme of proto-vowels is characterized by two splits in open syllables that yielded different reflexes for vowels within the following pairs: () pataḥ and qameṣ and () segol and ṣere. For the first of them, a Yiddish-like association of, on the one hand, pataḥ to /a/ and, on the other hand, qameṣ to /ɔ/ or /o/, already appears in such documents compiled by BNEY HES as M, R, Le, R, and MinP. Indeed, the pointers of these sources use pataḥ for MHG a and qameṣ for back vowels for which they also use a ḥ olem-vav, namely MHG â and sometimes MHG o too. The same rule is valid for elements given in Hebrew letters in H, a source written by one of BNEY KHES. Yet, qameṣ is used inconsistently in SAB and not used at all in H. Even during the sixteenth century, we find in western sources numerous instances of the use of pataḥ instead of qameṣ.238 A distinction between segol and ṣere similar to that given in Table . is more recent. SAB and MinP use both these diacritics inconsistently.239 M includes only ṣere but for a few combinations segol-yod appearing in place of certain occurrences of MHG ë (Heide :). Le uses segol only. R mainly uses segol and only sporadically ṣere.240 In R the distinction between segol and ṣere corresponds to vocalic quantity rather than quality: segol is used for MHG e, ä, and ë (all short in MHG), while ṣere is used by MHG ê and æ (both long in MHG). This distribution corresponds to rules proposed by Kimhi.241 H appears to be among the earliest documents in which the distinction between the use of ṣere and segol is similar to that of Table .. Indeed, the pointer of that manuscript uses () segolayin for MHG æ, ä, ë, and short e and () ṣere-yod for MHG ê and lengthened e.242 In the nine entries of H with words from the vernacular language given in Hebrew characters, we find two occurrences of ṣere,243 both in the combination ṣere-yod for MHG ê and lengthened e, and four cases of segol, all for the reduced unstressed vowel. Several rules for reading vernacular Ashkenazic texts given in Mid () indirectly imply the same (or, at least, close) distribution. According to its author, (i) yod can signify both ḥ ireq and ṣere; (ii) alef can signify both pataḥ and qameṣ; (iii) ayin signifies segol.244 The pointing of the preface to LBr () also generally follows the same approach, though a number of its spellings are inconsistent. According to its spelling conventions, NH () perfectly fits the distribution given in Table . for both pairs in question: pataḥ –qameṣ and segol–ṣere. As mentioned earlier in this section, Christian Hebraists of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries—such as Henricus de Hassia, Nigri, and Pellicanus—write about the distinction between the Hebrew vowels in both pairs in question. For, pataḥ and qameṣ their description can be interpreted as directly corresponding to that of Table .: they speak about [a] for pataḥ and a vowel between [a] and [o] for qameṣ. Nigri and Pellicanus (both mainly reflecting the pronunciation of BNEY HES) compare segol to MHG ë and ṣere to MHG e, that is, they make exactly the same qualitative distinction as that postulated in Table ..245 Globally speaking, the information See examples in TG and including numerous instances in ShB and some cases in BZR. In the excerpt from MinP appearing in EYT , segol and ṣere are used interchangeably in words of German origin, with the latter diacritic sign being much more common. Moreover, in a number of Hebrew words ṣere is used instead of segol used in the TIBERIAN spelling of the corresponding words. 240 In R, MHG æ, ä, ë are all expressed via pataḥ -ayin, while segol-yod corresponds to MHG ê and e. 241 242 See Table . in section .. See Heide : and TG . 243 The name of the grapheme ṣere itself is written in H in a peculiar way, namely ֵצי ֵריinstead of ֵצ ֶרה, that is, with two instances of the ṣere-yod combination. 244 See the English translation of the whole section in Frakes :, the original text in EYT and Frakes :. 245 The fact that Table . posits this distinction in open syllables only, while examples provided by Nigri and Pellicanus deal with closed syllables, is not particularly significant in this context. Indeed, both Christian Hebraists speak about normative differences, while Table . encompasses vowels of the vernacular language. Moreover, their report can correspond to Ashkenazic pronunciation norms during the time and in areas where fusion between reflexes of MHG ë and e in closed syllables had not taken place yet. 238 239
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Stressed vowels
provided by the consideration of early Jewish and Christian authors leads to a conclusion that the renorming from the vocalic system with five qualities to one with seven qualities lasted several centuries.246 It is precisely because of its gradual character that no discussion of it appears in rabbinical literature. This sociolinguistic process was stimulated by the desire to obtain a system in which every TIBERIAN vowel is to be pronounced differently.247 The fact that the vocalic chart of the German component was by chance perfectly adapted to achieve this goal was highly favorable for this renorming. To obtain Table . from Table ., the following normative changes were effected in open syllables: . Raising of qameṣ from [a:] to [ɔ:]; . Lowering of segol from [e:] to [:]; . Maybe also shortening of pataḥ from [a:] to [a]. Table . lists according to their relative chronology certain vocalic phenomena that enable an explanation—by taking into account phonetic processes in German and Ashkenazic Hebrew—of the first of these three processes. During the early period of Ashkenazic history, Jews pronounced Hebrew according to the scheme appearing in Table .. In this pronunciation, processes – of Table . were already completed. At that time, a number of words of Hebrew origin were already a part of the specifically Jewish repertoire of German dialects spoken by Ashkenazic Jews in their everyday life. When MHG â (sound [a:]) was raised and rounded in these German dialects (process of Table .), the phonetics of words in question that were taking qameṣ or pataḥ in open syllables followed the same development and, therefore, acquired the reflex [ɔ:]. Yet, in this context, qameṣ is found much more frequently than pataḥ : the latter appears only before consonants that cannot be geminated in the TIBERIAN pointing system, namely, before resh and gutturals. As a result, when the prestige of the TIBERIAN system became established, for Ashkenazic Jews the normative assignment to [ɔ:] of qameṣ (rather than pataḥ ) in their WHOLE HEBREW (process of Table .) was totally natural. The details of the normative separation between ṣere and segol—by lowering of segol to /:/ and keeping the value [e:] for ṣere—are more obscure. The existence of the distinctive phonemes /e:/ and /:/ in the vernacular German-based language was an important factor. It does not explain, however, for what reason it was decided to start to pronounce segol (and not ṣere) precisely as [:]. Firstly, one can observe that such pronunciation is generally postulated for the classical TIBERIAN scheme. This fact, however, may not be directly relevant here: we have no evidence that the TIBERIAN vocalic scheme was synchronically valid for any non-Ashkenazic Jewish medieval community whose members could influence Ashkenazic choice. In other words, nothing can be said in favor of the direct application of Weinreich’s BABYLONIAN RENAISSANCE. Secondly, if we consider all front vowels, we can see that the bigger the number is of sublinear dots in the TIBERIAN grapheme the more open is the corresponding vowel: one for ḥ ireq /i/ (◌ִ ), two for ṣere /e/ (◌ֵ ), and three for segol // (◌ֶ ). Thirdly, in all old manuscripts, qameṣ corresponds to a dot given under the horizontal stroke
246 Weinreich’s discussion of the renorming in question during the thirteenth century (WG :–) provides information more relevant for the (partly conventional) pointing of Hebrew texts rather than for the pronunciation of Hebrew. 247 A similar wish could be a factor leading to the creation of the Kimhi scheme in medieval southern France (see Table .). However, contrary to Ashkenazic Jews, in this region qameṣ in open syllables underwent no raising. As a result, in the Kimhi scheme (that was attempting to reconcile certain theoretical principles with the realities of the local phonetic tradition), the pronunciation of the two kinds of qameṣ, gadol and qatan, remained significantly distinct: /a:/ and /o/, respectively. For Ashkenazic Jews, the qualities of these vowels were much closer: qameṣ qatan was /o/ (as for Sephardic Jews), but qameṣ gadol during the period of renorming was on the way from /ɔ:/ to /o:/.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Suggested chronology of Ashkenazic vocalic phenomena Process
Period
. Establishment of a system with five different vocalic qualities: • Five PALESTINIAN qualities • Geminated consonants if dagesh forte • Long vowels in open syllables • Short vowels in closed syllables • Consonantal character of ayin and alef • Short (and not ultra-short) ḥ aṭef-vowels
Most likely, pre-Ashkenazic
. Loss of the consonantal character of ayin and alef
Maybe pre-Ashkenazic; in any case, after process 248
. Establishment of (ante)penultimate stress position (according to rules suggested by Leibel and exposed in section ..)
Maybe pre-Ashkenazic; in any case, after process and before processes , ,249 and
. Raising of MHG â to [ɔ:] in (Jews’) German (= basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift # in Table . of section ..)
th–th centuries (after process and before process )
. Lengthening in open syllables / shortening in closed syllables in (Jews’) German (= basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift # in Table .)250
th–th centuries (after process and before process )
. Degemination of consonants with dagesh forte
th century (after process )
. TIBERIAN Renorming of WHOLE HEBREW vowels
th–th centuries
. Monophthongization of MHG ie and uo in (Jews’) German/Yiddish (= basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift # in Table .)
th–th centuries
. Total fusion of German and Hebrew vowels
th–th centuries (after processes and )
248 This relative chronology is necessary to explain that in PolY sonim ‘enemies’ ( )שוׁ ֹ ְנִאיםthe stressed vowel is short (see section ..). 249 In this respect, the suggested relative chronology contradicts ideas by Weinreich. To explain the short reflex in PolY emes ‘truth’ (whose first vowel corresponds to ḥ aṭef-segol), he implies that at the moment when the lengthening in open syllables took place, the ancestor of this Yiddish word was ultimately stressed and thus escaped the lengthening (WG :). According to Table ., as a consequence of processes and , the stress was present on various ḥ aṭef-vowels before the lengthening in question (process ). The latter phenomenon did not lengthen the first vowel in emes because at that moment the system of Hebrew vowels was autonomous with respect to that of German vowels. It was only later, during process , that the general fusion of both systems took place. 250 The hybrid Hebrew-German word meaning ‘Saturday evening’ and pronounced shabeyse-nakht in StY has a pan-Yiddish peculiarity: a diphthong or a long vowel in the second (stressed) syllable. Its lengthening may be due only to the German shift # and therefore the first part of this word provides an example of E in a stem of Hebrew origin. (See its forms known in SWY in Table . (section ..) and footnote .) This word provides one of the rarest examples of the influence of German-inspired lengthening on words of Hebrew origin.
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Stressed vowels
(similar to pataḥ ◌ַ ), and it was only in the course of time that the dot became attached to the pataḥ , yielding its present form (◌ָ )a.251 As a result, the old qameṣ grapheme had a certain degree of symmetry with segol (◌ֶ ): both signs had two levels, with a dot on the lowest one. Due to this symmetry, they could be considered as being closest to /a/ (pataḥ), representing /ɔ/ and //, respectively. Using modern linguistics terminology, we would say that both are on the same level of the vocalic triangle. Concerning the two last factors, one should stress that even if we certainly do not know whether medieval Jewish grammarians had any relevant concept corresponding to the modern idea of vowel height or openness, we can conjecture that they might have had some general understanding of these phonetic properties. After the TIBERIAN renorming (process in Table .), words borrowed from Hebrew by the vernacular Ashkenazic language already had seven different vowels in open syllables.252 The fusion of vowels of this vernacular language and WHOLE HEBREW (process in Table .) is a more recent phenomenon. It explains data of Table . (section ..) that shows a similar treatment of vowels in both German and Hebrew components of modern Yiddish varieties. This fusion played a role of paramount importance in the development of Yiddish. The scheme of PROTO-YIDDISH Hebrew vowels (Table .) is precisely posited immediately after process was completed. The fusion took place necessarily after the monophthongization of MHG ie and uo in coterritorial German dialects (process in Table .). The completion of this process allowed one to associate the long ḥ ireq or long shureq to the newly obtained monophthongs /i:/ and /u:/. In regions in which the monophthongization reached local Jewish speech rather late, long ḥ ireq and long shureq could not merge with MHG ie and ue and merged, in a few instances, with MHG î and û, respectively. Several forms derived from biblical Zipporah ( )ִצֹּפָרהare among these rare examples. As noted in section .., forms used by BNEY HES in medieval western German communities (including the shortened form Pure) invariably had the /u/-colored vowel in place of ḥ olem. Its reflex [u:] merged with MHG û and underwent a diphthongization together with it; compare Paur in Prague (). Hypocoristic forms of Pure constructed using the functional umlaut had reflexes [y:] or its unrounded equivalent [i:]. They merged in turn with the MHG iu and î, respectively. After the diphthongization, these vowels were pronounced [ej] and later [aj]; compare Pejrle, Peirle, Pajrle in Prague () and numerous references to פײארלin the old cemetery of the same city during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Various forms of this name were widespread in different Ashkenazic communities; compare Peurl in Austria (), several references to פייארלה/ פייארליin Frankfurt (second half of the eighteenth century), Peyer in Alsace (), and StY Paye.253 Jeiderle (Swabia), Jeitel (Bohemia, ), and Geidel (Hessen, eighteenth century), all found as Jewish given names in Christian documents, could appear as hypocorisms derived from biblical Juda ()ְיהוּ ָדה. If this etymology is correct, then they represent examples of the diphthongization of a similar kind: their full form included shureq [u:], See, for example, Chomsky :. Evidence also exists concerning the renorming (at least by BNEY HES) of the reading before heth of the so-called pataḥ furtivum, that is, pataḥ written in the TIBERIAN tradition at the end of the word but pronounced—contrary to all other Hebrew vowels—before (and not after) the consonant under which it is written. In the twelfth-century Latin transcription from Hebrew found in Swabia (Walde :) we see the form ruha (and not *ruah or *rueh) that corresponds to Hebrew ‘ ְרוַּחspirit.’ We are unlikely to be dealing with an erroneous transcription since we find mention of similar forms in the RESPONSA by Maharil (fifteenth century). An inquiry was sent asking him whether the syllable with heth in the word-final position in ‘ ֹנַחNoah,’ ‘ ֹּכַחpower,’ and מַח ֹ ‘brain’ was to be read the same as in ‘ ָאחbrother.’ Maharil answered that one should not pronounce the words ֹנַח, מַח ֹ , and ‘ ְרוַּחspirit’ as if they were spelled נוחה, מוחה, and רוחהrespectively, but rather like ‘ ָהָאחthe brother’ and ‘ ֵמָאחfrom a brother’ (Satz :, ). On the one hand, this passage shows that Maharil understood the concept of pataḥ furtivum. On the other hand, it implies that both he and the inquirer were also aware of the “incorrect” readings like *ruha. [The whole footnote is due to MRPC.] 253 The exact spelling of the unique reference to the name פייארלן/ פויארלןamong the martyrs of Worms (, Salfeld :) is uncertain. 251 252
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The Hebrew component
whose diminutive form had [y:] or, after the unrounding, [i:]. The uniqueness of the above examples within the Hebrew component can be explained by the loss of the etymological link between the names in question and their original biblical forms. For other Ashkenazic names of Hebrew origin such a link was generally well understood. As a result, the way the Hebrew form was spelled (and pronounced according to the WHOLE HEBREW norms) prevented them from following—during the period when numerous Hebrew elements were not yet fully integrated in the vernacular speech—certain shifts that took place in the German dialects on which Jewish everyday tongues were based. Table . starts by postulating the (pre-Ashkenazic?) existence of a system of Hebrew pronunciation having one major property unknown in any other Hebrew system, namely the direct link between the openness/closeness of syllables and the length of vowels independently of the stress position. Note that this feature is quite close to the following phonological characteristics of the TIBERIAN system used in the medieval Middle East and discussed at the beginning of section .: • Under the stress all seven full vowels are long; • In unstressed position, all vowels are long in open syllables and short in closed syllables. The only difference existing here between the two systems concerns stressed full vowels in closed syllables. For the TIBERIAN system in question, they are long while in our consideration they are short. After the fusion of German and Hebrew vowels that led to the creation of the PROTO-YIDDISH vocalic chart, various phonetic processes that occurred in Yiddish varieties concerned vowels independently of the origin of the words. For example, the diphthongization [e:] > [ej] and [o:] > [ou] (shifts # in Table .) is pan-Yiddish. It affected in the same way vowels in words from the German and Hebrew components. As can be seen from the onomastic materials, in the Yiddish dialect of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania this change occurred during the sixteenth century. During the third quarter of that century in Pinsk, the names cognate with StY Peysekh (Hebrew )ֶּפַסחand StY Leyzer (from biblical ‘ ֶא ִליֶעֶזרEliezer’) appear when making reference to the same individuals, with monophthongs (Песах and Лезер) in certain documents and with diphthongs (Пейсах and Лейзер) in others.254 This factor implies that the diphthongization was not yet totally completed during the period in question in that area. The diphthongization of [o:] can be illustrated by such spellings of biblical names as Двoйра (‘ ְדּבֹוָרהDeborah,’ StY Dvoyre) in and Говшия (שַע ׁ ֻ ‘ ְיהֹוJoshua,’ StY Hoyshie) in , both in Volhynia, and Мoвша (שה ֶׁ מ ֹ ‘Moses’) in in Brest. Yet, in the documents from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from and we find references to such forms of biblical ש ׁ ‘ ְיהֹוָאJehoash’ as Гoваш and Oвoш, both with monophthongs. No information based on the Hebrew component is available for Central and Western Europe that would allow us to estimate the period of the diphthongization.255
.. E-Effect The Hebrew pronunciation of medieval BNEY HES was characterized by a distinctive feature that will be conventionally called E-EFFECT.256 The stressed vowels pataḥ , ḥ aṭef-pataḥ , and qameṣ, when
254 In both these names, their stressed segol gave reflexes as are normally expected for ṣere (see feature {v} in Table ., section ..). 255 A Jewish male given name spelled Werach or Weirach appears in Austrian documents from the second half of the fifteenth century. This name is likely to be derived from the biblical Berechiah ()ֶּב ֶרְכ ָיה. The exceptional character of the reference to Weirach makes this form doubtful. It may be due to some misinterpretation. 256 The idea of paying particular attention to this effect and the name proposed for it are both due to MRPC.
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Stressed vowels
adjacent to heth or ayin, were pronounced as some sort of front mid-vowel: [e(:)] or [(:)]. Historical sources show the presence of this phenomenon in such words as: • ehet from ‘ ֶאַחדone,’ hegiaz probably ‘ ַהֲחָיַאתresurrection of,’ eherihim ֵכןa‘ ַאֲח ֵריafter,’ ezzit ָעִתיד ‘future’ (adjective), rechmaf ‘ ַרֲחָמיוmercy,’ ruech ‘ ְרוַּחspirit,’ samyech, most likely, ָׂשֵמַח ‘joyful’ (or, less likely, ‘ ָׂשָמחrejoiced’), ed ‘ ַעדtill,’ eza ‘ ָע ׂ ָשהmade, did,’ and hezaka ֲחָזָקה ‘strength,’ all in the Latin transcription of the (incomplete) Hebrew translation of the Christian liturgical texts Apostles’ Creed and Magnificat, found in a twelfth-century manuscript from the Cistercian monastery of Kailheim, Swabia (Walde :);257 • the female name spelled הינאin in the Rhineland, in and in Nürnberg, Henne in in Hessen and Henna in in Hungary; all these forms are likely to be related to biblical ‘ ַחָּנהAnna’; • behesemen ‘to seal, to sign’ (Hebrew root )חתםfound in a German source from Worms () (Neuberg );258 • the male given name spelled Hedgim in in Upper Franconia, Heddin, Hetzgym, and Hedzim between and in the Netherlands, Hedigym, Heczheym, Heczhym during the first half of the fourteenth century in Erfurt, all for Hebrew ח ּיים ִ ַ ‘Ḥ ayyim’; • hesier ‘swine‘ ()ֲחִזיר, in a Latin-character document from Zürich compiled in (Guggenheim-Grünberg :–); • the male name Alhennen for ֶאְלָח ָנןin in Erfurt, the female Heva for ‘ ַח ָוּהEve’259 during the first half of the fifteenth century, Rehel in Regensburg () and Rehlein Hessen in the sixteenth century, both related to the biblical Rachel (;)ָרֵחל • meas ‘money, coins’ ( )ָמעֹותnoted by von Harff; • erof ‘flies (one of the Ten plagues of Egypt)’ ( )ָעֹרבand herosses ‘food eaten on Passover’ ( )ֲחֹרֶסתin the transcription of a Haggadah compiled in in Switzerland (Walde :); • ֶַחזןinstead of ‘ ַח ָּזןcantor’ in MinP (EYT ) and ‘ ֶחַב ְרָתfemale friend’ in Mold from the root ‘ ָחֵברfriend’ plus the suffix of Aramaic origin; • surname Enoff in Prague in derived from Hebrew ‘ ָע ָנוmodest’;260 • חתןrhyming with (for)gesen in PuV, ( ֵחַתןin BZR and MPW), ֶחַתן, and ֶחֶתן, all from documents of the sixteenth century (TIBERIAN spelling ‘ ָחָתןbridegroom’); chesan in a German source from the mid-eighteenth century;261 • during the sixteenth century in northern Italy: ֵחֶברinstead of ‘ ָחֵברfriend’ (TG –), בעהרfor ‘ ָּבחוּרlad’ in PuV for the nickname of Elia Levita (Timm and Gehlen :–), ֶעִשירfor ‘ ָעִשירrich man’ (Sand :), ֶשַעהfor ‘ ׁ ָשָעהhour’ in MPW (Fox and Lewis :); • the male name Nehm found in (undated) source from Frankfurt and נעהםin Amsterdam in could come from the biblical ‘ ַנחוּםNahum’ (though this could be ‘ ְנֶחְמָיהNehemiah’). In a number of documents compiled in medieval Germany using Hebrew letters, heth is used to express the sounds of the German letter combinations “he” or “eh.” This is found in SSC and is quite systematic in CC (TG ). The same idea also explains the use of heth in the transcription of the
257 Most likely, these translations and transcriptions were done by converted Jews. In these texts, we find no reduction of unstressed vowels. For this reason, ‘e’ in ruech and samyech is not a reduced vowel (as in modern Yiddish ruekh ‘spirit’) but a vowel that results from E-EFFECT. 258 The AlsY verb khasmene (Weill :, StY khasmenen)—derived from the same root—has no trace of E-EFFECT. 259 Stephan Bodeker writes that this name is pronounced as Heva by Jews of “upper lands” and as Chava by Jews from “lower lands” (Walde :). 260 In tombstone inscriptions this family name is spelled ( ענוBondy-Dvorský :, Beider :). 261 Information taken from TG and, for MPW only, Fox and Lewis :.
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The Hebrew component
female given names Richheit ()ריכחיט, Liebheit ()ליבחייט, and Adelheit ( )אדלחייטmentioned in section ... Another orthographic convention proper to BNEY HES involves the use of ayin ( )עfor /e/-colored vowels. Its earliest examples appear in western Germany during the thirteenth century. In lists of the martyrs of massacres of (Franconia) and (Worms and Nürnberg) we find numerous instances, among them: ( בעלטאBeletta, Belette), ( ֶעברליןEberlin, Äberlin), עלהand עלא (Ella, Elle), ( גנענליןGnänlin, Gnenlin), ( יענטליןJentlin), ( לעבלנגאLeblang), ( פערלאPerla, Perle), ( פפערקורןPfefferkorn), ( זעפלמןSeppelman), ( פעסליןPeslin), ( סערליןSerlin), and ( צערליןZerlin). Since the end of the fifteenth century ayin has been systematically used for /e/-colored vowels.262 The existence of these two graphic conventions implies that E-EFFECT next to heth and ayin was really commonplace in the pronunciation of Hebrew by BNEY HES.263 The first of these conventions was abandoned, certainly because of the gradual renorming of the pronunciation of heth into [x]. The second one survived. It represents one of the most striking examples of the legacy of BNEY HES: in modern Yiddish the letter ayin serves to express /e/, this graphic tradition being unknown among nonAshkenazic Jews for whom this letter either expresses a (glottal) consonant or has no phonetic value.264 In the twentieth century, some other definite traces of E-EFFECT could still have been observed in Yiddish. In AlsY and/or SwY, we find ērel ‘non-Jew’ ()ָע ֵרל, eref ‘guarantor’ ()ָע ֵרב, mēes and meys ‘money’ ()ָמעֹות, tsēkene(n) ‘to shout’ (from the root )צעק, lekēkhe(n) ‘to take’ (from the root )לקח, Yēkef ‘Jacob’ (קב ֹ )ַי ֲעa,265 shē ‘hour’ () ׁ ָשָעה, nēlem(er) ‘shoes’ (from ַנ ֲע ִליםor ) ְנָע ִלים, and emed ‘pulpit’ 266 ({ )ַעּמוּדv}. Certain of them are found in other Yiddish varieties: () WphY meyes (along with mōs and moes), tsēkenen, Ye(y)kef (Weinberg :), and lekeikhen/lokeikhen ‘to take, conclude a deal’; () tsēkenen appears also in EGY; () erl is sporadically found in both PolY (along with more usual url and ūrl) and LitY (along with orl, LCA ). Several words found only in modern dictionaries of EY seem also to retain traces of E-EFFECT, namely bediéved ‘afterwards, subsequently, in retrospect’ (Aramaic )ְּב ִּדי ֲעַבד, ése or mitsves-ése both having the same meaning ‘a positive obligation (under Jewish law)’ ( ֲעֵׂשהand )ִמְצ ַות־ ֲעֵׂשהa.267 In these forms the stressed [e] corresponds in the etymons to ḥaṭef-pataḥ under ayin. These examples are exceptions: generally speaking, all modern Yiddish varieties have no E-EFFECT. Since we find no trace of this phonetic phenomenon in medieval sources
The most detailed coverage of the history of the use of ayin by Ashkenazic Jews can be found in TG –. This does not mean that E-EFFECT was present in all words with ayin or heth. For example, in the documents from Kailheim (twelfth century), in addition to forms with E-EFFECT mentioned at the beginning of this section, we find a number of forms without it: alma ‘ ַע ְלָמהvirgin,’ mispahoz from ‘ ִמְׁשָּפחֹותgenerations,’ daaz ‘ ַדַּעתwisdom,’ anavim ‘ ֲע ָנִויםhumble (plural),’ and veaszierim ‘ ַו ֲע ׁ ִשי ִריםand rich (plural).’ 264 The index of several hundred Hebrew names found in medieval sources from France (Seror :–) includes a lone example of ‘ בענדיטBendit’ (Champagne, ). In other documents from the same region, this name is spelled בנדיטor באנדיט. We thus must be dealing with a simple slip of the pen. 265 One of the earliest references is that to Jeckoff in Hessen (sixteenth century). In the fifteenth century, Jacob Weil (:, RESPONSA, ) refers to a divorce bill by Maharil that mentions יעקבnicknamed יעקב. In the original text at least the last form was likely to be pointed to show that its pronunciation was different from the TIBERIAN pointing for Jacob (קב ֹ )ַי ֲע. In the given expression, Maharil meant that the first form was pronounced as in WHOLE HEBREW, while the second form was vernacular and, most likely, it corresponded to the pronunciation Yekev/Yekef: it is the only form of Jacob used in Western and Central Europe that at the same time (i) was different from the standard one, (ii) included no additional suffix, and (iii) would have been spelled precisely this way (given that in Yiddish proper ayin is used to represent [e]-vowels). [This footnote is based on MRPC.] 266 See BA –, , ; Lowenstein , maps , , Weill : (AlsY emed), Zivy : (AlsY lekēkhe), (AlsY eref), (AlsY tsēgene ‘to shout’); compare also SwY forms ērel ‘non-Jew,’ ēref ‘guarantor,’ shē ‘hour,’ mēs ‘money,’ nēlemer ‘shoes,’ tsēgene ‘to shout,’ and lekēkhe ‘to take.’ Several authors (Lowenstein :, Zuckerman :) state that the /e/-reflex corresponds to ָעonly. Our list shows that both ַעand ֲעare affected as well. On the other hand, similar reflexes in the vicinity of heth (and not only ayin) were apparently changed during (or immediately after) the renorming of the pronunciation of heth (see section ..). 267 These examples are due to MRPC. 262 263
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Stressed vowels
dealing with Danubian BNEY KHES either,268 we can presume that Yiddish inherits the absence of EEFFECT (exactly like the velar pronunciation of heth) from the language of BNEY KHES. As a result, the examples cited above are mainly WY relics from the time of BNEY HES, and in the case of erl borrowed by EY from WY (or just resulting from the reading of the word ערלas if it were of non-Hebrew origin). There are, nevertheless, also at least two examples that are known in both WY and EY: StY mekn ‘to erase’ and shekhtn, WphY shekhten, and SwY shekhte ‘to slaughter’ {v}. In Yiddish historical linguistics, it is well known that in the verb mekn (from the root )מחקthe disappearance of intervocalic heth is likely to result from its merger with he in the language of BNEY HES.269 Far less attention has been paid to its root vowel: the [e] actually results from E-EFFECT, another idiosyncrasy of BNEY HES. The same phenomenon explains the root vowel in the verb shekhtn ‘to slaughter,’ from the Hebrew root ׁשחט. Generally speaking, Yiddish verbs of Hebrew origin never come just from a Hebrew root but always from a specific stem, that is a root in which some specific vowel pattern is infixed (sometimes with prefixes and/or other modifications). A detailed analysis of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of the present book, but its global result is clear. Not one of the patterns that may be involved in the creation of Yiddish verbs includes [e] in the root. Several scholars suggested the presence in this word, as well as in mekn, of the Germanic umlaut (BN, WG :). Umlaut, however, applies in Yiddish (or any other Germanic language) under specific conditions. Phonological umlaut, which took place in German in the early Middle Ages, was triggered by a following high front vowel [i] or glide [j], but this condition is obviously not met in the verbs in question. In Germanic languages, over time, morphological umlaut comes to be regularly triggered by certain suffixal morphemes, such as the -er plural, diminutive suffixes, etc. But the only suffix in the word under discussion is the infinitive morpheme -(e)n that rarely triggers umlaut in German.270 More important, in numerous Yiddish verbs with a Hebrew root, the stressed vowel is [e] only in shekhtn, mekn, WY tsēkenen, and medieval western Ashkenazic behesemen; in all four cases, this vowel is present before ayin or heth. Consequently, the root vowel in shekhtn is also due to E-EFFECT. The consonant [x] that follows this vowel does not necessarily imply a BNEY KHES origin, as has been asserted by some authors. Actually, the disappearance of the second consonant in mekn and its [x]-reflex in shekhtn are directly related to the environment and in particular to the following consonant. As discussed in section .., the change from [ht] to [xt] is a standard development in medieval German, this consonantal sequence being perfectly common.271 Yet, no [hk] occurs in German: this explains mekn. Most likely, in the BNEY HES territory, contrary to other vernacular words that originally had E-EFFECT at the moment of renorming that eliminated the traces of this phonetic phenomenon, for these two verbs their Hebrew etymons were not immediately perceived any longer and, as a result, these words were left unchanged.272 The elimination of E-EFFECT first occurred in WHOLE HEBREW 268 Rehel, a variant of Rachel, from Regensburg ()—already mentioned in section ..—could be a recent migrant from the area of BNEY HES. 269 This derivation is suggested in Elia Levita’s Tish (s.v.). Katz (b:) observes that this word could result from a consonantal assimilation [xk] > [k]. His hypothesis is implausible mainly because of the root vowel [e]: only the provenance from the BNEY HES area can explain both the loss of the heth (presumably realized as *[h]) and the quality of the root vowel. 270 Compare such exceptions as German and Yiddish krank ‘ill’ and German kränken / StY krenken ‘to be ill.’ 271 Further corroboration of this idea comes from Heide (:). In R, he found a mention of the verb shekht(e)n written using kaf with the diacritical sign rafe ( )כֿinstead of heth, while the document clearly comes from the BNEY HES area since in other contexts heth and he are just allographs. The ideas about the relationship between the root vowel in (oys)mekn and shekhtn to E-EFFECT in the area of BNEY HES as well as about the influence of the development of MHG ht appear in Neuberg :– and TS –. In several manuscripts compiled by BNEY HES, MHG ht is expressed via either חטor ( ֿכטLe, Be), or via ֿכטonly (R) (see Heide :, , indices in Röll .). 272 In this connection, note that since the Middle Ages shekhtn has often been spelled with khaf instead of heth and believed to be of German origin.
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The Hebrew component
before being spread to Hebraisms incorporated into the vernacular language (MERGED HEBREW) as well. Both verbs were borrowed by EY from WY. If we search for traces of E-EFFECT in various non-Ashkenazic systems of the pronunciation of Hebrew, we may observe that in the Septuagint numerous names having either ayin or heth are rendered with epsilon (): ˝ø Ø ‘Noemi/Naomi’ () ָנֳעִמי, Ø ‘Phinehas’ ()ִּפי ְנָחס, ˝ø ‘Noah’ ()ֹנַח,a¯ıÆ ‘Eve’ ()ַח ָוּה, ¯øå ‘Enoch’ ()ֲחנֹוְך, and ˚æ ‘Korah’ (ק ַרח ֹ a).273 However, in this list, only the first two examples, both with qameṣ, can be unambiguously linked to a phenomenon looking similar to E-EFFECT. For the others, the situation is doubtful because—as mentioned in section .— in the Septuagint, generally speaking, epsilon appears (along with alpha) where the TIBERIAN system has pataḥ , independently of the consonantal context. Moreover, we find in the same source names with /a/ such as `Æ ‘Anna’ ()ַחָּנה, PÆåź ‘Rachel’ ()ָרֵחל, IÆŒø ‘Jacob’ (קב ֹ )ַי ֲע, `ÇÆæØÆ ‘Azariah’ ()ֲע ַז ְרָיה, and ¯ºÆÇÆæ ‘Eleazar’ ()ֶאְלָעָזר. As discussed earlier in the section, for the first three names in this list /e/-forms are known in (medieval) western Germany. As a result, the distribution found in the Septuagint cannot be related to the E-EFFECT of BNEY HES. No clear example of E-EFFECT appears in Origen’s Secunda.274 No traces of this phenomenon are found in the TIBERIAN system or in the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew. Yet, in a document compiled in in northern France in the Roman alphabet several forms include the letter combination “aih” to transcribe a sound that corresponds in the Hebrew spelling to heth with either qameṣ or pataḥ . Most likely, this combination expresses the sound [].275 In sources related to ZARFATIC Jews, biblical Anna ( )ַחָּנהappears as Henay (, northern France) and Henna (, England).276 Note that in these communities, exactly as those of BNEY HES, this vocalic shift is not observed in the immediate vicinity of the consonant he. This information implies that, most likely, E-EFFECT resulted from a regional innovation shared by Ashkenazic BNEY HES and Jews from ZARFAT. It clearly appeared before heth and he merged in the pronunciation(s) of Hebrew peculiar to these two groups, namely during the period when both heth and ayin were still (pharyngeal) consonants.
.. Exceptions: pataḥ , ḥ aṭef-pataḥ , and qameṣ In a large number of words from the Hebrew component of modern Yiddish varieties, the reflex of the stressed vowel—the TIBERIAN pointing of whose etymon corresponds either to qameṣ, or to (ḥ aṭef-)pataḥ .—does not conform to the general rules formulated in section ... Globally speaking, one can observe numerous instances of confusion between qameṣ and pataḥ . This phenomenon is particularly apparent in phonological contexts in which, according to the rules of Hebrew grammar, the presence of any of these vowels is in principle possible. The exceptional forms can be divided into several groups depending on the exact context in which the vowel in question appears. One group corresponds to the position before yod. Table . presents its reflexes in open syllables and, for the last line only, in formerly closed syllables.
273 The same development is found in the Vulgate for the same names: compare Noemi, Finees, Noe, Enoch, and Core, respectively. The only exception is the Vulgate form for Eve: Hava. On the /e/-colored reflexes in Greek transcriptions of the Bible see Sperber :–. 274 Surely, one finds a few forms with in place of the TIBERIAN pataḥ near ayin or heth (examples can be found in Brønno :, , ). Yet, in this source—exactly as in the Septuagint (see section .)—dozens of cases with epsilon are found in the vicinity of other consonants too (not just ayin and heth) and always in place of pataḥ , never in place of qameṣ. 275 See Gumpertz :; additional details in TG and WG :. 276 See the exact references in Seror :. Jews from England were of northern French origin.
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Reflexes of pataḥ and qameṣ before yod Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
qameṣ
/a:/ or /a/ {v}
ַאֲח ָריוּת
responsibility
StY and DuY akhrayes, PolY akhrāyis277
ִמְׁש ָניֹות
Mishna
StY and DuY mishnayes, PolY mishnāyis
ְל ָוָיה
funeral
StY and DuY levaye, PolY livāyi, SwY lefaye, AlsY (Zuckerman :) lefāye278
ַה ֲע ָוָיה
grimace
StY havaye, PolY havāyi
ְרָאָיה
proof
StY, CzY, and EGY raye
ִּב ָּזיֹון
shame
StY and EGY bizoyen, PolY bizōyin
ִנָּסיֹון
temptation
StY nisoyen, PolY nisōyin
ְתּ ָנִים
terms
StY tnoim and DuY tenoem
ִקָקיֹון
shade tree
StY kikoyen280
ׁ ִשַּנִים
teeth
WphY shnōyem, AlsY (Picard ) shnōyemer
ַיִין
wine
Old AlsY *yoyen,281 but SwY yayin, EGY and DuY yayen
ַזִין
name of the letter ;זseven
WphY (Weinberg :) zōyen, SwY zoyin,282 EGY and DuY zoyen, but PolY zā(y)in
ֶאְפ ַרִים
male name Ephraim
StY Efroyem, PolY Efrōyim283
qameṣ
pataḥ
/o:/ in PolY279 {v}
/o:/ or /o/ {v}
(continued ) 277 Unless a reference is given explicitly, PolY forms found in all tables of this and the following sections of this chapter are taken from BN – and, for names of Hebrew letters and diacritical signs, from Birnbaum :–. EGY names of Hebrew letters are taken from Friedrich :–; this source does not allow us to distinguish between short and long vowels. The same limitation is valid for Tirsch used as the source for CzY. Moreover, often Tirsch indicates “e” or “o” in place of diphthongs /ey/ and /oy/ (or /ou/) known from other sources. As a result, in this chapter information from Tirsch is used for CzY only to illustrate phenomena that are related neither to vowel length nor to the distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs. 278 Compare also the spelling ְל ַוָיהin one WY source of (Sand :). 279 In PolY, the stressed vowel in these words is long [o:] (Birnbaum :) or [ɔ:] (BN ). Yet, Weinreich relates this vowel to short /o/ (WG :) either being unaware of its length in PolY or implicitly considering that the lengthening results from a (rather recent) secondary lengthening. 280 This word appears in Yiddish dictionaries only in the expression kikoyen deyoyne ( ְדּיֹו ָנהa‘ ) ִקָקיֹוןsomething ephemeral’ (literally: ‘Jonah’s shade tree’). 281 Chrysander (:) mentions the form yohan cited in a document from Strasbourg from the mid-seventeenth century. While this may have been partly influenced by the given name Johann, it still seems to suggest that the word was pronounced with a rounded vowel, not with [a] (MRPC). The modern AlsY form is yāyen (Zuckerman :). 282 See LCA . 283 The earliest reference to /o/-forms corresponds to the hypocoristic form Froim(b) appearing in a document from Vienna ().This /o/ can, in theory, be due to the influence of WHOLE HEBREW based in turn on numerous biblical occurrences of the pausal form ֶאְפ ָרִים, with qameṣ; compare, for example, such important contexts as Genesis :, :, :, and Numbers : (MRPC).
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Vowel
Reflex
pataḥ
/a:/ or /a/ {v}
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ַר ְגַלִים
feet
WphY raglōyem, but SwY reglayim, PolY raglāyim (Birnbaum :)
ֵעי ַנִים
eyes
WphY eynōyem, but EGY eynayem
ַעִין
eye
SwY oyin, but WphY āyen/āyem, EGY ayen
ְירוּ ׁ ָשַלִים
Jerusalem
WphY and DuY Yerusholoyem284
ַּבִית
house
SwY bāyis, WphY bāyes, EGY and DuY bayes
ַמִים
water
WphY māyem, SwY mayim, EGY and DuY mayem
ַחִיל
army
PolY khāyil (Birnbaum :)
pataḥ
as for qameṣ {v}
ַהַּב ִיתa ַּבַעל
master of the house
StY balebos, PolY bal(a)būs, SwY and DuY balbōs, WphY balbō(e)s, AlsY balbūs (Zuckerman :), CzY balbous, EGY balboes
pataḥ before yod with dagesh
/a:/ or /a/ {v}
ַּדָּין
judge
PolY dāyin, StY and DuY dayen
ַגּּיוּת
(common) people; gentiles
SwY and DuY gayes, WphY and AlsY gāyes, PolY gayis (Zuckerman :)
ַחָּיה
animal
PolY khāyi, StY khaye
ַחּיוּת
life
PolY khāyis (Birnbaum :), WphY khāyes, StY, DuY, AlsY, and SwY khayes
ַחָּיט
tailor
WphY khāyet, StY khayet
ַחָּיב
guilty
WphY khāyev, SwY khayef, StY khayev
ַהּיֹום
today285
WphY hāyem, StY hayem
ַ ִחּיים
male name Ḥ ayyim
StY and DuY Khayem
ְמַבֵּיׁש
to shame, disgrace
StY and DuY mevayesh (zayn), WphY mevāyesh (zayn), AlsY mefāyesh (zay/zãy) (Zuckerman :), SwY mefaish (zay)
284 The WphY form appears on p. of the second edition () of Weinberg . The modern AlsY form is Yerüshelāyem (Zuckerman :), StY Yerusholaim. 285 In EY, this lexeme appears as the first word of each verse of a prayer closing the Jewish New Year service.
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Stressed vowels
As discussed in section .., for several vernacular forms the Hebrew /a:/ merged at some moment of Ashkenazic history with MHG â. The consideration of the series {v} in Table . implies that during the rounding of MHG â from [a:] to [ɔ:] in (Jews’) German,286 [a:] was retained before [j] as an allophonic variant of [ɔ:]. The possibility of the existence of an allophonic variant that would be limited to the Hebrew component only is quite natural since the environment in question is specific to Hebrew. Indeed, we find no MHG word in which â would occur in open syllables before [j]. Moreover, the phenomenon in question predates Yiddish and, as a result, during the period in question, partial autonomy still existed between the phonetics of the Hebrew and German components. The absence of raising/rounding before [j]287 is not enigmatic. Indeed, the contact of [a:] with the following glide creates a (kind of) diphthong, while as can be seen from the history of various languages, and more specifically Yiddish, the first elements of diphthongs are less subject to phonetic shifts than long monophthongs. In the WHOLE HEBREW pronunciation underlying that of the Hebrew component of PolY, qameṣ in open syllables went through the following stages: [a:] > [ɔ:] > [o:] > [u:].288 The words from the series {v} were incorporated into the vernacular language at the earliest stage, that of [a:]. On the other hand, the root vowel in those from the series {v} can be explained if we conjecture that (i) they were borrowed later, during the [ɔ:]- or the [o:]-stages;289 (ii) the presence of the following glide, exactly as for words from the series {v}, prevented their additional raising to [u:]. In principle, the forms from the series {v} can also be explained in another way. It is easy to observe that all of them as well the /o/-forms from the series {v} have a similar environment: [(qameṣ or pataḥ ) + (yod + vowel + nasal consonant)]. Their /o/-reflex—contrasting to the /a/-reflex in series {v} and {v}—could be directly due to the influence of the nasal consonant.290 If this rounding had taken place during the early period of Ashkenazic history, it would mean that the pronunciation of existing forms with pataḥ pronounced [a:] before the (yod + vowel + nasal consonant) combination, some of which are listed in Table . for {v}, results from a later change influenced by WHOLE HEBREW norms. Note also that certain transcriptions made by von Harff—such as “jojen” ‘wine’ ( ) ַיִיןand “moim” ‘water’ (–)ַמִיםdemonstrate a phenomenon in the language of BNEY HES that is similar to {v}. However, in H (written by one of BNEY KHES) several other forms listed earlier for {v} appear with qameṣ instead of pataḥ . This is the case for words meaning ‘feet’ and ‘eyes’ and the letter name ‘zayin’ (spelled )ָזֶעןa.291 The same peculiarity appears in such spellings as ‘ ָאְז ָנִיםears,’ ‘ ְש ָׁפָתִיםlips,’ and ‘ ָׁש ָדּיִיםbreasts.’
This change corresponds to process in Table . and shift # in Table .. It was Bin-Nun (BN ) who suggested that the /a/-colored vowel in these words is related to the following /j/ that prevented the raising/rounding. An alternative theory was suggested by Jacobs (:). He stated that the glide /j/ hindered the lengthening, while only lengthened /a:/ underwent raising/rounding. Jacobs’ idea seems unattractive: it needs an additional hypothesis to explain the long /a:/-rendition of this vowel in modern WY. On the other hand, the length of /a:/ in modern PolY may be quite recent and not necessarily inherited from early Ashkenazic times. Indeed, in PolY we also find [a:j] in numerous words from the German component including lāyin ‘to loan,’ shpāyin ‘to spit,’ drāy ‘three,’ frāy ‘free,’ nāy ‘new,’ and even in dbāyin ‘to take care’ (from Polish dbać) (BN , ). In all these words, [a:j] results from former [aj] (that in other contexts gave [a:] in PolY). 288 See details in section ... 289 Bin-Nun also considers the series in question to be more recent in Yiddish than the series designated in Table . as {v} (BN ). For the latter series, he considers that /a:/ in PolY forms corresponding to StY levaye and mishnayes reveals the archaic pronunciation of qameṣ, while the root /a:/ in PolY variants of akhrayes and havaye, borrowed by Yiddish quite recently, is due to the analogy to forms incorporated earlier. 290 Nasals often have the effect of darkening and sometimes rounding adjacent vowels: for example, Polish ą is completely identified with the nearest higher round vowel, while French an is much darker than the corresponding nonnasal vowel a. 291 On the other hand, pataḥ appears in words meaning ‘teeth’ and ‘wine’ that also appear in Table .. 286 287
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Reflexes of pataḥ and qameṣ before [f] or [v] Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ַרב
rabbi
LitY rov, PolY ruf, DuY, CzY,292 and EGY293 rōv, SwY, AlsY, and WphY rāf / rāv (BA , LCA )294
ָאב
Jewish month Ab
LitY ov, PolY uf, SWY āf/āv (BA )
ְּכָתב
writ
LitY ksav, PolY and SwY ksāf, WphY kesāv
ַּדף
page
PolY dāf, DuY daf
ַלאו
no
WphY lāv, StY and EGY lav295
name of the letter
EGY tōf (Selig :) and DuY, PolY tuf/tuv
ָּכף
name of the letter ;ּכtwenty
EGY kōf (Selig :), PolY kuf, WphY and SwY kaf
ָואו
name of the letter ;וsix
EGY vōf (Selig :), PolY vuf/vuv, WphY and DuY vōv,296 SwY fōf
ָּתו
ּת
The reflex found in {v} is unique and therefore exceptional in comparison to /a:/ in the series {v}, which includes the same word meaning ‘house.’ In {v}, this word appears as the second element of a compound. Most likely, at some moment it had only a secondary stress, the primary accent being in the first element of the compound (MRPC). In the secondary stress position, the glide could be dropped, thus removing the obstacle for later raising/rounding. The long /a:/ for pataḥ before geminated yod (series {v} in Table .) is regular for different varieties of modern Yiddish that distinguish the vowel length.297 Table . presents another context in which we find an anomalous series: before [f ] or [v], with long vowels in closed syllables {v}. The dialectal realizations of the stressed vowel in the first two words, ‘rabbi’ and ‘Jewish month Ab,’ are exactly the same as those for the lengthened MHG a.298 Note that here the long stressed vowel occurs in closed syllables where words of Hebrew origin usually have only short vowels, while German-inspired lengthening (basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift # in Table . of section ..)
292 The form /ro:v/ for CzY appears in modern Yiddish atlases. Yet, Tirsch (:), who does not indicate the vowel length, writes about the pronunciation “rav” as a general term and “rov” to designate the chief rabbi. 293 Friedrich (:), who rarely indicates the vowel length, spells it “row.” 294 The author of H writes ‘ ַה ָרבthe rabbi’ instead of TIBERIAN ָה ַרב. 295 SD spells this word, as well as the word for ‘rabbi’ with pataḥ instead of qameṣ. 296 DuY vōv appears in Beem :. The PolY forms ruf, uf, tuf, kuf, and vuf clearly appeared after the shortening of /u:/ because otherwise their /u/-quality would be unexplainable. Compare also LitY Khove and PolY Khuve, variant forms of pan-Yiddish female given name Khave ‘Eve’ ()ַחָוּה, found in LitY and UkrY, respectively, which can be related to a similar phenomenon. 297 Since—as discussed in section ..—geminated yod corresponded for medieval Ashkenazic Jews to an affricate consonant, in this series pataḥ could occur in open syllables. 298 See Table . in section ..
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Stressed vowels
was not applicable.299 These factors imply that here the lengthening is due to a process internal to western Ashkenazic communities. This change was valid for monosyllabic words ending in [f ] and it took place when the raising of [a:] for A (basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift #) was no longer operative. The resulting forms [ra:f] and [a:f ] were brought to other territories where their [a:] changed to [ɔ:] and later to [o:] simultaneously with the reflexes of the lengthened MHG a (basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift #). Note also the long realization before [f ] in monosyllabic words can sometimes be found in Yiddish varieties not only for pataḥ and qameṣ but for other vowels too; compare PolY kīf (‘ )קוּףname of the letter ( ’קBN ) and WphY gūf ‘body’ ()גּוּף. A large number of forms with qameṣ in open syllables gave /a/, or (rarely) /a:/ (see Table .) {v}. TABLE . Anomalous reflexes of qameṣ in open syllables Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ָנ ָדן
dowry
PolY and UkrY nadn (LCA ), WphY nāden
ָחֵבר
friend
StY, PolY, CzY, DuY, and WphY khaver, SwY khafer300
ֲחָתִנים
bridegrooms
StY khasánim and DuY khasanem301
ָח ִריף
sagacious person
StY, AlsY (Weiss :) and DuY kharef
ַקְט ָלִנית
three times widow
StY katlánes
ַחְכָמִנית
wise woman
StY khokhmanis
ַמְלָאִכי
angel Malachi
StY malakhe
ְנָפׁשֹות
persons, souls
StY nefashes, PolY nifashis, but DuY nefōshes
ׁ ָש ְואa ָוֶׁשֶקר
utter falsehood
StY shave-sheker, PolY shāve-sheyker302
ָאֶלף
name of the letter ;אone
StY, CzY, and EGY alef, PolY alif, but SwY, AlsY, and DuY olef, WphY alef/olef
ָּדֶלת
name of the letter ;דfour
StY and EGY dalet, PolY dalit, but AlsY and DuY dolet, WphY dalet/dolet
ָלֶמד
name of the letter ;לthirty
StY, EGY, WphY, AlsY and DuY lamed, PolY lamid
ָסֶמְך
name of the letter ;סsixty
StY, PolY, DuY, WphY, and AlsY samekh, EGY tsamekh
299 The German lengthening also took place by analogy with inflected forms in which the same vowel appeared in open syllables (see section ..). This context is not relevant here either. 300 Note that both EY and WY have the same vocalic contrast for two Yiddish words derived from the same Hebrew ָחֵבר. PolY has khaver ‘friend’ and khūver ‘rabbinic title.’ SwY has khafer and khōver, respectively. Bin-Nun’s idea (BN ) about the analogy to the vowel in the plural ֲחֵב ִריםsounds ad hoc and implausible: in the plural this vowel is unstressed and nothing indicates that the singular form was less commonly used. 301 Note that the spelling ֲחַת ִניםis given in Mizvat Nashim (Venice, , p.). (I would like to thank Meyer Wolf who drew my attention to this reference.) 302 In this case, the vowel corresponding to qameṣ appears under the secondary stress. This can be precisely the reason for its anomalous reflex (MRPC).
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Reflexes of qameṣ in syllables that are now closed Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
/a/ {v}
ָאְס ַנת
female given name
StY Asne (hypocoristic form)
ְסָפ ַרִּדי
Spanish (Jew)
StY, PolY (Birnbaum :), and CzY sfardi, DuY sefardi
ָצ ְרַפת
France
LitY (archaic), EGY, SwY, and AlsY tsarfes303
ָנְפָקא
prostitute
StY, DuY, and WphY nafke, SwY and AlsY (Weiss :) nafge
ָּפ ָר ׁ ָשה
section of Torah
StY, CzY, DuY, and AlsY (Weill :) parshe
ְמָפ ְר ׁ ִשים
exegetes
StY and AlsY (Weill :) meforshim, DuY meforshem
ְמ ׁ ָש ְרִתים
servants
StY and AlsY (Weill :) meshorsim
/o/ {v}
Several particular modern forms mentioned in Table . are due to the Hebrew pronunciation by medieval BNEY HES. In section .., German dialectal lammes ‘thirty’ was mentioned, an old borrowing from the language of BNEY HES. In the present context, it is important to pay attention not to its last consonant (which was renormed from [s] to [d] in modern Ashkenazic Hebrew and Yiddish) but to its stressed vowel, the short [a]. Elia Levita uses in Tish the spelling ( סּמךs.v.). The dagesh in mem implies that for this author the vowel in the first syllable was short and behaving as if it was a pataḥ (MRPC). Several of the above peculiarities are also attested in H: ‘ ַלֶמדlamed’ and ‘ ַסֶמךsamekh’ (with pan-Yiddish /a/), but ‘ ָאֶלףalef ’ and ‘ ָדֶּלדּdaleth’ (with /o/-forms known in WY). Table . presents reflexes of qameṣ in syllables that in modern Yiddish are closed by a sequence of two consonants. For forms from the series {v}, the /a/-reflex may be due to the closing of the stressed syllables at an early period. Note that Elia Levita uses in SD the spelling ‘ ְסַפ ַר ִדיone from Spain’ and ‘ ַצ ְרָפִתיone from France,’ both times with pataḥ instead of TIBERIAN qameṣ. The short /o/ in the series {v} can be explained in the following way: the stressed syllable became closed when qameṣ was already associated in WHOLE HEBREW to the /o/- or the /ɔ/-qualities; once this word was borrowed into Yiddish, its original posttonic vowel disappeared as a result of a total reduction and the original long vowel became shortened in the resulting closed syllables. Alternatively, /o/ may be of recent origin and appeared under the influence of the WHOLE HEBREW rule according to which qameṣ in closed syllables is to be pronounced as [o].
The EY form tsarfes appears in Lebensohn : (this reference is known to me thanks to MRPC), while AlsY references are mentioned in Weill : and Zivy :. StY tsorfas is due to WHOLE HEBREW. This fact is revealed by the second vowel: in the course of natural development, this posttonic vowel would necessarily become reduced [ə] and not [a]. The first vowel is also directly due to the WHOLE HEBREW rule that posits [o] for any short qameṣ. 303
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Stressed vowels
The position before or after a Hebrew (formerly) guttural consonant heth, ayin, alef, or he represents another particular context for pataḥ and ḥ aṭef-pataḥ . As shown in Table ., both of them have a series of examples in which their realizations are those normally found for qameṣ: TABLE . Reflexes near a guttural Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
pataḥ before heth
as qameṣ {v}
ַנחוּםor ְמ ַנֵחםa304
male name Nahum/ Menahem
StY Nokhem, PolY Nūkhim, DuY and AlsY305 Nōkhem
ַתַּחת
buttocks
StY, WphY, CzY (Ehrlich :), DuY, and EGY tokhes, PolY tukhis, SwY tōkhes/ tūkhes, AlsY dōkhes (Zuckerman :)
ַּבחוּ ִרים
lads
StY bokherim, AlsY bokhorim (Weill :), WY bokhrim (PhilogLottus :), but WphY bakhurem
ַקַּדַחת
ague
StY kadokhes, PolY kidukhis, WphY kedōkhes/kadōkhes, DuY kedākhes, CzY (Ehrlich :) gedukhes, EGY gedokhes306
ַעּמוּד
pulpit
PolY ūmit, DuY omed, AlsY emed (Weill :)307
ְלַהְכ ִעיס
in spite
PolY tsilūkhis (with Germanic prefix)
ֲחלֹום
dream
StY and DuY kholem, PolY khūlim, WphY khōlem/khaulem, SwY khōlem/ khūlem
ֲחִצי
half
StY, CzY, and EGY khotse, DuY khōtse, PolY khūtsi, WphY khotse/khūtse, SwY khutse308
pataḥ under a guttural
ḥ aṭef-pataḥ under a guttural
as qameṣ {v}
as qameṣ {v}
(continued )
304 Forms with “o” are unknown until the seventeenth century, while in the sixteenth century we regularly find “a” in various Christian documents from Austria and Poland (Beider :). The situation here is also complicated by the fact that many of the early manuscripts and printed editions of the Bible point Nahum and/or (more rarely) Menahem with qameṣ rather than pataḥ (MRPC based on Ginsburg ). 305 Nochem appears in the census of Alsatian Jews carried out in (Leeson :). That source does not indicate the quantity of the root vowel. Our knowledge concerning both the forms of this given name in other Yiddish varieties and the general phonology of AlsY implies that this vowel was long. 306 For the geography of WY dialectal variants of tokhes and kadokhes see BA . For the first of these words, in the Bible we find two spellings: ( ַתַּחתfirst occurrence in Genesis :) and ( ָתַּחתGenesis :), both times with the meaning ‘under,’ ‘beneath.’ The second, pausal form that appears in the famous chapter related to Jacob blessing his sons, could in principle be responsible for the reflex in the Yiddish word (Simon :). 307 On /e/ in this form as a result of E-EFFECT see section ... 308 Also note chozi in PhilogLottus :.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ֲא ָדר
Jewish month Adar
StY, DuY and EGY (Selig :) oder, PolY ūder, AlsY uder (Zuckerman :)
ֲהַדס/ aֲהַדָּסה
myrtle; female given name Hadassah
StY hodes, CzY hodus, PolY hūdis
male given name Enoch
LitY Khonekh309
ְמָטֵהר
to purify
StY metaer (zayn), PolY mitāer (zān), DuY metaher (zeyn), SwY and AlsY medār (zay/zãy) (Zuckerman :)
ְמָבֵער
to expound, burn
StY mevaer (zayn), PolY mivāer (zān)
ְמ ׁ ָש ֵער
to assume
StY meshaer (zayn), PolY mishāer (zān)
ְמָיֵאׁש
to be disappointed
StY (zikh) meyaesh (zayn), PolY miyāish (zān), AlsY (zikh) meyaesh (zay) (Weill :)
ְמָפ ֵרׁש
commentator
StY mefaresh, PolY mifarish
ְמָח ֵרף
to blaspheme, to insult
StY and DuY mekharef (umegadef zayn)
ְמָצ ֵרף
to include in a count
StY metsaref (zayn), PolY mitsarif (zān)
ְמ ָג ֵרׁש
to banish
StY and CzY megaresh (zayn)
ְמָק ֵרב
to befriend
StY mekarev (zayn), PolY mikariv (zān) (Birnbaum :), DuY mekoref (zeyn)
ָקָהל
people of the community
StY kol, CzY kōl and kūl (Ehrlich :), PolY kūl, SwY, WphY, and DuY kāl (see also BA )
either way
PolY mūnifshakh310
director of studies in yeshivah
PolY minūl
ֲחנֹוְך qameṣ before a guttural in participles of the piel paradigm
qameṣ before resh in participles of the piel paradigm
[a:] or [a] {v}
[a] {v}
qameṣ before a guttural
[a:] in WY; as qameṣ in EY {v}
pataḥ before a guttural
as qameṣ in EY {v}
ַּנְפ ׁ ָשְךa-ַמה ְמ ַנֵהל
309 The PolY variant Heynekh is either derived from the German Christian form (H)enoch or, less likely, is due to a proto-form with E-EFFECT. 310 Some early Hebrew sources show the spelling ַנְפ ָׁשְך-a ָמהthat conforms to PolY mūnifshakh (MRPC based on Ginsburg ).
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Stressed vowels
Data available to us do not allow us to unambiguously link the particularities of these words to the language of the BNEY HES or that of the BNEY KHES. A few facts point, however, to BNEY HES, at least for the series {v}. Firstly, as mentioned in section .., Jekuthiel ha-Kohen speaks about cases of lengthening of ḥ aṭef-vowels including ֲעֵלה. Secondly, Elia Levita in SD gives ָא ָדר instead of the standard TIBERIAN pointing ֲאָדרas the Hebrew spelling for the Jewish month Adar.311 Participles of verbs corresponding to the so-called piel paradigm generally have pataḥ for the stressed vowel and dagesh forte in the following consonant, the sign that in the past would make the preceding syllable closed. Yet, in TIBERIAN pointing, this sign is impossible under Hebrew gutturals and resh: the syllable becomes open and qameṣ is used instead of pataḥ . As seen from Table . (series {v} and {v}), in Yiddish varieties distinguishing vocalic quantities, the reflex is short /a/ before resh and long /a:/ before gutturals.312 Taking this information into account, Bin-Nun suggests that in the Yiddish words whose Hebrew source has a guttural or resh in medial position, the qameṣ was treated as if it were a pataḥ , by analogy with the more general case with resh that—contrary to standard rules of TIBERIAN pointing—was geminated (BN –).313 When during early Ashkenazic history most of [a:] became rounded following the development of MHG â, in the cases under the discussion [a:] was maintained. The intervocalic gutturals were already mute and, as a result, [a:] came into immediate contact with the following vowels: the hiatus prevented the raising/rounding, exactly as for the series {v} with yod discussed earlier in this section. In any case, short /a/ in syllables that are now open, which is found in the series {v}, implies that the long /a:/ in other series—such as {v} and, most likely, {v}, {v}, {v} too—is not due to Germaninspired lengthening.314 Dialectal reflexes of the word ‘ ָקָהלpeople of the community’ (see {v}) reveal several peculiarities. It can be observed that (except for DuY) the distribution is exactly the same as for words meaning ‘Jewish month Ab’ and ‘rabbi’ (see {v}). Most likely, all three words were already incorporated in MERGED HEBREW in an early period when no difference in the pronunciation existed between qameṣ and pataḥ in similar phonological contexts, and both were still associated with the /a/-quality. WY /a:/ should reflect the old pronunciation from which modern rounded EY reflexes are derived. On the other hand, in ָקָהלwe have exactly the same sequence (qameṣ + he + qameṣ) as in the given name ‘ ַאְבָרָהםAbraham.’ Yet, dialectal variants of this male name are pronounced as if we were dealing with a single qameṣ: StY Avrom, PolY Avrūm, and AlsY (Zivy :) Afrōm {v}.315 The last line of Table . {v} shows additional EY traces of the confusion between qameṣ and pataḥ in the Hebrew pronunciation underlying Yiddish. Table . presents several combinations of Hebrew vowels that have the same reflex.
311
Both these arguments are due to MRPC. This rule is also explicitly stated in Birnbaum :. The unexpected /a/ in PolY kharef {v} and parshe {v} can also be explained by former non-TIBERIAN geminated /r/ (compare BN –) where the same explanation is given for short [e] in PolY terits (StY and DuY terets ‘pretext’ ; ֵתּרוּ ץusually spelled תּירוץin Yiddish). 314 See shift # (Table . in section ..). 315 Maybe in this last form the rounding/raising was facilitated by the presence of the final nasal /m/ (compare the discussion of the series {v} and {v} earlier in this section). The phonetics of SwY, AlsY (Zivy :), and WphY rōf ‘hunger’ ( ) ָר ָעבmay be due to the influence of WHOLE HEBREW. Note that if this word were in vernacular use by BNEY HES during the Middle Ages, its vocalism would, most likely, have E-EFFECT at that time. 312 313
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Reflexes of vowel combinations Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
pataḥ + [ayin, alef or he] + ḥaṭef-pataḥ 316
StY ay, PolY ā, DuY ey, EGY ā, WY ay / ā {v}
ַגֲּא ָוה
arrogance
StY and CzY gayve, PolY gānvi, WphY gayve/geyve, SwY gayfe, EGY gāve, DuY gey(n)ve
ַמ ֲע ֶש ׁה
story
StY and CzY (BA ) mayse, PolY mānsi, WphY mayse/māse, EGY māse, DuY meynse, AlsY mā(n) se317
ַט ֲע ָנה
claim
StY tayne, WphY tayne/tāne
ַמ ֲע ָרב and
ַמ ֲע ִריב
West and/or evening prayer
StY and CzY mayrev, PolY mārif, EGY mārev, AlsY māref, SwY mayref, DuY meyrev (BA , GGA )
ַּבֲאֶׁשר
with regard to
StY bansher
ַיֲהדוּת
conscience
StY yandes, PolY yāndis (WG :)
ִהְתַּפ ֲעלוּת
enthusiasm
StY hispayles, PolY hispālis (Birnbaum :)
ִהְתַלֲהבוּת
ecstasy
StY hislayves318
ַמְאִּדים
Mars
EGY (Selig :) maydim, StY maydem
הֹו ַׁשְע ָנא
bunch of willow twigs
StY heshayne
ְּד ָא ָגה
worry
StY and CzY dayge, PolY dā(n)gi, EGY dāge, SwY daynge, AlsY dā(n)ye, DuY deyge (see also LCA )
ְטָעִמים
musical accents written in Hebrew Bible texts
StY taymim
pataḥ + [ayin or alef] + shewa
shewa (or qameṣ) + [ayin or alef] + qameṣ
Idem {v}
Idem {v}
316 In H, Hebrew words having this structure are spelled with shewa instead of ḥaṭef-pataḥ. The same approach mainly characterizes NH. Tirsch (:) writes that in CzY the combination (pataḥ + ḥaṭef-pataḥ) is pronounced as [aj]. 317 Unless written explicitly otherwise, AlsY forms in Table . are taken from Zuckerman :. 318 The diphthong in the Yiddish male given name Mayrem/Mayrim (derived from the Hebrew acronym )מהר״םis related to a similar phenomenon; note that for pronouncing Hebrew acronyms generally a pataḥ is placed under consonants; the form in question was to be read as ַמַה ַרם.
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Stressed vowels TABLE .
Continued
ְקָעָרה
collection, plate
StY and CzY kayre, PolY kāri (Birnbaum :)
ְר ׁ ָשָעה
female antiSemite, wicked woman
PolY (near Warsaw) reshánte, WphY and DuY reshānte, AlsY reshānde, SwY reshante (see also LCA )319
shewa + alef + ṣere
Idem {v}
ְש ֵׁא ָלה
question
StY, CzY, SwY, and AlsY (Zivy :) shayle,320 PolY shāli, EGY shāle, DuY sheyle (see also GG )
qameṣ + he + ḥ aṭef-qameṣ
Idem {v}
ָטֳהָר ה
ritual cleansing of a dead body before burial
StY taare, LitY tayre (Zuckerman :), PolY tāri (Birnbaum :), AlsY dāre/dayere (Zuckerman :), DuY tey(e) re (see also BA )
pataḥ + [ayin, alef or he] + ḥ aṭef-pataḥ
in EY as qameṣ {v}
ַתּ ֲעִנית
religious fast
StY tones, PolY tūnis, EGY and AlsY (Zivy :) tanes, CzY taynes/tānes, DuY teynes/taynes (see also BA , WG :, LCA )
ַאֲהֹרן
male name Aaron
StY Orn, PolY Ūrn, AlsY Aren (Zivy :), WphY Ārn, EGY Āren and Ōren321 (see also BA )
ַי ֲעֹקב
male name Jacob
StY Yankev, PolY Yānkif and (regional) Yūkif, AlsY Yaykef/ Yaukef/Yekef (Zivy :), SwY (Fleischer :) Yekof, DuY Yokef/Yankef/Yēkef/Yeynkef (see also BA )322
319 This Yiddish word ends in the suffix -te (see {m} in section ..). Contrary to the forms listed in Table ., StY róshete is derived not from the feminine Hebrew form but from the masculine שע ׁ ָ ‘ ָרvillain.’ 320 Compare Judezmo sheela (Bunis ). 321 Friedrich (:XVI) gives “Ahren” and “Oren.” BA mentions Ayren in CzY. The same phonetic form could be the second name of Samuel Eiron mentioned in in Zürich (Guggenheim-Grünberg :). 322 In principle, it is possible that the /o/- and /u/-forms appeared not from a process internal to Yiddish but from the borrowing of a ready-made Christian form with /o:/; compare medieval German Jokob and Jocoff, Polish Jokob and Jokub (Beider :). However, the existence of similar reflexes in EY colloquial forms for Aaron makes this source implausible for Jacob too.
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The Hebrew component
Table . presents several Yiddish peculiarities. In certain words we observe nasalization {v}; compare words meaning ‘worry,’ ‘story,’ ‘with regard to,’ ‘conscience,’ as well as the name Jacob.323 Янкель [jankəl’] (, western Belorussia) is one of the earliest known references to a nazalized form derived from Jacob. The identical reflexes found in series {v} and {v} provide an additional illustration concerning the confusion between pataḥ and qameṣ in Yiddish. The earliest reference to the phenomenon corresponding to {v} is apparent in the spelling ַקְעָרה ‘plate’ in H. In Tish (s.v. )טעם, Elia Levita writes that the word ְטָעִמיםis mispronounced by his contemporaries (Ashkenazic Jews) as if it were ַטֲעִמים. Also note that NH uses the spelling ַטְעִמיםfor the same word. One can also observe that in numerous Yiddish varieties the combinations corresponding to {v–v} went through the [aj] stage. This is certainly true for EY and characterizes WphY and SwY too. The reflex in question is unusual: the presence of the glide [j] cannot be directly explained by the combination of vowels and consonants found in the Hebrew etymons of these words. Moreover, their modern realizations coincide with those found in words from the German component whose MHG ancestor had î {v}.324 For EY, this merger certainly took place when the German vowel in question was already diphthongized to [aj].325 For WY, this is not so clear. Indeed, numerous forms from this series include ayin and, consequently, we cannot rule out the possibility of the presence of E-EFFECT in their medieval pronunciation. As a result, in theory, for these forms, the merger could occur when the reflex of MHG î was [ej] or [j].326 However, H provides information that makes the possibility of this early merger quite implausible. Indeed, in that source (written circa by one of BNEY KHES in a dialect related to CzY) MHG î gave [ej] or [j].327 Yet, the combinations corresponding to {v–v} are written with pataḥ + (ayin, ale for he) + shewa and could be pronounced either [aj] or [a:] but certainly not as the reflexes of MHG î. From this example, we can assume that the pan-Yiddish character of the merger {v} is not of medieval origin. The series {v} is of particular interest: it shows one of the rare significant phonological differences existing in the Hebrew components of eastern and western varieties of Yiddish. It is clear that only the EY reflexes are exceptional: they contradict the general rule found in series {v} and valid for dozens of words in all Yiddish varieties. Beranek proposes that WY was influenced by the medieval pronunciation of Hebrew by French Jews, while the sources for EY forms with rounded vowels are Persian or Byzantine (BA ). LCA also speaks about etymological doublets, without, nevertheless, giving any precision concerning their exact nature. It appears, however, that
323
Origins of this nasalization are uncertain. Certain scholars consider that it results from the combination pataḥ +ḥ aṭef-pataḥ (Birnbaum :, WG :). However, the phenomenon is not that general. Selig (:) considers ayin to be responsible for the nasalization. Yet, we find examples not only for words with ayin but also for those with alef. As discussed in section .. (feature {C}), the introduction of /n/ between /j/ and /s/ or /š/, a phenomenon influenced by certain German dialects, characterizes a number of words of the German component of both WY and EY. It can, in principle, be responsible, at least, for the phonetics of PolY mānsi ‘story,’ StY bansher ‘with regard to,’ as well as DuY mānshene ‘what is the difference’ (Aramaic ְׁש ָנאa )ַמאיand WphY shmontses ‘rumors,’ a phonetic variant of shmues (( )ְׁשמוּעֹותthis possibility is also mentioned in BN ). 324 The merger is not total in AlsY. Indeed, there we find only [aj] for MHG î, while the reflex for the Hebrew combination in question is either [aj] or [a:] (Zuckerman :, ). However, in theory, the latter reflex can be due to the influence of WHOLE HEBREW. The reflex [a:] regular in EGY conforms to the [a:]-realization of MHG î in that dialect; compare “frah” (that is, [fra:]) ‘free’ for MHG vrî (NHG frei), “gahzek” (that is, [ga:tsek]) ‘mean’ for MHG gîtec (NHG geizig), etc. For EGY, this [a:] clearly results from earlier [aj]. 325 For the additional discussion of the whole series see TG – and Jacobs :–. 326 See Tables . and . in section ... 327 See sections .. (feature {V}), .., and ...
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Stressed vowels
the series contains only two given names328 and only one common noun. Note that this noun is the most commonly used in a compound meaning ‘Fast of Esther.’ It appears that in WY and EY the order of parts in this compound is not the same: אסתרa תעניתin WY and DuY (following the rule standard in Hebrew: the head before the modifier) and תעניתa אסתרin EY (following the rule standard in German: the modifier before the head). For both WY and EY, the pronunciation of the word תענית in these compounds is identical to that given earlier for the same word in a free-standing position.329 This difference of positions may be responsible for the difference in the pronunciation. Indeed, in the WY compound, the word תעניתrepresents the first element and for that reason it has the standard realization. On the other hand, in EY the same word stays in the second position and as a result it was in the past subject to the reduction of its secondary stressed vowel.330 Apparently, EY dialects have generalized the phonetic form originally found in the compound in question as the basic form and used it even outside of the compound in question.331 These considerations show that the existence of the small series {v} does not necessarily contradict the idea of a common origin for the phonology of the Hebrew component of WY and EY.
.. Exceptions: segol, ṣere, and shewa The number of words from the Hebrew component of modern Yiddish varieties in which we observe a deviation from the general rules formulated in section .. for ṣere and segol is significantly smaller than the number of anomalous forms with pataḥ and qameṣ considered in detail in the previous section. This, at least partly, can be explained by the fact that the number of contexts in which both ṣere and segol can, in principle, be found is fairly small. It is only in open syllables that we find a large series of segolates (with segol) and also an important number of forms with ṣere. It is precisely in this context that a large number of forms whose Hebrew etymon has a segol gave reflexes that are usually found for ṣere (see Table .) {v}. TABLE . Anomalous reflexes of segol Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ֶּפַסח
Passover; male given name Pessach
StY and DuY peysekh, AlsY (Zuckerman :) and SwY beysekh
ֶא ִליֶע ֶזר
male given name Eliezer
Hypocorism: StY, DuY, SwY (Fleischer :) and AlsY (Weiss :) Leyzer, PolY Layzer (continued )
328 The anomalous variants of Jacob are regional and exceptional. For Aaron, the earliest reference to a form starting with a back rounded vowel is Oheron (Prague, ; Bondy-Dvorský :). It is unclear whether its initial vowel could be influenced by the length of the initial letter in Áron/Árón, the Czech form of this biblical name. Note that we do not find any evidence for the use of this name by Czech Christians and, moreover, /h/ is not found in the Czech form either. 329 Compare LCA and . Yet, this statement is invalid for CzY in which we find the order of parts in the compound and /o:/ in ‘Fast of Esther’ exactly as in EY, but /a:/ in ‘fast.’ 330 In modern LitY, in the compound Ester-tones the second part has the primary stress and the first part the secondary stress. Since here the order of parts is as in German, it is quite likely that in the past the situation was reversed (following the rule standard for German compounds). The phonetic development of this word has important similarities with that of the word meaning ‘master of the house’ (see the discussion of {v} earlier in this section). 331 The ideas concerning both the importance of the compound in question and the reduction of the secondary stressed vowel are due to MRPC.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ֶקֶבר
grave
StY, EGY, DuY, and WphY keyver, SwY and AlsY (Zivy :) keyfer
ֶחֶדר
traditional Jewish school; room
StY, EGY, DuY, WphY, and SwY kheyder
king; male given name
StY, EGY, DuY, WphY, AlsY (Weiss :), and SwY meylekh332
ֶּפ ֶגר
carcass
StY, DuY, and WphY peyger, SwY beiger
ֶצֶלם
cross
StY, DuY, WphY, AlsY (Zivy :), and SwY tseylem
ַצֶּדֶקת
pious woman
StY tsedeykes,333 PolY tsidaykis (BN )
ֶּכֶפל
multiplication
StY and WY334 keyf(e)l
ֶּפ ֶרק
chapter
StY and DuY peyrek
ֶזֶבל
excrement, manure
AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY zeyfel, WphY zeybel/zeyvel / zaybel/zayvel, EGY zeyvel (or zayvel?)
ֶּפֶסל
beautiful child or animal
WphY peysel, DuY peyzel
ֶּפה
mouth
DuY and WphY pey, AlsY (Zuckermann :) and SwY bey, EGY pe
ֶעֶבד
servant
WphY eyved, SwY eyfed, EGY and StY eved
ֶעֶצם
bone
WphY and DuY eytsem, EGY and StY etsem
ֶלֶמְך
good-for-nothing
WphY and CzY (Ehrlich :) leymekh, StY lemekh
ֶּכֶלב
dog
EGY, DuY, and WphY keylev, SwY keylef, StY kelev
ֶר ַוח
profit
PolY rayvekh (Katz :), EGY and DuY reyvekh, WphY reyvakh/reybakh, AlsY (Weiss :) and SwY reyfekh,335 StY revekh
ֶׁשֶקר
lie
PolY shayker,336 EGY, DuY, AlsY (Zivy :), and WphY sheyker, StY sheker
ֶמֶלְך
332
It is a variant with melekh, the latter especially prevalent in LitY but also attested in DuY, as discussed by Katz (:) in his exemplary study of this variation. 333 SwY tsadīge (from the Hebrew feminine adjective )ַצ ִדּיָקהand WphY tsadīkente are based on other words. 334 335 PhilogLottus (:) writes keiff ’l. Also note Reivech in PhilogLottus :. 336 It is a variant with a more recent form sheyker (BN ).
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Stressed vowels
Globally speaking, the whole series in question—covering words whose semantics often reveals their old age in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews—represents an important additional argument for the theory implying that a PALESTINIAN-like system of pronunciation of Hebrew underlies the Hebrew component of modern Yiddish varieties.337 From the last two lines of Table . (and more specifically from PolY forms with /aj/), it is clear that the modern StY forms in question, both with /e/, result from forms with /ej/ whose pronunciation was changed under the influence of the WHOLE HEBREW norm that states that in the territory of LitY, segol is to be pronounced as /e/. In principle, the same can be true for the examples given on the four previous lines too, all with /e/ in LitY. It is quite possible that here western dialects retain a number of archaic forms—relics from the language of BNEY HES—that underwent a renorming in EY. One of the earliest references to a form showing the anomaly {v} appears in H. Its author, one of BNEY 338 KHES, gives the spelling ‘ ֵכֶלֿבdog’ and ‘ ֵח ֶדּרroom,’ both with ṣere instead of segol. In PuV, whose author was one of BNEY HES, the word ‘ מלךking’ rhymes with ‘ איליךrightful,’ which in turn is related to MHG êlîch (Timm :). Consequently, here we have exactly the same association between the stressed vowel in the word meaning ‘king’ and MHG ê as in Yiddish, while this MHG vowel became associated with ṣere and not with segol.339 Von Harff ’s transcriptions deesse ‘grass’ () ֶדֶּׁשא and meela ‘salt’ (—)ֶמַלחalso related to BNEY HES but noted several decades before the compilation of PuV—do not allow any conclusion about the exact reflex of segol: it can be either just a long vowel, a phenomenon shared in open syllables with all modern Yiddish varieties distinguishing the vowel length, or it could—as in the above case of PuV—attest to identical realizations of segol and ṣere. Generally speaking, Yiddish varieties realize ṣere in closed syllables as a short /e/ (Table .). The same reflex is regular in this context for ṣere followed by yod. This rule has a few exceptions some of which are listed in Table .. In all of them, the reflex is the one expected in open syllables:
TABLE . Anomalous reflexes of ṣere (+ yod) in closed syllables Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ֵחן
grace, charm
StY, SwY, AlsY (Weiss :), and DuY kheyn, WphY kheyn/khayn
ֵריק
empty (Hebrew); idler, good-fornothing (EY); soldier (WphY)
StY reyk, WphY re(y)k
ֵאין
no (negative prefix)
StY and WphY eyn, AlsY (Weill :) and SwY ey
ֵּבית
name of the letter ּב
StY, SwY, EGY, and DuY beys, WphY beys/bays
ֵריׁש
name of the letter ר
StY, EGY, and DuY reysh
{v}
337 This series is so large and important that the idea of Birnbaum (:) about such reflexes representing the rule rather than exceptions may indeed make sense. In this book, they are considered exceptional for two reasons: () contrary to the opinion of Birnbaum, the number of forms with reflexes of segol different from those of ṣere is also significant (especially in EY), and, more importantly, () these reflexes conform to WHOLE HEBREW rules. 338 Yet, he writes ‘ ֶמ ֶלךking,’ ‘ ֶעֶצםbone,’ ‘ ֶפַסחPassover,’ and ‘ ֶעֶֿבדּservant’ with segol, that is, according to the TIBERIAN tradition. The spelling ‘ ֵח ֶדרroom’ appears also in Mel (Fuks .:). 339 See Tables . (section .) and . (section ..).
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The Hebrew component
As follows from rhymes in PuV (Timm :), for the author of this work the vowel in the word meaning ‘grace’ could not be short. The diphthongized reflexes in the names of two Hebrew letters (see the last lines of Table .) are particularly odd because no diphthong is found in pan-Yiddish khes ( )ֵחיתand tes ()ֵטית, whose Hebrew etymons have exactly the same structure {v}.340 In several given names, we observe shortening of the reflexes for segol or ṣere in open syllables {v}. The example for segol is pan-EY Perets ()ֶּפ ֶרץ. In nineteenth-century civil records from the area of PolY, we find many hundreds of Perec (Polish spelling) and only a dozen Pejrec (certainly influenced by WHOLE HEBREW norms). A short vowel for ṣere is the rule for the pronunciation of the biblical Elijah ( ;)ֵא ִלָיהוּcompare AlsY (Zivy :), StY, and PolY Elye.341 For biblical Levi ()ֵלִוי, Polish civil records from the nineteenth century make dozens of references to Lajwe/Lajwa that correspond to PolY Layvi, with /aj/ for ṣere. This form fits a general rule that states that ṣere in open syllables yields /aj/ in PolY. Yet, in the Radom and Lublin provinces, phonetic variants corresponding to PolY Leyvi such as Lejwi/Lejwe/Lejwa appear much more frequently than the /aj/-forms. Moreover, in Poland by far the most popular form of the same given name is Lewi.342 In a few Yiddish words, shewa acquired the accent and, moreover, gave diphthongal reflexes that are normally found for ṣere (see Table .) {v}. TABLE . Anomalous reflexes of shewa Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ְּכ ִלי
vessel
StY and AlsY keyle, PolY kayli (WG :), EGY keyle (or kayle?)
ְּפ ִרי
fruit
StYand AlsY343 peyre, PolY payri (Birnbaum :, WG :)344
ְׁש ָוא
the sign shewa
StY sheyve (alongside with shvo), PolY shayvu (BN ), shayvi (WG :)
ְוֲא ָדר
Veadar, the added month of the Jewish leap year
StY veyoder, PolY vayūder (BN ), AlsY (Catane :) féyouder / (Weiss :) véyayder
ְוָחָכם
falsely wise
AlsY féykhokhem (Catane :), DuY veykhōkhem
340 These forms are known for EY, EGY, SwY, and WphY. Bin-Nun suggests that the phonetic forms beys and reysh were influenced by the WHOLE HEBREW pronunciation of identical common nouns, meaning ‘house’ (in compounds) and ‘head,’ respectively (BN ). Note also that in the work by the Christian Hebraist Wagenseil () we find the following names of the four letters in question: beês, reêsch, chès, and thès (Frakes :), that is, with exactly the same opposition between diphthongs in the first two and short monophthongs in the last two letter names. Similarly, Selig (:) mentions beiss, reesch, chess, and tess in EGY. The earliest reference to this particular Ashkenazic phonetic distribution appears in H whose author provides standard Hebrew spelling for beys and reysh, but spells the other two letter names with segol instead of ṣere, namely ֶחסfor khes and ֶטסfor tes (compare Röll :). 341 DuY Eylye may be due to WHOLE HEBREW norms. 342 This form either results from a shortening internal to Yiddish, or it is related to the vowel given in the German and Polish Christian forms of this biblical name. 343 Weill (:, ) gives ṣere instead of shewa for words meaning ‘vessel’ and ‘fruit.’ Also note beire in PhilogLottus :. 344 H spells this word with segol instead of shewa.
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Stressed vowels
The first two examples in Table . could, in theory, be explained as analogical back formations from their respective plurals, keylim ( )ֵּכ ִליםand peyres ()ּפ ֵרֹות, respectively. Yet, this explanation is invalid for the other three words. Also note that the first three of these exceptions have the same structure: the consonant with shewa is followed by one consonant and one vowel. This particular environment could be responsible for the stress shift to shewa.
.. Exceptions: shureq and ḥ olem Medieval sources reveal traces of the confusion between ḥ olem (ֹ or )ֹוand shureq/qibbuṣ ( וּor ֻ )—that is, [u] instead of TIBERIAN [o], or [o] in place of TIBERIAN [u]—in a number of words of Hebrew origin found in the languages of BNEY HES and/or BNEY KHES. This factor provides an additional argument about the non-TIBERIAN (but rather PALESTINIAN) origins of Ashkenazic pronunciation.345 The first example comes from the analysis of the names of vowels in question.346 In medieval Hebrew for scholars from Spain and France, the word spelled מלאפוםor פוםa מלאreferred to the ḥ olem. Its derivation from an Aramaic expression meaning ‘fullness of the mouth’ also suggests that originally it could not designate a closed vowel. For Ashkenazic Jews, however, it is a traditional name of the shureq. Various Christian Hebraists mention this fact and call the sign וּeither meluppim/mellupim (Nigri and Pellicanus, both most likely related to the language of BNEY HES) or mlopum (Bodeker and the author of Modus scribendi, both likely in connection with BNEY KHES).347 H is the earliest Jewish source that directly corroborates this opinion.348 Another testimony comes from Elia Levita who explicitly writes that פוםa מלאis the Ashkenazic name for shureq (Ginsburg :). In medieval prayer books studied by Eldar (:–), the largest number of substitutions of ḥ olem with shureq or vice versa was found in the book related to the EASTERN rite (area of BNEY KHES). Among those related to the WESTERN rite (area of BNEY HES) some show a small number of cases of the confusion of this kind, and others none at all. In the transcription of the Haggadah compiled in in Switzerland (Walde :) we find tökofah ‘period’ for ְתּקוָּפה. The Bohemian scholar Abraham ben Azriel reproaches Rhenish Jews for pronouncing ‘ ְסעוּ ָדהrepast, feast’ instead of ְסעֹוָדה, while authors from Champagne use both spellings.349 Modern Yiddish forms are derived from the variant with shureq; compare StY and DuY sude, SwY and WphY sūde. This means that the phonetic form used in medieval Bohemia was of no influence {v}. Other examples come from onomastics: references to various forms of Hebrew personal names are the most eloquent testimonies in cases where they are different from Christian forms for these names and therefore necessarily reveal the pronunciation internal to Jewish communities. Forms with [u] related to Zipporah (Tiberian )ִצֹּפָרהsuch as Cippure, Zip(p)ur, Pura, Pure, Bure, Purlin, Burlin, and Bürlin (the last one with functional umlaut related to the addition of the hypocoristic suffix -lin) are frequently found in documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the BNEY HES territory {v}. During the same period not a single reference to this name appears in Christian documents from the BNEY KHES areas. The first known attestation there dates from the late fifteenth century and has ‘o’: Porca (, Bohemia). In the sixteenth century, we find several references to Puria/Purje in Prague; these may well be due to migrations from the West. This female name is 345 On the confusion of the same kind in the PALESTINIAN system of Hebrew pronunciation see Morag : and Revell :, , . 346 A suggestion to pay attention to these names is due to MRPC. 347 See Walde :, , , . For the historical and bibliographic details concerning this issue see Nestle , Bacher , and Simonsen . 348 The author uses the following sign names: מלאפוּםfor shureq and שו ִריק ֻ for qibbuṣ (Röll :). 349 All these references apply to the thirteenth century (Banitt .:).
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The Hebrew component
derived from Hebrew ‘fruitful’ whose Tiberian spelling, ּפֹו ִרָּיה, contains a ḥ olem. The folk etymology considered it to be derived from Zipporah. The names in question were not used by Christians. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the [o]-forms—such as Smoy(e)l, Smoi(e)l, and Smohel—were the only definite specifically Jewish variants of Samuel ( )ְש ׁמוֵּאלin the area of BNEY KHES (Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Poland). For BNEY HES (the Rhineland, Alsace, Franconia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands), the same forms were common too; several references to other [o]-forms such as Smoll/Schmoll were also found in the fifteenth century, but the [u]-forms, such as Smuhel and Schmul, occurred as well. Note that not a single form starting with Sm- or Schm- was used by Christians and, therefore, we are clearly dealing with forms internal to Jewish communities.This sharing of the [o]-forms of Samuel by both groups of Ashkenazic Jews {v} can be explained in several ways. These forms could have originated in the Rhineland before being brought by migrants to the Danube area. Alternatively, the forms in question could already have been used in Hebrew as it was pronounced outside of German-speaking territories by ancestors common to both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. In Austria and other BNEY KHES areas, the given names related to Moses (מ ׁ ֶשה ֹ ) are transcribed in Christian sources of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only with “u”: Musch(e), Muschlin, and Muschlein. The earliest reference corresponds to the hypocorism Mussel in Regensburg (). Yet, in the BNEY HES areas such as the Rhineland and Franconia, one mainly finds forms derived from the root with [o] such as Mosse, Moesselin, and Mosman. The [u]-forms are almost non-existent there: among the rare exceptions are Musse in Konstanz and Frankfurt (both in the fourteenth century). Note that at the same period Christians from German-speaking provinces used the forms Moses and Moyses (Beider :); in no case could they be the sources for the above Jewish names. This implies that [mu(:)še] was the original pronunciation for BNEY KHES, while BNEY HES inherited from their ancestors two variants, [mo(:)se] and [mu(:)se]; gradually the second of these forms disappeared {v}.350 The information provided above shows that the languages of both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES would retain traces of the confusion between ḥ olem and shureq. However, for both groups we do not observe a regular merger of two vowels but rather remnants of a phenomenon that seems to be archaic. Note, for example, that we find not a single reference to Jewish [u]-forms for Solomon (מה ֹ ֹ )ְׁשל, Joseph ()יֹו ֵסף, Jonah ()יֹו ָנה, and Deborah ( ) ְדּבֹוָרהand no [o]-form for Reuben () ְראוֵּבןa,351 Uri ()אוּ ִרי, Uriah ()אוּ ִרָּיה, Judith ()ְיהוּ ִדית, Menucha ()ְמנוָּחה, and Shulamith ()ׁשוַּלִּמיתa.352 In modern Yiddish, some traces of the same confusion are still discernable. The term melupm-vov is used in StY to designate the sign shureq וּ. This feature is inherited from BNEY HES; compare Elia Levita’s פוםa מלאand Christian Hebraists’ meluppim/mellupim mentioned at the beginning of this section {v}. Paye, a common female name in Eastern Europe, descends from the [u]-forms of Zipporah {v}.353 In Lithuania during the twentieth century the forms Shmoyl (related to medieval [o]-forms of Samuel) {v} and Mishl (a hypocorism whose full form had [u] in its root; compare Musch(e) found among medieval BNEY KHES) {v} were used. These forms are exceptions. Generally speaking, for biblical names various dialects of Yiddish use phonetic variants that conform to the TIBERIAN pointing. Moreover, the link between Paye and Zipporah, as well as that between Mishl and Moses has been lost.
Note also the root vowel in the hypocorism Musetto in medieval Florence (Cassuto :). A few medieval references to Robin are likely to correspond to Christian forms: note the internal consonant /b/, while Jewish forms have either /v/ or /f/ in this position. 352 A few exceptional references to Jodelin used by both BNEY HES (Frankfurt) and BNEY KHES (Silesia) in relationship to Judah ( )ְיהוּ ָדהcould represent ready-made forms borrowed from German Christians for whom they were derived, not from Judah but from Jodocus, of Celtic origin (Beider :). 353 The derivational chain is: Tsipūre à Pūre à Pyrl / Pīrl > Payerl à Paye (here, the sign ‘ à ’ is used for hypocoristic derivations). The only phonetic shift in this chain (designated by ‘>’) corresponds to the diphthongization /i:/ > /aj/ related to a similar phenomenon in German dialects (as for MHG î; see the discussion of this process in section ..). 350 351
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Stressed vowels
However, several other words and names whose TIBERIAN spelling has ḥ olem still use /u/ or vice versa. Several examples are given in Table .. TABLE . Confusion between shureq and ḥ olem Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew Aramaic
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ḥ olem in open syllables
as shureq {v}
ְּבׂשֹו ָרה
announcement, news
StY psure, CzY bsure, PolY bsīri (BN ), AlsY bsure (Weill :)354
ׁשיּכֹו ִרים
drunkards
StY shikurim, PolY shikī(e)rim (Birnbaum :)
ְמֹט ָרף
madman
StY meturef, AlsY (Weill :) meturof, DuY metoref, WphY metōref, SwY medorf 355
ְתּאֹוִמים
Gemini (Zodiac sign)
LitY *tumim356
טֹוִבָיה
male name Tobias
StY Tuvye, PolY *To(y)vye357
ְיֹרָחם
male name Jeroham
StY Yerukhem, PolY Yerikhim358
יֹוָמא
Yoma (the name of a Talmudic tractate)
LitY yume, PolY yīmi (BN )359
ַתּ ֲעֹרֶבת
forbidden feeding mixtures
PolY tarīvis (BN )
ַתּ ְרֹעֶמת
strictures, complaints
StY tarumes, PolY tarīmis (BN )
יֹוד
name of the letter י
StY, EGY, and WY (PhilogLottus :) yud, PolY yīd (Birnbaum :), WphY yūd, DuY yod
קֹוף
name of the letter ק
StY, WY (PhilogLottus :), and EGY kuf, PolY kīf (BN )
ḥ olem in closed syllables
as shureq {v}
(continued )
The [u]-form, bisura ‘news,’ is also known in Judezmo (Bunis ). The [o]-forms may be due to the lowering of [u] before [r]. Compare also Judezmo metoraf (Bunis ). In DuY, [o] can be related to the general lowering of short /u/ (see section ..). The same rule also explains the DuY letter name yod; see {v}. 356 The phonetics of StY toymim (in Niborski ) are likely to be due to WHOLE HEBREW rules, with oy for ḥ olem. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the main form used in LitY was clearly tumim: compare common surname Tumim adopted in this area and derived from Hebrew ‘twins; Gemini’ (Beider ; see also BN ). 357 The PolY form is deduced from the most common (Polonized) forms of this given name that appear in civil records from the area of PolY, namely, Towja and Towia. In the same area, one also finds less numerous references to *Toyve (spelled Tojwa, Tojwia, and Tojwie) and even more uncommon *Tuvye (spelled Tuwja, Tuwia, and Tuwie in Polish), but no evidence of **Tivye, a PolY form one would normally expect to find being based on the LitY form Tuvye. Here we find one of the rare cases of PolY and LitY forms not having the same ancestor. 358 Forms Jerychim and Jerychem found in Polish civil records do not allow one to identify the length of the stressed vowel. Beginning with at least the sixteenth century, various forms of this name behave as if they were derived from Hebrew ( ְירוָּחםBeider :). 359 The phonetics of modern StY yoyme (Niborski ) are due to WHOLE HEBREW. 354 355
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew Aramaic
Meaning
Yiddish forms
shureq
as ḥ olem360 {v}
ְירוּ ׁ ָשה
inheritance, heritage
DuY yerōshe, WphY yerōshe/ yerūshe, but StY yerushe
ְיקוִּתיֵאל
male name Jekuthiel
AlsY and SwY Koshel (Beider :)
The history of the names for the letters קand יpoints to the BNEY HES origins of the corresponding Yiddish words. As seen in Table . (series {v}), in both EY and WY the reflexes look as if they were derived from the Hebrew words ( קוּףkuf) and ( יוּדyud). However, the Sephardic names of these letters are clearly related to a different pronunciation tradition: kof ( )קֹוףand yod ()יֹוד. Early Christian authors who wrote about Hebrew refer to these letters in the following way: (i) Henricus de Hassia: cof and iod/iota; (ii) Bodeker: coph and yod; (iii) Nigri: qof and jot/jos; (iv) Pellicanus: quf and jots; (v) the author of Modus scribendi: qof and jot;361 (vi) von Harff: kuff and joth. Note that the form [kuf ] appears only in the writings of Pellicanus and von Harff, the only authors from this list who clearly base their knowledge on the pronunciation by BNEY HES.362 Yet, both authors whose link with BNEY KHES is undeniable (that of Modus scribendi and Henricus de Hassia) demonstrate another tradition. On the other hand, as it can be seen from the above data, [o] is the vowel invariably appearing in the name of the letter י. Note, however, the words yus(s) ‘ten’ found in the German dialects of Swabia and Hessen, and AlsY/SwY yūserle ‘coin of the value of ten,’ both mentioned in section ... These words are related to the archaic Jewish pronunciation of the letter name in question whose numeric value in Hebrew is ten. In the Middle Ages, all the aforementioned provinces were inside of the BNEY HES area. Most likely, in the area in question, two variants, one with [o] and one with [u], were used. The former was recorded by Pellicanus and von Harff.363 The latter gave rise to modern Yiddish pronunciation. In H, we find both vowels in question spelled according to their modern Ashkenazic pronunciation: קוּףand יוּדּ.
360 Numerous cases of ḥ olem used instead of shureq appear in HiP (Brünnel :XXIV). Among exceptional WY forms with [o] instead of shureq/qibbuṣ, Weinreich also mentioned khope ‘bridal canopy’ (usually spelled in Hebrew as ֻח ָּפהor ( )חוָּּפהWG :). However, this [o]-form is attested in DuY, that is, the dialect where short /u/ was lowered to [o] in all words (see section ..). In other western dialects no lowering took place and the word is accordingly pronounced khupe. 361 See Walde :, , , , , , . 362 In Tish, Elia Levita after presenting words starting with ק, rhymes the name of this letter קוףwith ‘ ִי ְזקֹוףhe will straighten up,’ thus implying that he was pronouncing the name of the letter as [kof ]. Note, however, that this work is written in WHOLE HEBREW and, as a grammarian, the author may have preferred using a form specific to his illustrious predecessors (including the Sephardic ones) rather than the form that corresponded to his vernacular language. (This footnote is due to MRPC.) 363 In certain cases, the presence of [o] in the name of this letter could be influenced by the name of the Greek letter iota. However, Nigri’s jos and Pellicanus’ jots—because of their final consonants—are likely to reflect some authentic Jewish pronunciation. Also note that all these testimonies appeared before the publication of Hebrew studies by Johann Reuchlin (–), fundamental for the creation of the Christian tradition of the transcription of Hebrew. This tradition was based on Sephardic pronunciation mainly because Reuchlin himself borrowed from David Kimhi’s works. It influenced the transcription used by numerous Christian scholars: compare the spelling iod/jod used by Münster (), Fagius (), Schadäus (), and Wagenseil () (see their original text in Frakes :, , , ).
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Stressed vowels
Table . presents additional anomalous forms having either shureq or ḥ olem.364 TABLE . Anomalous reflexes of shureq and ḥ olem Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
shureq in open syllables
as in closed syllables {v}
ְמזוָּזה
a small tube containing an inscribed strip of parchment, attached to the doorpost
PolY mizizi (BN ), WphY mezuze, DuY mezoze365
ְמכוּ ָלה
spoiled
StY and SwY mekhule, DuY mekhole366
מוָּטב
better
PolY mitef (BN )
מוָּסר
moralizing
PolY miser (BN ), StY muser
מוָּסף
extension of the morning prayer, recited on the Sabbath and on holidays
PolY misef (BN ), StY musef
לוּ ָלב
the palm branch which is carried and waved in the synagogue during the Sukkoth holiday
StY lulev, but WphY lūlev
ְמצוּ ָדה
castle
PolY mitsidi (BN )
נוַּסח
version
StY nusekh, PolY nisekh (Birnbaum :)
נוּן
name of the letter ; נ also ‘fifty’
PolY nīn (Birnbaum :), archaic WY *nūn,367 but modern WphY and SwY nun
shureq in closed syllables
as in open syllables {v}
(continued )
A few additional examples appear in BN and WG :. This word is one of the two examples of congruent anomalies suggested by Katz to illustrate common origins of Yiddish varieties (see section .). Certain cases of the presence of short vowels in open syllables in both WY and EY can be erroneously taken for evidence of their common origin. The word meaning ‘honor’ (StY koved, Hebrew )ָּכבֹודis an example; compare PolY kuvit (Birnbaum :) and WphY koved. Indeed, the SwY form is kōfed. Since the PolY form has /u/ and not **/o/, while StY has /o/, we can be sure that /u/ in PolY results from a secondary shortening that is relatively recent. 366 Weinreich mentions mekhule, lulev, and nusekh in the list of words with short stressed vowels in all subdialects of EY (WG :). 367 Grolman (:) testifies to the fact of the existence of the words nuhn and noon meaning ‘fifty’ in the language of German thieves. This form was borrowed from WY. 364 365
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ḥ olem in open syllables
as in closed syllables {v}
יֹוֵסף
male name Joseph
PolY Yosif (Birnbaum :), AlsY Yosef (Zivy :)
מה ֹ ְׁשֹל
male name Solomon
LitY and PolY Shlome368
ְּדבֹו ָרה
female name Deborah
LitY and PolY (both regionally), CzY Dvore369
גֹּוי
non-Jew
PolY (BN ) and DuY gōy, but WphY goy, SwY goy/guy, AlsY guy (Weiss :)
ḥ olem before yod in closed syllables
[o:] {v}
The series {v} may be—but for a few exceptions appearing in the first two lines—limited to EY. Note also a certain similarity between the last particularity {v} and the series {v} from Table .. In both cases, we have a long [o:], a sound that is exceptional in PolY. In both cases, it appears before yod [j]. The feature {v} is quite general. Note that examples of a similar shortening in given names are also found for segol and ṣere in open syllables; compare Yiddish forms for biblical Peretz, Elijah, and Levi {v}. Note also monophthongs instead of diphthongs in names of Germanic origin, Yiddish names Helman and Kofman discussed in section ...370
.. Other exceptional reflexes The list compiled for Table . presents other SHARED ABERRANCIES. It is most certainly far from exhaustive. For certain anomalous forms mentioned in Table ., we have references in the text by Bodeker: kassia ‘question’ {v} and medras ‘Midrash’ {v} (Walde :–). As discussed in section .., this Christian Hebraist mainly records the pronunciation of BNEY KHES. We lack, however, any reference to these words in the language of BNEY HES, and, as a result, we are unable to say whether they were pronounced by them differently or similarly. On the other hand, for both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES we find cases of lowering [i] > [e] before /dr/ and /sr/ (Eldar :–), the phenomenon that—as noted in BN —may be responsible for /e/ in the series {v}. 368
In civil records of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century from the areas of both PolY and LitY, the forms Szloma and Szlomo (Polish spelling) are by far the most common. Szlojma and Szlojmo (PolY Shloymi) are significantly less frequently used. References to Szlejma—corresponding to LitY Shleyme—are exceptional. 369 In the Białystok area and eastern Galicia, Dwora/Dwore (LitY Dvore, PolY Dvori) was three to four times more common in the nineteenth century than variants that correspond to local dialectal rules, namely, Dwejra (LitY Dveyre), and Dwojra/Dwojre (PolY Dvoyri), respectively. In other regions of the whole area that between the two World Wars belonged to Poland, local forms of Deborah perfectly fit local Yiddish rules, for example, Dwejra in the Łomża area and Dwojra in Warsaw, Kalisz, Piotrków, and Lublin provinces. The CzY *Dvore can be deduced from its hypocorism Dvor(e)l, spelled דװארלand דװארילin tombstone inscriptions of Prague (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). 370 The idea concerning the general phenomenon of shortening in Yiddish given names is due to MRPC. The exact origin of this process is uncertain. Maybe it is due to the vocative contexts typical of given names (MRPC).
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Stressed vowels
TABLE . Additional shared aberrancies Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
qameṣ
as ḥ olem {v}
ָהרוּג
killed person (EY), deformed (WphY)
StY hoyreg, PolY hoyrik, WphY hoyrek, DuY houreg
ַהְפָט ָרה
a lesson from the Prophets read in the synagogue
StY haftoyre, PolY haftoyri, WY (Weinberg :) haftauro, but DuY haftōre
ׁ ָשאוּל
male name Saul
StY Shoyel, PolY Shoyl371
shureq
[a] {v}
שָיא ׁ ְ קוּ
(religious) question, objection
StY, EGY, DuY, and WphY kashe, AlsY kashio (Weill :)372
ḥ ireq before /dr/373
[e] {v}
ׁ ִמְד ָר ש
Midrash, homiletical exposition of the scriptures
StY, AlsY (Weill :), and CzY medresh, PolY medrish (BN ), but DuY midresh
ִסְד ָרה
section of Torah assigned for a week’s reading
StY, CzY, and DuY sedre, PolY sed(a)ri (BN ), but AlsY (Zivy :) sidre
ִמָּקח
price, cost
WphY, DuY, and SwY mēkekh, StY and CzY mekekh374
ִ ּב ִרָיה
efficient, skillful person
StY, EGY, SwY and DuY berye
ֵגּיִה ּנֹום
hell
StY g(eh)enem, PolY gihenim (Birnbaum :) / gēnim (BN ), AlsY genem (Zivy :),375 but DuY gehinem
ḥ ireq in formerly closed syllables
[e] or [e:] {v}
(continued ) 371 Bin-Nun suggests that all these examples are hypercorrected forms due to early confusion between ḥ olem and qameṣ (BN ). This idea is consistent with the results obtained by Eldar (:–) and mentioned in section .. In the medieval Hebrew manuscript from the Bavarian-Austrian area, Eldar found four instances in which ḥ olem was used instead of qameṣ. He suggested that this pointed to an early stage in the rounding of qameṣ. 372 Compare Judezmo kushiya (Bunis ). The Yiddish word is directly related to Jewish Aramaic ש ָיא ׁ ְ ַק ‘unanswerable objection; contradiction’ (compare Jastrow ; personal communication with Andrey Rozenberg). 373 In contrast to this pan-Yiddish peculiarity, a regular lowering of the stressed vowel before /r/ and /x/ is limited to certain Yiddish varieties. The shifts [i] > [e] and [e] > [a] characterize UkrY and all of PolY except for its northeastern part (LCA –). We also find some examples in WphY: the word tirkhe ‘trouble’ ( ;ִט ְרָחהStY tirkhe) has a variant terkhe. The latter form also characterizes WY (“tercho” in PhilogLottus :) and EGY (Friedrich :, Selig :).The shift [u] > [o] is specific to PolY. In parts of WY, we find [u] > [ɔ] before [r] and [x] in AlsY (Zuckerman :). Taking into account the discontinuous geography of the lowering, one can conceive that this phonetic phenomenon in EY and WY could be independent. At any rate, the absence of similar phenomena in LitY makes rather implausible the possibility of the lowering being found in the hypothetical ancestor of the Hebrew components of both WY and EY. Note that the earliest examples of the shift /i/ > /e/ before /r/ or /x/ in the Hebrew component are of medieval origin. Their existence was observed in prayer books from the Rhineland: Eldar (:–) notes the use of segol instead of ḥ ireq. 374 The Judezmo form also has /e/ instead of /i/ (Bunis ). 375 Only PolY gihenim given by Birnbaum points to the penultimate stress and therefore, as suggested by Birnbaum, the anomalous /e/ for ḥ ireq. It is possible, however, that this form (together with StY gehenem) appeared
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Vowel
Reflex
Hebrew
Meaning
Yiddish forms
ḥ ireq in open syllables
as in closed syllables {v}376
ִניָסן
Jewish month Nissan
PolY nisn (Birnbaum :)
ִציִצית
tassels on the undergarment
PolY tsitses (Birnbaum :, BN )
ֲח ִגי ָגה
Talmudic tractate Hagigah
PolY khagige (BN )
ḥ ireq in closed syllables
as in open syllables {v}
ִגּּטין
Talmudic tractate Gittin
PolY gītn (BN )
ׁ ִשין
name of the letter ׁש
PolY (Birnbaum :) and DuY shīn
ḥ ireq
as pataḥ {v}
ִּפּיוּט
hymn, liturgic poem
StY and AlsY (Weill :) payet, PolY pāit (Birnbaum :)
pataḥ in formerly closed syllables
as segol {v}
ַרִּבי
rabbi, teacher
StY, CzY, EGY, SwY, DuY, and WphY rebe, AlsY rebe (Weill :) / reve (Zivy :)377
segol or ṣere in closed syllables before /r/
as pataḥ {v}
ֶח ְרָּפה
shame
StY, AlsY (Weill :), SwY, DuY, and EGY kharpe
ֵמֲחַמת
because of; due to
StY makhmes, PolY (BN ) makhmis
A number of forms show irregularities in secondary stressed syllables. One of the examples shared by EY and WY concerns the pronunciation of the word designating the intermediate weekdays between the first two and last days of the Passover and Sukkoth holidays {v}. Note that both StY khalemoyed and AlsY khalemōt (Zuckerman :) have secondary stressed /a/ in the first syllable for ḥ olem in the Hebrew etymon ַהּמֹוֵעדaחֹול.
rather recently under the influence of the spelling of the Hebrew etymon, while the older vernacular forms are those that do not include /h/. In this case, the stressed /e/ may come (as suggested in BN ) not from ḥ ireq but from ṣere on the first syllable. In Judezmo, the form is geinam/geinan (Bunis ). 376 Bin-Nun (BN ) also presents a list of a few plural forms in which the short /i/ could appear, according to his opinion, by analogy to their singulars. 377 The etymological analysis of this word in TG – is convincing. Timm points to the spelling “rby” found in Latin transcription from Hebrew made during the thirteenth century in northern France to which the form ְר ִביgiven in BZR and H (with shewa instead of pataḥ ) conforms. Consequently, in former times, at least for Ashkenazic Jews from western provinces, the vowel of the first syllable was the unstressed (reduced) /ə/. Later, when the stress position was displaced to the first syllable, it gave rise to /e/. Note also that (as pointed out in Simonsohn :), forms rebbi/ribbi are also known in medieval southern Italy and are related to an old Palestinian tradition. (The idea— appearing in WG :—about the influence of the OHG umlaut pattern in the event of the presence of /i/ in the following syllable—sounds significantly less plausible. We have no evidence of any influence of OHG on the vernacular idiom of Ashkenazic Jews; see section ...)
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Vowels in unstressed syllables
.
VOWELS IN UNSTRESSED SYLLABLES
Several important features are pan-Yiddish in the domain of unstressed vocalism. The standard rule of the reduction of the posttonic vowel to [ə] (and sometimes even to zero) is a natural consequence of the similar phenomenon in the German component; it was inherited from the German donor dialects. Of more interest are numerous cases of the elision of the Hebrew vowel mobile shewa (◌ְ ) that in nonAshkenazic pronunciation normally gives [e] or reduced [ə] {u}. Medieval northern France represents the only exception: elision of mobile shewa is known there as well.378 This phenomenon is most notable in the initial syllable. A sample of modern Yiddish examples appears in Table .. Note that among the forms shared by WY and EY, we find a significant number of those that start— after the elision of shewa—with consonantal clusters that are impossible in German: ks-, psh-, skh-, sr-, tv-, tsh-, and tsn-. Consequently, the whole phenomenon cannot result from the influence of German. A few WY words with the total elision of mobile shewa are not found in dictionaries of StY, for example, WphY (t)skhoken ‘to play cards’ (from Hebrew ‘ ׂ ְשחֹוקgame’). In EY, numerous other words underwent the same phonetic process. Among them are, for example, the male given names Gdalye ( ְגַּדְלָיהor ) ְגַּדְלָיהו, Psakhye ()ְּפַתְחָיה, and Skharye ()ְזַכ ְרָיה, female Dvoyre ( ) ְדּבֹו ָרהand Mnukhe ()ְמנוָּחה. The earliest Ashkenazic examples of the elision of the mobile shewa are found in the language of BNEY HES. Jekuthiel ha-Kohen, although he insisted on pronouncing mobile shewa in readings from the Bible, prefaced to his treatise two poems whose scansion implies instead the dropping of most mobile shewas (as well as ḥ aṭef-vowels) in one poem, and of all in the second one.379 In sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we find mention of forms resulting from the elision of mobile shewa among both groups of Ashkenazic Jews: • BNEY HES: Smario(n), Smaria, and Smarge for ‘ ְׁשַמ ְרָיהShemariah’; Slomo and Sloman for מה ֹ ְׁשֹל ‘Solomon’; Smo(h)el, Smoll, Schmoll, Schmul, and Smuhel for ‘ ְׁשמוֵּאלSamuel’; • BNEY KHES: Smer(i)l, Smerel, Smärl, Smerlin, and Smerlein for Shemariah; Sloma and Schlomlein for Solomon; Smoy(e)l, Smoi(e)l, and Smohel for Samuel; Twora, Twerl, and Tworl for ‘ ְדּבֹוָרהDeborah.’380
378 See details in Banitt .:. Latin transcriptions of Hebrew words published by Gumpertz (:–) show significant vacillation in the way of rendering shewa. We find not only cases of no sign for mobile shewa in the first syllable (brakot ‘blessings’ ְּב ָרכֹות, smai ‘hear!’ ְׁשַמע, trafim ‘idols’ ) ְּתּ ָר ִפיםbut also the opposite phenomenon: a vowel for silent shewa (aezera ‘help’ ֶעְז ָרא, myqara ‘verse’ )ִמְק ָרא. 379 See Yarkoni .:–, (MRPC). 380 Weinreich conjectured that Ashkenazic Jews have acquired this feature during the hypothetical BABYLONIAN RENAISSANCE (see section ..) when Oriental scholars brought TIBERIAN norms (in which the same sign is used for both types of shewa, and, consequently both likely corresponded to a zero sound). He provides two arguments to corroborate his idea (WG :). Both of them are unattractive. Firstly, he states that the elision in question is unknown in medieval communities of Italy, France, and western Germany. However, as discussed in this section, we have indirect evidence of the elision for both northern France and western Germany. Secondly, Weinreich states that forms with the elision of mobile shewa are found in LitY more frequently than in PolY, while in WY their proportion is the smallest. This geographic distribution is correlated, according to him, with the manner of the propagation of ideas of Oriental scholars, from Slavic countries (that is, the future LitY and PolY territories) to Germany (the area of WY). Yet, we have not a single piece of evidence that this phenomenon was valid for Slavic-speaking Jews during the Middle Ages. More likely, the geographic distribution observed by Weinreich could be related to some other factors. Firstly, Slavic languages used by the Christian majority in Eastern Europe possess many consonantal clusters that are not found in German. This feature could allow for some clusters arising after the elision of mobile shewa to survive in EY. In German-speaking provinces of Western and Central Europe, in some cases, the vowel could be reintroduced to make the pronunciation easier and conforming to the phonology of local German. Secondly, the geographic distribution in question may be related to the partial restoration of mobile shewa from West to East following the teaching of Ashkenazic grammarians who based their views on theories about the distinction between mobile shewa and silent shewa elaborated by Kimhi and other scholars from southern France and Spain.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Zero sound for mobile shewa in the initial syllable Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew
StY, CzY, and WphY brokhe, SwY brōkhe
benediction
ְּב ָרָכה
StY, CzY, and WphY droshe, SwY drōshe
religious sermon
ְּד ָר ׁ ָשה
StY, CzY, WphY, and SwY treyfe
non-kosher food
ְט ֵרָפה
StY ksiven, WphY ksivenen
to write ornately (from the root ‘writing’)
ְּכִתיָבה
StY skhoyre, WphY skhaure
goods, ware
ְסחֹוָרה
StY srokhe, WphY (t)srōkhe, SwY srōkhe
stench
ְס ָרָחה
StY and WphY prat
era, calendar; detail (EY only)
ְּפָרט
StY pshore, WphY and SwY pshōre
compromise
ְּפ ׁ ָשָרה
StY tsnies, WphY tsnīes
chastity, virtue
ְצִניעוּת
StY, CzY, and WphY knas
fine, penalty
ְק ָנס
StY and CzY krie, WphY krīe
the tearing of clothes as a sign of mourning
ְק ִריָעה
StY and WphY shvat
Jewish month Shebat
ְׁשָבט
StY, CzY, WphY, AlsY (Weiss :) and SwY shtus
nonsense
ְׁשטוּת
StY sheliekh (but plural shlikhim/shlukhim) and WphY shliekh/shliēkh
messenger
ׁ ָש ִליַח
StY and CzY shmue, WphY shmūe
news
ְׁשמוָּעה
StY and WphY shma, SwY shmā
Hear (in several expressions)
ְׁשַמע
StY, CzY, and WphY shney
two
ְׁש ֵני
StY and CzY (Kulke :) srore, WphY (t)srōre, SwY srōre
high-ranking person
ְׂש ָרָרה
StY and CzY shtike, WphY shtīke, SwY shtīge
silence
ְׁשִתיָקה
StY tvue, WphY tvūe or tfūe
grain
ְתּבוָּאה
StY tshuve, WphY tshūve, SwY tshūfe
answer
ְּתׁשוָּבה
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Non-phonological features
In both regions, Rhenish and Danubian, not a single form with [e] between the two first consonants is found in the available medieval sources. Christian authors also amply demonstrate this phenomenon.381 In modern Yiddish, the unstressed TIBERIAN ḥ aṭef-pataḥ often turns into the zero sound. Among the StY examples are kh(a)litse ‘the act of refusal of a man to marry his childless brother’s widow’ ()ֲח ִליָצה, khsidim ‘Hasidic Jews’ ()ֲחִסי ִדים, khshad ‘suspicion’ ()ֲח ׁ ָשד, khshash ‘apprehension’ ()ֲח ׁ ָשׁש, khtsos ‘midnight’ ()ֲחצֹות, makhne ‘host, multitude’ ()ַמֲחֶנה, and shakhres ‘Jewish morning service’ ()ַׁשֲח ִרית. In theory, these cases can be explained via the total reduction of unstressed vowels that is well known in other components of Yiddish also. For the history of Ashkenazic pronunciation, more important is the fact that early western sources (including ShB and BZR) regularly use shewa in place of ḥ aṭef-pataḥ {u}. This particular substitution is also known in texts from medieval northern France and western Germany.382 It represents an additional argument for the non-TIBERIAN origin of the Hebrew component of the language of BNEY HES. The sound /i/ in the penultimate unstressed syllable of the the word meaning ‘Hanukkah’ ()ֲחֻנָּכה represents an important pan-Yiddish peculiarity; compare StY khanike, SwY khanige (BA ). “Normal” LitY forms would be either **khaneke (with /ə/ for unstressed vowel) or **khanuke (with /u/ for qibbuṣ).383
.
NON-PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES
In addition to the numerous phonological features discussed in previous sections, there are also important peculiarities from other domains that are found in many modern Yiddish varieties, often with early references coming from the area of BNEY HES.384
.. Lexical and semantic peculiarities The first group relates to the lexicon. A simple comparison of other Jewish languages shows that even the Hebrew component is utterly different from language to language so that it is inconceivable that two unrelated languages—such as posited by Katz—would have the same words as, for example, hesier, paritz, and vermassert, mentioned in the Latin characters document of from Zürich (Guggenheim-Grünberg :–), deep in the area of BNEY HES;385 compare pan-Yiddish khazer ‘swine’ ( )ֲחִזירand StY porets ‘lord, landowner’ (( )ָּפ ִריץboth from the Hebrew component) and the StY verb farmasern ‘to betray,’386 with a Hebrew root and German prefix and ending, Compare the following references: (i) Henricus de Hassia: snaym ‘two’ ()ְׁש ַנִים, smona ‘eight’ (מ ָנה ֹ ( ;)ְׁשii) Bodeker: ksüvim ‘Ketuvim, the third section of the Jewish Bible’ (( ;)ְכתוּ ִביםiii) Nigri explicitly states that German Jews have no sound for shewa given under the first consonant, while Spanish Jews pronounce it as /e/ (Walde :, , ); (iv) von Harff: “tangol” ‘cock’ () ַתּ ְר ְנגֹול, “plonosa” ‘so-and-so (feminine)’ ()ְּפלֹוִניָתא. 382 See references from northern France and western German-speaking territories in TG –, . On the use of shewa instead of ḥ aṭef-pataḥ and vice versa in early Ashkenazic Hebrew sources see Eldar :, . Note also the dropping of ḥ aṭef-vowels in poems by Jekuthiel ha-Kohen mentioned above in this section. Henricus de Hassia states that ḥ aṭef-pataḥ is pronounced either as “thick” /e/ or as /o/ (Walde :), without giving any precision about the exact context (stressed or unstressed syllables). 383 Note that /i/-forms already appear in fourteenth-century Christian sources from the territory of BNEY KHES (see section ..). 384 Some of the elements provided below were already mentioned, with fewer details, in Manaster Ramer :–. 385 This argument is due to MRPC. Note also the presence of E-EFFECT in the first of the three words appearing in the Zürich document. 386 In other dialects we find: WphY fermasern, DuY fermaseren, AlsY (Weiss :) and SwY fermasere. 381
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The Hebrew component
respectively {l}. Note also that in both the text from Zürich and modern Yiddish dialects the word derived from Hebrew חזירdoes not mean the animal ‘pig’ but is used as a curse.387 The name of the letter צis also relevant to our context {l}. In modern Yiddish varieties it is tsadek, derived from Hebrew ַצ ִדּיק. This form also appears as an unusual variant in the Sephardic tradition where the main form is ָצ ִדיa.388 Among Christian authors who wrote about Hebrew, those from the BNEY KHES area (Henricus de Hassia and the author of Modus scribendi) use the spelling czadi that corresponds to the latter form. Yet, authors related to BNEY HES spell it with a final /k/, as in modern Yiddish: zadeck (Pellicanus) and zodick (von Harff). The scribe of H uses the spelling ַצ ִדק. For a number of Yiddish words, the semantics is different from that of their Hebrew etymons {l}. Often, the meaning in Yiddish is narrower; compare StY seyfer ‘religious book’ derived from Hebrew ‘ ֵסֶפרbook’ (WG :). In AlsY, the same word is often used in the sense ‘scroll of the Torah’ (Zivy :). Actually this meaning comes from the expression תֹּוָרהa ֵסֶפרin which the word seyfer was most commonly used. Most likely, it is quite new. In numerous other cases a semantic difference between a Yiddish word and its Hebrew etymon is relatively recent. StY, CzY, and WphY nekeyve, as well as SWY nekeyfe389 have the same meanings as Hebrew קָבה ֵ ְנ, namely ‘female’ and ‘woman.’ In SwY, however, nekeyfe also acquired an additional meaning, ‘mare,’ while in AlsY it came to mean ‘prostitute’ (Zivy :). Both these new meanings seem to be argotic. A large number of Hebrew or Aramaic words and expressions unknown in these languages at least before the Middle Ages are found in both EY and WY but are not given in the dictionary of Semitic elements in Judezmo by Bunis (). A sample is shown in Table . {l}.390 TABLE . Post-biblical Ashkenazic lexical items Hebrew
Yiddish forms
Meaning
ִי ְשָׂרֵאלaֹאַהב
StY oyev-yisroel, WphY auf-yisrōel, ōev-yisrōel
judeophile
ְּבזֹול
StY, EGY, and WphY bezol, CzY bezul
cheap
ְּבָּכאן
StY bekan, CzY, WphY, and SwY bekān
here
חֹובaַּבַעל
StY balkhoyv, WphY balkhauf, CzY balkhov
debtor
ַתְּכ ִליתaַּבַעל
StY, CzY, and WphY bal-takhles
practical man
ְּברֹו ֵגז
StY and CzY broyges, WphY brauges/braukhes/ broges/brokhes, SwY brouges
sore, angry
387 In the Zürich document, the expression boeser paritz (where the first word is cognate to NHG böser ‘malicious’) means ‘scoundrel.’ We do not find this meaning in modern Yiddish. However, a word with the same root, pritses ()ּפריצות, also has a negative connotation and means ‘profligacy.’ 388 Compare the Judezmo forms tsadi and tsadik (Bunis ). 389 As discussed in section .., /f/ for בfound in this form is of medieval origin. 390 This table includes only examples known in both EY and WY. For other forms, often absent from WY sources, see Mark . The approximate age of these words in Hebrew was checked following Even-Shoshan . Tables . and . generally ignore DuY: that dialect shares numerous lexical and semantic peculiarities cited in these tables with other Yiddish varieties.
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Non-phonological features TABLE .
Continued
ְּב ֵר ָרה
StY breyre and WphY bereyre, SwY brēre
choice
ַגּּיוּת
StY and SwY gayes, WphY gāyes
non-Jews
ָז ָנב
StY zonev, WphY zōnev, AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY zōnef
tail; penis
ִח ֵגּר
StY, WphY, and SwY khiger
lame
ִחּלוּף
StY, CzY, EGY, WphY, and SwY khilef
exchange
ַחָּלף
StY, CzY (Benno :), WphY, AlsY (Weiss :), and SwY khalef
knife for ritual slaughtering
ַחָּלׁשוּת
StY and CzY khaloshes, WphY khalōshes, SwY khaloushes, EGY kheloshes
swoon, faint
ֻחְלׁשֹות
StY, EGY, and WphY khulshes
faintness, weakness (plural)
ֲחִמיָמה
StY khmime, CzY khamime, EGY khemime, WphY and SwY khamīme
extreme heat
ָחצוּף
StY, CzY, and EGY khotsef, WphY khōtsef
insolent person
ֻחְצָּפה
StY, CzY, EGY, WphY, and SwY khutspe
insolence
ׂ ָש ָרףaֵיין
StY yain-soref, WphY ya(ye)n-sōref
alcohol
ִּכּׁשוּף
StY, CzY, EGY, WphY, and SwY kishef
spell, charm
ַּכ ָתּב
StY katevnik, EGY katev, WY katef 391
jester, joker
ַּכ ָתּבוּת
StY katoves, CzY ketoves (Kulke :), EGY katoves, DuY ketōves, WphY ketōves/katōves, WY katoufes (PhilogLottus :)
jest, joke
ְמֻח ָתּן
StY mekhutn, CzY, WphY, AlsY (Zivy :) mekhuten
relative by marriage
ְמֻכ ָלה
StY, WphY, and SwY mekhule
bankrupt
ְמֻנ ָוּ ל
StY, CzY, and WphY menuvl, SwY menufel
contemptible person
ִניָחא
StY nikhe, WphY nīkhe
agreeable (to)
ְסחֹו ָרה
StY and CzY skhoyre, WphY skhaure, EGY tsekhaure
goods, ware (continued )
391 This form appears in Frankfurt in the nineteenth century. The earliest reference to Ashkenazic *katef appears in Tish where it is defined as ‘master of comedy and maker of parables’ (see details in Katz a:).
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Hebrew
Yiddish forms
Meaning
ְסָרָחה
StY srokhe, WphY (t)srōkhe, SwY srōkhe
stench
ַע ּ ְמ ָך
StY amkho, WphY amkhe
Jews (as against Gentiles)
ַעְק ׁ ָשן
StY akshn, WphY akhshen
obstinate person
אל ֵ ִיְׂשָרaּפֹו ׁ ֵשַע
StY poshe-yisroel, WphY pōshe-yisrōel, AlsY (Zivy :) poshe-yisrol, CzY peshe-yisroel
irreligious Jew, bad Jew (literally: criminal of Israel)
ַּפ ְרצוּף
StY and WphY partsef
(ugly) face
ִּכּבוּד
StY kibed, WphY kibed/kived
honor
ָאבֹותaֶקֶבר
StY keyver-oves, WphY keyver-ōves, SwY keyfer-ōfes
parental graves
ִיְׂשָרֵאלaֶקֶבר
StY keyver-yisroel, WphY keyver-yisrōel
burial in a Jewish cemetery
ְק ָנס
StY, CzY, and WphY knas
fine, penalty
ְק ִרי ָרא
StY and AlsY (Zivy :) krire, WphY k(e)rīre
frost
ְי ָרקֹותaְׁשָאר
StY shar-yerokes, WphY shayerōkes
cheap junk
ַׁשְּדָכנוּת
StY shatkhones, WphY shadkhōnes, SwY shadkhounes
matchmaking
ִיְׂשָרֵאלaשֹו ֵנא ׂ
StY soyne-yisroel, WphY saune-yisrōel392
anti-Semite
ָמנֹותaׁ ָשַלח
StY shlakh-mones, CzY, AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY (Fleischer :) shlakhmōnes
presents sent on Purim
ְׂשָר ָרה
StY srore, CzY (Kulke :) srore, WphY (t)srōre, SwY srōre
high-ranking person
ַתְּלָין
StY, CzY, EGY, WphY, and SwY talyen
hangman
Several words from Table . appear in SD: ‘ ִּכׁשוּףspell’ and ‘ ָז ָנבtail.’ Tish also mentions ְמֻח ָתּן ‘relative by marriage’ (Grünbaum :) and ‘ ַּכ ָתּבוּתjest.’393 A number of Ashkenazic words show semantic peculiarities with respect to the meaning of their Hebrew etymons. A sample appears in Table . {l}. For several words we do not find any direct etymons in Hebrew (see Table .) {l}. A few lexical elements shown in Tables . and . are not specific to Ashkenazic Jews. This is the case for StY khoge and bilbl ‘libel’ (both in Table .), as well as StY khanufe ‘flattery’ (Table .). Indeed, we find their equivalents in Judezmo too: [xaga] ‘Gentile (principally, Christian) holiday,’ A plural form of this expression appears in DB (Dreeßen and Müller .:). See his entry כתב. The earliest reference appears in LekY (Timm and Beckmann :). On the general history of this Yiddish word see Katz a:–, Timm and Beckmann :–. 392 393
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Non-phonological features
TABLE . Semantic peculiarities Yiddish forms
Yiddish Meaning
Hebrew etymon
Hebrew meaning
StY bilbl, WphY, and SwY bilbel
libel394
ִּבְלּבוּל
mess
StY, SwY, and DuY berye
efficient, skilful person
ִ ּב ִרָיה
creature
StY and SwY khoge, WphY khoge and khōge
Christian religious holiday395
ָח ָגּאa+ ַחג
terror + holiday
StY yasher-koyekh, WphY yasher-kauakh
appreciation, thanks396
ֹּכֲחָךaִייֵׁשר ֹּכַחaְיַי ּ ׁ ֵשר
May your strength be firm!
StY klezmer397
musician
ֶזֶמרaְּכֵלי
musical instruments
StY lemekh, CzY (Ehrlich :) and WphY leymekh
good-for-nothing
ֶלֶמְך
biblical personage
StY, WphY, and SwY mies
ugly
ִמאוּס
aversion
StY, CzY, EGY, and WphY mokem, SwY moukem
place; (large) city
ָמקֹום
place
StY mekekh, WphY and SwY mēkekh398
price, cost
ִמָּקח
purchase
StY meshugas, SwY meshugās, DuY meshogās
madness
ְמ ׁ ֻש ַגּעת
crazy (woman)
StY, EGY, WhY, and SwY eydes
witness
ֵעדוּת
evidence, testimony
StY and CzY azes-ponem, WphY and SwY azes-pōnem399
insolent person
ַע ּזוּת־ָּפִנים
impertinence, impudence
StY and WphY eysev
non-Jew
שו ׂ ָ ֵע
biblical personage
StY oysher, WphY ausher and ōsher, SwY ousher400
rich (man)
ֹעִשיר
wealth
StY pesl, WphY peysel
handsome child or girl
ֶּפֶסל
statue (continued )
This meaning is already found in ShB (TG ). The earliest reference (circa ) comes from Maharil (WG :), a scholar from the BNEY HES area. Note also that for this Yiddish noun we have similar shortened variants: StY shkoyekh and WphY shkaukh. 397 In both ShB and DB (Dreeßen and Müller .:, plural זמריםa כליspecific to Ashkenazic Jews) this word means ‘musical instrument(s).’ The meaning ‘musician(s)’ appears in a text compiled circa in Mainz (TS ) and also in KrJO (Bałaban :). Mel has both meanings (TS –). 398 Judezmo retains this word only in the expression mekakh tauđ ‘bad deal, commercial error’ טעותa( מקחBunis ). 399 In HiP, this expression appears in its Hebrew (and not Yiddish) meaning. 400 This Yiddish word mixes the phonetics of Hebrew ‘wealth’ and the semantics of ‘ ָעִשירrich.’ 394 395 396
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Yiddish forms
Yiddish meaning
Hebrew etymon
Hebrew meaning
StY shlumiel, WphY shlemiel, SwY shlemíil, AlsY shlemil (Weiss :)
unlucky fellow
ְׁשלוִּמיֵאל
biblical personage (Numbers :)401
StY and WphY shmues
chat, talk
ְׁשמוּעֹות
rumors, news
StY, EGY, WphY, and SwY tifle402
church
ִתְּפ ָלה
vacuousness
TABLE . Ashkenazic innovations Yiddish forms
Meaning
Related Hebrew word
StY dalfn, WphY, DuY, AlsY (Weiss :), and SwY dalfen
poor man
‘ ַּדלpoor’403
StY khanufe, WphY khanūfe
flattery
blend of two synonyms: ֲח ִניָפהand ֲחנ ּוָּפה
StY hakl-bakl, SwY and DuY hakelbakel, WphY hakel-b(ey)akel
all together
‘ ָּכלall’
StY khalás, WphY khalā(ye)s, AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY khalās
illness
‘ ָח ָלהto be ill’ + Hebrew suffix404
StY and WphY shmue, SwY shmūe, AlsY (Weiss :) shmu
cunt
?405
StY khoyzek
mockery; simpleton
?406
StY, WphY, and SwY sheygets
Gentile boy
‘ ֶשֶקץdetested thing, abomination’407
StY, DuY, and WphY shikse, SwYshigse
Gentile girl
female form of the previous word408
StY tsitkes, SWY,409 EGY, and WphY tsidkes (also צידקותin Be)
piety, virtue
same meaning as ַצִּדיק ּות, but sounds as if it were derived from *ִצְדק ּות
401 Rée (:) suggests that this word is not derived from the name of the biblical personage but from the Yiddish expression shlim-mazl having the same meaning (see Table .). To take into account particular vowels found in various Yiddish dialects forms cognate with StY shlumiel it is appropriate to add to the etymon proposed by Rée the idea about its contamination by the name of the personage. 402 This word already appears in CC (see also TG ). 403 Dalfon appears in PhilogLottus :. See various etymological hypotheses in Weinberg :. Modern Hebrew ַדּ ְלָפןcomes from Yiddish. 404 Modern Hebrew חֹו ַלַאתis a form borrowed from Yiddish. 405 See Weiss : about a possible anagram of a German word. 406 See the discussion of this word in section ... 407 See the discussion of this word in Weinberg :, WG :. In the RESPONSA by Solomon Luria (, Rubashov :) and ZuR (Neuberg :), we still find the etymological /k/, שיקץand שקץ, respectively. Tirsch (:) mentions CzY “schekets” and its diminutive form “schekitsl.” 408 Modern Hebrew ׁ ִשְקָצהcomes from Yiddish. 409 PhilogLottus (:) gives “zidkos,” a form influenced by WHOLE HEBREW.
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Non-phonological features
[bilbul] ‘calumny,’ and [xanufa] (used along with [xanupa]), respectively (Bunis ). Similarly, post-biblical noun StY khumesh410 meaning ‘(five books of) Torah’ (ֻחָּמׁש, having the same root as חֶמׁש ֹ ‘one fifth’ and ‘ ָחֵמׁשfive’) corresponds to Judezmo [xomaš] and [xumaš], with the same meaning. The term arbekanfes (ַּכ ְנפֹותa )ַא ְרַּבעis the compound word used in both LitY and West Germany for fringed undergarment worn by Jews, while in the area intermediary between these two regions other terms, most likely resulting from innovation, are used (Lowenstein :). Yet, we also find [arba kanfođ] in Judezmo. Consequently, these forms are likely to appear already in the lexicon of the (post-biblical) ancestor common to Sephardic and Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew. Alternatively, some of them may represent peculiarities of a geographic area where Judezmo may have simply borrowed them from neighboring Ashkenazic Jews in relatively recent times, most likely in Italy, the Balkans or the Greek islands.411 For these specific words, the possibility of a borrowing in the opposite direction is significantly less likely, though theoretically it exists as well, at least for a few of them.412 A few lexical isoglosses concerning words with a strong religious connotation and related to the Hebrew component oppose, on the one hand, EY and CzY, and, on the other hand, SWY, with EGY and DuY being transitional between the two. This is the case for words used for ‘daily prayer book’413 and ‘dowry,’414 and the verb meaning ‘to count the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot’ {l}.415 Another lexical isogloss concerns the verb ‘to blow the Shofar in a synagogue’ {l}. The expression used in EY, CzY, and EGY (compare StY blozn (a) shoyfer) consists in a verb of German origin and a noun from the Hebrew component. Yet, both SWY and DuY use the forms tetshen, with a Romance root and German ending.416 The StY verb davenen ‘to pray’ is of uncertain, most likely Hebrew, origin {l}.417 It belongs to the lexicon of EY and EGY.418 Yet, it is unknown in SWY, which uses ōren (of Romance origin) instead. In CzY, both words are used.419 WY (PhilogLottus :), CzY, and EGY avze / WphY aveze ‘goose’ represents one of the lexical peculiarities of Yiddish {l}. Its earlier references are: eufasa in the text by von Harff, אוֿבָזה (masculine) in H, and ַאְװָזאin NH. It cannot be derived from the masculine Hebrew form ַא ָוּז, but is related to the feminine Hebrew form ַא ָוָּזהand/or Aramaic forms ַא ְווָזאand ֲא ָווָזא.
410 Weill (:) mentions the AlsY form khomesh. Among early references is “humas” appearing in a Latin sentence from Nürnberg (circa ) (Stern :). 411 For example, the word cognate to khoge was known to Elia Capsali, a rabbi from Crete during the first half of the sixteenth century (WG :). 412 Goldenberg (:) provides a small sample of words (she considers to be most characteristic of Ashkenazic Hebrew) that appear in Sefer ḥ asidim, a book compiled in Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. All of them have a meaning that cannot be found in the Bible. Almost all these new meanings, or very similar ones, are also found, however, in Judezmo (Bunis ): ‘ ַמ ֲעֶׂשהstory,’ ‘ עֹו ָלםpeople, mankind’ (Judezmo: ‘world’), ָתּ ִדיר ‘constant,’ ‘ ָמאוּסobnoxious’ (Judezmo: ‘repulsive’), ‘ ַמָּמׁשreality’ (StY ‘truly,’ Judezmo: ‘real’). Moreover, Jastrow (–) lists, for example, for the first three words in the preceding list a similar meaning already in Jewish Aramaic. Consequently, it is difficult to see the list in question as an Ashkenazic peculiarity. 413 WY and DuY have forms derived from Hebrew ( ְתּ ִפי ָלהSwY tfile); the word ( ִסדּוּרStY sider) is the basis for CzY and EY (BA ), while both forms are found in EGY. 414 The SWY word is derived from Hebrew ( ְנדוּ ְנ ָיהSwY nedinye); the word ( ָנ ָדןStY nadn, nedan) is the basis for DuY, EGY, CzY, and EY(BA , LCA ), while both forms are found in WphY. 415 The Hebrew עֶמר ֹ represents the root of the SWY verb (AlsY oumern); the word ְס ִפי ָרהappears in the expression used in CzY and EY (StY sfire zeyln) (BA ). 416 417 On this verb see section .. On its etymology see Timm and Beckmann :–. 418 One of the early references appears in in Kraków (TS ). EY forms are: LitY davnen, PolY davenen, UkrY dovenen (LCA ). 419 For a rare reference in SwY see Fleischer :, . According to informants for LCA , in Prague the verb dav(e)nen was applicable to cantors, while ōren was applicable to other community members (see also Timm and Beckmann :, BA ). The German Christian scholar Wagenseil in his book published in makes reference to the form “dafnen” (Timm and Beckmann :). The same form is also mentioned in Selig :, as one of the two alternative verbs (the second one being “oren”) meaning ‘to pray’ used in EGY. The presence of “f” implies the old age of this form in Central Europe (see the feature {c} in section ..).
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The Hebrew component
.. Morphological and grammatical peculiarities A number of peculiarities found in the Hebrew component of Yiddish correspond to the domain of morphology. Several of them appear in Table .. TABLE . Morphological peculiarities Feature
Yiddish forms
Meaning
suffix -te, of Aramaic origin ( ) ָתּאused to create feminine forms {m}420
StY menuvlte, WphY menuvelte, DuY menobelte, AlsY (Weiss :) menufelte
contemptible woman
StY ganefte, DuY ganevte
female thief
‘ ַגּ ָּנבthief ’
StY and WphY baleboste, SwY and DuY balbōste
female owner
ַהַּבִיתa‘ ַּבַעלmale owner’
StY beryete, WphY briēte, DuY beriēte
efficient housewife (EY), distinguished woman (WphY)
‘ ְּב ִרָּיהcreature’
StY and AlsY (Weill :) klafte, DuY kelafte
bitch
‘ ֶּכֶלבdog’
StY mekhuteneste, WphY mekhutēneste/mekhutente, AlsY (Zivy :) makhadeynesten, DuY mekhotente
son-in-law’s or daughter-in-law’s mother; female relative by marriage
‘ ְמֻח ָתּןrelative by marriage’
StY, WphY, AlsY (Zivy :), and SwY khonte
prostitute
‘ ָח ָנהto halt, to camp’
StY, WphY, AlsY (Zivy :), and SwY akhbrosh, DuY akhberosh
impudent fellow
perhaps, ַעְכָּבר ‘mouse’ + ֹראׁש ‘head’421
StY, DuY, and WphY shabesgoy, AlsY (Zivy :) shaves-goy
Gentile hired to perform domestic chores forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath
‘ ַׁשָּבתSabbath’ + ‘ גֹּויnon-Jew’
StY Ester-tones422
fast of Esther
‘ ֶאְס ֵתּרEsther’ + ‘ ַתּ ֲעִניתfast’
compound Hebrew words with the German order of parts {m}
Hebrew etymon
ְמֻנ ָוּל
‘contemptible man’
420 See additional examples for PolY in Birnbaum : and for DuY in Beem :. Words with this suffix appear in Br (Riedel :), ZuR (Neuberg :), and HEZ. Contrary to Yiddish, this suffix is unproductive in Judezmo (see a comparison between Judezmo and Yiddish in Bunis :–). In CzY, the suffix is -ten (Beranek :), derived from -te plus -in, the typical feminine suffix in German. 421 This etymology (which can, in theory, be a folk etymology) appears in Weinberg : and GuggenheimGrünberg :. Tendlau (:) suggests a derivation from a Talmudic expression. 422 In WY, the order of parts conforms to Hebrew (and not German) rules (see section ..).
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Non-phonological features TABLE .
Continued
non-grammatical plurals {m}423
StY yontoyvim, DuY yomtouvem, WphY yomtōvem424
holidays
( יֹום טֹובsingular)
StY taleysim, AlsY taleysem
prayer shawls
( ַטִּליתsingular)
StY kadeyshim, AlsY kateysem
prayers for the dead
( ַקִּדיׁשsingular)
StY khazeyrim, AlsY khazeyrem
swines
( ֲחִזירsingular)425
StY seyfer-toyres, SwYseyfertōres
scrolls of the Torah
תֹּו ָרהaֵסֶפר
StY ameratsim, SwY amratsem, WphY amoratsen
ignoramuses
singular ָהָא ֵרץaַעםa426
StY and AlsY (Zivy :) yayles, DuY yeyles
wails, lamentations
“singular” ַי ֲעֶלה (literally,‘May he/ it rise,’ the first word of a series of invocations repeated on the eve of Yom Kippur)427
(singular)
For certain of the elements already cited, any possibility of their independent creation by different Ashkenazic communities is excluded. This is clearly true for mekhuteneste whose structure is redundant (two feminine suffixes, -es and -te, of Hebrew and Aramaic origin, respectively), as well as for words whose etymology is uncertain or very peculiar such as akhbrosh, honte, and yayles. The assignment of the neuter gender to a large number of words from the Hebrew component represents an idiosyncrasy of Yiddish. This gender is unknown in Hebrew but is well established in German and the German component of Yiddish. A sample appearing in Table . {m} illustrates this phenomenon428 and also lists a few other changes of gender. See Weinreich :–, Birnbaum :. PhilogLottus (:) gives joum touv’m for the WHOLE HEBREW influenced WY form. Judezmo yamim tovim corresponds to the grammatically correct form ָיִמים טֹו ִבים. Note, however, that the last form also appears in certain Yiddish texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including KrL and HiP. 425 The Hebrew plurals of the last three words (ַט ִ ּלּיֹות, ַק ִדי ׁ ִשיםand ) ֲחִז ִריםwould yield StY **talyes, **kadishim, and **khazirim, respectively. AlsY forms are all taken from Catane :. 426 The grammatically correct Hebrew forms are ָהָא ֵרץa ַעֵּמיor (less standard) ָהֲא ָר ִציםaַעּמֵי. Note, however, that Judezmo forms [amaretsim] and [amaaresim] (Bunis ) are similar to the Ashkenazic ones. Maybe they were borrowed by Sephardic Jews from their Ashkenazic coreligionists. 427 This etymology appears, for example, in Weill :. 428 See the discussion of this topic in Birnbaum :–, Neuberg :– (with numerous examples found in ZuR), and Weinberg :–. A comprehensive list of the neuter gender nouns in AlsY appears in Weiss :–. Also note that the use of two possible genders—masculine and neuter—for some words of StY is related to the absence of the neuter gender in LitY on which StY is based. Perhaps, this factor is also responsible for the masculine gender of (among others) such StY words as zikorn ‘memory’ ()ִזָּכרֹון, veyshet ‘gullet, esophagus’ () ֵוֶּׁשט, kheyder ‘room’ ()ֶח ֶדר, and khoysem ‘seal’ ()חֹוָתם, while AlsY (Weiss :), WphY zikōren, AlsY (Zivy :) feyshed, AlsY (Weiss :) and WphY kheyder, and AlsY (Weiss :) khausem are neuter. 423 424
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Change of gender Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew etymon
(neuter) StY rakhmones, AlsY rakhmōnes;429 (neuter or masculine) WphY rakhmōnes
pity, mercy
(feminine) ַרֲחָמנוּת
(neuter) StY anives, AlsY anifes (Weiss :)
modesty
(feminine) ֲעִניווּת
(neuter) StY and AlsY (Weiss :) rishes
meanness; antisemitism
(feminine) ִרְׁשעוּת
(neuter or masculine) StY goles; (neuter) PolY (Birnbaum :) gūlis, AlsY (Zivy :) gōles and (Weiss :) gūles
diaspora
(feminine) ָגּלוּת
(neuter) StY and AlsY (Weiss :) khayes, WphY khāyes
life
(feminine) ַח ּיוּת
(neuter) StY and AlsY (Weiss :) kol; (feminine) WphY kaul
voice
(masculine) קֹול
(neuter) StY g(eh)enem, AlsY genem (Zivy :)
hell
(masculine) ֵגּיִה ּנֹום
(neuter) StY lev, WphY and AlsY (Weiss :) lef
heart
(feminine) ֵלב
(neuter) StY mazl, WphY and AlsY (Zivy :) mazel
luck
(masculine) ַמ ָּזל
(neuter or masculine) StY makhzer, (neuter) AlsY (Zivy :) makhzer
prayer book for the Jewish holidays
(masculine) ַמֲחזֹור
(neuter or masculine) StY ganeydn, (neuter) AlsY (Zivy :) ganeyden
the Garden of Eden, paradise
(masculine) ֵעֶדןaַגּן
(neuter) StY loshn, PolY (Birnbaum :) lūshn, AlsY (Zivy :) loshen430
language
(masculine) ָלׁשֹון
(neuter or masculine) StY mes, (neuter) PolY (Birnbaum :) and WphY mes
dead body
(masculine) ֵמת
(neuter or masculine) StY seyfer, (neuter) AlsY (Weiss :)
religious book
(masculine) ֵסֶפר
(neuter) StY ponem, PolY (Birnbaum :) pūnim, AlsY (Weiss :) būnem/bōnim, WphY pōnim
face
(masculine) ָּפִנים
(neuter or masculine) StY moshl; (neuter) AlsY (Zivy :) and WphY moshel
fable
(masculine) ָמ ׁ ָשל
429 430
Zivy (:) gives AlsY rakhmones; however, we find rakhmōnes (without indication of gender) in SwY. The masculine gender of WphY lōshn may be an innovation under the influence of Hebrew.
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Non-phonological features TABLE .
Continued
(neuter or masculine) StY keyver; (neuter) PolY (Birnbaum :) kayver, AlsY (Zivy :) keyfer, and WphY keyver
grave
(masculine) ֶקֶבר
(neuter or masculine) StY kol; (masculine) WphY kāl
people of the community
(masculine) ָקָהל
(neuter or masculine) StY korbn
sacrifice
(masculine) ָק ְרָּבן
(neuter or masculine) StY goyrl, (neuter) AlsY gōrel431
fate, lot
(masculine) גֹּו ָרל
(neuter) StY hegdesh, AlsY (Zivy :) hektish
almshouse (StY); alms (AlsY)
(masculine) ֶהְק ֵדׁש
(feminine) AlsY (Zivy :) and WphY koved; (masculine) StY koved
respect, honor
(masculine) ָּכבֹוד
(masculine) StY eventov, AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY ēfentof
precious stone
טֹובa ֶאֶבןinstead of טֹוָבהa( ֶאֶבןfeminine)
(masculine or neuter) StY nakhes, (masculine) WphYnākhes
pleasure
(feminine) ַנַחת
(masculine) StY and WphY shabes
Sabbath
(feminine) ַׁשָּבת
(masculine) StY and WphY eydes
witness
(feminine) ֵעדוּת
(masculine) StY, AlsY (Weiss :), and WphYemes
truth
(feminine) ֱאֶמת
A number of changes of gender can be explained by the gender of the MHG words having the same meaning (Neuberg :). At least one purely Ashkenazic rule is general: but for a few exceptions, feminine nouns ending in וּתin Hebrew acquire the neuter gender in Yiddish. This rule is illustrated in the first lines of Table .. Yet, changes from the the feminine to the masculine gender for a number of names ending in tav (illustrated in the last lines of the table) are not restricted to Ashkenazic Jews. In Judezmo, the words meaning ‘pleasure,’ ‘Sabbath,’ ‘witness,’ and ‘truth’ are also masculine. This factor reveals an old tradition common to both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. As a result, the importance of these examples for the question of unity of Yiddish dialects is relatively low. Certain of these peculiar morphological patterns of modern Yiddish are also found in the language spoken by BNEY HES. In Tish, Elia Levita mentions several Ashkenazic forms constructed in violation of rules of Hebrew grammar such as: () the plural of ָהָא ֵרץa( ַעםs.v.) equivalent to StY amratsem, compare {m}; () ( גויהsingular) and ( גויותplural), the feminine forms of ( גויs.v.) {m}.432 For several words from the series {m}, earliest examples of the neuter gender also correspond to
431 Zivy (:) gives the form gorel. However, often he does not distinguish between short and long vowels. The long /o:/ in SWY follows from SwY gōrle ‘to draw lots,’ whose AlsY equivalent is spelled gorle by Zivy. 432 Compare StY, WphY, and SwY goye (post-biblical Hebrew )גֹּו ָיהand StY goyes (post-biblical Hebrew )גֹּויֹות, respectively; see also Weinreich :.
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The Hebrew component
western German-speaking areas. Among them those having the following Hebrew etymons: ()
( ַמֲחזֹורWorms ; TG ); () ( ָקָהלwork by Moses Minz, a rabbi from western Germany, first half of the fifteenth century); () ֵסֶפר, ָק ְרָּבן, גֹּוָרל, ֵגּיִהּנֹום, and ש ׁ ֶהְקֵדin ShB,433 with the first two also
given in Mel (TG –, Neuberg :, ), the first one in DB (Dreeßen and Müller :) and MM, the fourth one in R (Röll .:, also in Pr); () קֹולin Mel (Neuberg :); () טֹובa ֶאֶבןin HiP, () ַמָּז ל, ַגּן ֵעֶדן, and ָּפִניםin PuV; and () ֵעֶדןa ַגּןin BZR (TG ). Goldenberg (:) claims that the derivational pattern qatlan is specific to Ashkenazic Jews. However, the dictionary by Bunis () includes a large number of Judezmo nouns constructed following the pattern in question: ‘ ַּבְטָלןidler’ (one of the words cited by Goldenberg), ַדּ ְר ׁ ָשן ‘preacher,’ ‘ ַׁש ְדָּכןmatchmaker,’ ‘ ַׁשְקָרןliar,’ etc. Consequently, it is more accurate to say that this pattern has been actively used by Ashkenazic Jews.434
.. Hybrid Hebrew-German words and expressions All Yiddish varieties include numerous compound words or expressions of which one part is of Hebrew-Aramaic origin and another belongs to the German component. Dozens of verbs have the first part from the Hebrew component and the second part cognate with NHG sein ‘to be,’ A sample appears in Table . {m}.435 These particular constructions already appear in the texts by BNEY HES of the fifteenth century such as the RESPONSA by rabbis Jacob Weil and Moses Minz, as well as MinP.436 We also find examples in
TABLE . Compound verbs with Hebrew stems + Germanic ‘to be’ Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew etymon
StY zoykhe (zayn), WphY zaukhe (zayn)
to be worthy (of)
זֹוֶכה
StY, CzY, WphY, and SwY mekhabed (zayn/zay), AlsY (Zivy :) mekhaved (zay)
to honor
ְמַכֵּבד
StY, CzY, and WphY mehane (zayn), AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY mehane (zay)
to gratify
ְמַה ֶּנה
StY moykhl (zayn), WphY maukhel (zayn), AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY mōkhel (zay)
to pardon, excuse
מֹוַחל
StY noykem (zayn zikh), WphY naukem (zayn zikh)
to take revenge
נֹוֵקם
StY maseg-gvul (zayn), WphY masek-gevul (zayn)
to go out of bounds
ְגּבוּלaַמ ּ ִסיג
433 We have no formal proof about the author of this work being one of BNEY HES. However, the place of the publication (Augsburg, ) corresponds to Swabia, within the BNEY HES territory during the fifteenth century. 434 Compare StY akshn and talyen in Table .; for additional examples see Mark :–, WG :–. 435 Additional examples of the same pattern can be found in series {v}, {v}, and {v}, all in section ... In tables appearing in this section, no attempt was made to present exhaustive information about DuY in which numerous similar hybrid forms are also found. 436 See details in TG . On this pattern see also WG :–.
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Non-phonological features
TABLE . Verbs with German suffixes based on Hebrew stems Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew root
StY and CzY akhlen, EGY akheln, DuY akhelen, WphY akhel(e)n/akhlen, SwY akhele, AlsY akhle (Zivy :)
to eat
אכל
StY dabern, WphY dabern, SwY dabere
to speak
דבר
StY gazl(en)en, CzY and WphY gazlen, EGY gazeln, SwY gazle
to plunder
גזל
StY nablen, WphY and SwY nable
to make obscene remarks (EY); to slaughter an animal in a non-kosher way (WY)
‘ נבלto be vile’
StY pask(en)en, CzY, WphY, and EGY paskenen, SwY pasgene
to decide (in religious matters)
פסק
StY sarf(en)en, CzY sarfenen, EGY tsarfenen, WphY sarfenen/tsarfenen, SwY sarfe
(sun) to broil
ׂשרף
StY yarsh(en)en, CzY yarshen, DuY yārshenen, EGY and WphY yarshenen, AlsY (Zivy :) yarshe
to inherit
ירׁש
StY darsh(n)en, CzY darshen, DuY (LCA ), EGY and WphY darshenen, AlsY (Zivy :) darsh(en)e
to preach
דרׁש
StY kasv(en)en, CzY and EGY kasvenen
to write
כתב
Be, a manuscript compiled by one of the BNEY HES during the same period,437 a letter from Frankfrut written in (Katz c:), and numerous cases in HiP. A large number of Yiddish verbs are composed of Hebrew verbal stem and Germanic ending -(e)n. A sample appears in Table . {m}. All the preceding items follow exactly the same pattern: short /a/ is introduced between the first and the second consonants and there is no sound between the second and the third consonants. However, this pattern is not specific to Ashkenazic Jews: it is also found in the hybrid Judeo-Italian and Judezmo verbs.438 As a result, in principle, it could have been inherited by Ashkenazic Jews from their Romance-speaking forefathers.439
See Röll .:, :, and the discussion of this source in section ... This document is also one of the earliest Ashkenazic manuscripts that actively incorporate words from the Hebrew component in Jewish vernacular language: fifty-one words from this category can be found only in glosses for the book of Job (Röll .:). 438 See examples in Timm and Beckmann :. 439 Neuberg (:–) suggests that this pattern originated in Jewish elementary schools where teachers would explain Hebrew verbs vocalizing them as if the three-syllabic stems were abbreviations: note that in various Jewish traditions acronyms are vocalized by introducing /a/; compare Rambam for ( רמב״םRabbi Moshe ben Maimon = Maimonides). 437
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The Hebrew component
Numerous other Yiddish verbs are based on nouns or adjectives from the Hebrew component of Yiddish to which the Germanic ending -(e)n was added. A sample appears in Table . {m}.
TABLE . Verbs with German suffixes based on Hebrew nouns or adjectives Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew base word
Meaning of this word in Yiddish
StY geshemen, EGY and WphY gēshemen, SwY geshēme
to rain
ֶגֶּׁשם
rain
StY ksiven, WphY ksivenen/tsivenen
to write ornately
ּכִתיָבה
ornate writing
StY maklen, WphY makeln
to beat with a stick
ַמֵקל
stick
StY melokh(en)en, CzY melokhenen, WphY melōkh(en)en, SwY melōkhene
to work out
ְמ ָלאָכה
craft
StY mishpetn, CzY and WphY mishpeten, SwY mishpete
to judge
ִמְׁשָּפט
judgment
StY sarsern, WphY saser(e)n/tsaser(e)n, SwY sasere
to mediate
ַס ְרסוּר
mediator
StY, CzY, and WphY shikern, SwY shigere
to drink
ׁ ִשּכֹור
drunk
StY shmuesn, CzY, DuY, and WphY shmusen
to talk, chat
ְׁשמוּעֹות
talk
CzY and EGY shasyenen, WphY shasyenen/ shasgenen/shaskenen, AlsY (Weill :) and SwY shasgene/shaskene440
to drink (excessively)
ַׁשְתָין
drunkard
StY shatkhnen, WphY shadkhenen, SwY shadkhene
to attempt to match
ַׁשְּדָכן
matchmaker
TABLE . Verbs based on Hebrew participles Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew participle
StY meymesn, WphY meymesen, AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY meymese
to beat, to kill
ֵמִמיתfrom ‘ מותto
StY noysnen, WphY nausnen, AlsY (Zivy :) na(u)sne and SwY nousene
to give money
die’
נֹוֵתן, from ‘ נתןto give’
440 StY shtien ‘to drink’ is based on another Hebrew form. However, the form *shasyenen could also have existed in EY in the past.
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Non-phonological features
TABLE . Verbs with German prefixes and suffixes and Hebrew roots Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew base word
Meaning of this word in Yiddish
StY farmiesn, WphY fermiesen
to make loathsome or unpleasant (EY); to spoil, grumble (WphY)
ִמאוּס
ugly
StY farkhideshn, WphY ferkhideshen
to amaze
ִחּדוּׁש
remarkable thing
StY farknasn, DuY and WphY ferknasen
to betroth
ְק ָנס
fine
StY oysshmuesn, WphY zikh ausshmusen
to have a long discussion (EY); to talk things out (WphY)
ְׁשמוּעֹות
talk
StY aynshmuesn, DuY and WphY zikh aynshmusen
to persuade (EY); to ingratiate (WphY)
StY farkhazern, WphY ferkhazern, SwY ferkhazere
to make dirty
ֲחִזיר
swine
StY baganv(en)en, WphY beganeven
to steal
ַגּ ָּנב
thief
StY bazevlen, DuY and WphY bezeybelen
to besmirch
ֶזֶבל
excrement
StY bagazl(en)en, WphY begazeln441
to rob
גזל
to rob
StY ayntaynen, WphY a(y)ntanen
to plead, reason with
ֲטַע ָנה
claim
A number of forms are based on Hebrew participles (see Table .) {m}. We also find numerous examples of verbs having a Hebrew stem to which a prefix and a suffix, both of Germanic origin, were added (see Table .) {m}. All early references to forms similar to those listed in Tables .–. correspond to the BNEY HES area. As discussed in section .., it is in that area that the ancestors of verbs spelled shekhtn and mekn in StY originated. The manuscript Be mentions a verbal form גסדרטא, with German affixes and a Hebrew root ;סדרcompare modern Yiddish sadern ‘to arrange.’ These three verbs correspond to the series {m}. Section .. presented a reference from Zürich to the verb vermassern, from the series {m}. To the same series belongs the verb behesemen ‘to seal, sign’ (section ..) found in a German source of dealing with the Jewish community of Worms. This verb is the earliest
441
The participle of this verb, *begazelt, appears in HiP, Kr, and Pr.
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The Hebrew component
reference to several typically Yiddish characteristics: (i) hybrid verb with a Hebrew root ()חתם, Germanic affixes be- and -en; (ii) the [s]-reflex for the Hebrew consonant tav without dagesh ()ת. This verb includes both the main peculiarities of the BNEY HES phonology: the [h]-pronunciation for heth and E-EFFECT.442 A number of verbs listed in Tables .–. have the infix -en- in their structure; compare StY yarshenen, bagazlenen, WphY ksivenen {m}. This feature is of particular interest for the history of Yiddish because it represents an innovation that gradually spread to all its dialects a long time after their inception. Note that even at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries the phenomenon was not yet generalized. In one document from northern Italy () one finds nineteen forms without the infix -en- and only three with it. Br contains only a few verbs with -en-, but more than references without this infix (Timm and Beckmann :–). In ZuR, forms with -en- are also rare exceptions (Neuberg :–). In modern times, as can be seen from Tables .–., the forms with infix were significantly more common in EY, WphY, and DuY than in SWY.443 The particularity of StY shnodern, DuY shnoderen, AlsY (Catane :) and SwY shnōdere ‘to promise a donation in a synagogue’ {m} consists in its Hebrew stem. It comes from the expression by which a donation is introduced: ֶׁש ָנַדרa ‘ ַּבֲעבוּרinasmuch as he has vowed.’ StY vayivrekh and its western equivalents all represent a stem mainly used in the sense ‘away’ or ‘flight’ in compound verbs {m}; compare StY makhn vayivrekh and DuY veyivrekh makhen ‘to run away, take to one’s heels,’ SwY er ratst fayefrekh ‘he runs away’ and fiefrekh houlekhe ‘to take flight,’ (literally, ‘walk flight’), AlsY (Zivy :) gay vayifrakh ‘go away!,’ WphY veyivrakh ‘go away!’ This word derives from the biblical phrase ‘ ִַו ּיְב ַרחso he fled’ (Genesis :). A similar construction from the language of BNEY HES is mentioned by von Harff: ferrohaz ‘to bathe,’ drawn from the expression ‘ ְוָרַחץand he shall bathe’ that appears a number of times in Leviticus (verses , , , and ) (MRPC). Certain other morphological idiosyncrasies are illustrated in Table ..444
442 See some additional early references from texts by BNEY HES in TG . They include the RESPONSA by Jacob Weil and Moses Minz, R and MinP. 443 See also LCA –, with -en- absent in AlsY and present in EY, DuY, and the Yiddish of northern Germany. Several authors (including Weinberg :) suggest that the infix is of Hebrew origin. They relate the inception of this pattern to Yiddish verbs that are derived not directly from Hebrew verbal forms, with three consonants, but from the Hebrew substantives based on them, with four consonants, the last of them being /n/ (compare the last line in Table .). Other verbs would acquire -en- by analogy. However, as is pointed by Neuberg (:–), a correlation between extant substantives with four consonants and verbs with the infix is almost non-existent. Moreover, we find sporadic cases of verbs with -en- outside of the Hebrew component; compare StY leyenen ‘to read’ (with -en-, at least sometimes, in BZP, ZuR, PB, ShL, but without this infix in all works before and PuV) and plankhenen ‘to lament’ (both of Romance origin, see section .) and a few examples of verbs with a similar structure in the German component of Yiddish and some German (non-Jewish) dialects. Neuberg suggests the German origin of this infix. He proposes several independent sources and convincingly points to the important role of the apocope of the final unstressed vowel that in a number produced verbal forms ending in a cluster of two consonants often difficult to pronounce. For example, for the verb kasven ‘to write,’ the form of the first singular without the infix would be *kasv, phonologically impossible for a language of German origin. Note that the earliest known reference of a verb with -encomes from a document written in Regensburg (): *ikh kasven ‘I write,’ but exactly the same form *kasven (and not kasvenen yet) is given in the same document for the infinitive ‘to write’ (Neuberg : based on Straus :). 444 See additional EY examples in Birnbaum :– and Bunis :, , and .
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Non-phonological features
TABLE . Miscellaneous hybrid forms with Hebrew roots and German affixes Pattern
Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew word
Meaning of this word
plural suffix -er {m}
StY penemer, PolY peynimer (BN ), DuY pēnemer, WphY pōnemer/pönemer
faces
ָּפִנים
face
StY tekheser, PolY tēkhiser (Birnbaum :)
posteriors
ַתַחת
posterior, buttocks
StY and PolY (Birnbaum :) keler
voices
קֹול
voice
suffix -(en)er {m}
StY, WphY and SwY meshugener, DuY meshogener, AlsY (Weiss :) mishuger
a crazy one
ְמ ׁ ֻש ָגּע
crazy
suffix -shaft {m}
StY mekhutone(s)shaft,445 WphY makh(a)tonesshaft
relation by marriage (EY); friendship (WphY)
ְמֻח ָתּן
relative by marriage
suffix -keyt/ kayt {m}
StY mieskeyt, WphY mis(ig) kayt, SwY miiskāt, AlsY (Weiss :) mūeskāt
ugliness
ִמאוּס
ugly
StY azeskeyt, AlsY (Weiss :) and DuY azeskat
impudence
ַע ּזוּת
impudence
agentive suffix -ler {m}
StY, AlsY (Zivy :), and WphY kisler
pickpocket
ִּכיס
pocket
negative prefix um-/ un- {m}
StY umtam, WphY umtām
disgust
ַטַעם
taste
StY umkheyn, AlsY (Zivy :) unkheyn, WphY unkheyn and umkheyn
dislike, disfavor (EY), fiend (AlsY), person with a bad taste or manners (WphY)
ֵחן
grace
adjective suffix -ish {m}
StY and WphY balbatish
of means, well-to-do
ַּבַעלa ַהַּבִית
owner, landlord
StY and WphY goyish
non-Jewish
גֹּוי
non-Jew
StY khazerish, WphY and SwY khazērish
dirty
ֲחִזיר
swine (continued )
445 Weinreich mentions mekhutonimshaft and considers that mekhutone(s)shaft could be a form introduced by Judah A. Joffe (WG :, :). Yet, the former word appears not only in Harkavy but even in Lifshits :.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Pattern
Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew word
Meaning of this word
adjective suffix -dik {m}
StY mazldik, WphY mazeldik
lucky
ַמ ָּזל
luck
StY kheynevdik, AlsY (Catane :) kheynetik
charming, lovely
ֵחן
grace
StY and WphY meyushevdik
staid (EY), comfortable (WphY)
ִמֻי ׁ ָשב
sane
StY shabesdik, SwY shabesdig
Sabbath, festive
ַׁשָּבת
Sabbath
StY tsniesdik, WphY tsnīesdik
virtuous
ְצִניעוּת
virtue
StY and CzY khometsdik, SwY khōmetsdig
containing or contaminated by leavened dough or bread, and thus forbidden during the Passover holiday
ָחֵמץ
leavened dough or bread
StY bakheynt, DuY, WphY and SwY bekheynt
gracious, charming
ֵחן
grace
StY batamt, WphY and SwY betāmt
delicious, attractive
ַטַעם
taste
StY farkhusht, WphY ferkhusht, and SwY ferkhushd
pensive, thoughtful (EY); confused (WY)
חוּׁש
feeling, one of the five senses
StY tsekhusht,WphY tserkhusht
distraught (EY); confused (WphY)
StY farkholemt, WphY ferkhōlemt
dreamy
ֲחלֹום
dream
StY and WphY geshmat
converted to Christianity
ְׁשָמד
conversion to Christianity
StY rebetsn, AlsY revetsen (Zivy :), CzY revitsin (Tirsch :), SwY rebetsen446
wife of rabbi
ַרִּבי
rabbi
participle with German prefix + suffix -t {m}
feminine suffix –in {m}
446 See additional WY variants in BA . On the etymology of this word see Timm and Beckmann :–. The same source indicates the earliest references, all from the sixteenth century: a large series from northern Italy and one reference from KrJO. It may be noted that rabbinical works compiled in medieval Germany use the word רבניתto designate a rabbi’s wife (Güdemann :). As discussed in sections .. and .. (feature {v}), in western
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Non-phonological features
In the series {m}, the plural suffix -er, of German origin, is added to the Hebrew root. Note that exactly as in words from the German component, this addition is concomitant with the change of the root vowel, the change that corresponds to the German phenomenon of umlaut.447 In WY, we also find forms in which -er is redundant because it is added to the form that already includes another plural marker, that of Hebrew origin; compare WphY anshemer ‘men’ ()ֲא ָנ ׁ ִשים, SwY and AlsY (Weiss :) nēlemer ‘shoes’ (Hebrew plural ַנֲע ִליםor ) ְנָע ִלים, and numerous other forms known in AlsY: ketsinemer ‘rich men’ ()ְקִציִנים, rakhmoneser ‘pitiful persons’ (( ) ַרֲחָמִניתCatane :), raklayemer ‘feet’ (( ) ַר ְגַלִיםWeiss :), shnōeymer (Picard ) or shinayemer ‘teeth’ (( ) ׁ ִשַּנִיםWeiss :), eynayemer ‘eyes’ (( )ֵעי ַנִיםWeiss :) {m}. In a few cases the root is of German origin, while the plural suffix is Hebrew -(on)im {m}. Among the examples are: StY poyerim ‘peasants,’ doktoyrim ‘physicians,’ tayvolim ‘devils,’ StY naronim and DuY narōnem ‘fools,’448 whose singular forms are poyer, dokter, tayvl, and nar, respectively. At least for the first two words, it is possible that the Hebrew -im replaced the original German suffix -en pronounced quite close in unstressed syllables;449 compare the NHG equivalents of these words: Bauern, Doktoren, Teufel, and Narren (plural), Bauer, Doktor, Teufel, and Narr (singular). The opposite process—the addition of the suffix -(e)n to a Hebrew stem—can be observed in StY dafn / CzY dafin ‘pages’ (singular daf, ) ַדּףand StY skhusn ‘merits’ (singular skhus, )ְזכוּתa.450 In modern Yiddish, the main diminutive suffix (-l in EY and CzY, -le in SWY, etc.) can be added to various nouns independently of their origins {m}.451 Among early examples of hybrid words ending in this suffix and having a root of Hebrew origin are the following forms appearing in Br: *khazerl and *ganevl, diminutives of ‘ חזירpig’ and ‘ גנבthief,’ respectively.452 Table . presents hybrid Hebrew-German words and expressions that appear in various dialects of Yiddish {m}. The compound verb StY bentshn goyml, WphY gaumel benshen, AlsY (Zivy :) gaumel benshe, and SwY goumel benshe ‘to say the blessing after escaping a great danger’ is based on Hebrew ‘ גֹוֵמלblessing after escaping a great danger’ and starts with a hybrid RomanceGermanic verb ‘to bless’ {m}.
Germany the final tav was pronounced close to the affricate /ts/, while rebe remains for ‘rabbi.’ As a result, the word in question could be pronounced *rebenits. The permutation of the two last consonants yielding the form rebetsin was due to contamination by the German feminine suffix -in that was commonly used by Ashkenazic Jews during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see, for example, a list of plurals of these forms in TS ). 447 This change is optional; compare AlsY yontefer (LCA ) from the single yontef ‘holiday’ ()יֹום טֹוב. On the other hand, umlaut is present in SwY tefer ‘better’ (Guggenheim-Grünberg :), from tof ‘good’ ()טֹוב. 448 This form is also known in CzY (Benno :). 449 Compare LCA, p.. Krogh (:) suggests a similar idea for the origin of StY poyerim. To corroborate this conjecture, he also points to the fact that PolY (in contrast to StY, LitY, and partly UkrY) has -n and not -im in this word. 450 In StY, two plural forms are accepted for these words: skhusn and skhusim, dafn and dafim. The second variants in these pairs have the suffix -im of Hebrew origin. Yet, all these forms are different from the Hebrew plurals ְזֻכּיֹותand ַדִּּפיםthat would yield **skhuyes and **dapim, respectively. Note, however, that the form ( זכיותcorresponding to the standard Hebrew plural) appears in both Kr and Pr (Röll .:). 451 Compare StY khosedl ‘Hasid (affectionate), also a kind of Hasidic dance’ and revl ‘insignificant rabbi’ (Harkavy ), from khosed ‘ חסידHasid’ and rov ‘ רבrabbi,’ respectively. See also SwY examples with the suffix -le in Guggenheim-Grünberg :, . In GH, we find יתומכיר, the diminutive of the word ‘orphans,’ constructed by adding the suffix -kher (Landau :); compare footnote (section .). 452 See the German transcription of this text in Riedel :.
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Hebrew-German compound words and expressions Yiddish forms
Meaning
Hebrew word
Meaning
Germanic part
Meaning
StY medine-geyer, WphYmedīnegeyer
peddler
ְמ ִדי ָנה
country
geyer
peddler, tramp
StY shabeyse-nakht, SwY shbeysishts-nākhd, AlsY (Weill :) shbēsaus-nakht453
Saturday evening
ַׁשָּבת
Sabbath
nakht
night
StY kharote hobn, WphY khorote haben, EGY kherote hoben
to regret
ֲחָרָטה
regret
hobn, haben
to have
StY shmire shteyn, WphY shmīre shteyen
to keep watch
ְׁשִמי ָרה
guard
shtey(e)n
to stand
StY shlimazl, WphY and AlsY (Weiss :) shlamazel, SwY shlemazel
unlucky person
ַמ ָּזל
luck
shlim
bad
StY makhn pleyte, AlsY (Weiss :) pleyte makhe
to flee, escape
ְּפֵליָטה ְּפֵלָטה
flight, rescue
makhn/ makhe
to make
StY kalye makhn, WphY kalye(s) makhen, AlsY (Weiss :) and SwY kalyes makhe454
to spoil
makhn/ makhe
to make
.
uncertain 455
SEMITIC AND GREEK GIVEN NAMES
.. BNEY HES / BNEY KHES and their legacy A portion of Hebrew and Aramaic names used in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries by BNEY KHES in Austria, Regensburg, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, eastern Germany, and western Poland are never found among BNEY HES of western Germany. Among these are: male Abba ()אבא, Abner ()אבנר, Canaan ()כנען, Dan ()דן, Ḥ anukkah ()חנכה, Ḥ asdai/Ḥ isdai ()חסדאי, Melech ()מלְך, Nissan ()ִניָסן, Nissim ()נסים, Ozer ()עוזר, Peraḥ iah ()פרחיה, Petaḥ iah ()פתחיה, Sasson ()ששון, Sinai ()סיני, and female Hadassah ()הדסה, Ḥ aya ()חיה, Maḥ lah ()מחלה, Menorah ()מנורה, Menuḥ ah ()מנוחה, 453 Even if the SWY forms are different from those used in EY, all Yiddish varieties share the same quite unusual feature: the stress in the first part, of Hebrew origin, is on the second syllable and not on the first one as in the Yiddish noun shábes ‘Sabbath.’ Moreover, the part of German origin (related to NHG zu nacht ‘at night’) underwent significant changes in various dialects. The [e]-quality of the stressed vowel may be due only to the posttonic reduction to [ə] of the original vowel, later—after the stress shift from the first to the second syllable—this vowel was lengthened and even became diphthongized in EY and SwY. The global derivation chain that yielded the StY form might be as follows: shábas-tsu nakht > shábes-tsenakht > shabéstse-nakht > shabése-nakht > shabēse-nakht > shabéyse-nakht. (This example is due to MRPC; see also BN , .) 454 This expression appears in ShB, with the first part spelled כליות. PuV mentions כלייהpronounced *kalye ‘annihilation’ because it rhymes with Italye ‘Italy.’ 455 The root can represent a mixture of two words both meaning ‘annihilation, extermination’ in Hebrew: ְּכ ָלָיה (suggested in Simon :) and ָּכ ָלה. The form כליהappears in ZuR (Neuberg :).
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Semitic and Greek given names
Neḥ amah ()נחמה, Noemi ()נעמי, and Ruḥ amah ()רוחמה. Note that one of them, Petaḥ iah, was known in Regensburg already during the second half of the twelfth century. There is an additional series of male biblical names which we find a number of times among BNEY KHES of Central Europe, while only a few exceptional references are known in the nearby Franconian communities (such as Nürnberg, Rothenburg, and Würzburg), mainly in tombstone inscriptions. There is not a single reference to them in the Rhineland. Among these are: Azriel ()עזריאל, Bezalel ()בצלאל, Gad ()גד, Manoaḥ ()מנוח, Noah ()נח, Paltiel ()פלטיאל, and Pedahzur ()פדהצור. Another peculiarity of Central Europe is the common use of certain Hebrew names that were unusual in western Germany. These include, first of all, Aaron ()אהרן, Shabbetai ()שבתי, Shalom ()שלום, and Ḥ ayyim ()חיים. All of them were among the most common appellations in medieval Austrian provinces. The first two appear in the list of the ten most frequently used names in Breslau, the capital city of Silesia, during the period between and (Beider :). Analysis of Jewish names used in the Middle Ages in such important Austrian communities as Wiener Neustadt and Vienna reveals another important feature: the proportion of Hebrew or Aramaic post-biblical names was significantly larger than in western Germany.456 Several other forms derived from Hebrew names were specific to Central Europe: Nachem/Nachim from Nahum ( )נחוםor Menaḥ em ( ;)מנחםRachem, possibly, from Yeraḥ miel ( ;)ירחמיאלAvidor/Abidor, a phonetic variant of Avigdor (גדורa ;)אביLachman, a variant of Naḥ man ( ;)נחמןBerach/Werach, from Berechiah ( ;)ברכיהseveral names derived from Ezekiel ( )יחזקאלsuch as Hetzekel, Chezkel, Cheskl, Chesschel, Hesskel, Chazkel, and Chaskel. Mari (מרי, Aramaic) first appears in Prague and Vienna only during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, this fact can be related to the non-comprehensive character of available sources. Actually, this name is likely to have occurred in Central Europe from the Middle Ages. During the eleventh to fifteenth centuries BNEY HES also used a number of Semitic names that did not appear in the available documents from the area of BNEY KHES of that period. Among these are: male Akiva (עקיבא, Aramaic), Ḥ akim (חכים, of Arabic origin), Ḥ alafta (חלפתא, Aramaic), Ḥ ananel ()חננאל, Ḥ iyya ( חיאor חייא, Aramaic), Joez ()יועץ, Natronai (נטרונאי, Aramaic), Neriah ()נריה, Otniel ()עותניאל, Shaltiel ()שלתיאל, Tamar ()תמר, and Urshraga ()אורשרגא, female Iscah ()יסכה, Segula ()סגולה, and Zeruiah ()צרויה. Another peculiarity of the corpus of names used by BNEY HES consists in the presence of a small set of names with Greek roots. From the earliest available representative lists of names from that area, those of victims of the First Crusade () compiled in Hebrew, we regularly find bearers of such appellations as Alexandri (Alexander), Kalonymos, and Parigoros. The last of these names disappears during the fifteenth century. Most likely it was never used by BNEY KHES. Two other names gradually start to appear in the East as well, presumably after migrations of western Jews.457 Tod(e)res (from Theodoros) first appears only at the beginning of the fifteenth century, again initially in the BNEY HES area only. From the end of the same century onward its references are known in Slavic countries too. A consideration of these names together with names of Hebrew and Aramaic origin is totally justified. Indeed, as discussed in section .., in the Ashkenazic tradition, all of them were considered to belong to the same category, that of SHEMOT HA-QODESH. It is precisely for that reason that we regularly find them in medieval Jewish sources that as a rule call Jewish men according to their SHEMOT HA-QODESH only. Alexander, Kalonymos, and Parigoros are clearly substratal: they were inherited by one portion of Ashkenazic Jews (BNEY HES) from their Greek-speaking ancestors.
See statistics in Beider :. The earliest reference in Central and Eastern Europe to Alexander dates from the end of the sixteenth century and corresponds to Kraków. 456 457
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The Hebrew component
In Jewish sources, they are spelled as if they were Hebrew.458 On the other hand, Tod(e)res may represent a name that appeared in Ashkenazic communities long after their initial development as a result of migrations (most likely from some Romance countries).459 The previous data clearly show that in the Middle Ages the corpus of Hebrew and Aramaic names used by BNEY KHES was significantly different from that of BNEY HES.460 This feature cannot be fortuitous; it cannot be due to the small size of the sample of appellations under analysis. Indeed, numerous documents from that period are available that deal with BNEY HES from the Rhineland and Franconia. Many of them—such as lists of martyrs of various pogroms (eleventh to fourteenth centuries), real estate transactions from Cologne (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), and tombstone inscriptions from various towns—are written in Hebrew. According to the Jewish tradition, in sources written in Hebrew men are generally called by their religious names (SHEMOT HA-QODESH), which can be distinct from the appellations used in the vernacular life. Consequently, these documents provide a particularly rich collection of Hebrew names. For BNEY KHES, the collection of names in Hebrew documents available to us is significantly smaller. It covers a small number of tombstone inscriptions from eastern Germany and Silesia and a few sources for Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria. As a result, we know the corpus of Hebrew names used by Rhenish and Franconian Jews much better than that of names used in Central Europe. This factor implies that all specific features found in the latter reveal its true idiosyncrasies. The presence of these peculiarities in the Hebrew component of the corpus of appellations used by BNEY KHES represents an important argument supporting the idea that local communities were independent in their origin from those of BNEY HES. In modern times, a number of names peculiar to medieval BNEY KHES ceased to be used by Ashkenazic Jews. Among them are Canaan, Ḥ anukkah, Ḥ asdai/Ḥ isdai, Manoaḥ , Nissim, Pedahzur, Perachia, Sason, as well as such forms as Avidor and Rachem. Yet, others survived in Slavic countries. In the area of EY, we find: StY Beyrekh (Berechiah), Don (Dan), God (Gad), Khaskl / Khatskl (Ezekiel), Lakhman (Lachman), Meylekh (Melech), Nisn (Nissan), Paltiel; female Noyme (Noemi) and Rukhame /Rokhme (Ruḥ amah). The above names were rare or even non-existent in the Czech lands. On the other hand, in the areas of both EY and CzY we find: StY Abe (Abba), Avner (Abner), Nokhem (Nahum or Menahem), Psakhye (Petaḥ iah), and Sheftl (Shabbetai). More (Mari) was found in Prague and western Polish provinces. However, it seems never to be used in the East. Several names known in Slavic countries are also found in the tombstone inscriptions of Hamburg. Among them are StY Azriel, Betsalel (Bezalel), Noyekh (Noah), Oyzer (Ozer), Hodes (Hadassah), Khaye (Ḥ aya),461 Makhle (Maḥ lah), Menukhe (Menuḥ ah), and Nekhame (Neḥ amah). Some of the above appellations—namely Avner, Don, God, Paltiel, and Nekhame (in the form Nakhme)—were also known in EGY.462 References to bearers of many names mentioned in this paragraph appear in
458 In certain respects, they are similar to a small set of Hebrew words of ultimate Greek origin that we find in the Hebrew component of Yiddish; compare apetropes ‘guardian,’ apikoyres ‘heretic,’ and sandek ‘man holding the boy while he is being circumcised.’ See also the discussion of Yiddish words with Greek roots (but never coming directly from the Greek language) in Timm and Beckmann :–. 459 Alternatively, one can conjecture that the name was substratal for Ashkenazic Jews, while the absence of references to it in the available sources from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries is due to their non-comprehensive character and the fact that the name was somewhat rarely used. 460 See also in Beider :– the results of a statistical analysis of given names of Hebrew and other origins used during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the territory of modern Austria. They clearly show the onomastic autonomy of Austria in comparison to western Germany. 461 For this name, one of the most popular among Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, one finds only two references in the Frankfurt cemetery, both from the second half of the eighteenth century. 462 A small list of EGY given names appears in Friedrich on p.XVI of the appendix for the first part.
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Semitic and Greek given names
Ashkenazic civil records from Amsterdam during –.463 Yet, in AlsY, all names in question were either non-existent or exceptional.464 Almost all names that during the Middle Ages were typical of BNEY HES and unknown for BNEY KHES did not survive. Among rare exceptions are Akiva (StY Akive, quite common in EY, rare in Prague, found in Amsterdam and Hamburg, no references in AlsY), Urshraga (StY Urshrage, unknown outside of EY), and Iscah (common in Prague, found in western Germany, Hamburg, Amsterdam, but unknown in Eastern Europe). StY Irakhmiel descends from Yeraḥ miel ()ירחמיאל, known already in the medieval Rhineland: note that the biblical form Yeraḥ mel ( )ירחמאלlacks /i/ after /m/. Numerous other modern Yiddish names of Hebrew origin are also commonly found in sources in the medieval Rhineland. A consideration of these names does not allow for establishing any reliable link between the communities of BNEY HES and contemporary Ashkenazic Jews. They are generally also known as used by BNEY KHES too. Moreover, Jews of various communities could take names of important biblical personages—such as Abraham, Aaron, David, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Solomon, Esther, Lea, Rachel, Rebeccah, Sara, etc.—independently of each other, directly from the biblical text.
.. Hebrew and oriental names of EAST CANAANITES In the Middle Ages Jewish communities existed in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus. In this book, these Jews and various immigrants to the same territories as well as their descendants who spoke in their everyday life an East Slavic language are conventionally called EAST CANAANITES. During the tenth to the thirteenth centuries various sources demonstrate the presence of Jews in Russian principalities.465 Non-Jewish documents do not mention the given names of Jews who lived there in this period, and very few Hebrew documents do either. One such list dates from the “Kievan letter,” a document from the tenth century that is usually seen as related to Kiev though this possibility is actually rather doubtful.466 The document includes their given names as well as several patronymics: sixteen different male names in total. More than one half of these appellations are biblical: Abraham, Isaac (twice), Judah (twice), Joseph, Moses, Reuben, Samson, Samuel (twice), as well as, most likely, a name for which only the two last letters אלare apparent. Two names, Sinai ( )סיניand Ḥ anukkah ()חנכהa,467 are Hebrew post-biblical. The appellation גוסטטאcould be borrowed from Slavic non-Jews: Гостята (Gostjata) is known from Russian medieval chronicles, while 463 No reference appears for the following only: Beyrekh, Khaskl/Khatskl, Lakhman, Meylekh, Sheftl, and Menoyre (see the alphabetical list given in van Straten and Snel :–). 464 For example, the census of , Alsatian Jews () makes reference only to two Chayé, one Hayé, one Hay, three Hayel (all related to StY Khaye), one Hodes and one Hodel (both related to StY Hodes), one Nissen (StY Nisn), three Noa (StY Noyekh), one Oser (likely related to StY Oyzer), five Nochem (StY Nokhem) (see the index appearing in Leeson :–). 465 In this book, the names of towns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are conventionally given in traditional English transliteration from Russian, the official language of the country. 466 See its text in Golb and Pritsak :. As stressed in Schwarzfuchs (and emphasized again in Erdal :), the interpretation by Golb of the original Hebrew text as saying that the letter is from Kiev is unattractive. The syntax of the sentence implies that, most likely, the letter was addressed to Kiev. Moreover, serious doubts exist about this letter being related in any way to Kiev (MRPC). Indeed, the name of the town represents an interpretation of a word read as *קייוב, in which the first letter in the original manuscript cannot be read, while the last letter allows several possible readings. Nevertheless, even if the restitution by Golb of these two letters is correct, the internal combination double yod-vav does not fit any known spelling for the name of this city and is much more likely to correspond to such sound combinations as /aju/ or /ejo/ than to /i(j)e/ as in the word Kiev. 467 Ḥ anukkah is also given in the list of names of Khazar kings (Golb and Pritsak :).
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The Hebrew component
Gostata appears in Czech sources of the first half of the thirteenth century.468 Other names cited in the letter, מנר, מנס, סורטה, ( כיברthe father of *Gostjata) and קופיןare of unclear origin. Pritsak suggests that these names are of Khazarian or Bulgaro-Altaic origin;469 however, for several reasons his conclusions are far from convincing. From the Hebrew spelling, we are unable to know how these names were pronounced: the vowels are lacking. The number of consonants is not large and, as a result, the correspondence between the known sounds and those given in certain words evoked by Pritsak as possible sources could be due to simple coincidence.470 קופין, as well as Copin and Copyn, its spelling variants, found in Christian documents, appear during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in northern France and England, where Jews were of French origin. Among them, it was used as a hypocorism of Jacob/Jakop. There is an occurrence of כיברabout the mid-fifteenth century in Styria, where it is found in a Christian document in the form Kever. These facts do not necessarily imply that קופיןmentioned in that letter was of French origin, or that the כיברin that letter and Styria represent the same name as the one in the “Kievan letter.” Here we may be dealing with phonetic coincidences. On the other hand, since (i) no equivalent of other names appears in European or Oriental sources, and (ii) the proportion of unusual names in this small sample is particularly high, it is reasonable to suppose that they belonged to individuals whose roots differed from those of other groups of Jews known to us from various sources.471 During this very period the influence of the Khazar Kingdom was of particular importance in the same region. The upper class of this Kingdom had already converted to Judaism one or two centuries earlier. As a result, a Khazar connection appears to be the most plausible. Nothing indicates, however, that the names in question necessarily belonged to Khazar converts: Jewish migrants from various countries were undoubtedly resident in the Kingdom.472 Note that the Hebrew letter under analysis explicitly indicates that מנרand גוסטטא, the son of כיבר, were of priestly (Kohen) origin, and, therefore, it is highly unlikely that these persons descended from converts.473 No names appear in the Russian chronicles written about the Jews in Kiev during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Jewish sources from the twelfth century mention a few individuals who originated from the area in question: (i) Moses of Kiev who knew Jacob ben Meir (Rabbenu Tam); (ii) in England, a rabbi Isaac ( )יצאof Chernigov; (iii) in Cologne, Benjamin of Vladimir ().474 The 468 The connection between גוסטטאand the East Slavic Gostjata was suggested by Torpusman (). The idea of Erdal (:) about the etymon *Kostata, a hypocorism of the Greek form of Constantine, sounds less attractive according to OCCAM’S RAZOR. In comparison to the Slavic origin, this Greek connection includes two additional independent hypotheses: () the initial consonant /g/ instead of /k/ should be explained; () the existence of the given name *Kostata during that period should be demonstrated. 469 See Golb and Pritsak :–. 470 The Slavic etymologies proposed in Torpusman for *( קופיןKupin) and *( סורטהSeverjata or *Surjata), as well as Orel’s (:) idea that the last name represents East Slavic nickname *sirota ‘orphan’ are all farfetched. Torpusman suggests names unattested among Slavs, while Orel conjectures a spelling error (transposition between vav and resh). Erdal (:–) convincingly shows that the etymology suggested by Pritsak for מנסand סורטהcannot be correct. For the last name, Erdal suggests its derivation from Gothic swartä ‘the dark one,’ without providing any reference that would indicate the existence of such a name or any other link of the document in question to Gothic. As a result, his own etymology remains speculative. 471 A similar conclusion is made by Golb but using another, inappropriate, argument. He speaks about a peculiarity of the list of names mentioned in this letter from the statistical point of view: contrary to other medieval Jewish communities known to us, here Hebrew names from the Torah outweight the other biblical names by a proportion of three to one (Golb and Pritsak :). Yet, any statistics based on a sample that is so small—just eleven elements— is clearly senseless. 472 See historical details in section C.. 473 This point was emphasized by Schwarzfuchs () who criticized a farfetched theory suggested by Golb (:–) to reconcile the link to the priestly caste and the idea about these people being converts to Judaism. 474 See Jacobs :, , Kupfer and Lewicki :, ), Aronius :, Evrejskaja Enciklopedija :.
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Semitic and Greek given names
latter locality seems to correspond to the main town of the principality of Volhynia, west of Kiev, while at the time Chernigov was the center of another important Russian principality, north of Kiev. Two rabbis from Vladimir, Isaac and Manoaḥ ben Jacob, are also quoted in a Hebrew source of the same period.475 A Jewish document from the fourteenth century also describes a circumcision ceremony in Vladimir attended by Abraham, David ben Ḥ asdai, Joseph, Sinai, and Samson.476 Two names in this list are worth particular attention: Ḥ asdai and Sinai. As discussed in section .., both Ḥ asdai and Sinai were unknown in western Germany. Only a few medieval references are found for them in Central Europe. For Sinai, the reference is unique: in , in the Regensburg area. Yet, in Eastern Europe, Sinai is mentioned several times and during the previous centuries. As already mentioned, its earliest reference (tenth century) appears in the “Kievan letter.” Hebrew sources also tell us that Asher ben Sinai from “Russia” studied in Toledo (Spain) during the first quarter of the fourteenth century.477 Consequently, it is logical to consider Sinai to be one of particular names used by EAST CANAANITES. In Red Ruthenia, Smogil (Samuel) from Lwów occurs in in Silesia. Seven years earlier, three other individuals “de Russia,” as is stipulated in the original Latin document, Abraham, Effraym (Ephraim), and Schabdei (Shabbetai), are also mentioned in Silesia. Apparently, these were Jews either from Red Ruthenia (the most plausible source), Volhynia, or from the region of Brest and Grodno. During the first half of the fifteenth century in Red Ruthenia we find references to Caleb ( )ָּכֵלבand Schachno. The bearer of the former was a migrant from Crimea. The latter form (spelled according to the German orthography) represents a Slavic hypocorism of a name starting with Sha-, most likely, Shalom () ׁ ָשלֹוםa.478 Until the s, not a single Jewish name is mentioned in Christian documents of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (RN, REA), while the oldest available Jewish sources from that region date only from the sixteenth century. The earliest references to names of Lithuanian Jews come from Christian records from neighboring countries. Between and , Jakob Slomkowicz (that is, the son of Slomko), a merchant from Lutsk (Volhynia), and his son Izaak are quoted by Polish documents (Schiper :). Several Jews from Lithuania appear in the lists of merchants who visited the town of Danzig (Polish Gdańsk) between and : Abraham Bossermenyn, Samuel Lawerwice, Abraham and Mordusz (all from Troki), and two persons named Sloma, one from Volhynia and another from Grodno.479 Mordusz represents a hypocorism of Mordecai created locally using the Polish suffix -uś or a form that originated from Czech lands (compare Mordusch mentioned in Moravia). Sloma and its hypocorism Slomko correspond to biblical Solomon (Hebrew מה ֹ שֹל ׁ ְ ). If we take into account the elision of the mobile shewa in this non-Christian form and the fact that Slomko also occurs in Silesia in the mid-fourteenth century, it would be logical to suggest the western origin of this appellation and/or its bearers.480 During the period –, in the thirty years that preceded the general expulsion of all Jews from Lithuania, Russian sources mention several dozen given names. They mostly belonged to rich individuals who had leases for the tax collection on salt and candles (откупщики, соленичие, восковничие). They lived in Brest, Grodno, Kiev,
475
They are mentioned in the RESPONSA compiled during the last third of the thirteenth century by Rabbi Ḥ ayyim, the son of Isaac ben Moses Or Zarua. The identification of this Vladimir as the town in Volhynia (and not the locality with the same name in eastern Russia) is provided by the reference to a “nearby” town of Chełm (Ta-Shma :). The last one, now in southeastern Poland, was at the time the RESPONSA inside of the Volhynian-Galician principality. 476 See the original Hebrew text in Kulik :. 477 See Ta-Shma :–. The source in question applies the label “Ashkenazic” to Asher ben Sinai. 478 See also section .. and the detailed analysis of this name in Beider :. 479 The first person from Troki is likely to be a Karaite as his sobriquet Bossermenyn implies. Compare Russian besermen/basurman ‘a Moslem’ generally applied to Turks and Tatars. Note that the language spoken by the Karaites was Turkic. In principle, all other Jews from Troki could also be Karaite. 480 See section ..
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The Hebrew component
Troki, and Lutsk. Certain names from that group could be Karaite since (i) the Russian sources of that period do not distinguish this sect of Judaism from other Jews, and (ii) Karaites certainly lived in Troki and Lutsk. The majority of names are covered by the East Slavic versions of the biblical names. Examples are Аврам ‘Abraham,’ Данило ‘Daniel,’ Есип ‘Joseph,’ Илья ‘Elijah,’ Моисей/Мошей ‘Moses,’ Рувим ‘Reuben,’ and Садко ‘Zadok.’ These forms could, in principle, be created from the Slavonizing of the original phonetic variants. More instructive are the forms of biblical names that are different from the Slavic versions: they reveal peculiarities in the pronunciation of Hebrew by local Jews. Агрон/Огрон [ahron] ‘Aaron’ ( )ַאֲהֹרןand Игуда [ihuda] ‘Judah’ ( )ְיהוּ ָדהboth include the Cyrillic letter “г” (pronounced [h] in Belarusian and Ukrainian) used for Hebrew he ()ה. In all available references to the various forms of these names in Central and Western Europe not a single one includes this internal [h]. On the other hand, Karaites in Lutsk also used both forms (REA :). It is reasonable to suppose that these forms have existed in Jewish communities of EAST CANAANITES since before the arrival of immigrants from the West, both Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews and Czech-speakingWEST CANAANITES. To the same layer should belong Говаш [hovash] ‘Jehoash’ ()ְיהֹוָאׁש, no variant of which appearing in Central and Western Europe, and Ицхак ‘Isaac’ () ִיְצָחק, with internal [x] that is never found in various forms of Isaac known in other regions of Europe. Мордухай, whose earliest reference dates from the sixteenth century, also appears to be a pre-Ashkenazic form used in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This specific form of the biblical Mordecai, with a root vowel /u/, is unknown in other countries among both Jews and non-Jews. In Lithuania, Karaites used it also. On the other hand, for Хацкель [xackel] ‘Ezekiel’ ( )ְיֶחְזְקֵאלand Нахим (derived either from Nahum ַנחוּםor Menahem )ְמ ַנֵחםwe also know of corresponding forms in Central Europe.481 Both these names together with Ицхак ‘Isaac,’ all with the [x]-reflex for Hebrew heth ()ח, reveal the fact that we are dealing with Jews whose pronunciation was similar to that of the WEST CANAANITES and Ashkenazic BNEY KHES. The form of Ezekiel with /a/ in the first syllable reveals a close link to Silesia where (as discussed in section ..) a document makes reference to Chazkel as early as . In Алкон/Олькона ‘Elkanah’ ()ֶאְלָק ָנה, the stressed [o] in the second syllable corresponds to the Ashkenazic pronunciation of qameṣ.482 Consequently, here we are most likely dealing with traces of migrations from the West. Шлема [šljoma] ‘Solomon’ (מה ֹ )ְׁשֹל, similarly to its spelling variant Sloma discussed above, is also likely to be of Western origin: note the elision of mobile shewa.483 Several appellations are postbiblical Hebrew. Among them, Шалoм ‘Shalom’ () ׁ ָשלֹום, Песах ‘Pesaḥ ’ ()ֶּפַסח, and Симха ‘Simḥ a’ ( ) ִש ְׁמָחהare known in various Jewish groups. These names show a clear distinction between [š] and [s]: another major phonological peculiarity valid for WEST CANAANITES and BNEY KHES but not for BNEY HES.484 *Меворах ‘Meborach’ ()ְמבֹוָרךa485 corresponds to a name common among Oriental Jews (Mann .:), which was mentioned in the whole of Western Europe only once, in in Baden. Нисан ‘Nissan’ ( )ִניָסןwas a common name in Lithuania where it was used by both Rabbanite Jews and Karaites.486 On the other hand, one finds no reference to it in West Germany and
See the discussion of the [a]-forms of Ezekiel and Nachem/Nachim in section ... The shift from [s] to the affricate [ts] before plosive consonant that we observe in the form Хацкель could be a Slavic phenomenon: compare Kasper and Kacper, both used by Polish Catholics. In modern times, the [ts]-form, Khatskl, was limited to LitY. 482 Among the Belarusian Christians, due to a spelling convention, the initial unstressed sound [a] was often designated by the letter “O” (Biryla :). This phenomenon is responsible for the existence of such spellings as Олкона and Огрон. Joffe (:), who was not aware of this graphic convention, erroneously stated that the initial “O” in Огрон reveals the Ashkenazic origin; compare the Yiddish vernacular form Orn. 483 The final [а] for ḥ olem reveals the penultimate stress position. 484 See section ... 485 The name is misspelled Меровах in the source. 486 Compare REA :, :, RN, , (for Rabbanites) and REA : (for Karaites). 481
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Semitic and Greek given names
only one medieval reference in Silesia (that could, in principle, correspond to a migrant from the East). Consequently, both Меворах and Нисан are likely to be due to EAST CANAANITES. Another particular name, Рабей [rabej], appears together with its derived forms Рабчик and Рябичка several times in the sources of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The origin of this name is uncertain. Either it represents a Slavonized form of Talmudic ַרָּבה, or it is derived from Belarusian рабэй ‘rabbi.’ In modern times, a number of names specific in the past to EAST CANAANITES did not survive among Jews from Eastern Europe. This is the case for: Meborach, Rabej, and unusual names appearing in the “Kievan letter,” that is, Ḥ anukkah and all non-Semitic (Khazar?) names. Yet, others survived in the area of LitY and/or UkrY: compare LitY Heyves / UkrY Hoyvish ‘Jehoash’ and LitY Kolev / UkrY Kulev ‘Caleb.’487 A link to EAST CANAANITES is also plausible for Nisn ‘Nissan.’ Indeed, this name appears in the nineteenth century in LitY and UkrY, while in the area of PolY it was common only in southeastern provinces (Galicia and the Lublin area of the Kingdom of Poland). Exactly the same distribution characterizes StY Shakhne, a form whose origin in medieval eastern Slavic-speaking Jewish communities is without question. Yet, a similar geographico-statistical analysis yields doubts about any link between modern StY Sine ‘Sinai’ and EAST CANAANITES. This name was rare in Lithuania and Ukraine. In the Kingdom of Poland, it was common only in the (south)western region covering Piotrków, Kalisz, and Radom guberniyas, that is, far from areas where one would expect to find traces of EAST CANAANITES.488 LitY Zorekh, PolY Zūrekh, and UkrY Zurekh are all related to ( ָז ַרחGenesis :), the pausal biblical form of Zerah. Such forms are mainly limited to EY.489 The oldest reference, Zarach (fifteenth century) comes from the territory of modern western Ukraine.490 In the nineteenth century, in Polish civil records, Zorach (LitY Zorekh) was particularly common in the northeastern provinces. Zurech/Zurach (PolY Zūrekh) and their hypocorism Zurek were significantly less common, with highest frequency in the Przasnysz district of Płock guberniya, that is, in the immediate vicinity of the area of Zorach.491 As a result, the use of this name is also likely to be due to the legacy of EAST CANAANITES. Certain forms specific to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania do not appear in available sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Surnames adopted in Eastern Belorussia during the first half of the nineteenth century testify, however, to the fact of their use at that period: Агронов(ич), Агроновский, and Агроник (all from Агрон [ahron]), Агроскин (from *Агроска [ahroska], a hypocorism of the same name related to Aaron), and Игудкин (from Игудка [ihudka], a hypocorism of Judah) assigned during the first half of the nineteenth century in that area. These forms, with internal /h/ absent from the Yiddish forms of these names (compare StY Orn and Yude) are directly related to Агрон and Игуда, mentioned earlier in names used in the fifteenth century. 487 Very few references to variants of this name appear in nineteenth-century Polish civil records. All of them are limited to the northeastern part of the Kingdom of Poland that belongs to the area of NEY (forms: Kolew and Kolef) or the Lublin guberniya, in the immediate vicinity of Ukraine (forms: Kulew and Kulef). 488 Formally speaking, this information does not preclude the possibility of the Eastern European origin of Sinai. Indeed, once the tradition to use this name came into being in the Middle Ages, the name gradually spread over Eastern and Central Europe. Note that nine bearers of this name have been buried between and in the old Prague cemetery. In no region of Poland was this name really common during the nineteenth century. The relatively higher frequency of its use in southwestern guberniyas of the Kingdom of Poland may be due to various subjective factors: prolificity of certain families, fame of some local bearers of it, etc. Of course, the above elements are arguments ad hoc. Taking into account the geographic distribution of this name in nineteenth-century Poland, it is simpler to conjecture that the name came to Poland from the South-West rather than from the East. 489 However, in ShB we also find the spelling ָז ַרחfor the name of the biblical personage. 490 Forms with a typically Ashkenazic /o/ in the root are regularly found in documents of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Red Ruthenia from the second half of the sixteenth century. 491 Zorekh in the area of EGY (Friedrich :XVI) could be due to migrants from northeastern Poland.
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The Hebrew component
.. Ashkenazic innovations A number of Yiddish names of Hebrew origin result from innovations internal to Ashkenazic communities. The most important group encompasses StY male “animal” names Arye ‘lion,’ Dov ‘bear,’ Tsvi ‘deer,’ and Zev ‘wolf.’ All of them started to be used from the sixteenth century as SHEMOT HA-QODESH for common Yiddish names Leyb, Ber, Hirsh, and Volf, respectively. Dov, Tsvi, and Zev were created during that period as calques of the corresponding Yiddish names. Yet, several references to Arye are known in the Middle Ages (including one from Cologne). However, it appears that the name was abandoned by Ashkenazic Jews. It reappeared again several centuries later, this time as a calque of Leyb. All the earliest references to these four names correspond to the compact area covering Kraków, Prague, and Vienna. During the following period these forms spread to various provinces of Eastern and Central Europe as well as to Hamburg and Amsterdam. Shimone, a female counterpart of male Shimen ‘Simon’ was known during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Prague and Hamburg. During the same period came into being female names that in StY are spelled Brokhe ‘blessing,’ Teyne ‘fig tree,’ and Khaysore ‘life of Sara’ (a section of Genesis). Their bearers are known in CzY and EY. Several new names are limited to EY. Among these: StY Kadish ‘heir’ and Rakhmen ‘the compassionate one’ (both since the sixteenth century), Bentsiyen ‘son of Zion,’ Kayem ‘stable,’ and Sheyvekh ‘praise’ (all since the seventeenth century), PolY Zukn ‘old man’ and Skayne ‘old woman’ (both since the nineteenth century as calques of Yiddish Alter and Alte, respectively).492 It was also only rather recently that certain biblical and Talmudic names started to be used. For example, the earliest references to Zebulon (StY Zvuln) and Lapidot (StY Lapides) come from the seventeenth century. During the next centuries the first of them was used in Eastern Europe, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. Ithamar (StY Isomer) and Shammai (StY Shame) are both unknown until the nineteenth century, with no reference outside of Eastern Europe.
.
AGE OF THE HEBREW COMPONENT
.. Hebraisms in early Ashkenazic texts Several methods can be applied for the analysis of the age of the Hebrew component. One of them consists in analyzing early Ashkenazic texts. There is no doubt that already in the first established communities in Germany, Jews were using in their vernacular speech a number of words of Hebrew origin. They were necessary at least for religious notions restricted to Judaism for which no direct equivalent was found in German. Among the earliest references of this kind are two lexemes appearing in the blessing in the Hebrew prayer book (Worms, ): ‘ ַמֲחזֹורJewish prayer book’ and ‘ ֵּביֿת ַהְּכֶנֶסתsynagogue.’ When analyzing this phenomenon from available Jewish written sources, one should bear in mind certain important aspects of methodology. Documents at our disposal were often compiled by the most erudite members of the Ashkenazic communities. Since a very large bulk of Hebrew texts is known to exist for the period in question, we can be sure that this social layer consisted of people able to write (and most likely to speak) Hebrew fluently. For them, it was not difficult to distinguish vernacular words of Semitic origin from those taken from their Christian neighbors. This knowledge would allow them to proceed, if necessary for stylistic reasons,
492 In civil records of the second half of the nineteeth century both names are common only in Piotrków guberniya. Most likely, it was in that area that during the first half of the century they were invented.
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Age of the Hebrew component
to a linguistic purge of their texts written in a language they considered to be German.493 Drastic constraints related to certain genres were clearly imposed by them on the selection of words appearing in these texts. According to the proportion of words from the Hebrew component, early Ashkenazic documents can be classified according to a continuum scale. On one of its poles are situated multilingual dictionaries and conversation guides such as SD and NH. The very fact that one of their columns corresponded to Hebrew was a determining factor for the absence of words of Hebrew origin in the column “Ashkenazic”/“German.”494 Various (mainly biblical) collections of glosses and glossaries can be placed close to the same pole. In such sources as, for example, SAB, R, R, Le, Fl, and Ox we find a few words of Hebrew origin because all of these sources include only direct glosses whose aim consisted in explaining Hebrew lexical elements using vernacular words. On the other hand, in Be, H, Kr, and Pr vernacular words of Hebrew origin are much more common because the documents in question regularly include not only direct glosses (in which there is no sense in translating a Hebrew word by a word of Hebrew origin) but also comments, sometimes fairly long, concerning certain biblical expressions. It is precisely in these comments that an important number of lexemes with Hebrew roots are found.495 We can be sure that the Hebraisms appearing in biblical glossaries were undoubtedly presented in the everyday language of authors of the sources in question. Table . provides examples for several semantic categories:496 TABLE . Hebraisms in early Ashkenazic texts Category
Hebrew
StY
Translation
Glossaries
Other early sources
Basic religious terms
גיהנום
g(eh)enem
hell
R, Be, Ox, H, Kr, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP, BZV, Br
עדןaגן
ganeydn
paradise
R
PuV, Mel, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, Br
שד
shed
demon
R, Be, Kr, Pr
Mel, FF, Br
שטן
sotn
Satan
Be, H, Kr, Pr
HiP, BZR, BZP, Br
מלאך
malekh
angel
R, Be, Ox, H, Kr, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, FF, Br (continued )
See details in section ... See footnote (section .). In NH, we find very few words of Hebrew origin. They include: the second elements in the greetings gut shabes‘good Sabbath!’ and gut yontef ‘good Jewish holiday!’ as well as the root of the verb חִטין ֽ ( ֶׁשעStY shekhtn) ‘to slaughter ritually.’ 495 Be, the oldest of these sources, includes fifty-one lexemes of this kind in its glosses for the Book of Job (Röll .:). On the reasons for the absence of Hebraisms in sources of this group see TG –. 496 Regular searches were done only in sources for which alphabetical lists of words are available: those from Röll , SAB, PuV, Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, FF, and Br. Not a single word with a Semitic root appears in SAB, Le, and Fl. Also note that a number of words listed in this table appear in Teh. Among them are, for example, forms cognate to StY gehenem, malekh, toyre, and tfile (Katz c:). 493 494
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The Hebrew component
TABLE .
Continued
Category
Hebrew
StY
Translation
Glossaries
Other early sources
תורה
toyre
Torah
R, Be, H, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZV, BZP, FF, Br
צדיק
tsadek
pious man
Be, H, Kr, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP, BZV, Br
יסורים
yesurim
suffering
Be, H, Kr, Pr
HiP, Br
רשע
roshe
evil-doer
Be, H, Kr, Pr
Mel, HiP, BZR, FF, Br
תפילה
tfile
prayer
Be, H, Kr, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZP, Br
נבואה
nevue
prophecy
R, Be, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP, Br
Directions
דרוםa צפון מזרחa מערב
dorem, tsofn, mizrekh, mayrev
South, North, East, West
R, R, Be, Ox, H, Kr, Pr
Mel, ShB, HiP
Abstract words
מזל
mazl
fortune, luck; star
Ox, H, Kr, Pr
PuV, Mel, HiP, FF, Br
צרהa צרות
tsore(s)
trouble(s), woe(s)
Be, H, Pr
BZR, FF, Br
זכות
skhus
merit
Be, Kr, Pr
PuV, Mel, HiP, BZV, FF, Br
גדולה
gdule
glory
Be, Kr, Pr
HiP, Br
At the other extreme of the scale are situated Jewish communal administrative and legal texts. Since a majority of documents of this kind were written in Hebrew, those compiled in the vernacular language include a huge number of Hebrew words, expressions, sentences, and even whole Hebrew sections. KrJO, with the Jewish regulations of Kraków (), is among the most representative examples of this kind.497 Close to the same extreme are situated various works on Jewish ethics, morality, rabbinical RESPONSA, and other kinds of religious studies, that is, also coming from domains in which writing in Hebrew has been the norm. It is no surprise that these works (as those from the administrative and legal domains too) include a large number of words of Hebrew origin including not only nouns but also various prepositions such as ‘ לto’ and ‘ מfrom’ (mainly before toponyms), Its first publisher, Bałaban (:), points out that when looking into the text in question a reader can sometimes think they are dealing with a Hebrew document. Hebraisms are also particularly common in documents compiled during s in Kraków by the local synagogue administration (see excerpts in Dubnov :–). A total fusion of Hebrew and Yiddish characterizes certain communal records from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries collected and analyzed in U. Weinreich b. 497
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Age of the Hebrew component
numeral adjectives, and numerals.498 Br is a particularly curious example belonging to this category. As its author explicitly states in the preface, the book was written for women who—contrary to men—were not knowledgeable in Hebrew. For this reason, its author, Moses Henochs, translates for his female audience into “German” numerous quotes he provides from the Bible, the Talmud, and writings of various Jewish scholars. Yet, he regularly uses Hebraisms throughout its book. Many of them are even found in passages corresponding to his direct translations from Hebrew or Aramaic.499 Lyrics, epics, tales, and other genres of literature are situated in between the two extremes in question. For them, the choice of the linguistic register to be used has always been determined by stylistic decisions of their authors. As a result, the fact that only one word with a Hebrew root, תפלה ‘church,’ appears in CC, a poem of about , words, should not be interpreted so as to draw a conclusion about the Hebrew component being practically absent from the vernacular language of its author(s).500 Not a single Hebraism appears in M (TG ). Only a few dozens words of Hebrew origin are present in BB, PuV, Mel, ShB, DB, BZR, BZV, and BZP.501 Globally speaking, one can observe that for numerous authors the stylistically imposed constraint of avoiding Hebraisms in a literary text considered by its author to be written in German was very strong at least until the end of the sixteenth century. No stylistic constraint ever existed for such private texts as letters and memoirs. In them, the proportion of words from the Hebrew component depended on the social status of the author, his/her profession, and could also be influenced by various subjective decisions. Hebraisms are regularly found in letters from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in various European countries.502 According to calculations made by Landau (:XXXIV), Hebraisms cover about two to eight percent of words in letters written by women appearing in PB; yet in GH, ethically oriented diaries by Glückel of Hameln, their proportion reaches twenty percent.
.. Direct references in non-Jewish sources Another method applicable to the evaluation of the age of the Hebrew component consists in analyzing non-Jewish sources. Here earliest evidence about the incorporation of Hebraisms in the vernacular speech of Ashkenazic Jews dates from the fourteenth century. For two men among those 498
Excerpts related to the RESPONSA literature from Eastern Europe (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), with a particularly high percentage of Hebraisms can be found in Dubnov :– and BN –. For western legal works by Jacob Weil and Moses Minz, both from the fifteenth century, Rubashov (:, ) speaks of thirty percent of Hebraisms. Globally speaking, the paper by Rubashov provides a detailed picture of the use of Hebraisms in the RESPONSA literature of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. His materials are amply discussed by Klayman-Cohen (:–). From their consideration, it becomes clear that in no case can we consider testimonies quoted in the sources in question, with numerous examples of the total mixture of German and Hebrew elements within the same sentence, to be representative of the oral speech of Jews of that time. The fact that these testimonies appear in a written source whose first language is Hebrew is determinant. One example is particularly eloquent: a quote from a comment made orally by a non-Jew includes only three German words, all other words in the sentence being Hebrew (Rubashov :, Klayman-Cohen :). 499 Klayman-Cohen (:–) amply discusses this and other works of the same genre. 500 In this context, results of the statistical calculations found in Mark : are particularly instructive: they provide percentages of Hebraisms in works of a set of Yiddish writers from the end of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. The average value is about five percent of all words. Yet, in works written by Mendele and Y. L. Peretz, Hebraisms cover about nine percent. On stylization in Ashkenazic literature see also Weinreich a: and Katz c:–. 501 Timm indicates the following percentages: . in ShB, . in BZR, . in BZV, and . in BZP. The idea that the use of Hebraisms was related to stylistic decisions may be illustrated by percentages found in two works by the same author, Elia Levita: . in a chivalric verse romance BB () versus in a satirical poem Hamavdil () (TG –). 502 See Rubashov (passim) and Katz c:–.
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The Hebrew component
appearing in the list of Jewish inhabitants of Nürnberg (), indications of their professions correspond to words of Hebrew origin that follow the German definite article der. This is the case of “David der mohel” and “Izak der deyhen,” compare ‘ מֹוֵהלcircumcizer’ (StY moyel) and ‘ ַדָּּיןjudge’ (StY dayen), respectively. Though appearing in a Christian document, the lists were prepared inside of the Jewish communities.503 Another document, also in Latin characters, provides a direct quote from the speech of a Jew from Zürich (), with two words, hesier and paritz, being of Hebrew origin and a third one representing a German-Hebrew hybrid verbal form vermassert.504 Two centuries later, in his book published in Strasbourg (), Christian scholar Schadäus states that Jews mix in their speech Hebrew and German words. The opinion of Buxtorf () is similar.505 All the above data correspond to Western Europe. No information of this kind is available for Eastern Europe.
.. Indirect methods Phonological analysis provides indirect information about the age of certain elements of the Hebrew component of Yiddish. Various factors cited in previous sections of this chapter point to a medieval or even pre-Ashkenazic origin of numerous Hebraisms. A number of forms with antepenultimate stress position belong to this group. As discussed in sections .. and .., the rules found by Leibel could have been applicable only many centuries ago. They may be preAshkenazic. The rule according to which all vowels are short in closed syllables is even older than the stress rules. Also pre-Ashkenazic appears to be the rule according to which vowels are long in open syllables. For all these rules, discussed in section .., numerous examples can be found in Yiddish. The TIBERIAN pointing system for the biblical text, which is used, among others, by Ashkenazic Jews and was discussed in section ., has the same graphemes for two kinds of qameṣ (gadol and qatan) and shewa (mobile and silent), and yet, one observes important differences in the pronunciation of the members of these pairs. These differences are more compatible with oral traditions than textual. As discussed in sections .. and .., there are numerous words for which qualitative and/or quantitative peculiarities in the pronunciation of their stressed vowels cannot be deduced from the TIBERIAN pointing. In many cases, they should be due to the oral tradition. For certain words, their consonants reveal their medieval origin. As discussed in section ., this is the case, among others, of some words with guttural (or zero) pronunciation of heth, the reflex /f/ for vav or veth in SWY, and the affricate realization of the soft tav, that is, again forms whose phonetics contradicts standardized rules of Hebrew pronunciation based on the spelling of the corresponding Hebrew words. On the other hand, no definitive judgment about their age inside of Yiddish can be made for Hebraisms whose phonetics perfectly fit with the TIBERIAN pointing but do not conform to the rules of the PALESTINIAN pronunciation. Indeed, their pronunciation could have been changed during Ashkenazic history following a renorming based on the TIBERIAN pointing system. Certainly, technical scholarly terms had more of a chance to undergo such renorming than items from the colloquial language. The fact that numerous peculiarities are shared by different Yiddish varieties represents a particularly strong argument in favor of the age of these features.506
503 505 506
504 See Stern :–, TG . See the beginning of section ... See the beginning of section .. See also sections .. and ., as well as Katz a:–, c:–.
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Age of the Hebrew component
.. Dynamics of the size of the Hebrew component As discussed in section .., Katz is one of the rare scholars in the domain of Yiddish studies who insists on the non-textual origin of numerous elements belonging to the Hebrew component of Yiddish. He writes that for someone who thinks about the textual origin of the main bulk of Hebraisms incorporated into modern Yiddish, the proportion of words of Semitic origin would gradually increase during the development of Yiddish. Katz (c:–) himself adheres to a theory according to which a large number of such words have been inherited by Ashkenazic Jews from the medieval period when a group of Jews for whom Aramaic was their first language created communities in the Danube area and gradually shifted to Yiddish. According to his theory, the proportion of words of Semitic origin would instead be decreasing throughout the history of Yiddish. These two opposing scenarios described by Katz actually are no more than two extreme solutions for the problem in question. The truth is situated somewhere between these two extremes: the dynamics of the size of the Hebrew component is unlikely to be as straightforward as any of these scenarios implies. An illustration of this statement can be made using data from onomastics. In all available medieval documents, Jewish or Christian, a large number of Jewish men from nonMediterranean Europe bear Hebrew names. For communities from the Rhine area, this is true during the First Crusade () and during the following centuries. In Franconia and neighboring southern German areas it is clearly the case in the lists from . It is also true for various groups of medieval BNEY KHES. For women, the proportion of Hebrew names is smaller, but still significant. These names of Hebrew origin are commonly found not only in Jewish sources (where they often correspond for men to religious SHEMOT HA-QODESH that can in some sense be assimilated to formal Hebrew) but also in Christian documents (where they necessarily reveal names used in an everyday context and should therefore be seen as belonging to the vernacular language). During the following centuries the percentage of Hebrew names was maintained high in various areas.507 In numerous cases, given names were inherited from previous generations following the Ashkenazic tradition of naming children after close (deceased) relatives. For various reasons, some names gradually ceased to be used. On the other hand, certain new names have been created.508 The presence of a name in the biblical text has always been an important factor that influenced its popularity or survival within the Ashkenazic corpus. The Bible has always been seen as a major repository of names helping parents to make a choice for the names of their children.509 As a result, we know examples where a biblical name that was not used during all of Antiquity started to be used again in the Middle Ages and has remained in the corpus since then.510 The above considerations show that for the development of onomastic elements of the Hebrew component both direct legacy of previous generations and the extant sacred Jewish texts were of paramount importance. Similar processes are valid for the common lexicon. Certain words commonly used in the past in everyday speech disappeared. For example, numerous references to ממון ‘money’ appear in early Ashkenazic sources from Central and Eastern Europe, including the collections of glosses in which only a small number of Hebraisms is found (examples: H, Kr, Pr), as well as in rabbinical RESPONSA511 and other books from the same area such as Br and BZP. Yet, this word does not appear in dictionaries of modern EY, DuY, and WphY.512 On the other hand, there is no doubt that numerous elements of the Hebrew component of Yiddish do not belong to its 508 See statistical tables in Beider :–, –. See details in section ... 510 See Beider :–, . See section ... 511 For example, those by Meir (Maharam) of Lublin and Joel Sirkis (Rubashov :, ). 512 A rare reference to this word in EY corresponds to PolY mumin (BN ). The form mōmen is found in SwY and AlsY (Weill :) The same form also appears as a rare lexeme in EGY: Friedrich (:, ) mentions it 507 509
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The Hebrew component
substratum but were borrowed later from Hebrew. The sacred texts of Judaism and other major religious resources were sources for the borrowing of numerous words and expressions. Exactly as for given names, the existence of these documents was important for the survival of numerous Hebraisms inside of the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews.513 Moreover, as discussed in sections .. and .., numerous lexical and a number of morphological innovations internal to Ashkenazic communities affected the Hebrew component. The above considerations show that the development of this component was not linear and both of the extreme theories formulated at the beginning of this section are untenable. Only for the layer covering hybrid German-Hebrew words was the development more or less straightforward: the size of this layer marking fusion of these two major components of Yiddish would gradually increase throughout history. No evidence exists allowing us to corroborate the existence of forms resulting from a merging of Hebrew and German elements before the fourteenth century. Yet, during the sixteenth and the following centuries—when Yiddish varieties clearly represented idioms with system-level differences with respect to any German dialect—their number was already significant.
.
HEBREW OF EAST CANAANITES
No direct sources allow one to analyze the pronunciation of Hebrew by EAST CANAANITES, that is, Slavic-speaking Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in the territory of modern Ukraine and Belarus. Certain pieces of indirect information were already extracted in section .. from the analysis of given names. They show that according to major consonantal features—such as the velar character of heth and the distinction between shin and sin—EAST CANAANITES were similar to their coreligionists from the Czech lands (WEST CANAANITES) and different from BNEY HES from western Germanspeaking areas. Since the same pronunciation was also valid for Ashkenazic BNEY KHES, both these features are also valid for modern EY. Yet, for certain other features peculiar to EAST CANAANITES we find no cognate forms either in sources dealing with medieval Jews from Central Europe or in modern EY. This is the case of the internal consonants [x] in Ицхак ‘Isaac’ and [h] in Агрон ‘Aaron.’ Additional traces of the pre-Ashkenazic pronunciation that characterized EAST CANAANITES could have been retained in Slavic languages. The most detailed analysis of this topic was done by Wexler (:–). He shows that one group of Hebraisms found in East Slavic languages is due to the internal Christian tradition related to the studies of the Old Testament,514 while another group was borrowed from local Jews. If a Slavic word sounds different from its Yiddish equivalent, then, as stated by Wexler, (a) the shorter the time it has existed in a Slavic language, the larger are the chances only in the EGY-German part of his dictionary along with moes, another word of Hebrew origin. Yet, in the GermanEGY part of his dictionary he presents only moes (with a sign ‘archaic’). 513 In this context, detailed considerations appearing in WG :– of possible textual sources for Hebraisms are totally relevant. See also the discussion of learned words in Neuberg :– and the list of semantic fields with a large number of Hebraisms in WG :– and Bunis :–. See also Bunis :– on the intentional borrowing from Hebrew into Judezmo (especially during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) and Yiddish in order to create and maintain linguistic divergence between Jews and Gentiles (Spaniards and Germans, respectively), a kind of Jewish resistance to linguistic accommodation. 514 This tradition covers not only biblical terms but also contemporary Jewish realities. Compare, for example, Polish chasyd and Russian хасид ‘Ḥ asidic Jew,’ while during the period when this religious movement developed (that is, the second half of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century), this word was pronounced by Jews as khusid/khusit/khūsit (in Ukraine and Poland) or khosid (in Belorussia and Lithuania). Similarly, we have Polish cheder and Russian хедер ‘Jewish elementary school,’ different from Yiddish kheyder or khayder. (For a comprehensive list of Polish Hebraisms see Brzezina :–.)
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Hebrew of EAST CANAANITES
that this is due to Christian theology or liturgy; (b) if the word is amply attested in Ukraine and Belorussia and rarely in Poland, then we may be dealing with a word borrowed from pre-Ashkenazic Jews. Yet, despite these correct general premises, the hypotheses advanced by Wexler for particular words are unattractive. Ukrainian гáман ‘Purim’ is derived from Haman, the name of the personage of the book of Esther. In Polish Catholic tradition he is called Haman (compare Hebrew ָהָמן, Yiddish Homen). The Ukrainian word for the Jewish holiday is most likely borrowed from the Polish name for the personage in question: note the penultimate stress position. Similarly, the odds are low that the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian кагáл and Polish kahał ‘autonomous Jewish administration’ (compare Hebrew ָקָהל, pronounced kol in LitY, kūl in PolY, and kul in UkrY) are due to EAST CANAANITES. Here the reason is chronological. Indeed, documents from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania use the expression збор жидов(ский) even during the sixteenth century.515 The term кагал replaces it only from the mid-seventeenth century (RN). Such a chronology shows that the word is likely to appear after a relatively recent Christian transliteration of this Jewish word.516 In , the chronicles of Vladimir-Volynskij mention the word бахурчик ‘(Jewish) boy’ (RN); compare Belarusian бáхур ‘young Jew; ladies’ man,’ Ukrainian бáхур ‘Jewish boy; ladies’ man; illegitimate child,’ Polish bachor ‘child; brat’ and bachur ‘young Jew; boy,’ Hebrew ָּבחוּר, bokher in LitY and bukher in UkrY ‘boy; young man; bachelor.’517 In this case, contrary to the two words discussed above, we are dealing with an item that clearly belongs to the vernacular layer. The Christian scholarly origin of its phonetics in Slavic languages is significantly less plausible than its borrowing from local Jews. The form *bakhur could be present in the vernacular languages of (i) Jewish immigrants who came to medieval Poland from the West, namely from the Czech lands,518 Austria, or Germany (if this was true, East Slavic languages borrowed their respective words from Polish bachur), or (ii) EAST CANAANITES (if this was true, Polish would borrow the word bachur from East Slavic languages). The penultimate stress in Belarusian and Ukrainian makes the first hypothesis more attractive: we have no evidence about the penultimate stress position in Hebrew of EAST CANAANITES. Two scenarios are possible here. Firstly, the form /baxur/ could have appeared in preAshkenazic Polish Jewish communities, created thanks to migrations during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of WEST CANAANITES from the Czech lands. Secondly, bachur could have been borrowed by the Polish language from Jews during the earliest stage of the development of PolY, when the vowel of the first syllable was [a:] or [ɔ:] (but not [o:]), while the vowel of the second, unstressed, syllable was not yet reduced to [ə].519 Independently of the stress position in the etymon, in the Polish language the stress would gradually become fixed on the first syllable.520 Formally, we cannot rule out a possibility of the Ukrainian-Belarusian form being due to EAST CANAANITES and the Polish one to WEST CANAANITES / BNEY KHES. See REA :; :. The idea concerning the WY origin of the Polish kahał (WG :) is implausible: the only known WY form is kāl, and not **kahal (see BA ). 517 Belarusian also has the meanings ‘big-bellied person’ and ‘boar,’ both related to an independent Slavic root (Wexler :); compare Czech bachor ‘belly,’ Old Czech bachoř ‘large intestine.’ 518 Note that the surname from Prague based on this Hebrew word (בחור, in tombstone inscriptions, Hock :) is spelled Bachor/Bacher in Latin characters during s (Bondy-Dvorský : , ). 519 In modern WY, we find traces of bākher in the Rhineland though a more general pronunciation uses, not [a:] but [o:] or [ɔ:] (see BA , GGA ). However, there is no reason to believe that that dialect of Yiddish was ever spoken in Polish lands. Moreover, it is known that during the first half of the sixteenth century in a large area of WY (covering the Rhineland too) this word was still pronounced as beher because of E-EFFECT. As discussed in section .., this was, for example, the phonetic form of the nickname of Elia Levita. Also note that H (compiled most likely in Czech lands) spells the Hebrew word with pataḥ instead of qameṣ. 520 The fixed stress position has been used in Polish since the fifteenth century. At that period, it became initial and since the seventeenth century it has become penultimate (Stieber :). 515 516
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The Hebrew component
TABLE . Characteristics of Hebrew in Cyrillic manual of Hebrew Characteristic
Feature (section)
Jews with similar pronunciation
heth /x/
{c} (..)
WEST CANAANIC, BNEY KHES, Italian (but not Sephardic, southern French, ZARFATIC, BNEY HES, Persian)
shin /š/, sin /s/, samekh /s/
{c} (..)
WEST CANAANIC, BNEY KHES, maybe southern France (but not Italian, Sephardic, ZARFATIC, BNEY HES)
yod with dagesh /dž/
{c} (..)
Italian, southern French, ZARFATIC, BNEY HES, BNEY KHES (but not WEST CANAANIC, Sephardic, Persian, Caucasian)
penultimate stress
{v} (..)
ZARFATIC, BNEY HES, BNEY KHES, Persian, North Caucasian (but not Sephardic, southern French, Italian)
cases of elision of mobile shewa
{u} (.)
ZARFATIC, BNEY HES, BNEY KHES (but not Sephardic, southern French)
Several Orthodox Christian documents that originated in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania include transcriptions from Hebrew made with the participation of local Jews. One document from this group—copied during the third quarter of the sixteenth century from an earlier original—is described by Temchin () and called by him Cyrillic manual of Hebrew. Its main phonological characteristics are listed in Table .. Table . shows that the Hebrew pronunciation revealed by the document in question is typical of Ashkenazic BNEY KHES only.521 All other features are also compatible with the early BNEY KHES pronunciation: /ts/ for tsadi {c}, /s/ (or maybe /Ł/) for soft tav {c}. The vocalic chart looks like the PALESTINIAN system since identical transcriptions are used within the following pairs: pataḥ and qameṣ gadol, qameṣ qatan and ḥ olem, segol and ṣere. However, since the Cyrillic alphabet does not allow for distinguishing between short and long vowels and has a limited number of signs for midvowels, we cannot be sure that the pronunciation of elements in these three pairs was really identical. We can merely assume that qameṣ gadol did not have the [o]-quality yet, but either [a] or [ɔ]. Note that the earliest cases of Jewish names with “o” for qameṣ gadol appear in Christian documents of Lithuania at the end of the fifteenth century, while from the second half of the sixteenth century they are commonplace.522 Independently of the everyday language of Jews who helped to compile the documents in question, we can be sure that their Hebrew pronunciation was due to a tradition brought from Central Europe. Codex of the Central Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius is another document from the same group. It includes an early sixteenth-century copy of a translation directly from Hebrew of several Old Testament books made most likely during the last decades of the
521 This conclusion is certainly valid if the original was written no later than the first quarter of the sixteenth century. During the later period, BNEY HES already accepted norms of BNEY KHES concerning the pronunciation of heth and shin. Note, however, that in one place the document mentions the existence of an alternative Jewish tradition, illustrating it by providing the pronunciation of two words: it differs form the one used in the manuscript by the reflex /s/ instead of /š/ for shin and could be related to BNEY HES. 522 See Beider :.
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Synthesis
fifteenth century. The pronunciation of Hebrew of the translator can be judged from his transcription of personal names and several other words.523 We find the following features also characteristic of the Cyrillic manual of Hebrew: a distinction between shin /š/ and sin/samekh /s/; /ts/ for tsadi; no traces of any distinction between pataḥ and qameṣ gadol, segol and ṣere, qameṣ qatan and ḥ olem. Codex also mainly uses /x/ for heth.524 Yet, we can also observe one important difference between the two documents. The Cyrillic letter “т” /t/ is used in Codex not only for hard tav but also for soft tav for which the Cyrillic manual of Hebrew uses “c” /s/. Moreover, we do not observe any cases of elision of mobile shewa, while yod with dagesh is not given as an affricate.525 As a result, it is unlikely that both documents are related to the same tradition of Hebrew pronunciation. Codex , most likely, reveals the pre-Ashkenazic pronunciation proper to EAST CANAANITES. Note also that all the above rules of Hebrew pronunciation are valid for Lithuanian Karaites.526 As a result, we cannot exclude the possibility of the Karaite origin of the translator(s).527
.
SYNTHESIS
.. Unity of modern Yiddish varieties At the beginning of this chapter, several major substantial questions concerning the Hebrew component were formulated. The second of them concerns the possibility of the existence of an ancestor common to all modern Yiddish varieties. The information provided in the preceding sections of this chapter allows us to answer this question. It leaves no doubt concerning the common origins of the Hebrew components of all modern Yiddish dialects. We can be sure that at some moment of their history (or the history of their common ancestor) both EY and WY underwent such important changes as the stress shift from ultimate to (ante)penultimate syllable {v, v} and the passage in open syllables from a system with five stressed vocalic qualities to that with seven {v}. From their common ancestor they inherited: five full vocalic qualities in closed syllables {v}, with a large series of words in which qameṣ gives /a/ {v}, distinct reflexes of the same Hebrew vowels in open and closed syllables {v}, corresponding associations between Hebrew and German monophthongs {v}, elision of the mobile shewa {u}, as well as identical realizations for all consonants, including the velar reflex of heth {c}, the [d]-pronunciation for the soft daleth, and—a phenomenon specific to Ashkenazic Jews—the [s]-pronunciation of the soft tav {c}. Formally speaking, these general rules are not definitive proof of the unique source of the phonology of the Hebrew components of EY and WY. Some of them—as, for example, the passage from five to seven Its analysis appears in Altbauer :– (the Five Scrolls), Taube (the book of Job), Wexler :–. The text also has three forms with “г” /h/. These exceptions (of which, two are related to such commonly known names as Bethlehem and Rachel) could, in theory, be related to the West Slavic transliteration tradition (Altbauer :). 525 Compare /tsion/ ‘Sion’ ( ִצּיֹוןAltbauer :), not **/tsidžon/. Yet, all elements of this word (except for its initial consonant) could be influenced by the traditional pronunciation by Orthodox Christians. 526 In the dictionary by Kowalski (), we can find numerous examples. The following lists give only a few instances: shin /š/ (p. ); sin /s/ (pp. , , ); samekh /s/ (p. ); /ts/ for tsadi (p. ); /x/ for heth (pp. , ); /e/ for mobile shewa (pp. , , ); /t/ for soft tav (pp. , ); /a/ for qameṣ gadol (pp. , , , ); no internal affricate in ‘Sion’ (p. ). Note also the form Naama ‘Noemi’ (p. ) equivalent to Naami of Codex (Altbauer :). 527 The translation includes one word of German origin that is clearly related to the Ashkenazic tradition of biblical translation: gim ‘(pure) gold’ (Altbauer :). This word is commonly found in early Ashkenazic sources (TS ). This fact alone provides no decisive argument about the origin of the translator. In theory, Lithuanian Karaite religious scholars of that time could also have some knowledge about the tradition in question. 523 524
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The Hebrew component
vowel qualities—result from renormings that followed preferences indicated by Jewish grammarians. Similar developments of certain other features could be due to common external influences: this is the case of the reduction of unstressed vowels that was due to a similar effect in German. Certain shared characteristics—including identical kinds of (unusual) merging in large series of combinations of Hebrew vowels with diphthongal reflexes of MHG î {v}—are relatively recent. Yet, a very important argument for our general conclusion remains the large number of “anomalous” phonetic forms mainly listed in sections . and ..–... Among these SHARED ABERRANCIES, one includes: • a number of forms with peculiar reflexes of consonants such as /t/ for soft tav {c}, final consonant in the name for the letter { דc}, a few forms with /k/ instead of /kh/ {c, c}, /n/ instead of /m/ in yontef ‘holiday’ {c}; • an unusual name for the letter letter { צl}; • a few words with idiosyncrasies in the stress position {v, v}; • words with unusual vocalic quantities {v, v, v, v, v, v}; • numerous cases of confusion between (ḥaṭef-)pataḥ and qameṣ {v, v, v, v, v, v, v}; • diphthongs for a series of combinations of Hebrew vowels and gutturals {v, v–v, v}; • numerous peculiarities related to segol, ṣere, and shewa {v–v}; • a number of idiosyncrasies related to shureq, qibbuṣ, and ḥ olem {v, v, v, v, v}; • a few other vocalic peculiarities {v–v, v–v}. These cases cannot be explained by the TIBERIAN spelling of their Hebrew etymons and consequently they are certainly due to “natural” phenomena, not to renormings of any kind. For this reason, most likely these features reveal the existence of “anomalies” in the language of the ancestor of the Hebrew components of both WY and EY from which these two major subdivisions of Yiddish inherited them. A number of these peculiarities are due to some specific pre-Ashkenazic developments. Others had certainly already appeared during Ashkenazic history. In principle, the fact that some of these anomalies are shared can also result from interdialectal borrowings, from WY to EY, or vice versa.528 Several factors imply, however, that—except for a few examples—that possibility is implausible. Firstly, it is hard to believe that one dialect X could take from another dialect Y anomalous forms whose phonetics do not conform to the canonical pointing of their Hebrew source words, these words being certainly known already in dialect Y, at least in its WHOLE HEBREW. A borrowing in the opposite direction, acquiring a “correct” form instead of the “anomalous” one, would be more plausible. A second factor is statistical: shared anomalies are so abundant that interborrowings cannot be responsible for all known cases (MRPC). A third factor is chronological. In some cases, to explain modern “anomalous” reflexes in EY and WY one needs to postulate old common proto-forms. For example, from the existence of LitY rov ‘rabbi’ and ov ‘Jewish month Ab’ and PolY ruf and uf one necessarily deduces that their ancestors were at some stage identical to modern WphY forms rāv and āv, respectively. Note also that equivalents to numerous “anomalous” forms known today in EY also appear in PhilogLottus (), a source that—as shown in Appendix A—describes WY. This fact excludes the possibility that speakers of EY brought them to western German-speaking provinces during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Another group of features shared by different Yiddish varieties corresponds to Ashkenazic innovations. Some of them are lexical and/or semantic {l–l}. Others deal with morphology and grammar {m–m}. Numerous Ashkenazic innovations correspond to hybrid words combining 528 Some obvious cases of inter-borrowing are: miesnik ‘ugly fellow’ (with the suffix -nik, of Slavic origin, revealing that the word first appeared in EY), asheryotser-papir ‘toilet paper,’ from Asher Yatzar ( ָיַצרaש ֵר ׁ )ֲא, the name of the blessing recited after engaging in an act of excretion, + papir ‘paper.’ from the German component.
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Synthesis
Hebrew and non-Hebrew elements {m–m, m–m}. Numerous given names are also shared by western and eastern communities. Taken together, these factors strongly corroborate the idea of the common origins of the Hebrew components of all modern Yiddish dialects. Only a small number of features are not pan-Yiddish. Among them one includes a few words in which a combination of Hebrew vowels received a reflex that is exceptional for this combination in EY only but not in other Yiddish varieties {v}. The explanation for this phenomenon provided at the end of section .. is compatible with the idea of the common origins of Hebrew pronunciation in all varieties of modern Yiddish. We also know that the initial prevocalic samekh and sin turned into the affricate /ts/ mainly in CzY and EGY {c}, while the /f/-reflex for vav and veth is specific to SWY {c}. In both cases, we know that these peculiarities were already in existence centuries ago and, moreover, their geography was much larger than now. For example, the initial affricate was common in medieval sources from Western Europe, while the /f/-reflex was also found in Austria and Hungary. Most likely, in both cases forms anomalous from the point of view of the standardized pronunciation of Hebrew were renormed in various regions based on the Hebrew spelling of the corresponding words. Several specific features restricted to WY such as pleonastic elements in hybrid plurals -eser and -emer {m} may represent relatively recent innovations within WY. The /o/-reflexes for pataḥ before yod {v} are many centuries old, while in modern times they are limited only to certain Yiddish varieties. In this case, again a renorming to /a/ could take place in other varieties. In section .., we discussed several lexical isoglosses dealing with terms directly related to Judaism, namely {l, l, l}, that place EY, CzY, and to a great extent EGY also apart from SWY and (to some degree) DuY. These differences are also unlikely to be recent. More likely they reveal the important cultural (and partly linguistic) autonomy of western and eastern Jewish communities that characterized them throughout centuries of their development.
.. BNEY HES and BNEY KHES Among major substantial questions formulated at the beginning of this chapter, two concern the Middle Ages. Question number deals with Hebrew used in various medieval Ashkenazic communities and its relationship to the Hebrew component of modern Yiddish. Question number compares medieval Ashkenazic Hebrew to that of other Jewish communities. Information presented in previous sections allows us to shed some light on these topics. One can distinguish two groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews: the so-called BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. As discussed in this chapter, during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries these Jews lived in () western Germany (the Rhineland, Franconia, Swabia, a large part of Bavaria), Alsace, and Switzerland, and () the Danube area (town of Regensburg, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia), Poland, and eastern Germany, respectively. The distinction concerned, at least, religious rites529 and several major features of the pronunciation of Hebrew: • Letter heth: velar for BNEY KHES but guttural for BNEY HES {c}; • Distinction by BNEY KHES between /š/ (expressed by shin) and /s/ (expressed by sin and samekh) contrasting with the /s/-pronunciation of all three letters by BNEY HES {c}; • E-EFFECT observed for BNEY HES but not for BNEY KHES {v}; • Affricate reflex /ts/ for soft tav found for BNEY HES only {c}. 529 The borders between the BNEY HES and BNEY KHES areas established in this chapter on the basis of the pronunciation of Hebrew are well correlated with the historical information about the areas of two Ashkenazic rites: WESTERN and EASTERN, respectively. Indeed, the latter was known in Austria, eastern Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Eastern Europe (Goldschmidt :).
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The Hebrew component
According to these characteristics, the pronunciation of BNEY HES is closely related to that of Jews from northern France and partly to that of Italian and Sephardic Jews also, while the pronunciation by BNEY KHES is similar to that by WEST CANAANITES from Bohemia and Moravia.530 For both groups, these linguistic links are perfectly correlated with the geography. On the one hand, the Rhenish part of the BNEY HES area is situated in the immediate vicinity of northern France. On the other hand, the German-speaking territories of BNEY KHES (Regensburg and northern Austria) lie near the Czech lands. Moreover, after the shift of Czech Jews to a German-based language, Bohemia and Moravia were already inside of the Ashkenazic BNEY KHES area.531 A number of other features also separate BNEY HES from BNEY KHES. The analysis of several testimonies to the Jewish pronunciation of Hebrew by early Christian authors shows that BNEY HES used the following letter names: tsadek/tsodek for { צl}, kuf for קand, regionally, yūs / yus for י {v}. Yet, BNEY KHES had tsadi, kof, and yod/yot, respectively. These letter names provide additional evidence for the genetic independence of the Hebrew components of the languages of the two groups in question; note that the pronunciation of the last two letter names by BNEY KHES is similar to that by Sephardic Jews. The pronunciation of certain biblical given names was also distinct in the two groups of Ashkenazic Jews. Only in the BNEY KHES area do we find phonetically unusual names derived from Shabbetai, with [ft] and [bd] for the Hebrew consonantal cluster ְּבת: Sheftl(in) in the south (Austria, Hungary) and Shabday in the north (Moravia, Silesia, and western Poland) {c}. For Samuel, we invariably find the [o]-forms like Smoyel and Smohel for BNEY KHES, while their Rhenish coreligionists used both [o]- and [u]-forms {v}. For Moses, only forms with the root /muš/ are known for BNEY KHES. They contrast with /o/-forms used by BNEY HES {v}. Fundamental distinctions between the two medieval Jewish groups characterize corpuses of given names of Hebrew origin. This factor and the differences in religious rites provide cogent arguments for considering that the scenario of independent inception of the two medieval groups of communities is logically much more plausible that the scenario according to which one group represents an offspring of the other. According to several other parameters the pronunciation of Hebrew was similar in both medieval groups, at least during the period from which we have documented evidence: penultimate stress position {v}; the existence of forms with antepenultimate accent {v}; elision of mobile shewa in the first syllable {u}; original vocalic system with only five qualities that gradually turned into the system with open syllables; affricate rendition of tsadi {c}; /f/-reflex for vav and veth (shared by BNEY HES at least with BNEY KHES from Austria and Hungary) {c}; affricate pronunciation of yod with dagesh {c}; fricative pronunciation of soft tav and soft daleth {c}; final /s/ for shin {c}; instances of confusion between ḥ olem and shureq/qibbuṣ discussed in section ..; cases of the [ts]reflex for initial samekh {c}. The existence of these shared characteristics is due to several independent factors. Some of these features already characterized the pronunciation of Hebrew by Jews from both the Rhine area and the Danube region during the earlier period and could have been inherited from a common ancestor for the Hebrew of these Jewish groups. For example, this is the case of the PALESTINIAN-like vocalic system with only five qualities and the features {c} and {c}, both shared in the Middle Ages by Ashkenazic Jews with their coreligionists from numerous other European countries (including WEST CANAANIC). The feature {c}, unknown among non-Ashkenazic Jews, was directly influenced by the phonological characteristics of German dialects spoken in both
530 Note that according to historical information, the medieval religious rites in German-speaking territories, northern France, Italy, and Balkans were all instances of the same so-called “Palestinian” group, while those from the Iberian peninsula and southern France belonged to the so-called “Babylonian” group. Differences between the two groups were mainly related to the piyyutim adopted (Goldschmidt :–). 531 On the cultural links between Rhenish Jews and their coreligionists in France see section .. The links between Jews from Regensburg and those from the Czech lands are discussed in sections .. and C...
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Synthesis
areas, that of BNEY HES and that of BNEY KHES. In principle, it could appear in both areas as a result of independent innovations. In certain other cases, the fact of sharing can be explained by interborrowing between the two Ashkenazic groups during the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. In other words, some of the shared peculiarities arose in one region and spread out to the other region. For example, the feature {c} is also known in medieval Italy and France (where it appeared as a local innovation), but it was not valid for WEST CANAANIC Jews. As a result, here we are dealing with a series of two consecutive influences: the first from northern France to BNEY HES, and the second from the latter to BNEY KHES. The scenario is particularly attractive because for BNEY KHES this idiosyncrasy is observable only in various phonetic forms of one Hebrew name, Hayyim ()ַחִּיים. Their earliest references (from the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) in Regensburg have [h] in the initial position, while later, during the fourteenth century, the initial consonant was already pronounced by local Jews (BNEY KHES) as [x] or even [kx]/[k]. Though in theory the names in question could have been brought to the Danube area by migrants from France as ready-made forms, several factors testify to the fact that they are more likely to be of local origin (see section ..). {v} and {u}, both known in northern France,532 may in theory belong to the same category. The passage—resulting from the introduction of a new norm—from five to seven vocalic qualities in stressed syllables, with the differentiation between the reflexes of qameṣ and segol from pataḥ and ṣere, respectively, represents strong evidence for the close links that existed between the two medieval Jewish groups in question. Indeed, documents from the thirteenth century still show the absence of these contrasts. Yet, at the end of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth century, the vowels in question were already distinguished for both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES: this fact is documented by contemporary Christian authors. Contrary to the previous example, the devoicing of internal /v/ {c} is not internal to Jewish communities. It followed a similar process that affected various German dialects coterritorial with both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. In the Jewish context this is exceptional: numerous other phonetic phenomena in German were not followed by Ashkenazic Hebrew.533 In the context of this book, the primary importance of the above comparison between BNEY HES and BNEY KHES is related to links that can exist between, on the one hand, the Hebrew of the two medieval groups in question and, on the other hand, the Hebrew components of modern Yiddish varieties. For this question, two opposite approaches exist in Yiddish studies whose main proponents are Weinreich and Katz, respectively.534 Weinreich considers the Rhineland to be the cradle for the ancestor of all modern Yiddish varieties. This scenario implicitly considers that major features of Yiddish as a whole, and therefore of its Hebrew component too, are inherited from Rhenish BNEY HES. Weinreich does not pay particular attention to linguistic differences between BNEY HES and BNEY KHES, considering the latter to be an offspring of the former. Yet, Katz asserts that all modern varieties of Yiddish are unrelated to the vernacular language of BNEY HES but related to that of BNEY KHES only. 532 The origin of the sharing of the [s]-reflex for shin in final position {c} is more obscure. On the one hand, it can also result from the influence of BNEY HES on their Danubian coreligionsts. Alternatively, it may demonstrate that in the early stages Danubian Jews had no [š], exactly like their Rhenish coreligionists. Danubian Jews could have been the first to introduce [š] by the way of renorming. For both scenarios, it is unclear why only the final position is affected. In the first, the reflex changed only in this position. According to the second, on the contrary, it was only word-finally that the archaic reflex [s] was retained longer than in other positions. 533 Two examples may illustrate this statement. Firstly, we do not observe diphthongization of the long ḥ ireq or long shureq (except in a very few exceptional cases discussed in section ..) while the descendants of MHG î and û became diphthongs in High German dialects and in the German component of Yiddish (see feature {V} in section ..). Secondly, in medieval sources we find no systematic confusion between ּבand ּפ, דand ט, גand קresulting from the loss of contrast between /b/ and /p/, /d/ and /t/, /g/ and /k/ in High German dialects (see feature {C} of section ..). 534 See their discussion in sections .., .., and ..
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The Hebrew component
Katz’s model claims that the BNEY HES spoke a different language, historically unrelated to that of the BNEY KHES. The replacement of the former by the latter for him is simply the death of one language and the adoption of the other by the population of the area where the former had originally been spoken. The information given earlier in this chapter allows us to shed light on this controversy. One may observe that modern Yiddish varieties mainly follow the pronunciation by BNEY KHES for all four major features listed at the beginning of this section, namely {c, c, v, c}. For EY, CzY, and EGY, that is dialects from Eastern and Central Europe, a region situated within the former territory of BNEY KHES, this fact is quite natural and may be related to the direct inheritance from BNEY KHES. Yet, for SWY such inheritance is implausible: there is no historical evidence for any migration flow to that area from the area of BNEY KHES. As a result, in WY subdialects spoken in the territories where BNEY HES dwelled during the Middle Ages, the reflexes similar to those by BNEY KHES can be easily explained via renormings of various kinds: that of {v} was meant to fit with TIBERIAN pointing; that of {c} corresponded to the establishment of standard rules according to which the same Hebrew letter is to be read in the same way in various words instead of affricates in certain words and nonaffricate interdental sounds in others;535 that of {c} allowed for the introduction of distinct graphemes for sounds /š/ and /s/; that of {c} corresponded to some other, more obscure reason.536 A similar explanation holds for the very unusual name of the letter daleth, with the final stop in all Yiddish dialects {c}. The earliest reference to it comes from a source compiled in the territory of BNEY KHES. The same document is also the earliest one in which the pronunciation of all letter names ending in soft tav or soft daleth is exactly the same as in modern Yiddish. However, earlier references from the BNEY KHES territory do not yet show the same distribution. Consequently, we are dealing with a series of reflexes that appeared as a result of pronunciation renorming. It is clear that the alphabet represents one of the semantic fields in which a notion of prestigious “correct” pronunciation is particulary strong. A number of pan-Yiddish features originated in the area of BNEY HES. Some of them correspond to new norms. This is clearly the case of the Yiddish use of the letter ayin to express the sound [e]. This phenomenon is due to the graphic tradition followed among BNEY HES who had E-EFFECT near ayin. The Yiddish pronunciation of the biblical names Shabbetai, Moses, and Samuel also mainly follows BNEY HES; compare StY Shabse (and not **Shabde or **Shafte), Moyshe (and not **Mush or **Mushe), and Shmuel (and not **Shmoel), respectively. Yet, this link is not necessarily related to any inheritance from BNEY HES. It may be primarily related to the TIBERIAN norms from which forms originally found among BNEY KHES deviated.537 The BNEY HES-like pronunciation of the three letters called in StY tsadek {l}, kuf, and yud {v} can also result from an introduction of a new norm, the “correct” way to pronounce the alphabet letters. For certain individual words whose phonetics cannot be explained by any norm, Yiddish clearly inherits the pronunciation by BNEY HES. Here belong the sound /e/ resulting from E-EFFECT in the pan-Yiddish verbs shekht(e)(n) ‘to slaughter’ and mek(e)n ‘to erase’ {v}, and, most likely, the final affricate in the StY leykhets {c}. For a series of particular traits found in modern Yiddish, we know of early references in works by BNEY HES, while their early reflexes in the language of BNEY KHES are unknown.538 Among them one finds the distinct treatment 535
Gradually, interdental sounds were replaced with /s/ for soft tav and /d/ for soft daleth. See their discussion at the end of section ... 537 Some non-TIBERIAN forms inherited from BNEY KHES were also used in EY during the nineteenth century as given names: Mishl, a diminutive of Mush(e), and Sheftl. 538 Due to a combination of historical circumstances, a large number of references mentioned here as known to us from the language of BNEY HES are actually taken from writings of only one author: Elia Levita (–). On the one hand, he still had in his vernacular language both of the most distinctive characteristics of BNEY HES: glottal pronunciation of heth and E-EFFECT. On the other hand, certain major geographical and chronological elements of his 536
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Synthesis
of the same TIBERIAN vowels in open and closed syllables,539 lengthening of stressed ḥ aṭef-pataḥ {v}, treatment of the combination (shewa + guttural + qameṣ) as if it were (pataḥ + guttural + ḥ aṭef-pataḥ ) {v}, long vowel for segol in open syllables {v}, numerous cases of the neuter gender {m} (resulting from Ashkenazic innovation) and Ashkenazic lexical neologisms {l}, as well as a large number of characteristics concerning individual words.540 The earliest references to several hybrid Hebrew-German pan-Yiddish patterns {m–m} also appear in works by BNEY HES. All these features are clearly inherited by modern Yiddish from the language of BNEY HES: they cannot be due to any kind of renorming but are necessarily due to oral transmission.541 Since we have no confirmation that realizations of the same features in the Hebrew of early BNEY KHES were different from those known for BNEY HES, we cannot formally rule out any possibility of the initial development of these features among BNEY KHES before they spread to the area of BNEY HES. Yet, the scenario in question is significantly less plausible than the propagation of these unusual characteristics in the opposite direction. Indeed, as shown in chapter , numerous specifically Jewish semantic, lexical, morphological, phonological, and onomastic elements of German origin appeared in western communities and at some point immigrants from Rhenish communities gradually brought them to the BNEY KHES territories.542 The information given in chapter concerning the earliest references to words and given names of Romance origin points in the same direction: all of these appeared initially in the Rhineland. As discussed at the end of the previous section, the lexical differences between WY and EY that concern the use of certain religious terms related to the Hebrew component {l, l, l} are quite old. The geographic localization of the corresponding isoglosses separating western Germany from Slavic countries and eastern Germany recalls the borders between the areas of BNEY HES and BNEY KHES from whom these lexical differences may be inherited. These features are among the rarest elements of the Hebrew component that are not shared by WY and EY. In addition to these factors all based on written documents, a comparison between modern Yiddish varieties and the languages of BNEY HES and BNEY KHES can also be made on the basis of a linguistic reconstruction. The vocalic systems of Proto-EY and that underlying CzY (Proto-CzY), WY (“Proto-WY”) appeared before the sixteenth century.543 Vowels of Proto-CzY and Proto-EY
life can be treated as “transitional” between BNEY HES and BNEY KHES: (a) he lived immediately before the period when the preceding two characteristics gradually disappeared from the area where BNEY HES dwelled; (b) he was born in Middle Franconia, not far from the BNEY KHES area; (c) he lived a large part of his life in northern Italy, a region where, in principle, Ashkenazic communities could be composed of both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES migrants. In theory, these factors may be used to conjecture that the vernacular language of Elia Levita represented not a “pure” language of BNEY HES (spoken, for example, a few centuries before him by Jews of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne) but a mixed tongue in which numerous elements that arose in the BNEY KHES area mingled with those “native” to BNEY HES. In reality, however, such consideration appears unattractive. Quotes from Levita’s works are not the unique references testifying to the huge influence of the language of BNEY HES on that of BNEY KHES and on modern Yiddish. They are well correlated with other pieces of evidence and together with them point to the same global picture. This picture is also well corroborated by factors that unambiguously point to the BNEY HES origins of numerous words and given names from the German and Romance components of Yiddish. It is difficult, not to say impossible, to conceive a scenario in which the elements from the Hebrew component of the language of Rhenish Jews would provide an exception in not spreading out eastward, contrary to other components. 539 As discussed in section .., the first evidence appears in a prayer book for the Western rite compiled in . 540 Among them: {c, v, v, v, v, m, m, m}. 541 Only the infix -en- {m}, an innovation that is much more recent than the patterns mentioned in the previous sentence, most likely originated in eastern Ashkenazic communities. In modern times, this characteristic continued to be much more common in EY than in SWY. 542 See, for example, the discussion of pan-Yiddish given names in section .., as well as features {M} and {L, L} in sections . and ., respectively. 543 See sections .. and ...
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The Hebrew component
originated in Slavic countries (Czech lands and Poland), that is, inside the area of BNEY KHES. The scheme of vowels of “Proto-WY” implies its inception primarily in a region coterritorial with the East Franconian dialect of German and, maybe, partly in neighboring Swabia. In that period the whole area in question was inside the BNEY HES territory and therefore at the moment of its inception, WY phonology still had several major phonological peculiarities distancing it from the pronunciation by BNEY KHES, namely the guttural pronunciation of heth, E-EFFECT, and most likely the confusion between shin and sin also. Gradually, in the area in question heth started to be pronounced as [x], while both E-EFFECT and the sibilant confusion disappeared. There is no reason to believe that these changes were caused by the influx of numerous BNEY KHES into the area in question: historical documents do not indicate the existence of any emigrational wave from Central or Eastern Europe to Western Europe before the mid-seventeenth century. Consequently, these changes were due to local renormings. The above considerations show that the odds are high that WY is no more than the language of BNEY HES in which the glottal pronunciation of heth, E-EFFECT, and a few other characteristics were renormed to what was considered “correct.”544 EY and CzY directly descend from the idiom spoken by BNEY KHES. Yet, according to the analysis in the previous section, there are striking similarities between the Hebrew components of WY, CzY, and EY that imply their common origin. This means that a large part of purely Ashkenazic idiosyncracies (including innovations) within the Hebrew component were already shared by various communities, both those of BNEY HES and BNEY KHES, before the sixteenth century. As shown earlier in this section, these idiosyncracies are principally due to BNEY HES, that is, Jews from western German-speaking territories. Consequently, the Hebrew component of all modern Yiddish varieties may be considered to be to a great extent from the same lineage as the Hebrew component of the language of BNEY HES. If we take into account all data and arguments suggested above, the following global scenario appears to be the most plausible. Initially, the Jewish settlers in the German-speaking regions of the Danube area (Regensburg and Austria) were not directly related to those from the Rhineland. Danubian and Rhenish Jews were distinct in numerous aspects of their culture: liturgy, given names, and the pronunciation of Hebrew. For Danubian Jews, close links existed to Slavic-speaking Jews from Bohemia-Moravia (WEST CANAANITES). For Rhenish Jews, we can observe a very close link to Jews from northern France as well as some correlation with the pronunciation of Hebrew by Sephardic and Italian Jews.545 During the period before the end of the fifteenth century, due to migrations and also perhaps the prestige of Rhenish Judaism, the Hebrew component of the language of BNEY HES gradually became dominant in the Danube area too.
544 Among the renormings in the area of BNEY HES one can also mention the pronunciation of the so-called pataḥ furtivum (see footnote in section ..). 545 See features {c, c, c, u}. Among the scarce information available to us concerning the Hebrew used by WEST CANAANITES one can also mention the following features that separate them from BNEY HES: the absence of silent alef (see {G} in section .) in Old Czech Jewish glosses of the thirteenth century (compare Urbach , Markon ) and the (non-Ashkenazic) pronunciation of the word meaning ‘repast’ {v}.
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4 Romance elements .
MAIN ISSUES
Modern Yiddish encompasses a number of words of Romance origin. In addition, several Romance names are part of the corpus of traditional Ashkenazic given names. Scholars can disagree about the inclusion of some particular words or names in these categories, but globally speaking the existence of the Romance layer is consensual. However, various questions dealing with the role of this layer and its importance for the question of the origin of Yiddish are highly controversial. One can distinguish two significantly different approaches. For one group of scholars, words of Romance origin belong to a substratum of Yiddish and for this reason the analysis of these words is of special interest for Yiddish linguistics. Weinreich, in his classical magnum opus (WG) spoke about four “components” in Yiddish: Hebrew, LOEZ, German, and Slavic. By LOEZ, he specifically meant a hypothetical group of Jewish vernacular languages based on various Romance languages. Weinreich listed explicitly all elements that according to him belong to the LOEZ component and suggested a linguistic analysis aimed at assigning them either to WESTERN LOEZ (northern France) or SOUTHERN LOEZ (Italy).1 Weinreich pointed that the “LOEZ component is included not because of the amount, but because of the ancestral merit.” Following his approach, Yiddish was born as a fusion language about one thousand years ago when WESTERN and SOUTHERN LOEZ speakers migrated to the Rhineland and gradually abandoned numerous Romance elements of their speech in favor of the German ones. Birnbaum (:) stated that Romance items in Yiddish are mainly inherited from the Judeo-French language (called by him ZARFATIC) spoken by Jews in medieval northern France. Fuks (.:) suggested a scenario in which Jews lived undisturbed in western Germany continuously from Roman times (fourth century CE) until the First Crusade (). During that period and a few centuries thereafter they gradually shifted from Romance (“Judeo-Latin” in his terminology) to a Germanic vernacular language. As a result, the Romanisms in Yiddish developed locally in Germany and were not due to migrations of French and/or Italian Jews there. The idea of a local, Rhenish, Romance source was also developed by Schwarzfuchs (:–). Note that in contrast to Weinreich, three other scholars cited earlier provided no linguistic argument to support their positions. Timm suggested numerous detailed arguments aimed at supporting the origin from northern France of roots of a number of Yiddish words and specifically Jewish meanings of certain other Yiddish words with German roots.2 For another group of scholars, the Romance items (except for given names) should mainly be seen as loanwords in Yiddish.3 Sainéan (:) postulates that some French words have been borrowed by Judeo-Alsatian and from it spread to other dialects of Yiddish. Bin-Nun tentatively links a few Yiddish words of Romance origin to Church Latin from which Jews would have taken them in Germany (BN –). Katz (:) writes that the few words there are of Romance origin 2 See WG :, :–, :–, :–. See TS passim, with synthesis on pp.–. The first list of (Western) Yiddish words that are neither of German nor of Hebrew origin was compiled by Zunz (:–). The author’s assignment of these words to various individual languages (French, Italian, Greek, Polish, and Dutch) shows that he was thinking rather about borrowings. 1 3
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Romance elements
are attested late and may well have been borrowed by Yiddish “horizontally,” for example, by contact with Jews in Romance-speaking lands, or in some cases by German dialectal mediation, in either case long after the birth of Yiddish. Katz agrees with earlier Yiddish linguist Nokhem Shtif, who in wrote that “not even a microscope would help find the alleged French connection in Old Yiddish.” King (:, :) stresses that there is no Romance component (or LOEZ determinant) in Yiddish; just a few words are present and nothing structural. Note that Bin-Nun and Katz approach this problem rather superficially, without studying the question in depth. For the scholarly interests of these linguists, the Romance elements in Yiddish were marginal. The same is globally true for King who addressed in detail only the question of the origin of the Yiddish plural suffix -s. The situation with Wexler is different. In his book of , he suggests a detailed critical analysis of almost all Romance elements in Yiddish from the list collected by Weinreich. He generally accepts the possibility of an Italian origin that was proposed by Weinreich for a few words, but rejects all his etymologies linking Yiddish to (Judeo-)French. Globally speaking, his study as a whole is aimed at showing that a “Judeo-French substratum is a fiction” (p.). Declining also any possibility of early links with (Vulgar) Latin, Wexler tries to show the possibilities of (northern) Italian, RhaetoRomance, Dalmatian, Istriot, or even Romanian origins. It may be observed that for a number of scholars, the way they address the Romance elements in Yiddish is directly related to their general theoretical concepts concerning the origins of Yiddish. For Weinreich, the question of the LOEZ component, and especially the Judeo-French connection, is of extreme importance. Since for the German component of Yiddish no link with the dialects spoken by Germans of the Rhine area can be established, the hypothetical LOEZ component represents the only linguistic argument he suggests to corroborate his idea that the Rhineland is the geographic cradle for Yiddish. Timm stresses the importance of the tradition of biblical translations for the development of the specifically Jewish semantic, lexical, and morphological elements in Yiddish. In this context, the fact that some of the items related to this tradition go back to medieval Rhenish communities and from them to northern France is also of paramount importance. Wexler (, passim) considers Yiddish to result from the relexification of elements of originally Slavic origin, and therefore, he traces its birth to Central and Eastern Europe. To support this general—extremely controversial—point of view, he needs to search for the origins of Romanisms as close to Slavic lands as possible. Here the choice of the Balkans appears quite naturally. Katz, King, and Eggers are all proponents of the theory about the Danubian (and not Rhenish) origins of Yiddish. For their approaches to be valid, exactly as the approach by Wexler, any link with France should be dismissed. As a result, it is no surprise that they minimize the importance of the existence of unique Romanisms in Yiddish, considering them to result from late borrowings and/or to be related to northern Italian/ Balkan Romance languages rather than to (Old) French.4 A number of linguists quite naturally relate the question of the origins of Yiddish to that of the roots of Ashkenazic Jews. For example, this is the case for Weinreich, King, and Wexler. Indeed, the provenance of various idiosyncrasies of this language (including its unique Romance elements) may in principle reveal the areas from which the ancestors of modern Ashkenazic Jews came to the German-speaking and Slavic-speaking provinces.
4 In this connection, one may note, for example, a totally different attitude by Eggers to studies written by Wexler about the Slavic and Romance elements in Yiddish. For the former, Eggers (:–) discusses in detail Wexler’s ideas about a putative Sorbian origins and shows—quite convincingly—that for the earliest Slavic elements in Yiddish the Old Czech origin represents a much more plausible source, while some other items (also seen by Wexler as Sorbian) are more likely to be due to the influence of the Polish, Ukrainian, or Belarusian languages. Yet, Eggers (:–) accepts the results of the analysis by Wexler of the Romance elements in Yiddish without making a single critical remark. Actually, Wexler’s arguments are untenable in both contexts.
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Links between Ashkenazic and ZARFATIC Jews
The aim of the present chapter consists in shedding more light on the controversial question of the origins of Romance elements in Yiddish. To elucidate this, the whole problem is addressed by trying to establish the most plausible answers to the following aspects of this question: () To what layer of Yiddish do these elements belong, and are they substratal (that is, inherited) or adstratal (that is, borrowed horizontally)? () To what particular donor languages are they due? () At what period did the adoption into Yiddish take place? These questions have significant nuances. For example, for the first and third ones the answer, in principle, may be not the same for WY and EY, the two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish. The discussion of the second question may deal with tongues spoken by the Gentile majority as well as with the specifically Jewish elements found in vernacular idioms used by Jews. In the latter case, one should have in mind that Romance-speaking Jews could be responsible for the presence in Yiddish of items that are not only Romance but also Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, or Greek. Section . discusses the information in our possession about the links between medieval German and French Jews. Section . explores the domain of onomastics showing the Romance contribution to the Ashkenazic corpus of given names and toponyms. Section . provides a detailed discussion of unique Romance words that are or were present in the vernacular language(s) of Ashkenazic Jews. Section . shows that no suffix in Yiddish is due to Romance-speaking Jews.
.
LINKS BETWEEN ASHKENAZIC AND ZARFATIC JEWS
.. Oral tradition and theory by Güdemann Neither historical evidence nor direct testimonies are known that could corroborate the existence of medieval migrations of Jews from Germany (Jewish ASHKENAZ), and, more specifically, from the Rhineland (called *LOTHER in the Jewish literature of that time) to northern France (ZARFAT). No direct sources are available either that testify to the existence of mass migrations in the opposite direction. In Jewish documents from western Germany, we find only sporadic references to immigrants from ZARFAT. However, they deal with individual cases and date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries only,5 that is, they correspond to “horizontal” links between the two cultural areas. Indirect testimonies date only from the first half of the sixteenth century. Jewish convert to Christianity Anton Margaritha (born circa as the son of the rabbi of Regensburg Jacob Margolis) states in his book first published in that German Jews use a large number of French words brought by their ancestors with them from France to the Rhineland (Margaritha :). The opinion of his contemporary Elia Levita is similar. In Tish he states that Ashkenazic Jews retain numerous words due to their ancestors who came from France.6 We will return to the linguistic aspects of these statements later. At this stage, it is important to stress that here we are dealing with an oral tradition that provides little knowledge about actual historical truth. Of course, it can serve as an additional, weak, support for stronger arguments from other domains (if any). For example, it is worth noting that no other “genetic” link is found in works of Ashkenazic authors: no story about putative comings of ancestors from Italy, Spain, the Balkans, or the Middle East.7 Still, in principle, See Salfeld :–. This statement appears in the entry ( קרובץsee the discussion in WG :, :). 7 The well-known legend about Meshullam ben Kalonymos coming from the Italian town of Lucca to the Rhineland, most likely during the tenth century, corresponds to only one family of “Kalonymides” (though an extremely influential one in the spiritual life of medieval German Jewry). Weinreich discusses this story and draws 5 6
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Romance elements
this tradition may correspond to a kind of legend of rather late origin. Note also that no discussion of the French roots of Ashkenazic Jews appears in rabbinical sources from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. The existence of a strong genetic link between Jews from western Germany and their coreligionists in ZARFAT was suggested by Güdemann (:–). This author proposed a theory about French being the vernacular language of Rhenish Jews before the fourteenth century. His hypothesis had a major influence: even in our day it is usual to read about this idea as if it were factual. However, a critical consideration of arguments advanced by Güdemann shows that a large part of them are inadequate. Firstly, he pays attention to the existence of numerous French glosses and a few sentences in writings of German religious scholars of the period in question. Actually, this fact can be directly related to the high esteem that Ashkenazic Jews had for the works by the representatives of the French Tosafist school. It is clear that for these internally Jewish reasons, as well as, perhaps, for some factors external to the Jewish community also, for the representatives of the cultural elite of Rhenish Jewry French was considered the language of prestige, the most appropriate idiom—after Hebrew—to discuss religious matters among themselves and with scholars from ZARFAT. Note that French glosses (along with German and Old Czech ones) also appear in Or zarua, the major work by Isaac ben Moses, a Bohemian scholar from the thirteenth century who in a similar way to some of his German coreligionists spent a part of his life studying in ZARFAT.8 Secondly, Güdemann points to the Ashkenazic spelling tradition of using the final alef for the zero sound (silent alef).9 He considers this phenomenon to be directly related to the loss of the phonetic value of the final -e in French. In principle, the last idea may at least be partly true. Indeed, the phenomenon of silent alef (especially in the position after a consonant) is unknown in Jewish communities outside of ASHKENAZ and ZARFAT. In French, weak articulation or even the dropping of the final -e has been known since the twelfth century (Fouché :). This chronology is well correlated with the fact that in both ZARFAT and ASHKENAZ the earliest examples of silent alef appear first during the thirteenth century.10 However, it clearly demonstrates that here we are dealing with a “horizontal” influence: it sheds no light at all on the controversial question about the genetic link between Jews from ZARFAT and ASHKENAZ. As noted by Weinreich (:), this influence is purely cultural: we are just dealing with (partly conventional) spelling rules. In no case can it be taken as evidence of French being the vernacular language of Rhenish Jewry. Finally, Güdemann presents a list of German glosses with the plural suffix -s found in works by Ashkenazic scholars. He considers this suffix to be of French origin and, therefore, a strong argument in favor of his general theory. This fact is indeed important and deserves a more detailed discussion: it will be addressed in section ..11
attention to the existence of a second legend—appearing in writings of the sixteenth-century Polish rabbi Solomon Luria—this time about the origin from the town of Le Mans (northern France) of the forefather of another branch of Ashkenazic scholars (WG :–). 8 See Jakobson-Halle :. 9 Certain references cited by Güdemann (:) in this context are inadequate. For example, this is the case for toponyms ‘ ָאְכאAachen’ and ‘ ַב ְד אBaden.’ Indeed, in medieval Christian sources we find the same places called O(e)che/Auche and Padae, respectively (Oesterley :, ), and therefore, here the final alef can actually correspond to a reduced vowel and not necessarily to the zero sound. 10 The most detailed linguistic analysis of the phenomenon of silent alef appears in TG – where the author discusses the chronology of corresponding references (including the absence of silent alef in Rashi’s glosses) and shows that if during the first stage the spelling used by German Jews could indeed be influenced by that of their coreligionists from northern France, during the next stages the development of this graphic feature is likely to be due to specifically German phonological peculiarities. On the presence of silent alef in early Ashkenazic texts see the discussion of the feature {G} in section .. 11 Güdemann suggests also another morphological argument: the presence of the French ending added to the German root. The incorrectness of his interpretation here was clearly demonstrated by Perles (:).
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Links between Ashkenazic and ZARFATIC Jews
To refute the theory by Güdemann, one can suggest several arguments that show that actually German and not French was the main everyday language of medieval Rhenish Jews. In the same rabbinical writings in which we find the French glosses, numerous German glosses are found as well. Güdemann himself mentions this fact for Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz (–) and Eleazar Rokeach of Worms (circa –). Güdemann writes that German Jews necessarily knew German because they needed this language for contacts with their Gentile neighbors. As ironically pointed out by Weinreich (:), the German glosses in question were certainly not intended for contacts with Christians. Their clear aim was a better understanding of Hebrew terms by German Jews. The text by Asher ben Jacob ha-Levi (Cologne area) compiled in explicitly labels German glosses as corresponding to “our language” (Timm :). Note that the same text also includes a large number of French glosses too. A similar interpretation allows one to explain the presence of the German glosses in the commentary by Rashi (–).12 They point to German being the native language of (at least some) Jews: Rashi learned these words either during his studies in the Rhineland or from his own pupils who came from Germany. For his time, that is, the second half of the eleventh century, onomastic materials also speak in favor of German being the vernacular language of many Rhenish Jews. The list of martyrs of the First Crusade () includes numerous female given names of German origin.13 One of them, Gute ()גוטא, was even one of the most frequently used (Beider :). Among other examples are: Brune ()ברונא, G(e)nanne ()גננא, Golde ()גולדא, Guthelde ()גוטהלדא, Hazeche ()הצכה, Mine ()מינא, and Richenze ()ריכנצא. A hypothetical situation in which Jews borrow given names from their Gentile neighbors, often with a pleasant semantics that can be perceived immediately—such as ‘good’ for Gute, ‘gold(en)’ for Golde, ‘love’ for Mine—but continue to use among themselves a language different from that spoken by Gentiles is inconceivable. In the history of various Jewish cultures in Europe (including Ashkenazic Jews), given names belong to one of the most conservative cultural layers in Jewish culture. As a result, a situation opposed to that described above is common: a community can speak the vernacular language of the Gentile majority, but the corpus of its given names continues to be distinctly different from that of the Gentile neighbors. The consideration of the phonetic features of certain given names also point to the fact that Jews from northern France and the Rhineland did not speak the same vernacular language.14
.. Cultural links The fact that during the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE French and German Jews spoke different languages in their everyday life did not prevent them from having close cultural links. In 12 Timm () suggests strong arguments showing the authenticity of these glosses: they were not introduced by Ashkenazic scribes several centuries after Rashi. 13 The absence of male examples is directly related to the fact that in Jewish sources men were traditionally called by their religious names (shemot ha-qodesh). This category encompasses almost exclusively those based on Hebrew or Aramaic. In everyday life, the same individuals could be called by other, vernacular names (kinnuim). All German names fall into this category. Traditionally, even in everyday life, men used biblical names more commonly than women. 14 One of the examples is *Doltse ()דולצא, common at least since the end of the eleventh century. It is related to Latin dulcis ‘sweet,’ Old French dolce. In this context, French /l/ shifted to /u/ during the twelfth century and it is no surprise to find in ZARFAT, in sources posterior to that shift, references to Jewish women called Doucine, Doucin, Duzelina, and Douceron, that is, with /u/ instead of former /l/. As a result, we see here that the shift in question affected communities in ZARFAT and had no influence on Rhenish Jews, who therefore were linguistically independent of them. Similarly, *Madrone ( )מדרונאwas used in the Rhineland until the mid-fourteenth century. In ZARFAT, there is a reference from . However, variants of this name known in ZARFAT as from the thirteenth century (Maronne, Marona, Meron) have no /d/, in good correlation with the disappearance of this consonant in the word meaning ‘mother’ in French (compare Old French madre, medre, modern mère).
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Romance elements
many respects, the religious rites in these two neighboring areas were similar.15 As pointed out by Weinreich (WG :), it would be inappropriate to say—as did some scholars during the nineteenth century—that the Torah scholarship was brought to ASHKENAZ from ZARFAT. This opinion is likely to be directly related to the fame of the French Tosafist school founded by Rashi and his grandsons Rashbam and Rabbenu Tam that eclipsed the Ashkenazic scholars of their period. Actually, according to a number of major features, the religious teachings in both ZARFAT and ASHKENAZ had their origin in the school founded at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries by Rabbenu Gershom “the Light of the Exile,” a rabbi in LOTHER (born in Metz, he lived a large part of his life in Mainz). Rashi studied in Worms and Mainz where his teachers were pupils of Rabbenu Gershom. During that period, in both ZARFAT and LOTHER Jewish communities were already well established. Consequently, in this domain we cannot speak about any “vertical” cultural heritage from ZARFAT to LOTHER/ASHKENAZ: the links rather were “horizontal.” The best experts in paleography agree that Jews in ZARFAT and western Germany used the same type of script. Later, this script became standard for all Ashkenazic communities in various parts of Europe. In the Middle Ages, it was different from the types of script appearing in southern France, on the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy.16 The analysis of the paleographic sources does not provide, however, any piece of information that would allow us to establish the direction of propagation of the script in question: from ZARFAT to LOTHER, from LOTHER to ZARFAT, or from some third region to both ZARFAT and LOTHER. A number of shared idiosyncrasies that characterize the orthography used in western Germany and ZARFAT give additional evidence concerning cultural links.17 One of them, namely the silent alef, was already discussed in the previous section. The second particularity concerns the grapheme used to express the sound [s] when transcribing words of local vernacular languages. In both areas, shin ()ש rather than samekh ( )סwas used for this purpose. Yet, in southern France,18 Italy,19 Spain,20 and Bohemia, samekh was used regularly.21 Note, however, that in both ZARFAT and the area of BNEY HES, the sound [š] was originally absent in the languages spoken by the Gentile majority. Indeed, in French, [š] is found only since the thirteenth century (Fouché :). In German dialects, this sound also appeared only in the Middle Ages when Jewish communities were already in existence. Both belonged to the so-called “Palestinian” group of medieval Jewish communities (Goldschmidt :). See details in Beit-Arié : and Birnbaum .:, , :. 17 The information on the spelling of French words by authors from ZARFAT is taken from Darmesteter and Blondheim (commentary on the Talmud by Rashi, Champagne, eleventh century), Lambert and Brandin :V–VIII (northeastern France, thirteenth century), Banitt .:– (Champagne, first half of the thirteenth century), Kiwitt (Champagne, circa ), and Banitt .: (Normandy or England, turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). 18 The information on the spelling in southern France is taken in this section from Kimhi (a dictionary of the Hebrew language compiled during the first third of the thirteenth century), Gross (with the list of medieval toponyms), Aslanov :– (a dictionary from the beginning of the fourteenth century), and Neubauer-Meyer (a poem from the fourteenth century). The first two of these sources include numerous cases of the use of samekh (see, for example, pp. , , , and for the first one and pp. , , , , and for the second). The latter source has only shin and no samekh. Here the difference may be related to the age of the documents. Probably, in the fourteenth century new spelling rules without use of samekh had been established. In principle, the absence of samekh in this poem could be also due to the individual choice of the person who wrote the copy available to us. 19 For Italy, the information in this section is taken from: Cassuto (an elegy from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries), Loew (glosses in a rabbinical work compiled circa ), and Sermoneta (a philosophical glossary from the second half of the thirteenth century). 20 Numerous occurrences of samekh appear in a poem compiled in Spain in the fifteenth century (Lazar :–). Its pronunciation may correspond to an affricate like [ts] while [s] is mainly expressed via shin (see also Minervini :). 21 See phonological details in section .. and the discussion of the graphic feature {G} in section .. In ZARFAT (for example, in glosses given in the commentary by Rashi), samekh was used only sporadically. 15 16
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Links between Ashkenazic and ZARFATIC Jews
As a result, in principle, the non-use of samekh could result in both ZARFAT and ASHKENAZ from independent developments.22 However, the possibility of coincidence here is unlikely. Note that Jews from both southern France and the Iberian Peninsula used samekh (though not necessarily for [s]). Consequently the graphic convention of not using samekh seems to be related to the influence of Jews from ZARFAT on BNEY HES or vice versa. The information available does not allow us to decide the exact direction of this influence and its chronology, and consequently to see whether it was “horizontal” or “vertical.”23 A number of other spelling idiosyncrasies do not represent features that characterize ZARFAT and ASHKENAZ only. To this category actually belong all the examples suggested by Weinreich (:) to complement Güdemann’s example of silent alef, namely: the same sign yod ( )יfor both /i/ and /e/; the same sign vav ( )וfor both /u/ and /o/; the introduction of initial alef before yod or vav if the word starts with one of these vowels. Surely Weinreich was right to say that these features characterize the spelling in both ZARFAT and LOTHER. However, they also hold true for Jews from medieval Bohemia, southern France, and Italy. Some other graphic features are not even general in western German-speaking provinces.24
.. Pronunciation of Hebrew Numerous rules for Hebrew pronunciation were common to Ashkenazic BNEY HES and Jews from medieval ZARFAT. In both areas (as well as in Sephardic communities and those from medieval Italy), shin was pronounced [s]. Yet, Ashkenazic BNEY KHES, Jews from the Czech lands (CANAANITES), and, maybe, those from southern France pronounced it as [š].25 In both areas (as well as in communities from Christian Spain and southern France), the letter heth was pronounced as the aspirate /h/. It contrasted with the velar /x/-pronunciation by Ashkenazic BNEY KHES and Jews from the Czech lands.26 The affricate pronunciation of yod with dagesh characterizes not only ZARFATIC Jews and BNEY HES but also BNEY KHES and Jews from Italy and southern France. It originally started in France and/or Italy and never reached Sephardic and CANAANIC Jews.27 Many more specific shared features correspond to: () E-EFFECT, that is, the pronunciation of certain (ḥ aṭef-)pataḥ or qameṣ , when adjacent to heth (or ayin) as some sort of front mid-vowel, [e] or [ε], with earliest references dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; () confusion between unstressed ḥ aṭef-pataḥ and shewa; () elision of mobile shewa; () placement of the stress on the penultimate syllable (valid, at least, during the thirteenth century).
22 Both these areas remain apart from Bohemia where shin and samekh were distinguished in correlation with the existence of both [š] and [s] in Old Czech. 23 Taking into account the fact that a rare use of samekh is already known for Rashi, the possibility of the “vertical” link of ZARFAT on ASHKENAZ appears quite plausible. 24 For example, the use of the double vav ( )װfor [v] can be sporadically observed not only in certain Ashkenazic (TG –) and ZARFATIC sources but in Italy too (compare, for example, Sermoneta :, ). Birnbaum (:–) also found sporadic examples of the use of this digraph in numerous other Jewish cultures. The spelling of pronouns, articles, and prepositions together with a word they precede or (rarely) follow, without any space between them, is found in several Ashkenazic manuscripts from the fifteenth century (see the feature {G} in section .). This convention is not observed in other Ashkenazic documents of the same period, those that seem to be compiled in more northern localities on the Rhine. Typical of ZARFAT, it is also found in medieval southern Italy (compare Cassuto :). 25 See the discussion of the feature {c} in section ... 26 See the discussion of the feature {c} in section ... 27 See the discussion of the feature {c} in section ...
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Romance elements
For the first two among these phonetic phenomena, we do not find any reference in other medieval Jewish communities in Europe.28 For the last two phenomena, references in the Middle Ages are known not only for Ashkenazic BNEY HES and Jews from ZARFAT, but also for Ashkenazic BNEY KHES.29 TIBERIAN Hebrew diacritical signs for vowels deserve a separate discussion. In both France and Germany—as well as in Greek, Italian, Sephardic, and most likely Czech Jewish communities, too— no contrast existed originally between the pronunciations in Hebrew words of the elements within the following two pairs: segol and ṣ ere, qameṣ and pataḥ . In other words, all these Jews followed the principles of PALESTINIAN (and not TIBERIAN) Hebrew. Yet, in certain manuscripts from ZARFAT dating from the thirteenth century, we find a distinction between qameṣ and pataḥ , and sometimes (in a document from eastern ZARFAT) between segol and ṣ ere also.30 We do not find this kind of distribution in early German glosses: the association of MHG ê with ṣ ere and MHG ë, ae, and ä with segol appears later. However, we know it was most likely during the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries that the pronunciation of Hebrew by Ashkenazic Jews (both BNEY HES and BNEY KHES) gradually changed from the system with five vowels to that with seven vowels. In the new system, pataḥ , qameṣ , ṣ ere, and segol became mainly associated with the same qualities as in TIBERIAN Hebrew, that is, /a/, /ɔ/, /e/, and /ε/, respectively. Note that this distribution is quite similar to that found in eastern ZARFAT, that is, in the immediate vicinity of the Rhineland. Under these conditions, the possibility of two parallel independent developments is impossible. Since the use of segol for a mid-vowel more open that that expressed by ṣ ere is apparent in eastern ZARFATIC sources earlier than in the Ashkenazic ones, we face here a (partial) influence that ZARFAT exerted on ASHKENAZ. The discussion of close historical and cultural links that existed in the Middle Ages between Jews from northern France and western Germany in the preceding sections of this chapter shows that we do not have in our possession any unambiguous information that could testify to the fact that Jewish communities in one of these regions inherit from those from another region. In certain cases, the links in question were clearly “horizontal” and corresponded to the borrowing of a particular cultural feature between already established communities. In identifiable situations, all dating from the end of the eleventh century onward, the features in question had their origin in ZARFAT. In other instances, the available information does not allow us to clarify the exact nature of the existing relationships and/or the direction of influences.
.
ROMANCE ONOMASTIC ITEMS
.. Given names A large number of Ashkenazic elements of Romance origin belong to the domain of onomastics. The first group involves given names. Their earliest representative lists deal with the victims of the First Crusade (). For women, they are quite eloquent. About twenty percent of persons bear names of Romance origin: almost twice the number of bearers of Germanic names (Beider :). Note that these Romance names were unknown among German Christians or, at least, unusual among them. This list includes the following common names: *Bele ()בילא, *Belet ()בילט, *Bonefilie ()בונפיליא, *Bone/Bune ()בונא, *Doltse ()דולצא, *Madrone ()מדרונא, and *Džentil ()יינטיל. See details in sections .. and . (feature {u}), respectively. See details in sections . (feature {u}) and .. (feature {v}), respectively. 30 See details concerning these vowels in sections . (for ZARFAT and other non-Ashkenazic communities) and .. (for Ashkenazic Jews). 28 29
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Romance onomastic items
As noted in section .., given names belong to one of the most conservative layers of Jewish linguistic culture. The proportion of Romance names at the end of the eleventh century is so high that we can be sure we are not dealing with appellations recently brought by immigrants from other countries: they correspond to the Romance substratum of the corpus of names in the Rhineland. It is difficult to establish firmly the exact linguistic provenance of this substratum. One can still note that all these names were also common in medieval France, both northern and southern. *Belet(te),31 with typically French diminutive suffix, and *Madrone are unknown as Jewish names outside of France and Germany. The other five names (or their variants) are also known in Spain and/or Italy. For *Doltse, the French origin appears to be more plausible than the Italian one. The latter is unlikely because in the case of the provenance from Italy we would expect the presence of the affricate /tš/ instead of /ts/.32 The French origin is also plausible for *Džentil, derived from an adjective meaning ‘noble’: in the Rhineland, this name had no final vowel.33 We find equivalent forms—such as Gentil and ינטיל/aיינטילa—in northern France and England (whose Jewish community represents an outgrowth of Jews from northern France), while Italian sources mention Gentile (Cassuto :).34 The corpus of male given names provides a smaller number of examples of non-Hebrew names (including the Romance ones).35 Among rare exceptions are Senior ( )שניאורand Vives (related to the Latin adjective vivus ‘living’ or vivax ‘long-lived’).36 In the Rhineland, both are already known in the eleventh century. Their variants appear among Jews in both northern and southern France as well as in Spain, while no references are known for Italy. Note that the exact form of the second of these 31 The Hebrew spelling בילטfound in the Rhineland ends in a consonant, while in French Christian sources this name always ends in a vowel; compare Belete, Bellette, Belleta, Beluta, Bellota, etc. Yet, the only known Hebrew reference to the same name in medieval France (Orléans, eleventh century) uses exactly the same spelling as the one known in the Rhineland, the one ending in /t/. In ZARFAT, we also find another name with the same diminutive suffix whose spelling ends in /t/, namely *( יואטJuette; forms with a final vowel—such as יואטאand —יואטהdo also appear in Jewish sources). 32 This argument was suggested in WG :–, :. It does not appear to be strong. Indeed, it is based on the noncorroborated premise that Jews came to the Rhineland from Italy and/or France not before the eighth or ninth centuries. Actually, in theory Jews could have lived in Germany without interruption from (at least) the fourth century and therefore the name could have been introduced from Italy before the Latin c became the affricate /tš/ when preceding a front vowel. Moreover, even a name having this affricate could have undergone adaptation to the local phonetic system in which this particular sound was unknown and for that reason end up as /ts/. See footnote concerning the link between this given name and Old French. 33 The German phenomenon of apocope cannot be responsible for this. Following its chronology (see the discussion of the feature {U} in section .), it is irrelevant for the end of the eleventh century. On the other hand, in Old French, no final vowel was given in the feminine forms of adjectives derived from forms whose Latin ancestor had final -is in the nominative case (of which gentilis is an example). The final -e was introduced for these adjectives only in Middle French by analogy to forms whose Latin ancestor ended in -a (Bourciez :). This rule does not apply to the French adjective douce (fem.) derived from Latin dulcis ‘sweet.’ Here the final -e was present already in the Old French dolce, the source of the Jewish given name *Doltse (see detailed explanation in Bourciez :). 34 Weinreich (WG :–, :) suggests the Italian origin of this Ashkenazic name. The Hebrew spelling with the initial double yod in the Rhineland () implies that this name was likely pronounced by Jews at that time with the initial [dž]. This affricate is compatible not only with northern Italian (as suggested by Weinreich) but with the French origin, too. In northern France, Latin initial G before /e/ or /i/ already gave the sound [dž] in the Early GalloRomance (or even Late Latin) period (Pope :). Since no such affricate exists in German, it could naturally turn into the closest sound that existed in the German consonantal chart, namely [j]. The southern Italian origin of the Yiddish Yentl, with initial [j] being the original sound, suggested in Aslanov a:– contradicts the medieval spellings of this name that imply [dž]. 35 See footnote (section ..). 36 In medieval German-speaking provinces, the (stressed) vowel in the first syllable of the name derived from Vives/Vivus underwent diphthongization (compare StY Fayvush derived from it). This fact implies that this vowel was long and pronounced by German Jews exactly as MHG î. Note that such pronunciation characterizes various MHG borrowings from Latin words having the same root and/or similar phonetic context; compare MHG vîte ‘life’ (Latin vita) and f îvel ‘vives’ (Latin vivolæ).
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Romance elements
names common in medieval Germany, France, England, and the Kingdom of Aragon was the same: Vives, with penultimate /e/, while Vivis, Vivus, and Vivas appear only sporadically. Both names were not invented by Jews. Numerous references to the Christian bearers of both of them appear in sources compiled before the twelfth century in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Senior together with its various hypocoristic forms is known among Christians of southern France.37 All these factors taken together make the following scenario the most logically plausible: both names came from southern France to ZARFAT,38 and from there to the Rhineland. Similar arguments are also valid for the female name *Bonefilie mentioned in the previous paragraph: its equivalent Bonafilia was found in ZARFAT, common in southern France and Catalonia and no reference to it is known in Italy.39 Sources from Germany dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries mention additional names of Romance origin. Among them, one can distinguish those whose French origin is beyond doubt: Belle Assez, Bonami, Bonefant, Bonnevie, Joie, Juif, and Vivant. All these names belong to individuals that could be either recent immigrants from ZARFAT or their direct descendants. None of them survived among Ashkenazic Jews during the following centuries.40 Yet Gente—from Old French ‘noble, beautiful’—common since the end of the thirteenth century (pronounced [džentə]/ [jentə]) remained within the Ashkenazic corpus until modern times.41 *Tsaret ()צריט, derived from biblical Sara, but including a French hypocoristic suffix, has been commonly used by Ashkenazic women since the thirteenth century. *Reine (‘ )ריינאqueen’ (whose earliest references in Germany date from the fourteenth century) could have originated in (northern or southern) France or Spain: in all these regions we find medieval references. However, it cannot be from Italy where the form Regina dominated. The presence of the form Reinette (with a French hypocoristic suffix) and the proximity of France in comparison to Spain make the French origin more plausible than the Spanish one. For *Rike ()ריקא, with references in the Rhineland from the thirteenth century, southern France represents the most plausible source.42 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we also find the earliest references to male names Bendit and Bonnom/Bunom. It is quite possible that they actually were also common during the previous period. As numerous other male KINNUIM they could be absent from earlier Jewish sources that mentioned almost exclusively SHEMOT HA-QODESH. The probability of this is high because throughout the following centuries these names are common. For both of them, the Italian origin is unlikely because of the absence of the final vowel; compare Italian equivalents Benedetto and Bonnome, respectively. Bendit, common in medieval France and Spain, most likely See Becker :, – (Spain) and Morlet : (France). The use in France of Gallicized forms of several names also testifies to the fact of the former existence of these names there. For example, Vivant (and not Vives) was the most common variant known in northern France during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (from earlier times no documents are available). See also examples given in footnote (section ..). 39 Numerous Christians named Bonafilia are known in medieval Spain (Becker :) and several bearers of it are also known in France during the tenth and eleventh centuries (Morlet :). 40 The female name *Gracia ( )גרסייאalso corresponds to only a few individuals. Two of its bearers are mentioned in Mainz in . Note the presence of a samekh that—as discussed in section ..—was specific neither to Ashkenazic nor to ZARFATIC Jews. Variants of this name are known in medieval southern France and Spain. 41 At the initial stage, it could be seen as a variant of *Džentil (the source for Yiddish Yentl) that has the same root. Later, Yiddish Yente was hypercorrectly reinterpreted as a “full” form of Yentl since the final consonant in the latter form was taken for a diminutive suffix. The idea by Weinreich (WG :–) about the hypercorrect origin of the form spelled in Christian sources of the thirteenth century as Gente is anachronistic. At that period in the region in question Jews were not using -(e)l as a diminutive suffix yet. Note that the form Gente/Genta already appears in sources from England and southern France. 42 Compare Occitan and Spanish rica, Italian ricca, and French riche. For Jews, the forms Rica, Riqua, Rika existed in medieval southern France, while ריקאappears in a Hebrew document from England in the thirteenth century (Seror :). 37 38
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Romance onomastic items
initially appeared in southern France; compare the Old Occitan verb ben(e)dir ‘to bless.’ Later, it was brought to ZARFAT (from where it came to Germany) and Spain. For Bonnom, references exist in southern France and Catalonia. It was in the former area that they were particularly common: most likely from there this name was brought to Germany.43 Note that this route is similar to that proposed earlier for Senior and Vives. Several other Romance names were unknown or quite rare in Germany but found in both parts of France and northern Spain.44 Such geography makes their initial development in southern France plausible before they spread out to ZARFAT and the Iberian Peninsula.45 A comparison of the medieval lists of common given names used in various West European countries shows a small correlation between Rhenish Jews and their coreligionists in southern France and Italy. For southern France, the list encompasses the following Romance forms with no equivalent among Ashkenazic Jews: male Astruc, Cresques/Crescas, Fosset, and Salvat/Salves, female Astruga, Blanca/Blanche, Fina, Mandina, and Serena.46 In Italy (and more precisely in Florence), one finds male Angelo, Bonaiuto, Consiglio, Grassino, female Colomba, Diamante, Gemma, Laura, and Stella, all unknown in Germany. Note also that a number of biblical names commonly used in Italy—such as Emmanuel, Ishmael, and Joab47—are either unknown or exclusively rare in Germany. Unfortunately, the lists available for northern France are not sufficiently representative to allow a similar kind of comparison. 43 In later times, it gave rise to StY Bunem. Wexler (:–) rejects the possibility of the provenance of this name from France on the basis of its root’s vowel /u/ contrasting to /o/ in French. The raising /o/ > /u/ before a nasal consonant is known in several other Romance languages (Italian and Rhaeto-Romance), which Wexler considers to be more plausible sources. However, his argument (which can be applicable to Occitan exactly in the same way as to French) is incorrect. The earliest reference to this name in Germany is ( בֹונֹוםLower Franconia, ), that is, with /o/. In Latin-character sources from the Rhineland from the fourteenth and fifteenth century, we find forms with /o/ along with those with /u/. This is true not only for the male name in question but also for the female Bone/Bune, related to the same Latin root bon(us) ‘good.’ Actually, the shift /o/ > /u/ before /n/, /m/, and /r/ is well known in medieval WCG dialects (MV ); compare also the medieval spelling variants Buonna and Pung for the name of the town of Bonn and Bunnengav for the neighboring town of Bonngau (Oesterley :–); note also the existence of the Jewish surname Zunz (known in Frankfurt from the end of the fifteenth century), which is derived from the Rhenish town of Zons (Menk :). This shift (and not the putative anachronistic Romance /u/) provides an accurate explanation of the root /o/ present in StY given names Bunem and Bune. 44 Among the examples are: female Comtesse/Comtessa ‘countess’ and male Cressent/Crescas, both from the root meaning ‘to grow,’ Deulesalt/Dieulosal/Deuslossal ‘God save him.’ Man(a)ser, an unusual form of biblical Manasseh, was also found in all these areas. 45 A complementary illustration about the influence of Jews from southern France on their coreligionists in ZARFAT can be found if one considers numerous given names starting with Bon- ‘good.’ In the medieval South (including not only Provence and Languedoc but also Catalonia and Aragon), this pattern was particularly common; compare Bona Dona, Bonafe, Bonafos, Bonanat, Bonastrug(a), Bonavida, Bondavid, Bone(n)fant, Bonisac, Bonjuda/Bonjuzas, Bonmacip, Bonsenior, and many others. In northern France and/or England, we find only a few examples such as: Bon Ami, Bonenfant, Bonnefoi/Bonefei, Bonjuif, and Bonne Vie (the last three are equivalents to southern Bonafe, Bonjuzas, and Bonavida, respectively). A number of other given names are found only in southern France and northern France (or England): female Precieuse/Preciosa ‘precious’, Pulcelle/Pulcella ‘maiden’, male Delacresse/Dieu lo cresca(s) ‘May God grow him’, Ursel/Orsel, from the root meaning ‘bear.’ Though the exact region of their origin is uncertain, their existence provides an additional corroboration about the links that existed in the Middle Ages between Jews from southern France and ZARFAT. This information refutes the idea by Schwarzfuchs (:–) about the absence of such links before at least the thirteenth century. In rare cases, we also find in documents from fourteenth-century southern France forms with phonological peculiarities that reveal their northern origin. Female examples: Chastellana and Chera; compare Occitan castelana ‘lady of the manor’ and cara ‘dear’, respectively. 46 See Seror :XI–XIII. Among other examples are Bon, Bonafos, Bonfils, (Bon)macip, Bonsenior, Comprat, and Profait. Vital was the commonest name in southern France. For it, we find only one medieval reference in Germany (). The etymology of StY Faytl (often believed to be of Romance origin) is uncertain. Known only in Central and Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century, it could be due to the borrowing from German Christians (compare German Veit, derived from Latin Vitus). 47 Names from medieval Florence are taken from Cassuto :–.
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Romance elements
The group of traditional EY names with Romance roots still used at the beginning of the twentieth century includes StY Beyle []בילא, Bune []בונא, Reyne []ריינא, Rike []ריקא, Toltse []דולצא, Tsertle []צריט, and Yentl [יינטיל, Gentil] (all female)48 and Bendit, Bunem [Bonnom, Bunom], Fayvush/Faybush [Vives], and Shneyer [Senior, ( ]שניאורall male). For all these names, we know of old references to their early forms in Western Europe. The corresponding aforementioned medieval forms are given in brackets. Several names of ultimately Greek origin used by Ashkenazic Jews seem to have been introduced into western Germany by Jewish migrants from Romance countries. Among them are: Alexander/ Alexandri, Kalonymos, Parigoros, and Tod(o)ros, all unknown in northern France. The second of them was common in the Rhineland as early as the eleventh century and its introduction from northern Italy is a part of the well-known legend.49 Two others could, in principle, have originated from the same country directly or through the intermediary of southern France where these names were also known. In StY, the names of ultimately Greek origin are Aleksander/Sender, Kalmen ( pleine ‘full’ (fem.), vēne > veine ‘vein,’ and Rēmis > (town of) Reims (Bourciez :). The idea about the French provenance of [ej] in the old Ashkenazic name for the Rhine River is due to MRPC.
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Romance onomastic items
Rhēnos in Gaulish and Rhēnus in Latin would be called *Rein(s) in Old French. Note that the earliest reference to the spelling רינוסis actually known not in the Rhineland but in ZARFAT. It appears in the commentary by Rashi.55 The old provenance from northern France explains the fact that in Ashkenazic sources the final vowel is samekh. Indeed, early Ashkenazic sources did not use samekh: the sound /s/ was expressed via the letter shin.56 In the name of the main tributary of the Rhine, the Moselle, the second consonant is regularly spelled in Old Ashkenazic sources with shin ( )שand not with zayen (זa): משלהor מושלא. Weinreich (WG :) considers that here we are dealing with an archaic spelling because the French and the German names both have /z/ in this position. To this, one can add that the absence of zayen shows that this spelling most likely comes from France. Indeed, it was in the works of various authors from France, both northern and southern, that this Hebrew letter was either totally absent or rarely used.57 Köln (Cologne) appears in old Ashkenazic sources under the name equivalent to Latin Colonia or French Cologne.58 It is difficult to decide whether this spelling reveals the vernacular pronunciation 55 See Darmesteter and Blondheim :. In the same source, the Old French diphthong -ei- is expressed via double or single yod; compare empeigne ‘upper’ אינפיניא, fein ‘hay’ פין ֵ (modern foin), sireine ‘siren’ ( שיריינאmodern French sirène), teile ‘cloth’ טיילאand ( טילאmodern toile) (Darmesteter and Blondheim :, , , ). 56 See section ... According to WG :, the Latin nominative singular masculine ending -us in רינוסtestifies to the fact that Romance-speaking Jews used in their vernacular language some words that were phonetically different from their equivalents in the language of their Christian neighbors. For this, he points out that the Romance languages of countries from which Jews could come to Germany, namely, France and Italy, did not retain this Latin suffix. This argument does not appear to be strong. Old French had two grammatical cases: cas sujet (nominative) and cas régime (oblique). According to the general development of French grammar, one expects the form known in Latin nominative as Rhēnus to produce *Reins in cas sujet (with -s derived from Latin -us) and *Rein in cas régime. The spelling Rein found in a Christian document of (Nègre .:) corroborates the conjectured root vowel. However, the available chansons de geste, the epic Old French poems, mention only the forms having /i/ in the root: Rin, Rim, and Ring (see Langlois :–). Note that the oldest of the texts in question were written at the end of the twelfth century. Most likely, the root vowel found in them did not result from the development internal to Gallo-Romance but was influenced by Rîn, the MHG name for the river. The final -s in the Jewish toponym רינוסis related to the Old French nominative form. On the other hand, the presence of vav can be due to the intentional Latinizing. (Note that in the commentary by Rashi, the name of the Apostle Paul is written פאולוס, that is *Paulus, also with the final -us; Darmesteter and Blondheim :.) It does not necessarily testify to the fact that the ending was indeed pronounced by Rashi as /us/ contrary to his French Christian contemporaries for whom it was /s/ in cas sujet. (Also note that in Jewish texts from northern France compiled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the same river is called *Rin, without /(u)s/; see Levy :.) This idea should not be extrapolated to consider that in both northern France and the Rhineland the name רינוסas a whole can be just a traditional literary graphic form inherited from Roman times when (Vulgar) Latin was the vernacular language in both northern France and the Rhineland and the river name was Rhēnus. It is the spelling ריינוסthat precludes such a possibility. Here the root vowel is a non-Latin diphthong /ej/. (On the use of Roman names for French toponyms in medieval documents written by French Jews, see Seror :–.) Weinreich (WG :) also considers that the presence of the Latin suffix -us in רינוסrepresents an important argument against the possibility of the non-interrupted presence of Jews in the Rhineland since the fourth century. According to him, their ancestors would necessarily come from Romance-speaking countries, otherwise they would have used a German name for this river, without -us, similar to MHG Rîn. This argument does not appear strong either. Indeed, Jews living in Germany without interruption could theoretically continue to use an old name for the river based on Latin even after German became dominant on that territory. (See also Cuno :–.) As discussed in this section, the French origin of the Jewish name for Rhine follows not from the final consonant but from the stressed vowel. 57 No zayen appears in the glosses by Rashi and documents from fourteenth-century Burgundy (Loeb :) and Provence (Neubauer-Meyer :–). Toponyms listed in Gross () for southern France have no zayen, while in those from the northern part of the country zayen is unusual. Yet, during these times French clearly had the sound /z/: the intervocalic /s/ was voiced to /z/ already in Gallo-Romance (Pope :), that is, several centuries before the works in question were compiled. On the other hand, in earliest known Ashkenazic glosses (SAB compiled at the end of the thirteenth century in the Cologne area), we find numerous words in which zayen is used either in the initial position or, more rarely, between vowels. 58 Most common spellings are: קולוניאa, קולונייאa, קלוניא,aand ( קלונייאGJ , ). Spellings that may correspond to the German name (such as קולנאin , Salfeld :) are rare exceptions. Also see the discussion in WG :.
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Romance elements
by Rhenish Jews or represents a traditional spelling. Note that Christian sources of that time also mainly used the Latin name of this place.59 The town of Worms appears in a number of medieval Jewish manuscripts from Western Europe with the initial gimel: גרמיזאa, גרמייזאa, גרמוייזאa,גרמישאa.60 These forms have several idiosyncrasies that unambiguously reveal the origin from France: (i) the initial Germanic /w/ that turned into /g/ (WG :);61 (ii) the last consonant /z/; and (iii) the diphthong in the second syllable (expressed in Hebrew by double yod).62 During the following period, the toponym appears in Jewish sources already with the initial װ, while the last consonant turns from /z/ into a less intriguing /s/ expressed by shin.63 Speyer is spelled in early Jewish sources (some of which come from France and others from the Rhineland) with an initial vowel: אושפיראa, אישפיראa, or אשפיראa.64 The existence of a prothetic vowel before a consonantal cluster in which the first element is /s/ is general for words of Latin origin in Romance languages spoken in France and the Iberian Peninsula, but had disappeared from ProtoItalian before the oldest Italian texts.65 In principle, the prothetic vowel could also be present in the Latin-based vernacular language spoken in Rhenish towns before German became the dominant language here. No direct data exists that would allow an estimation of when this change took place. We know that Cologne was exposed to German influence earlier than other Roman towns on the Rhine. Trier, completely taken over by Franks at the end of the fifth century, resisted the influence of the language of its conquerors longer than others. Here the Romance given names only appear before the eighth century even among clergymen.66 Information provided by archeology also shows Romance traces in the Moselle Valley for the sixth and seventh centuries only.67 In Mainz, no Romance given names appear on Christian tombstones after the seventh century.68 Since during a shift from one language to another the layer of given names is generally more conservative than other lexical elements, it is logical to consider that during the seventh century German was already the vernacular language of a large majority of urban Gentiles in neighboring Speyer too. However, at that period the town in question was still known by a name using another, Celtic, root. In Latin
The earliest reference to a form related to the German name, Collen, dates from only (Oesterley :). See GJ , and Salfeld :. In earliest Christian sources, Worms appears as Wormatia or Warmacia. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it is called Wormeze, Wurmeze, or Guormatia (Oesterley :). 61 Note that forms with /g/ derived from words with initial Germanic /w/ (including the name for the town of Worms) are common in the Talmudic commentary by Rashi (Darmesteter and Blondheim :). 62 In Gallo-Romance, the Latin sequence -ati- gave rise to -aiz (spelled -ais- in French): compare Latin ratione > modern French raison ‘reason,’ satione > saison ‘season,’ cymatia > cimaise ‘cyma’; Sarmatia > (town of) Sermaise (Bourciez :–, –). (The idea concerning the link between these phonetic shifts particular to Old French and the Jewish name for the town of Worms is due to MRPC.) At the end of the eleventh century, the Old French diphthong /ai/ was already pronounced as /e/ after going through the intermediate stage of /ei/ (Fouché :). The Ashkenazic form came from France before this change took place. 63 Compare װרמישאa, װרמשאa, װירמישא,aand װירמיישא,aall from the fourteenth century (Salfeld :, , , ). These changes were likely due to the influence of local German. Yet, the vowels distinct from those found in German forms were retained: () the stressed vowel of the second syllable (realized as a diphthong at least in the last spelling of this list); () the letter /e/ in the first syllable (expressed by yod) given in the two last spellings; it is not found in German forms listed in footnote . 64 See GJ , ; WG :–. 65 A prothetic vowel already appears in Latin during the second century CE. Spellings of words with an initial E are known from Latin texts of the fifth to seventh centuries. However, in Old French the presence of the initial vowel is irregular until the end of the eleventh century (Fouché :). See also Wiese :. 66 See Musset :–. 67 See Schützeichel :–. Schwarzfuchs (:) states that the Romance-speaking population continued to live in Cologne, Trier, Mayen, and Mainz “well after .” For this, he makes a reference to Schützheichel (:). However, Schwarzfuchs’ quote results from an erroneous interpretation of the original source. Actually, on the page in question Schützheichel provides information concerning the period after the fifth century. 68 See Dopsch .:. 59 60
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Romance onomastic items
sources, it appears as Nemetensis, Nemete, or Nemidone (Oesterley :). This chronology implies the French origin of the initial vowel in the old Jewish name of this locality.69 The medieval Jewish names for two other important Rhenish communities, Mainz and Trier, are less informative. For Mainz, the medieval spellings מגנצאa, מעגנצאa, and ( מענצאGJ , ) most closely correspond to the form Megenze, known in German sources from the ninth and tenth centuries and dialectal Mentz(e) appearing from the eleventh century, rather than to the Latin name Maguntia/Mogancia/Moguntia known from earlier documents (Oesterley :). We can see that here the traditional Jewish spelling with gimel (that at least for the mid-fourteenth century is unlikely to reflect the vernacular spoken form) is based on (early) German, but certainly not based on Latin.70 Trier is called Treberis/Treveris in early Christian sources (Oesterley :). Earliest Jewish sources use a form that is phonetically similar: ( טריברשGJ , ). Here the final consonant corresponds to the suffix whose trace can be found in Trèves, the modern French name for that town. During the following period, Jewish sources from western Germany already regularly mention the German name טריראor טרירa.71 In medieval documents written by Jews from ZARFAT or western Germany, the area that covers Metz as well as the main Rhenish communities discussed earlier is usually referenced as לותירa.72 This Jewish toponym comes from the name of Frankish ruler Lothair II who after the Treaty of Prüm () received a territory covering Metz and Verdun (now both in France), as well as Aachen, Cologne, Trier, and Bonn (now all in Germany). In Christian sources, this area got its name after him (or his father Lothair I, one of the grandsons of Charlemagne, as believed by certain historians): Latin Lotharii Regnum/Lotharingia from which modern French and English Lorraine as well as German Lothringen are derived. However, the Jewish toponym covered a larger area encompassing also the communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, that is, the part of the Rhineland that actually was governed neither by Lothair II nor by Lothair I. One graphic element in the spelling of Jewish toponyms is of note: the letter tav is regularly used. Yet, this letter was rarely used in the transcription of non-Hebrew words made by Jews from France and Germany. In Old French, the intervocalic /t/ and /d/ tended toward zero in all words. The zero sound was realized during the twelfth century only but during the three previous centuries it was a dental fricative that was sometimes spelled “th” or 69 During the following period, the initial letter disappears and during the fourteenth century the town is mainly referred to as שפירא. This spelling corresponds to both Latin Spira and modern French Spire (Salfeld :, , ). In the same century, we also find the first references to the German form, with a diphthong: ( שפייארSalfeld :); compare the form Speyr found in Christian sources of the beginning of the twelfth century. This and other forms with the diphthong—such as שפייערor —שפייראappear in numerous documents from Germany (GJ , ). Curiously, the rabbinical surname Spira ()שפירא, known in Germany since the beginning of the fifteenth century, retains the Romance monophthongal form. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it gave rise in Eastern Europe to the common surname Shapiro. 70 In the Old French chansons de geste, this city is referred to as Maience, Maiance, and the like (Langlois :). 71 Compare Salfeld :. Weinreich (WG :–) suggests paying attention to the fact that if German forms for this toponym invariably have two /r/, the Jewish ones are of two types: () those similar to Latin *Treveris (with two /r/) and () those similar to French Trèves (in which the second /r/ disappeared). According to him, the existence of the second type points to the provenance of this toponym from Romance countries. This argument is unconvincing. The references to forms of the second type—listed in GJ , —are actually taken from works written in sixteenth-century Italy by Jewish religious scholars who were not of Ashkenazic origin. We have no evidence that these forms were used in Germany during the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE. The rabbinical surname Treves ()טריויש, derived from the name of this city, retains the French form. Though its progenitor originated from Germany, the first known reference to the surname is from the fourteenth century when this person was already a rabbi in Marseille (see Gross :–). It is unclear whether the exact form used was brought as ready-made from Germany or (more likely) was adapted to the French pronunciation already in France. 72 Sometimes the spellings לותיירand לותרaappear as well. These graphic forms as well as the historic details presented in this paragraph are taken from Gross :, WG :, :.
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Romance elements
“dh” in Old French documents from the ninth to the eleventh centuries (Pope :). Since the non-initial /h/ of Frankish origin was likely to become a zero sound already in Gallo-Romance, the above phonetic shifts affected the given name borne by these two rulers also.73 In this situation, it was natural for Jews in ZARFAT and the Rhineland to spell the Jewish name of this province with tav, that is, a letter pronounced in Hebrew as a dental fricative.74 Finally, it is worth noting the names ‘ אנגלטיראEngland’ and ‘ לונדרשLondon’ that appear in the writings by Ephraim ben Jacob, an Ashkenazic rabbi from Bonn who lived during the twelfth century.75 These names are taken from French: compare modern Angleterre and Londres, respectively.
.
ROMANCE LEXICAL ELEMENTS IN YIDDISH
Texts and glosses corresponding to the vernacular German-based language(s) of Ashkenazic Jews include dozens of words of Romance origin. One can distinguish several layers. The first layer covers words that could reach Jews via the intermediary of non-Romance Gentile languages. Numerous internationalisms belong to this category.76 Certain lexical elements could be known to German Jews from neighboring German Christians who in turn borrowed them from French, Latin, or, less frequently, Italian. StY bonir ‘banner,’ loml ‘blade of sword,’ polish ‘anteroom in a synagogue,’ prizant/prezent ‘present, gift,’ as well as the form triokel ‘balsam’ from medieval western Germany, all may be either of Romance origin (compare French banière, lamelle, palais, présent, and Old French triacle, respectively) or derived from MHG banier(e), lâmel, palas ‘palace,’ prîsant/prêsant, and trîakel, respectively.77 Shul ‘synagogue’ is considered by Weinreich (WG :) to be an example of fusion: the German phonetic form of a word of Latin origin (compare German Schule, Latin scola) and Judeo-Latin (LOEZ) semantics. However, the meaning ‘synagogue’ exists in German (and some other European languages) as well: it comes from the Christian translations of the New Testament. StY dukes ‘duke’ and keyser ‘emperor’ are ultimately related to Latin dux and Caesar, respectively. However, the link is indirect: these words entered Yiddish through the intermediary of medieval Hebrew ֻּד ָּכסaand ֵק יָסרa.78 The second layer includes words that at various periods were introduced in particular dialects of Yiddish due to loans from local Romance-speaking Christians. Here one can distinguish several independent groups. Communities from northern Italy created by migrants from German-speaking 73 In the Oaths of Strasbourg (), the oldest known French document, the name of Lothair I appears as Ludher. The form present in Old French chansons de geste is Lohier, with silent “h,” as can be seen from the spelling variants Loiher and Loier (Langlois :). On the other hand, the modern French Lothaire is derived from the Latin standardized form Lotharius. 74 See section .. on the medieval pronunciation of this letter. The existence of a link between the Old French dental fricative and the Jewish name for the area in question was suggested in MRPC. 75 See his original text in Neubauer and Stern :, , . 76 See examples in WG :–. 77 Compare WG :–, TS , , . The fact that for a number of these words, as shown in TS, similar forms appear in biblical translations not only in those by Ashkenazic Jews but also in those from northern France, does not imply that they were necessarily borrowed or inherited by Ashkenazic Jews from their French-speaking coreligionists. Here the influence could be on the semantic level, “horizontal,” while the words themselves could be taken from German. Also to the semantic influence of French Jews is due the meaning of the StY word ployn ‘geometric plane’ derived from MHG plân (TS ). For the general lists of Ashkenazic words whose semantics is likely to be influenced by translations of the Bible made in northern France see TS . 78 See the discussion of the word dukes in Timm and Beckmann :–. Early Ashkenazic sources use for ‘emperor’ either the word with /s/ borrowed from Hebrew (examples: קײסרin SD and קיסארin BZV) or a word with /z/ borrowed from German (NHG Kaiser, MHG keiser) (examples: קײזרin CC and ַקִזירin NH).
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Romance lexical elements in Yiddish
areas during the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries played a major role in the general intellectual development of Ashkenazic Jewry. Of particular importance were local printing houses. During that period, numerous Italian words or roots were introduced into the vernacular German-based language of Italian Jews. Many of them are found in the chivalric verse romances of Elia Levita.79 To the same group may belong StY fatsheyle ‘kerchief, shawl,’ though for this word we cannot exclude an intermediary of German.80 Some examples appear in biblical translations or glosses: *kardon ‘thistle’ in Ox, *rekamern ‘to embroider’ in Teh and a few other sources some of which are from northern Italy, while the provenance of others is unknown, and *galbene ‘galbanum’; compare Italian cardone, ricamare, and galbena, respectively.81 During the last centuries, a number of Gallicisms were borrowed from French by Alsatian Yiddish.82 A significant number of (rather recent) borrowings from Romanian are found in the dialect of Yiddish spoken in Romania at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.83 The third layer encompasses words found in the Middle Ages in the vernacular language(s) of Ashkenazic Jews and unknown in local German dialects. For a study focused on the origins of Yiddish, the latter layer is the only one that is important. The two first layers correspond to loanwords in Yiddish and, moreover, those from the second one are or were limited only to specific Yiddish varieties. The third layer also certainly includes a number of adstratal (borrowed) elements that entered the vernacular language(s) of Ashkenazic Jews when Jewish communities in Germanspeaking provinces were already in existence and were already using in their everyday life a language based on German. Such communities existed in the Rhineland as early as the eleventh century. The adstratal elements in question appeared due to close contacts of Ashkenazic Jews with their coreligionists from northern France that lasted until the expulsion of Jews from France (). Some of them could be brought to Ashkenazic communities by these expelled Jews. From the history of French, we know that several phonetic shifts occurred during the period of our interest. During the eleventh century, raising /o/ > /u/ took place; compare French couronne, moulin, and tourment, corresponding to Latin corona, molino, and tormento, respectively (Fouché :). In biblical translations from Western Europe (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including R), we find such
About forty Italianisms appear in BB and about fifty in PuV (Timm and Gehlen :-). This word appears in NH as ַפְטֵשיָלא. Its root related to that of Italian fazzoletto ‘scarf,’ ‘handkerchief.’ Weinreich (:, WG :) speaks of the Romance origin of the Yiddish word resulting from a rather late borrowing. BinNun (BN –) derives it from German dialectal (Bavarian) fazel(et), which in turn is of Italian origin. Wexler (:) suggests (Northern) Italian faz(z)uòlo or Balkan Latin *faciol as possible etymons. All these theories leave unexplained the diphthongal realization in EY: /ej/ in LitY and /aj/ in PolY. Such reflexes imply that at an earlier stage this vowel was either /e:/ or /ej/ (corresponding to the proto-vowels E or E, respectively), but not one of these vowels is found in the etymons enumerated earlier. Actually, /e:/ results from the unrounding of /ø:/, the sound that appeared as a result of the functional umlaut /o:/ > /ø:/ concomitant to the addition of the diminutive suffix. Most likely, the WY ancestor of StY fatsheyle appeared as a back-formation from the diminutive plural form which is attested as וטשויליוin a Jewish laundry list from northern Italy compiled in the mid-sixteenth century (personal communication with Erika Timm). The non-diminutive plural form וטשולןappears in the same laundry list in BB, also from northern Italy. We cannot be totally sure that WY borrowed the full form directly from Italian. Note that a very similar non-diminutive plural form “faciolen” appears in a German text by von Harff written in the s (see Groote :; this reference also appears in Wexler :). 81 For the last two words see the exact references in TS , . 82 Dozens of examples appear in Zivy . Some of them are at least several centuries old. One of the examples is del ‘non-Jewish burial’; compare French deuil ‘mourning; funeral procession.’ In French, the final consonant in clusters -eil/-euil definitely became pronounced /j/ instead of the original /l/ during the eighteenth century (Fouché :). Also note that some of words marked by Zivy as “French” actually are or can be taken to be through the intermediary of German. One of the examples is kretayer ‘creature’ < MHG creatiure (compare TS ). 83 Examples can be found in Sainéan :–. 79 80
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Romance elements
forms as *kurtinen and *kurten(e) ‘curtain(s),’84 while in Teh and MM /u/ was fronted to /y/ and in BM to /i/ (TS –).85 The same Yiddish fronting also explains the root vowel of StY stirdes ‘defiance’/stirdish ‘defiant.’ The original form had /u/ revealing a French loanword.86 StY furem ‘pattern’ is likely to be related both semantically and phonetically to Old French fourme derived from Latin forma (TS –). We know about significant quality changes of vowels that appear during the same eleventh century before nasal consonants (Pope :). Consequently, the absence of the rendition of nasal consonants in ( קוֿפיטFrench confit ‘candies’) and ( קופושטOld French compost ‘preserved vegetables’) points to adstratal forms. Both words appear in LekY (TG ), the first one also in MinP (Kosover :). The word *madregol ‘mandragora’ is also adstratal. It is found in a few old Ashkenazic biblical glossaries such as R and Le.87 The verb brote(r)n/brete(r)n ‘to embroider’ appears during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in biblical translations compiled in various Ashkenazic communities, western (R) and eastern (MM, BM, NH). Its most plausible etymon is French broder (TS ). In Old French, the exact form was brosder. This variant with internal /s/ appears in the commentary by Rashi (Darmesteter and Blondheim :) and in French Christian sources of the twelfth century.88 WY plet ‘raffle’ is related to French billet ‘ticket’ (Zunz :). In French, this word is actually unknown before the fourteenth century. Most likely, it appeared in WY via non-Jewish languages that borrowed it from French. A number of items are clearly of French origin though it is difficult to decide whether they were adstratal or substratal. Among them one counts certain words known in early Ashkenazic texts from Western and Central Europe: surtabel ‘First Sabbath meal’ (LekY),89 templ ‘forehead temple’ (R, Le, Pr),90 alyander ‘coriander’ (R, MM),91 *verlanter(n)t, participle from ‘to darken, to become weak (about eyes)’ (R, MM, Pr),92 post ‘meal’ (R, BB, PuV, MM, ShB, DB, HiP, Br, BM),93 tolm(e)
84
Compare French courtine. In other languages, words that are also based on Latin cortina invariably have /o/ (Meyer-Lübke :). 85 See details about fronting in section .. (feature {V}). 86 Weinreich (WG :–, :–) shows that earliest Ashkenazic references to ‘defiance’ have vav (that corresponds to /u/); compare “sturdecheit” in M (this German transcription appears in Staerk and Leitzmann :) and ( שטורדשקײטPerles :; document from the sixteenth century). Weinreich also discusses references to the same root in medieval Jewish French sources. The form appearing in the commentary by Rashi is ( אישדורדיץDarmesteter and Blondheim :). It represents a participle of the Old French estordir ‘to daze,’ ‘to stun.’ This verb appears at the end of the twelfth century as estourdir, already with /u/ that is retained in modern French étourdir. Other Romance languages invariably have /o/ in cognate words (Meyer-Lübke :). The loss of the initial vowel present in its Old French etymon had apparently already occurred in Germany. The word had already come to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after the fronting /u/ > /i/. Otherwise the LitY forms would have /u/ in the root. 87 Compare the forms found in Jewish sources from various Romance countries in Blondheim :. Early Ashkenazic forms are listed in TS . 88 In French, the preconsonantal /s/ ceased to be pronounced during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Fouché :). 89 Compare French sur table ‘on table’ (TG ). 90 See Ashkenazic references in TS . Words derived from Latin tempus received internal /l/ only in Old French temple (the source for the English word; modern French tempe) and Occitan templa (Meyer-Lübke :). 91 Various Romance Christian forms ultimately derived from Latin coriandrum all have the initial /k/ (MeyerLübke :). Unusual phonetic forms without this consonant also appear in medieval Jewish documents from both southern and northern France (Blondheim :LXXXV, ; TS –). 92 The verb lanterner, with the same unusual meaning, appears in medieval Jewish French texts (TS ). 93 Several Romance languages have (or had) words derived from Latin pastus ‘food, feed.’ The form past ending in a consonant it limited to Old French, Occitan, and Catalan (Meyer-Lübke :). It was in Old French that [a] was lengthened and raised before [s] occurring at the end of a syllable and whose pronunciation was weakening (Fouché :). In medieval Champagne, the spelling posture corresponds to the word of the same root (Old French pasture, modern French pâture). In a Jewish French document compiled in Champagne in the thirteenth century, we find numerous cases of qameṣ followed by alef that designates this lengthened raised vowel in words in which this [s] had already disappeared. One of these words—spelled — ָפאטhas a meaning similar to that of Ashkenazic post (Banitt
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Romance lexical elements in Yiddish
‘bridal canopy’ (SAB, CC, M, R, Le),94 DuY onkel ‘uncle’ (R, ShB, Aug, BM, GH),95 as well as StY flank ‘flank’ (R, MM),96 and milgroym ‘pomegranate’ (R, MM, Mel, ShY, BM, ZuR).97 Influence of French is also quite likely in AlsY frimzl and SwY fremzl ‘noodle’/EY khremzl ‘Passover pancake’ (LekY),98 StY and SwY lomp ‘(Sabbath) lamp’ (NH) and is possible in StY ponts ‘paunch,’ .:, :). In the Ashkenazic tradition, forms without the final vowel and with the raised vowel (expressed by ḥ olem) are old: they are already present in the earliest available sources dating from the fourteenth century that were compiled in western Germany (TS ). This factor increases the probability that they were borrowed (or inherited) from French Jews. 94 Words related to Latin (of Greek origin) thalamus ‘inner room, chamber’ are found in Jewish texts of various Romance countries, though only forms from France, both northern and southern, are phonetically close to the Ashkenazic variant (Blondheim :). The link with northern France is also corroborated by the fact that in the Jewish document from Champagne mentioned in the previous footnote, lengthening and raising of [a] is observed not only before former [s] but also before [l], which disappeared in the preconsonantal position (Banitt .:). Similarly to post, the forms /tolmə/, with a raised vowel, are already found in old western Ashkenazic documents, at least from the fourteenth century onward (TS –). 95 This word is known in western Ashkenazic sources from the Middle Ages onward, while NHG Onkel was borrowed from French oncle only during the seventeenth century (TS ). The French word comes from Latin avunculus ‘maternal uncle’ and no close phonetic form is known outside of the territory of France (Meyer-Lübke :). We do not find any reference to it in various sources for modern SWY. This absence does not mean that the word was necessarily unknown in SWY. Indeed, the sources in question list elements particular to Jews only. As a result, the compilers of these documents could ignore this noun because an identical noun, Onkel, has been commonly used in NHG during the last centuries, 96 Present in the commentary by Rashi (Darmesteter and Blondheim :), this masculine noun has been known in Ashkenazic texts since the Middle Ages, while German Flanke is feminine and has appeared since the seventeenth century only (TS ). The word has been found in French since the eleventh century and is unknown in other Romance languages. 97 The origin from France follows from the sound /i/ present in the first syllable. It was in that country—most likely under the folk etymological link with mil ‘thousand’—that the original /e/ turned into /i/; compare Italian melagrana, and Old Occitan milgrana. The Old French form is not known but it also certainly had /i/ as testified by the Middle French migraine. (All arguments given in this footnote are taken from TS –; see also WG :.) On the disappearance of preconsonantal /l/ in French see footnote below. 98 On the geography of this word see GGA . This word is related in some way to Italian vermicelli though the immediate etymon for the WY word is uncertain. Starting with Kosover (:), several authors wrote about the link between the WY frimzl and the Old French word that in turn was loaned from Italian. However, no linguistic argument corroborating this hypothesis was ever suggested, while the proposed French etymon is actually anachronistic. In French, the earliest reference to a word derived from vermicelli dates from the sixteenth century only (Wexler :). Looking into the early Jewish references collected by Kosover (:–), one can observe the existence of two series: () with the initial gimel like גרימז״ליor גרימזלי״ש, principally found in ZARFAT but mentioned in western Germany too, the oldest date from the twelfth century; () with the initial vav or double-vav like ורומ״זילor װרימזלי״ש (plural), mainly present in sources from western Germany of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, but also known in Normandy in the thirteenth century. The first series is clearly of French origin. It was in certain Romance dialects in the territory of France that Germanic (Frankish) initial /w/ gave rise to /gw/ that later turned into /g/. The last process ended in Old French during the twelfth century. Under the influence of Frankish, in a number of words having /v/ in the original Latin etymons, the initial consonant also turned into /g/; compare French guêpe ‘wasp,’ goupil ‘fox,’ gui ‘mistletoe’ derived from Latin vespa, ulpiculus, and viscum, respectively. The form meaning ‘noodle’ with initial /g/ belongs to the same series. Its original initial consonant /v/ was replaced with /w/ under the influence of the Germanic word for ‘worm’ (compare MHG wurm) before turning into /gw/ and later into /g/. The second series (to which WY frimzl is related) may also be of French origin. Indeed, Frankish /w/ remained unchanged in northern (Wallony, Picardy) and eastern (Lorraine) dialects. [On the history of this phonological phenomenon in French see Bourciez :–, –, Meyer-Lübke :, Fouché :.] Both series have two idiosyncrasies in common: (a) the letter zayen /z/ for what was “c” in Italian; (b) the introduction of a vowel between /r/ and /m/, most likely as a result of the metathesis between the first vowel and the second (liquid) consonant. Such characteristics could not appear independently. Either both series had the same ancestor that already possessed these features, or one of these series influenced another. The feature (a) is typical for France only. It is regularly found in French and Occitan: compare modern French plaisir ‘pleasure’ < Latin placere, oiseau ‘bird’ < aucellus (Bourciez :–). For the feature (b), a close parallel can be found in French fromage ‘cheese’ whose initial sounds underwent in Old French the change from /furm-/ to /frum-/ (Pope :).
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Romance elements
compare לנפאand פנצא, respectively, found in the commentary by Rashi (Darmesteter and Blondheim : , ).99 Among Romance languages, only French had the palatalization in the position before /a/ of the initial or post-consonantal /k/ and /g/ into /tš/ and /dž/, respectively. These shifts took place several centuries after similar changes of the same consonants before front vowels /e/ and /i/, known in other Romance languages also, most plausibly, during the seventh and eighth centuries (Bourciez :–). The affricate reflexes were valid for several centuries until, during the thirteenth century, they turned into /š/ and /ž/, respectively (Fouché :, ). This chronology is important for the history of several Yiddish words. WY tetshen ‘to blow the Shofar in a synagogue’ (ShY), referred to as [totšən] in the oldest references (R) and [tøtšən] in more recent ones (MinP, Teh), is related to Vulgar Latin toccare ‘to touch.’ In medieval Jewish texts from ZARFAT, we find forms similar to those from western Germany, with the meaning ‘to blow the horn.’100 The form with /o/ came from France to Germany before the twelfth century; otherwise, as discussed earlier, the root vowel would be /u/. This chronology also explains /tš/ instead of /š/; compare modern French toucher. The affricate /tš/, brought before the thirteenth century by French Jews to Germany (and later from Germany to Slavic countries), is also found in StY tsholnt ‘a Sabbath dish.’ This panYiddish word101 is ultimately derived from a participle of the Latin verb calere ‘to be warm.’102 The dish called צלנטis attested in ZARFAT at the beginning of the thirteenth century: Isaac ben Moses (–) writes in his book Or zarua that he has seen this dish there in the house of his teacher Judah ben Isaac (–). The oldest Ashkenazic references are listed in Kosover : and TG –: טשאלנטand שאלענטin the RESPONSA by Jacob Weil (first half of the fifteenth century), טשלאנטand טשאלנטin LekY, and שלטin MinP.103 The verb shorme(n) ‘to bewitch,’ known in AlsY (Weill :) and DuY, with a special meaning ‘to perform magic movements accompanied by prayers to cure something’ is related to the archaic French charmer ‘to submit to magic operations’ that in turn is derived from Latin carminare. Its religious connotations and /o/ instead of /a/ before /r/104 both imply that this word has existed in WY for many centuries. The fact that the initial consonant is /š/ (and not the Old French affricate /tš/) does not refute this idea. The affricate in question is unusual in German and non-existent in modern French. Consequently, the original /tš/ could undergo adaptation to the local phonetic system. Note that, for example, the SWY 99
In principle, these words could be related to MHG lampe and panze, respectively. Still, we can observe the presence of the rounding [a] > [o] before a nasal consonant in both of them. Timm (TS –) notes the confusion between nasalized [ã] and [õ] observed in a Jewish French document from the thirteenth century (Lambert and Brandin ) and suggests the French origin of the Yiddish words. She provides a list of the earliest Jewish references: the form לונפאappears in a document from copied in Italy (Darmesteter and Blondheim :XIV); others correspond to northern Italy (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). In principle, these references can also be explained via the influence of German dialects. Note that [lɔmp] is known in Thuringian and Southern Austrian (Žir ). However, for lomp such origin is certainly less plausible than the French one since (i) the form with [o] is old and panYiddish, (ii) we know of no other cases of the influence of the German dialects in question on Yiddish. For ponts, the situation is less clear. We have no data implying that the form with /o/ is (or was) found in WY. We do not know its LitY form either: Harkavy lists lomp but no form cognate with ponts. As a result, /o/ in ponts may result from a rather recent innovation internal to PolY/UkrY (see the discussion of the form tsvontsik and footnote in section ..). 100 See a detailed discussion of this word in TS –. In modern Judezmo, we also find the verb tokar meaning ‘to play an instrument’ (Néhama ). 101 Compare PolY tshūlnt (BN ), shālet in both SWY and DuY, shōlet in CzY (BA , GGA ). 102 Compare modern French chaland ‘customer’ initially derived as a participle of the verb chaloir, the French equivalent of Latin calere. Additional details concerning the Yiddish noun can be found in WG :–, :–. 103 A variant *tsholet appears in Br (Riedel :XLII; in the edition of Basel (), this word is spelled טשאלט (personal communication with Simon Neuberg). 104 Note that generally speaking, modern AlsY is characterized by the lowering (and not the raising) of the stressed vowel before /r/ (Zuckerman :–).
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Romance lexical elements in Yiddish
equivalent of StY tsholnt is shālet and not **tshālet.105 For the same reason the sound /š/ in WY pretshen /predshen ‘to preach’106 also implies a French origin; compare Old French preechier (modern prêcher) from Latin praedicâre. SWY verb porshe(n) ‘to remove the forbidden fat and veins from meat’ (Pfrimmer :) is related to French purger ‘to purge,’ which in turn is derived from Latin purgare. The sound /š/ in porshen clearly points to its French origin: other Romance languages retain /g/, while in French, as discussed above, the shifts /g/ > /dž/ > /ž/ took place.107 Since the sounds /dž/ and /ž/ do not exist in German, one of them underwent in this word a natural change to the closest existing phoneme, namely /š/. The stressed vowel /o/ allows us to determine more precisely the period when the ancestor of this word reached Germany. This vowel results from the lowering /or/ < /ur/ that had already taken place in Germany: this shift is usual in Central German (and Yiddish). However, the Latin /u/ became rounded to /y/ in Gallo-Romance before the ninth century (Fouché :, ). Consequently, the verb reached German Jews also before the ninth century; its root at that time was [purdž], and, therefore, the odds are high that is belongs to the substratum of the vernacular language of Jews of the Rhineland. For StY vire ‘ruler’ (NH) and viren ‘to make lines’ (SAB, Le), it is certain that their use by Ashkenazic Jews is related to that by Jews from medieval ZARFAT. Indeed, the noun is found in the commentary by Rashi as ( ויראDarmesteter and Blondheim :), while the infinitive verb appears as *virer in a Jewish French gloss of the thirteenth century in the same document from the Cologne area (SAB) where one finds the earliest reference to Ashkenazic viren.108 We find no specifically French phonetic development that will explain the root /vir/. It is generally believed that the etymon is Latin virga ‘twig’ (compare WG :). However, this Latin noun gave rise to French verge, and, moreover, in Italian and other Romance languages the root vowel is /e/ (Meyer-Lübke :) implying that the raising /i/ > /e/ had taken place already in Late Latin. Taking this into account and allowing for the development of Latin /ga/ in French discussed above in the context of porshen, if the word were directly related to French, one would expect in WY the root *versh or— with a lowering internal to Ashkenazic Jews—*varsh, but certainly not vir. Consequently, either the etymon is identified incorrectly, or some kind of contamination with another word took place.109 Since no similar words are found in French or German, the propagation of this word is likely to have occurred through internal Jewish channels. In this particular case, we cannot be absolutely sure that the word came from (northern) France to Germany and not the other way around. The first possibility is still more plausible. We do not know of other examples of words brought by Jews from Germany to France, while, as discussed in this chapter, numerous examples for the propagation in the opposite direction may be identified. For similar reasons, the following words also likely came to German Jews from France: *eyved ‘midriff ’ (R, Le)110 and *galme 105 Any idea that the original initial consonant was /š/ (while the affricate /tš/ results from an innovation in EY) should be dismissed. Indeed, an affricate is already present in the earliest known reference cited above (צלנט, thirteenth century). 106 The exact geography of this word is uncertain. It appears in PhilogLottus : and Chrysander :, but is absent from sources dealing with modern Yiddish varieties. The first of these sources describes a WY subdialect (see Appendix A). 107 Wexler (:–), who suggests either an Italian or Romance Balkan origin, misses this point. The link between WY porshen and Old French purger was proposed, without providing arguments, by Beranek (:). In BA , the same scholar gives its dialectal geography stating that this verb has been used by Jews in western Germanspeaking provinces and Bohemia. As stressed by Erika Timm (personal communication), the fact that the Judezmo verb with the same meaning is purgár (Néhama ) corroborates the Romance origin of WY porshen. 108 109 See Timm :, , TS –. See possible sources for this contamination in TS . 110 In the commentary by Rashi the word appears in a plural form as ( אייברשor maybe ;אייבדשDarmesteter and Blondheim :). It is also found as *ebades/evades in Jewish documents from Spain (Blondheim :). Meyer-Lübke (:) suggests Latin hepar ‘liver’ (of Greek origin) as the etymon but notes that no descendants of this Latin word are found except for the Jewish items and Old Italian epa ‘belly.’
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Romance elements
‘galbanum’ (R),111 StY trop ‘the cantillation of the Bible and its notation’ (M, NH),112 AlsY (Weill :) and DuY almemer ‘pulpit, synagogue reading desk’ (MinP, Br).113 The French origin of WY piltsl ‘house maid’ (in old sources ‘virgin’) is more certain. Its oldest Ashkenazic references (R, in which the meaning is ‘maiden’) appear with the stressed vowel expressed via vav that can still correspond to both [u] and [y].114 However, in a large number of western sources from the sixteenth century (including Teh, PuV, and Mel) it is a non-ambiguous [y] spelled וי. BM, printed in Prague during the first decade of the seventeenth century, has [i].115 Here we are unlikely to be dealing with spontaneous fronting [u] > [y] (> [i]) known from some sources of the sixteenth century.116 Moreover, in modern WY the form is piltsl in various regions (BA ), while no [i] for German [u] is known of there.117 These factors imply that the word came to western Germany already with [y]. As discussed above, it was in French territory that the Latin [u] became rounded to [y] before the ninth century. Consequently, the word reached Germany after that period and certainly before the thirteenth century because otherwise the presence of the consonant [l] would be unexplained.118 This chronology also explains the affricate [ts]. The Latin c before e and i became [ts] in Gallo-Romance. During the thirteenth century it was changed to [s] in French. In the same position, Italian developed the affricate [tš] at a very early stage. This factor represents an argument—additional to the reflex of the stressed vowel—against the possibility of this WY word being derived from Old Italian pulcella. StY teytl ‘date (fruit)’—pronounced taytl in PolY (BN )—appears in western Ashkenazic sources with a diphthong (spelled )ײsince the Middle Ages (R). The same spelling is also found in Teh, MM, BM, and ZuR. Taking into account these forms as well as ַטִטיל, with the stressed /a:/, 111 See the exact references in TS , . Rashi cites ( גלמאDarmesteter and Blondheim :). Its source did not develop from Latin galbanum on the territory of France. As discussed above, Latin /ga/ was changed in GalloRomance to /dža/. In the commentary by Rashi, this would give in the initial position not gimel but double yod; compare the spelling for words cognate with French jarret and javelles (derived from Gaulish garra and gabella, respectively) in Darmesteter and Blondheim :. The exact provenance of *galme (identical to the early western Ashkenazic form) is uncertain. Most likely we are dealing with an Occitan form. In the list of variants of this word collected by Blondheim in medieval Jewish sources from various Romance countries (:–), only the variant from Provence is similar. Note that the Latin /ga/ remained unchanged in Occitan. 112 This word of ultimately Greek origin was also used by Rashi (Darmesteter and Blondheim :; see also WG :, :). In principle, here the sharing of the same lexical element was not necessarily related to contacts between Jews of these countries. Indeed, it was in the territory of medieval France and Germany that the same word was used by Christians (TS –). However, the similar meaning for French and Ashkenazic Jews not totally identical to that of the Gentile use makes unlikely the possibility of independent borrowing in two countries from local Christians. 113 Both CzY alemer (Schnitzler :) and StY balemer are more recent variants derived from the original WY form. The word is ultimately derived from Arabic al-minbar ‘pulpit (in a mosque)’ (WG :, :, ). The form *almembre (אלמימבראa, )אלמנבראa is cited by Rashi as used by French Jews (Darmesteter and Blondheim :). Already with /mb/ instead of the original /nb/, it clearly represents the ancestor of the Yiddish form. Ashkenazic sources from the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries mention the fact that a similar word is used by LOEZspeaking Jews (Perles :). In this context, LOEZ almost certainly means ‘French.’ For additional details concerning the word in question see TG , Timm and Beckmann :–. 114 See Birnbaum :–, . 115 See details in TS –. For Prague, also see Tirsch : and Schnitzler :. 116 Sources in which the word in question appears with [y] or [i] do not exhibit this fronting in other words. For example, this is the case of Aug (compare TS , , , etc.). 117 In words from the German component, the fronting is found only in AlsY but it is limited to the shift [u:] > [y:] (see section ..). 118 In French, the preconsonantal [l] was effaced or vocalized to [u] before the thirteenth century (Pope :). For this reason, in Old French texts, we find pulcele ‘maiden’ in the mid-twelfth century and pucel(l)e from the thirteenth century (see the entry pullicella in Wartburg ). Also note the references to the female given name used by Jews from ZARFAT and their descendants: Pulcella and Pucele in England (twelfth and thirteenth centuries, respectively) and *Pulceline ( )פולצלינאin Blois in (Seror :).
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appearing in NH, one may conclude that we are dealaing with the stressed vowel whose reflexes are similar to those found in many Yiddish varieties in words whose MHG ancestor had the diphthong ei, that is, [ej] in LitY, [aj] in PolY, and [a:] in WY.119 As correctly pointed out by Timm (TS –), such phonetic realization would be impossible if the etymon were MHG datel, the source of NHG Dattel. Timm also suggests paying attention to the fact that the Latin -act- regularly corresponds to the French -ait-, while the modern French datte is derived not from Latin but from Italian (MeyerLübke :) or Occitan. In French, two consecutive phonetic shifts took place: () /aj/ > /ej/, this change affected all /aj/ including the sound combinations /ajt/ that originated in Gallo-Romance from Latin -act-; () /ej/ > /ε/ (during the twelfth century) (Fouché :–).120 Allowing for all the information exposed in this paragraph, we may conclude that the ancestor of StY teytl came to Germany from France before the twelfth century, after the shift () but before the shift (). Reflexes similar to those of MHG ei (E) can also be found in three verbs of Romance origin: WY prāye(n) ‘to invite,’121 SWY bāfe(n) ‘to drink,’122 and StY leyenen ‘to read.’123 They testify to the fact that there was a period during the Middle Ages when the ancestors of these words were pronounced by Jews from (western) Germany with the diphthong [ej]. Their Latin equivalents are precare (Late Latin pregare), bibere, and legere, respectively. Among various Romance languages, it is only in the French territories that we find forms with [ej] derived from all these three Latin verbs: preier, beivre, and lei(e)re, respectively.124 The French origin of the WY verb meaning ‘to invite’ is beyond doubt. It was only in French that the intervocalic /g/ before /a/ shifted to /j/ (Fouché :–). This phenomenon can be observed in both Old French preier (this word is present in the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, the earliest surviving French literary text composed in in the northern regions) and WY prāye(n). The form beivre ‘to drink’ was still found in French texts of the twelfth century.125 For the verb meaning ‘to read,’ the chain leading from the Latin etymon to the modern French form looks like this: legere > leiere > leire > lieire > lire (Fouché :). A number of these shifts had occurred already in Gallo-Romance (Pope :). In Old French, See the feature {V} in section ... According to Weinreich’s system of designations (WG :), it represents the Yiddish “proto-vowel” E. 120 Forms found in Jewish texts from ZARFAT (see TS ) give direct corroboration concerning the application of these shifts for the vernacular language of medieval French Jews: the stressed vowel in the word meaning ‘date’ is either a diphthong or a mid-front vowel. 121 Modern Yiddish varieties have the following phonetic forms: [bra:jə] in AlsY (Zuckerman :), [brajə(n)] in SwY), and [pra:jən] in DuY. References to the same verb appear (among others) in MinP (Kosover :), M, R, PuV, Mel, ShB, HiP, BZR, BZP, Pr, and GH (TS –). Weinreich (WG :) taking into account the unique reference in the area of LitY (end of the nineteenth century), made a tentative link between the root vowel and MHG î (I). However, as shown in TS , this verb rhymes only with the reflexes of MHG ei in PuV, Mel, ShB, and several other early western sources. The link with MHG ei also unambiguously follows from the spellings found in R ( )עײand M ()ײ, impossible in these sources for MHG î. The unique reference in LitY cited by Weinreich is clearly due to a recent borrowing from WY (TS ). 122 This verb is pronounced [ba:fə] in AlsY (Zivy :), [ba:fə(n)] and [bajfə(n)] in SwY. As discussed in section .. (feature {V}), in WY dialects, the reflex [a:], with a variant [aj], is valid for words from the German component whose MHG ancestor had either ei or ou. However, a testimony from the end of the fifteenth century eliminates the possibility of ou. Arnold von Harff, a pilgrim from Cologne, notes that (Ashkenazic) Jews he met in Jerusalem use the word “beyueren” in the meaning ‘to drink’ (see the original text in Groote :). 123 Modern Yiddish varieties have the following phonetic forms: LitY [lejənən], UkrY [lejnən], PolY [lajnən], AlsY [la:jə] (Zuckerman :), SwY [lajənə(n)], and DuY [la:jə(nə)n] (see LCA ). The EGY form “leichnen” appearing in Friedrich : may result from a typographic error; the originally intended form could be “*leiehnen.” Tirsch (:) gives “leinen” for CzY. References to verbs with the same root appear (among others) in M, R, BB, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, DB, H, HiP, ShY, BZP, Br, BM, PB, ZuR, and GH (TS ). 124 The provenance of the ancestors of leyenen and prayen from medieval France is suggested in both BN and WG :, :–; :–. 125 Before the mid-twelfth century its diphthong turned into /oi/ in central and eastern parts of northern France (Bourciez :). 119
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Romance elements
the root vowel was not the same in various medieval dialects: /i/ was specific to the central and northern areas, /ie/ was typical of the West, while /ei/ characterized the East (Bourciez :). The diphthong [ej] in the medieval Ashkenazic ancestor of StY leyenen is related to this last realization.126 In theory, this diphthong can also be explained via a few other Romance languages: forms with initial /lej-/ are known in several southern Italian (Rohlfs :) and Rhaeto-Romance dialects.127 However, the putative Rhaeto-Romance origin is unlikely because of no documented evidence about the presence of Jewish communities in the early Middle Ages in the area in question. Moreover, only French can be responsible for the two other (WY) verbs discussed in this paragraph. If we admit the possibility of, say, a southern Italian provenance of leyenen, we need to conceive a scenario according to which the oldest Romanisms in Yiddish correspond to at least two independent sources separated in time and space: southern Italy (earliest layer) and northern France (more recent layer).128 This scenario is less simple than the theory of the unique (French) source. The French connection is also highly favored by the geography: northeastern France is situated much closer to the Rhineland than southern Italy. Once adopted from Old French, the three verbs with [ej] underwent several changes within the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews. In the word meaning ‘to drink,’ the root internal consonant [v] had become unvoiced to [f] already during the Middle Ages; traces of this shift are commonly found in modern WY.129 More recently, the infix -en- was introduced leading from leyen to leyenen, a phenomenon commonly found in numerous other Yiddish verbs.130 Contrary to the examples considered above, for a number of Yiddish words of Romance origin, an assignment to one specific source language cannot be made on a phonological basis. This is the case for StY pen ‘pen,’131sarvern ‘to serve,’ and sarver ‘waiter, caterer,’132 tornen ‘to repeat,’133 and antshpoyzn ‘to become engaged,’134 as well as WY dormen ‘to sleep,’ ōren ‘to pray,’135 and memere(n) ‘to conduct memorial service’;136 compare (Late) Latin penna, servire, tornare, spo(n)sare, dormire, orare, and memorare, respectively.137 For the last of these words, we can observe a perfect parallel Weinreich (WG :) also considers that (i) the root of StY leyenen is related to the Gallo-Romance form *leieand (ii) this form was brought by Jews from northern France (WESTERN LOEZ-speakers, according to his terminology) to the Rhineland. However, he postulates that at the time of the migrations in question this form was already archaic for coterritorial Old French in which *leie- shifted to li-. From this, he concludes that WESTERN LOEZ was not merely a reflection of Old French but phonologically an autonomous idiom. A conjecture about Jews coming from northern France to the Rhineland at the time and from the region (northeastern France) when and where the root was *leie- and not li- (for both Christians and Jews sharing the same vernacular language) appears much simpler and therefore logically more attractive. 127 Noted by Wexler (:) who considers this provenance to be the most plausible one. 128 This scenario is suggested by Aslanov (a:, –) who favors the Italian origin of StY leynenen. 129 See the discussion of features {C} and {c} in sections .. and .., respectively. 130 See the discussion of feature {m} in section ... 131 This word appears (among others) in R, R, Teh, MM, HiP, FF, ShY, ZuR, and NH (TS –). 132 BZP includes סערװט, the third singular of the verb *serven (TG , ). סרבירin BB (Grünbaum :) and סערװרin KrJO (Bałaban :) make references to the agentive noun. 133 The Romance origin of this word is uncertain. The idea of it is present in Margaritha : and WG :. As noted in WG :, this verb appears in Bibliophilus (an author from Germany) and a few books from Eastern Europe published at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 134 This word appears in M, R, PuV, ShB, MM, BM, and NH (TS –). 135 This word appears in R, MinP, Mid, ShB, BZR, BZP, and GH (TS –, the list also includes a reference from Sefer ha-gan published in Kraków circa ; TG ). In modern Yiddish, this form characterizes SWY, DuY, and the dialect used in Prague (BA , GGA ). According to informants for LCA , in Prague this verb was in general use, while cantors used dav(e)nen instead. The latter was a general term in Moravia as well as in the area of EY. 136 See BA (sporadic in Alsace, western Germany, Silesia), Pfrimmer : (AlsY). 137 For the realizations in various Romance languages see in Meyer-Lübke the entries pinna, servire, tornare, sponsare, dormire, orare, and memorare, respectively. In all Romance languages, the first of these words has /e/, the fourth has no /n/, while the last one has /b/ instead of /o/. The corresponding forms from which the words of various 126
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with the phonetic development of the word meaning ‘pulpit’ discussed above, compare SWY memeren and almemer versus Old French (and certainly Jewish French too) membrer and medieval Jewish French *almembre. In both cases, Jewish French /membr/ corresponds to SWY /memr/. Such correspondence is unlikely to be fortuitous. It is logical to suggest that for both words the Ashkenazic forms had the Jewish French forms as their ancestors. The French origin appears also quite plausible for dormen: the geography of this verb is similar to that of bāfen whose provenance from France, as discussed above, is beyond doubt.138 It is worth noting that the verb orer—with the same root and the same meaning as WY ōren—was still used at the end of the thirteenth century by Jews from ZARFAT (WG :). However, as can be seen from biblical translations, during the same period Jews of northern France were mainly using another word meaning ‘to pray,’ namely the equivalent of modern French prier. Here they followed the semantic development that characterized Old French generally speaking (TS ).139 This example provides additional evidence for the development of Ashkenazic Romance elements being independent of that of Old French forms cognate to them, and therefore a supplementary argument against the theory by Güdemann discussed in section ... The unusual phonology of a few other Yiddish words does not fit with the history of the development of any Romance language. One of the most striking examples is StY bentshn ‘to bless.’ This word is ultimately related to Latin benedicere ‘to bless.’ However, the Romance language of its immediate provenance is uncertain. Weinreich (WG :, :–) suggests the origin from one of the Italian dialects. Note that the Latin ce gave rise to Italian /tš/. To make this theory plausible, one should add an additional hypothesis: bentshn results from an earlier form *ben (e)ditshen, while the internal /(d)i/ had disappeared already in Germany.140 However, it is by no means certain that the PROTO-YIDDISH word had /tš/. Indeed, in all early Ashkenazic references from western and central Europe we find the root [benš] and not [bentš].141 The earliest exceptional references to a form with [tš]—APf and NH—date from the seventeenth century. In both of them, we also find [mentš] ‘man,’ with the same cluster [ntš] instead of [nš] implying that the affricate could be non-etymological but resulting from a phonetic change.142 Moreover, if [tš] appears in EY and CzY, Romance languages developed were *penna, *sposare, and *membrare. If the first two words seem to correspond to Late Latin, the last one appeared initially in France where the epenthetic /b/ was introduced within the consonantal cluster /mr/ that appeared in Gallo-Romance after the effacement of the unstressed vowel that was present in the corresponding Latin form (Pope :). Other Romance languages (including Italian) borrowed it from French or Occitan. The French origin of StY tornen and antshpoyzn is possible only if their ancestors came to Germany before the shift /o/ > /u/ took place in French, that is, as discussed earlier in this section, before the twelfth century (compare modern French tourner and épouser, respectively). The initial vowel in the ancestor of antshpoyzn is likely to be due to a non-Italian form with the prothetic e- added before the cluster sp-. 138 In modern Yiddish, both of them are mainly limited to SWY; see BA (with a reference for DuY, too) and . At the end of the fifteenth century “dormen” is recorded along with “beyueren” (related to modern bāfen) among Ashkenazic Jews living in Jerusalem (Groote :; see footnote ). 139 This French word also has an additional meaning ‘to invite.’ Its ancestor was responsible for Proto-WY preyen discussed above. In the Ashkenazic context, only this second meaning was applicable, but not the meaning ‘to pray.’ The verb orer (ourer in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) appears in numerous French Christian medieval documents (see the entry orare in Wartburg ). 140 This phenomenon conforms to general tendencies of the development of medieval German; compare PMG . 141 This is the case, for example, for R, Be, MinP, BB, PuV, MM, Mel, ShB, Aug, DB, HiP, BZR, BZP, Br, Pr, BM, PB, and ZuR (TS –, TG ). Le includes a reference to the form ( בינטשטאBanitt :), with [ntš]. However, the correctness of this reference is rather questionable because the same source also includes two forms with [nš] (Banitt :, ) and also because of the form appearing in all other western Ashkenazic sources of that time. 142 See the discussion of the feature {C} (an innovation in Yiddish) in section ... Weinreich (WG :) rejects the possibility of the shift /nš/ > /ntš/ in this word in EY. He emphasizes the existence of the following parallel: to EY forms with /tš/ such as bentshn and tsholnt ‘a Sabbath meal’ correspond WY forms with /š/. According to him, since /tš/ in tsholnt is etymological (see earlier in this section), it should be etymological in bentshn too, and consequently the shift /tš/ > /š/ took place in WY in both words. For at least two reasons, this Weinreich parallel is unattractive. Firstly,
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Romance elements
[š] is found in the form used in modern AlsY (Zivy :), SwY, DuY, and EGY. If the protoAshkenazic form indeed had no affricate, it is worth considering the possibility of the derivation of the root bensh from the Old French imperative form ben(e)is143 or the Old French infinitive beneïstre (with epenthetic -t-). For one of these French etymons to be plausible, the presence of [š] instead of [s] remains to be explained. Moreover, in medieval Jewish texts from northern France the root invariably includes /d/.144 As a result, for the provenance of the root of the Yiddish verb from northern France, one should introduce one additional hypothesis: during the Gallo-Romance period Jews from ZARFAT had a form without -d- exactly like their Gentile neighbors. This form was adopted in the Rhineland, while in ZARFAT itself it was later replaced by the form with -d- from southern France (thus introducing a distinction between Jews and Gentiles for this religious term). Taking into account all the arguments suggested in this paragraph, the Italian dialectal origin appears uncertain, but still more attractive than the French one. Another Yiddish word with unclear derivation is StY plankhenen ‘to lament,’ ‘to bawl.’ It is clearly related to the Latin plangere ‘to lament.’ Yet, the Romance language of its immediate provenance is less obvious; compare French plaindre,145 Italian piangere, Occitan planher, and Catalan planyer, all derived from this Latin word. The phonetic variant found in SWY is similar to that of EY, while in DuY and the Yiddish spoken in northwestern Germany one finds planyenen (BA ). Weinreich (WG :–, :–) postulates that the cluster [nj] in the latter form reveals PROTOYIDDISH phonetics. He suggests that the scheme of sound shifts [planj-] > [planç-] > [planx-] leads to a root that—once it appeared in one particular region—gradually spread to almost all Yiddish varieties.146 He also suggests the provenance of the Yiddish word from some hypothetical Italian regional form in which the verb was still pronounced like Latin [plangere] rather than as standard Italian [piandžere]. This theory deserves some comment. Firstly, to obtain an internal [nje] there is no need to hypothesize an etymon with [nge]. The source could be an Italian form with [ndže]: this sound combination can be easily replaced with [nje] in a language in which the affricate [dž] is unknown. Also, forms with [nje] are known in southern Italy (Aslanov a:). Secondly, [nje] is given in the Occitan and Catalan forms cited above. Thirdly, the possibility of a French origin
the original presence of an affricate in the WY equivalent to tsholnt is well corroborated by early Ashkenazic sources. Secondly, the sound /tš/ in the initial position is impossible in German and therefore its simplification to /š/ in Germanspeaking provinces appears totally natural. Yet, internal /tš/ is known in German. The ideas that /tš/ (i) was absent from the original form inherited by Ashkenazic Jews from their Romance-speaking coreligionists and (ii) is due to a general process internal to Yiddish are both due to MRPC. A comparative analysis of various editions of ZuR (a work originally written in Poland) made by Simon Neuberg (personal communication) shows the role that various editors/ printers could play. In the edition of (Basel-Hanau), /t/ appears twenty times in forms related to mentsh ‘man’ (twelve times) and bentshn ‘to bless’ (eight times). The next printing (Amsterdam, ) keeps only three of them: one for mentsh and two for bentshn. All other references appear without /t/. 143 This idea is due to MRPC. Note that for semantic reasons the common use of the imperative mood of this verb sounds quite plausible. 144 Compare *bondir (Blondheim :) and *bendire (Levy :). 145 Spelled by Rashi as ( ְפ ַליי ְנ ְד ְראDarmesteter and Blondheim :). 146 It is implausible that DuY and Yiddish in northwestern Germany, both with [planj-], retain an archaic form. Indeed, Jewish communities of these areas are much more recent than those from southern German-speaking territories or those from the Czech lands. As a result, their [planj-] represents instead an innovation, a secondary form derived from [planç-] or [planx-]. The possibility of this change is corroborated by the existence of DuY shadyen ‘matchmaker,’ derived from Hebrew ַׁשְּדָכן, with an etymological [x] that generally became palatalized in DuY after consonants (see the feature {C} in section ..). Also note that in all modern Yiddish varieties the infinitive verb form ends in -ene(n). The infix -en- appearing in it represents an innovation that started in Eastern Europe during the second half of the sixteenth century (see the discussion of the feature {m} in section ..). Consequently, the verb in question (or at least its current morphophonemic structure) clearly results from inter-borrowing between Yiddish varieties. Tirsch (:) mentions CzY “plangene.”
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Romance lexical elements in Yiddish
cannot be ruled out. It was in Gallo-Romance that the Latin cluster [ng] before the front vowels gave [ŋ(ŋ)] (Pope :). This sound could be responsible for the Yiddish [nj]. The (Old) French form was also characterized by two other shifts that had taken place already in Gallo-Romance: () the diphthongization to -ai- of the vowel in the first syllable, and () the epenthetic [d] introduced for simplifying the pronunciation of the consonantal cluster [nr]. The French origin is therefore possible either (a) if the word was acquired by German Jews before these two changes took place, or (b) if the root of the modern Yiddish word comes not from the infinitive but from inflected forms that had neither [d] nor the diphthong in the first syllable, namely present plural forms.147 Conjectures about the Occitan or (less likely) Italian origin include fewer independent hypotheses and consequently they appear to be more plausible than the possibility of the French origin exposed above. If Occitan were the source, then the intermediary of Jews from ZARFAT is more than likely. For both Occitan and Italian origins, the word can be either substratal or adstratal in Yiddish. The etymology of sargenes ‘white robe, shroud’ is also uncertain. In modern times, this word is attested in SWY (partly, as saryenes) and DuY, but unknown in Yiddish varieties of Central and Eastern Europe.148 It has been known since the Middle Ages; compare the forms שרגנשאcited by Eliezer ben Nathan in Eben ha ‘Ezer (mid-twelfth century) as used by Jews in their German vernacular language, שרגנישin Nürnberg (), שרגנזin LekY, and ַס ְר ְג ֵנסin Tish.149 The link between this word and MHG (of Romance origin) sargen/sergen ‘serge’ suggested by Bin-Nun (BN ) sounds more plausible than various direct Romance derivations proposed by other authors.150 Moreover, the only available explanation for the final -es considers it to represent the German adjectival neuter ending.151 We cannot exclude the possibility that both the root and the ending in sargenes are of German origin, while its initial consonant /s/ (instead of /z/ expected for a word of German stock) results from a Romance influence (or maybe reveals phonological traces of an original Romance etymon whose morphology was adapted by Ashkenazic Jews to that of their German vernacular).152 For certain other words their putative Romance origin is erroneous or at least far from being certain. Among these are: bable(n) ‘to stammer,’153 StY krepl ‘a kind of dumpling,’154 nitl
In modern French, we find nous plaignons, vous plaignez, ils plaignent. Despite these spellings, in earlier times no /ai/ was present in the corresponding forms. Indeed, the diphthongization /a/ > /ai/ before palatalized [ŋ] took place in Old French only if [ŋ] was final or followed by another consonant. If [ŋ] was followed by a vowel, /a/ remained (Bourciez :–). [The notion of the importance of French present plural forms is due to a personal communication with G. A. Beckmann and Erika Timm.] 148 See BA , GGA , LCA , Weill :, Zivy :. 149 See WG : (on Eliezer ben Nathan), Grünbaum :– (quotes from Tish), TG (other references). Zunz (:) mentions (without giving the exact spelling) references to the same word found in works by Eleazar Rokeach of Worms (circa –) and Maharil (circa –). 150 Compare Zunz (:) and LCA < Italian sargano, Guggenheim-Grünberg (:) < Latin sargineum, WG : < French serge or Middle Latin sargium (with German suffix -enes). 151 This idea was suggested in Grünbaum : (who speaks about an original adjective that became a noun) and repeated in WG :. As stressed in TS , the fact that the word is neuter in WY provides an additional corroboration of that idea. 152 In Tish, Elia Levita writes that the origin of this word (meaning for him ‘a long skirt of white linen’) was unclear to him until he met a French Jew who told him that a similar cloth existed in France also and it was made of ( סרגהwith the diacritical sign rafe over the gimel), the French word for ‘serge.’ 153 This word is related to German babbeln (of onomatopoeic origin; see DWB). It was Zunz (:) who first listed bable(n) together with nitl (discussed below) in his list of Yiddish words of non-German and non-Hebrew origin. He suggests French babiller and (Italian) natale as their respective etymons. The “French” origin of bable(n) is also postulated by Güdemann (:). 154 Harshav (:) considers that this word is related to French crêpe ‘crepe, pancake.’ However, the etymological link to NHG Kräpfel ‘a kind of pastry’ (pronounced Kräppel in Upper Saxonian and unrelated to the French noun) is much more direct. 147
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Romance elements
‘Christmas,’155 and penets ‘slice, section,’156 as well as tsamit ‘velvet’ found in Yiddish varieties of Central Europe.157
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ROMANCE MORPHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS IN YIDDISH
No Romance influence on the grammar of Yiddish varieties was ever discovered. The plural suffix -s is the only element for which certain linguists suggest a Romance provenance. In StY, the suffix -(e)s is used to construct plurals of several categories of nouns: () words (mainly feminine) from the Hebrew component, () numerous words from the Slavic component whose singulars end in -e, and () certain words from the German and Slavic components whose singulars end in a consonant. For the first category, the plural suffix used is no surprise. It corresponds to the Ashkenazic pronunciation of the Hebrew plural suffix ֹות- standard for feminine nouns and applicable to a few masculine nouns as well. In other words, Yiddish took from Hebrew both the singular and plural forms of the corresponding words.158 Since the Yiddish equivalents of the majority of the Hebrew feminine nouns end in -e, the second category—which also mainly encompasses nouns that are feminine in Yiddish—appears as created by analogy to the first one.159 Concerning the origin of the third category, positions of different linguists vary. Bin-Nun (BN , ) suggests the origin from 155 This expression is of German origin (see the discussion of its etymology in section .). Numerous authors mention the “derivation” of nitl from Latin (dies) natalis ‘birth (day)’ without giving the reason for /a/ turning into /i/ (examples: Sainéan :, Weill :). Weinreich (WG :) explains the root vowel /i/ via contamination of the Latin word in question by Hebrew (‘ ניתלהwas) hung,’ ‘(the) hung (one)’ used as a pejorative allusion to Jesus Christ. He also mentions the spelling ניתלfound in a French Jewish document from the fourteenth century compiled in Vesoul (Burgundy, now in Franche-Comté). All other non-Hebrew words in this document are French (compare Loeb passim) and therefore its author is unlikely to be an Ashkenazic Jew. This spelling, with tav (a letter unusual in medieval non-Hebrew texts or glosses written by medieval French Jews) and not tet can be viewed as corroboration of Weinreich’s ideas. However, the spelling נידלfound in the document from Austria (WG :) makes the possibility of contamination doubtful. Moreover, it is worth noting that Vesoul is situated in the immediate vicinity of the Alemannic territory. As a result, this word could be borrowed by local Jews from their coreligionists from neighboring Germanspeaking area. In theory, the appearance of tav in this spelling could be influenced by local Jewish tradition related to phonological peculiarities of Old French (MRPC). Indeed, as discussed at the end of section .., in Old French intervocalic /t/ turned into the zero sound (compare modern French noël < natal) through the intermediary of the dental fricative of which tav could be the graphic expression. 156 Since no references are known for WY, the word may be relatively recent and limited to EY. As a result, links to Latin panis ‘bread,’ (Old) French pain ‘bread’ (with a suffix -ets, most likely Slavic), or Middle Latin panicellus ‘a little loaf ’ (WG :) seem less likely than a purely Slavic etymon (compare Polish pień ‘stump’ + the substantive suffix -ec). Mieses (:) suggests MHG benît ‘honey stick’ as the etymon for its PolY form peynits ‘bread slices boiled in sugar.’ This idea is unattractive because it does not explain the final consonant and is semantically farfetched. The suggestion of an etymological link between PolY peynitsl ‘dry slice of bread’ and MHG baen ‘to heat’ (BN ) explains only the first two sounds but not the others. An early reference to this word (spelled )פעני״ץappears in a work Emek beracha by Abraham ben Shabbetai Sheftel ha-Levi Horowitz, a rabbi in sixteenth-century Prague (Kosover :). 157 Beranek (BA ) relates this word to (Old) French samit because (a) its initial /ts/ is found in that region in several words of non-German origin originally starting with /s/; (b) German Samt starts with /z/ whose change to /ts/ is impossible. However, the variant Zamit is known in modern Low German (see the entry Sammet in DWB). We cannot exclude the possibility that it was also used in some Central German dialects. Generally speaking, the French origin for a word known in Central Europe that has no reference in the vernacular language of Jews from western Germany (that is, in the immediate vicinity of France) sounds unlikely. 158 Compare StY kale-s ‘bride-s’ < Hebrew ַּכ ָּלה/aת a ַּכּלֹו, dor/doyres ‘generation-s’ < Hebrew ּדֹור/aּדֹורֹות. 159 Compare StY lopete-s ‘shovel-s, spade-s’ and blote-s ‘marsh-es’ < Polish łopata and błoto, respectively. Early examples of this kind appear in a medical manual printed in Poland in : ‘ ביינקשcupping glasses’ and ּפייאווקש ‘leeches,’ compare StY bankes and pyavkes, respectively (Geller :–). The same analogy also contributed to the creation of the plurals of a few words from the German component such as, for example, mume-s ‘aunt-s’ (found in PB) < German Muhme (Weinreich :–).
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Romance morphological elements in Yiddish
French that he believes—following Güdemann—to be the vernacular language of medieval Rhenish Jews. Weinreich (:–) gives the list of the oldest EY examples found in documents compiled during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in southern Poland and Ukraine. He also shows that but for a very few exceptions, all nouns from that category in the singular end in -er, -em, or -n. Examples: lerer-s ‘teacher-s,’ shnayder-s ‘tailor-s,’ plapler-s ‘chatterer-s’ (almost all words ending in -er actually denote actors), turem-s ‘tower-s,’ shturem-s ‘storm-s,’ furem-s ‘pattern-s,’ shtern-s ‘forehead-s,’ lign-s ‘lie-s,’ furman-es ‘coachman/coachmen,’ and groshn-s ‘small coin-s,’ oger-s ‘stallion-s’ (the last two, or maybe even three, examples are of Slavic origin), as well as all feminine forms derived from masculine that in turn end in -er, such as lererin-s ‘female teacher-s’ and shnayderin-s ‘female tailor-s.’ As shown by Timm, the series of the feminine nouns ending in the plural in -ins should be considered apart from the other examples (TS ). Unlike other series appearing in this list, these forms are found in WY also, with earliest references corresponding to the fifteenth century.160 As a result, it is possible that the pattern shown in the series, internal to Yiddish, arose by analogy to the Hebrew feminine forms. For other nouns, with no references in SWY, it is important to pay attention to the fact that all of them end in a consonant that is either nasal or liquid.161 Exactly the same final consonants characterize the singular forms of the following groups of German nouns that acquire -s in the plural: (a) Low German since the Middle Ages, (b) ECG, with references from northern Thuringian and Upper Saxonian, (c) WCG, with a few examples from Ripuarian and Rhine Franconian, all having -er in the singular, and (d) literary High German since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including not only numerous borrowings from French but also a few dozen words with German roots.162 Such coincidence between the phonological contexts in which German and EY nouns ending in a consonant acquire the suffix -s in the plural cannot be fortuitous. EY clearly initially borrowed this pattern from German.163 Within EY, in which, as explained earlier, the plural -s was already existent in words of other categories, it underwent additional development and became one of standard patterns used for creating plurals. Taking into account the geography and chronology of EY references, ECG appears to be the only plausible source of influence since it was the language of German colonists who constituted the majority of Christian dwellers of medieval Polish towns.164 Consequently, here any French (or, more generally speaking, Romance) influence is unlikely. In modern WphY, a number of nouns from the Hebrew component have the plural suffix -s that cannot be explained from Hebrew: the corresponding singulars end in a consonant and are either Examples of forms ending in -ins appear in Teh, MM, ShB, HiP, ShY, BM, and ZuR (TS , ). Examples appear in ShY, Br, NH and a few other sources from Prague, Poland, as well as Amsterdam (TS –). In GH, the s-plural is also found only after liquids or nasals (Landau :–). Krogh (:) suggests a list of StY words acquiring -(e)s in the plural aimed at showing that the last consonant of the stem may be different from /r/, /l/, /m/, and /n/. The “exceptions” he found actually all fall into one of the two following categories: () nouns ending in a vowel; () a few nouns of Slavic origin ending in /k/ (all acquiring the suffix -es). In the first of them, the final vowel is more important than the consonant that precedes it. All these examples correspond to the general pattern applicable to words ending in -e (mainly of Hebrew or Slavic origin) discussed earlier. In words from the second category, historically, we are actually dealing not with -es added to singular Yiddish forms but with -s added to Slavic plurals that all end in a vowel (compare TS ). For example, StY indikes ‘turkeys’ is based on the Polish plural indyki rather than on the Yiddish singular indik. As a result, this second category corresponds to exactly the same context as the first one. 162 See Öhmann passim, Žir –, Wegera :. 163 See Manaster Ramer and Wolf :–. 164 Structurally speaking this idea is quite similar to the approach suggested by King (:–). However, that author speaks about the possibility of the influence of the language of Christian colonists speaking “Low German” in Polish towns as marginal (if at all) and rather speculative. He insists on the Hebrew-Aramaic origin of the whole pattern in Yiddish. King also pays no attention to either the presence of the plural -s in old Ashkenazic texts and the fact that EY -s appears after a consonant only if this consonant is either nasal or liquid. 160 161
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Romance elements
masculine or neuter. Weinberg (:) gives the following examples: bekhabers ‘reproaches,’ kafs ‘villages,’ khavers ‘friends,’ khokhems ‘sages,’ lauyitslakhs ‘unfortunate fellows,’ menuvels ‘contemptible persons,’ misheberakhs ‘blessings,’ shofels ‘mean persons.’ We can see that in this list forms ending in -er, -el, or -em also dominate (though they are complemented by stems ending in singular in -akh). As pointed out by Weinberg, here we are dealing with a (Low) German morphological phenomenon. The origin of the non-Hebrew plurals with -s in Jewish texts from medieval western Germany is more problematic. As already mentioned in section .., these forms were used as one of the main arguments for the theory proposed by Güdemann (:–) about French being the vernacular language of Jews in the medieval Rhineland. The most comprehensive list of these references is given in TS –. Several series can be distinguished inside of it. The first of them covers nouns whose root may be of French origin. For these words, their plurals could be taken from French as ready-made forms.165 The second, larger, series includes nouns whose singular forms end in nasals or liquids.166 In total, these two series cover almost two thirds of references. For the majority of the remaining words their singular forms end in a vowel in MHG; compare kuoche ‘cake,’ latte ‘barred window,’ rîste ‘flax bunch,’ and smerze ‘pains.’ Moreover, a large number of them are found in a single document (SAB) from the Cologne area (). Local Christians spoke Ripuarian, that is, the High German dialect that even now exhibits certain Low German characteristics, while in the Middle Ages the number of such features was more important. The Jewish vernacular glosses appearing in that document also reveal the Ripuarian dialect.167 The area in question is also close to the Dutch territory, while from the Middle Ages Dutch plurals are formed with -s if the singular ends in a vowel or a nasal or liquid consonant. Taking all the above information into account, it appears plausible that the plurals with -s found in medieval Jewish glosses from the Rhineland represent evidence about the use of this pattern in the vernacular language of local German Christians.168 The logical probability of the French origin of the plural suffix in some of these Ashkenazic forms with German roots, though not excluded in theory, appears to be significantly smaller. According to the scenarios proposed earlier, the fact that the word bekhers ‘beakers’ appears in modern EY is not totally unconnected with its use in one medieval Jewish source from the Rhineland. Contrary to the opinion of certain major Yiddishists,169 this sharing is not due to phonological processes internal to Jewish communities. In both cases, we are dealing with the
165 Examples: various spellings of the word letres ‘letters’ ( ליטרישin LBr, לעטרשin PuV, לעטרישin ZuR ֶלעְט ִריס in NH) and plurals for the ancestors of WY frimzl ‘noodle’ and piltsl ‘maid’ (see the discussion of these words in the previous section). To the same category may also belong such words of Germanic origin as ‘ הרינגשherrings’ and ‘ פלאדונשfruitcakes’ that both were borrowed into Old French where they appeared in the singular as hareng and fla(d)on, respectively. 166 Examples: ‘ אורהנשblack cocks’ and ‘ ביכרשbeakers’ (both in writings by Eliezer ben Nathan), ‘ װדרשpens,’ ‘ בריצלישpretzels,’ ‘ קכלשtiles,’ and ‘ בוֿבירשpeasants.’ 167 See the discussion of SAB in section ... 168 The possibility that glosses known to us were written by French-speaking Jews is unlikely. In a number of these documents the authors use the explicit expression: “in the language of Ashkenaz” (Güdemann :, Timm :). The Old French glosses encompassed in the same sources are marked as corresponding to “the language of LOEZ/LAAZ,” the traditional medieval collective designation for Romance idioms. 169 Both Weinreich (WG :–) and Timm (TS ), after detailed discussion of the facts of German dialectology, reject the possibility of the German influence arguing that (a) a phenomenon that did not have substance in the coterritorial German could hardly have a strong influence on Yiddish, and (b) references from what both of them call “Old Yiddish” (it is more appropriate to refer to them in a more factual way as medieval texts from western Germany written by Jews in their vernacular language) should be related to the phenomenon found in modern EY.
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Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts and Romance elements
influence of local Central German dialects (ECG for EY and Ripuarian for the Rhineland) in which the pattern of adding -s to a singular ending in -er was known.170 A number of given names found in early Ashkenazic sources include French diminutive suffixes -et(te) and -in(e). The same names are mainly known in ZARFAT, and therefore they were borrowed by German Jews from their French coreligionists as ready-made forms. Nothing indicates that these suffixes were borrowed into the vernacular language of Rhenish Jews.171
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BASIC ASHKENAZIC VOCALIC SHIFTS AND ROMANCE ELEMENTS
Table . in section .. lists the main vocalic shifts in the German component that are valid for numerous Yiddish varieties. Some of them are also relevant for Romance elements that were already part of the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews at the moment of the corresponding phonetic changes. WY piltsl ‘house maid’ (formerly ‘virgin’) appears to be the only lexical element outside of the German component that was also affected by the unrounding (shift #).172 Traces of the lengthening of short vowels in open syllables (shift #) are apparent in the stressed vowels of StY tsholnt ‘a Sabbath dish’ (A), female name Beyle (E), and antshpoyzn ‘to become engaged’ (O), as well as WY ōren ‘to pray’ (O).173 The resulting long vowels later underwent—along with elements of other origins—additional changes. For the first word in the above list, its stressed vowel followed in CzY and EY a series of raisings [a:] > [ɔ:] > [o:] (shift #). Its WY form shālet kept [a:]. The realization in DuY reveals the mixed character of this Yiddish variety. Indeed, if [o:] represents the general DuY reflex for the lengthened MHG a, the lexical element in question is pronounced shālet, exactly as in WY. In the two other Romance elements, Beyle and antshpoyzn, their lengthened vowels, [e:] and [o:], respectively, underwent diphthongization (shift #).174 Beele and Behla found in documents from sixteenth-century Hessen show the presence of the long vowel rather than a diphthong in forms related to StY Beyle. The reference to Бейля in Volhynia in represents the earliest mention of a diphthongized form. The earliest western diphthongal form of this name is Beilla (Vienna, ). 170 In her analysis of the plurals with -s, Timm (TS –) divides all early references into three groups following their chronology only. For the first phase (before ), she considers that no particular pattern can be discerned and for this reason she postulates a Romance (French) origin of this suffix. During the second one, represented by documents from to , -s appears only in a large group of feminine forms ending in the singular with -in and a small number of “internationalisms” (words of non-German origin or found in non-German languages also). The third phase encompasses sources from to in which we find the representative of the first subgroup from the previous period as well as words ending in the singular in nasals or liquids. This chronological classification into three phases of the development of the plural -s in Yiddish is based on a correlation that is partially fortuitous. It appears that here the geographical factor ignored by Timm is even more important than the chronological one. Indeed, a large majority of sources from Timm’s “first phase” were compiled in the medieval Rhineland, in the vicinity of Low German areas with -s. Almost all documents known for the “second phase” were actually written by Jews who lived in the southern German-speaking provinces or migrated from them to northern Italy. For them, the German dialectal -s was foreign. Their language is the ancestor of modern WY. Yet, many sources from the “third phase” are related to EY. They were compiled by Polish Jews who themselves or their ancestors dwelled in towns where a significant part of the Christian population would be speaking ECG. For sources from the same “phase” that were written in the same geographic areas as those from the “second phase,” we find -s only in the contexts that were valid during the “second phase,” that is, they exhibit features of WY. 171 See Beider :–. 172 As discussed in section ., [y] is found in numerous western Ashkenazic sources compiled during the sixteenth century, while the unique reference in Prague (BM, first decade of the seventeenth century) has [i]. 173 See the discussion of the etymology of these elements in sections .. (Beyle) and . (tsholnt, antshpoyzn). 174 The fact that for WY ōren no diphthongized form is known is due to the appearance of this vowel before /r/ (see section ..).
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Romance elements
One definite Romance example exists for the diphthongization of MHG î (shift #): StY male name Fayvush. As discussed in section .., its ancestor Vivus/Vives was integrated into the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews quite early and its stressed vowel merged with MHG î. Various diphthongized forms of this given name—such as Veyvus, Veif(i)s, and Veifel—are known in Nürnberg from the first half of the fourteenth century.175 During the first half of the fifteenth century, forms of this kind are commonly found in sources from Regensburg, Austria, and Prague. Yet, during the whole of the fifteenth century, only forms with a monophthong— such as Vif(u)s, Vifis, Fifus, Fifis, Bifuss, Vifel(man), Vivelman—are known in Hessen (including Frankfurt), Alsace, and Thuringia. One such reference, Phiwelman, appears in Kraków (). It is only during the sixteenth century that diphthongized forms become commonplace in Hessen, in good correlation with the chronology of the diphthongization of MHG î and û in local German.176 This means that for Jewish vernacular idioms spoken in the Nürnberg and the Frankfurt areas a similar phonetic change took place with a difference of more than two centuries. Because of this difference, the chronology of the next stages of the global chain ([i:] > [ej] > [εj] > [aj]) varies depending on region. The earliest references to [aj] appear in Slavic countries: Faifl () and Fajše () in Bohemia, Faywel (fifteenth century) in Poland, and Файвиш () in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The first references to forms with [aj] cognate with StY male given name Faytl appear in Bohemia: Faytl () and Fajtl ().177 In several elements of the Romance origin, the phonetic development of the stressed vowel was exactly the same as that of MHG ei (shifts #). This is the case of StY female name Reyne, StY teytl ‘date’ and leyenen ‘to read,’ SWY bāfe ‘to drink’ and SWY prāye ‘to invite.’178 The existence of these Romance instances of E is important for several reasons. On the one hand, it helps to establish the etymologies of these elements. On the other hand, it corroborates the idea about their incorporation into the vernacular language of western Ashkenazic Jews during the period when MHG ei was still pronounced as the diphthong [ej]. Moreover, it implies that it was during the same period that these forms with [ej] were brought to Central and Eastern Europe. This factor allows a better understanding of the phonetic development of E in EY. Indeed, in theory, shifts # could affect for EY not only E, and O, but also E and O. This development would be valid if at the initial stage of the development of EY both E and O went through the stage of monophthongs specific to a number of German dialects including ECG. According to this scenario, the mergers of E with E, and O with O, took place at the stage of monophthongs. Since the ancestors of StY Reyne, teytl, and leyenen necessarily had [ej] when they appeared in Eastern Europe, this scenario sounds less plausible than the scenario according to which for EY both E and O had never become monophthongs and, consequently, these mergers had taken place later, only after the diphthongization of E, and O, .
175 The fact that the diphthongization was quite recent may be illustrated by the spelling ( ויבליןNürnberg, ) that does not indicate the diphthong. 176 The existence of the change in process may be illustrated by the existence of both kinds of forms in the same area (Hessen) during the same period (the last third of the sixteenth century): (a) monophthongal: Phybes, Fybus, and Viebes; (b) diphthongal: Pheybus and Feibes. 177 As discussed in section .. (see footnote ), the immediate Romance origin of this given name cannot be taken for granted: the intermediate role of German is possible. However, independently of its exact origin, its stressed vowel was identical to MHG î. 178 See their discussion in sections .. (Reyne) and . (all others).
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Synthesis
.
SYNTHESIS
.. French connection The main purpose of this chapter consists in shedding light on the controversial topic dealing with the origins of unique Romance elements that belong to the oldest strata of Yiddish. Arguments presented in section .. demonstrate that an important portion of medieval Rhenish Jews were German-speaking by the end of the eleventh century. Romance items, once acquired, did not follow any further phonetic shifts that characterized the development of Old French spoken by both Christians and Jews in neighboring areas. As shown in sections . and ., the number of these elements, used by Ashkenazic Jews since the Middle Ages as personal names, toponyms, and vernacular words, is significant. We are certainly not dealing with just a few isolated items that could have entered Yiddish at various periods and in different regions. Romance languages spoken by Gentiles in provinces that are situated far from places where medieval Ashkenazic communities dwelled are unlikely to be donors. Among them are idioms from the Iberian Peninsula, Occitan, and various Balkan languages (Dalmatian, Romanian, etc.). A major contribution of Rhaeto-Romance languages from Switzerland and northern Italy is also unlikely. No important medieval Jewish communities are known in the area in question. The same argument represents another factor for excluding Balkan Romance languages. As a result, it is no surprise that only the following idioms are generally mentioned in the literature as potential donor languages: Latin, Old Italian, and Gallo-Romance/Old French. Latin elements, if any, would necessarily belong to the substratum of the vernacular German-based language of Ashkenazic Jews. In principle, this source could only have had any influence if Jews had lived in the territory of modern Germany without interruption since Roman times (the fourth century or even earlier) until the tenth or eleventh centuries when references to Jewish communities reappear in historical documents of the area in question. In principle, as shown in Schütte , at least for Cologne, such a historical scenario is plausible. However, even if it were really valid, this scenario does not necessarily predict the existence of Ashkenazic linguistic items that would be taken from (Late) Latin. The Jewish population of Rhenish towns could shift to German simultaneously with their Gentile neighbors, without significant traces left from the period when the vernacular language was still Romance. In any case, as discussed in this chapter, we find no Ashkenazic linguistic elements that could be unambiguously characterized as Latin. The same is roughly true for Italian. No words in the Ashkenazic vernacular language(s) since the Middle Ages reveal features specific only to some of the Italian languages or dialects. The route through Italy to the Rhineland is plausible only for one given name: Kalonymos, of Greek origin, and, perhaps (but not for sure) one verb, bentshn ‘to bless.’ The situation concerning the possibility of the French connection is dramatically different. As shown in this chapter, the existence of close linguistic links between medieval Ashkenazic communities and those from northern France (ZARFAT) is beyond question. A tradition common to both Jewish groups (but distinct from those specific to their coreligionists in other regions of Europe) characterizes their Hebrew. For several related aspects—such as scripts used and the pronunciation of Hebrew vowels—no information exists allowing one to establish which one of the two groups borrowed or inherited it from the other. However, for spelling conventions of non-Hebrew words using the Hebrew alphabet as well as for several other extra-linguistic factors, it is clear that the influence was going from ZARFAT to ASHKENAZ and not vice versa. Some of these shared features resulted from the borrowing (during the eleventh century or later) of a particular feature between already established communities. The above elements, together with the existence of the oral tradition about the provenance from France of the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews (documented during
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Romance elements
the sixteenth century only) represent indirect data corroborating the general notion about the nature of the link between ZARFAT and ASHKENAZ. The information provided by the onomastic analysis and the study of words from the general lexicon yields results that are much more explicit. For various cultures, the consideration of toponyms often allows us to reveal the oldest linguistic and historical layers. Here Jews represent no exception. The Old French influence is observable in the Jewish name for the Rhine River itself. The Hebrew spelling of the Jewish name of the Rhineland, *LOTHER (לותירa/ a)לותר, is likely to be influenced by phonological peculiarities limited to Old French. The personal name of the local ruler, Lothair, was the basis for this Jewish toponym as well as for Christian designations of the same general area from which English and French Lorraine are derived. However, it is important to note that the territory covered by the Jewish toponym encompassed also such towns as Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, which have always been outside of Christian Lorraine. This consideration shows that during the second part of the ninth century and perhaps during the tenth century also, for medieval Jews, the communities in question (if they were already existent) were considered as outgrowths of other communities, those from Lorraine (covering Metz, Cologne, and Trier). As shown in section .., Speyer and Worms at least were known to local Jews under names of Old French origin. Yet, at the time when the name *LOTHER could have appeared, the Gentile majority in these Rhenish towns was already German-speaking. As a result, these Old French features could not have been due to a local Romance language spoken by Christians. All this implies that certain ancestors of Rhenish Jews came to the Rhineland bringing with them ready-made toponyms formed in the territory where Old French (or its Gallo-Romance ancestor179) was spoken. If in these territories they met their coreligionists living in the area from earlier times (and, for this reason, most likely German-speaking already), these migrants certainly were quite influential because of their number and/or prestige and imposed their toponyms. The consideration of given names used by medieval Rhenish Jews also provides a firm corroboration of the notion of the influx of French Jews to the Rhineland. A number of names of French origin clearly appeared in Germany only during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries following migrations of individual families and/or persons. However, the proportion of names of Romance origin among Ashkenazic women at the end of the eleventh century is so great that there is no doubt that in many cases we are dealing with names inherited from previous generations. For some of them, we can confidently establish an association with only one particular Romance language. In all these cases, Old French (or Gallo-Romance) is the tongue in question. Since ancient times, in the corpus of Jewish names, the male names have been significantly more conservative than the female ones. Their analysis can often reveal the oldest strata of the corpus. For this reason, of particular interest are several male Romance names—such as Bendit, Bonnom, Senior, and Vives—already commonly used by Ashkenazic Jews in the Middle Ages. For all of them, southern France represents the most plausible area of origin. ZARFAT was the intermediary stage in their route to Germany. The existence of a number of given names not found in the Rhineland but known in both parts of France and Spain corroborates the idea that southern France is the area of their initial development from which some names were brought to ZARFAT in the North and/or to Catalonia and Aragon in the Southwest. Due to migrations from West to East, Ashkenazic names of Romance origin gradually penetrated Slavic countries as well. As a result, in modern times a significant portion of them were pan-Yiddish.
179 Formally speaking, the term “Gallo-Romance” is used in historical linguistics to designate the ancestor common to French, Occitan, Catalan, and northern Italian languages. However, features characterized in this chapter as specifically “Gallo-Romance” were specific only to the dialect of this language, which may be called Proto-French. In other languages derived from Gallo-Romance, the features in question are not found.
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Synthesis
Additional arguments corroborating the French origin of a significant portion of medieval German Jews come from the consideration of the general lexicon. The semantic influence of the tradition of biblical translations of ZARFAT is clearly apparent in the corresponding tradition developed among Ashkenazic Jews. In this particular case, we are not necessarily dealing with a heritage. This factor could be due to close “horizontal” contacts between medieval German Jews and their coreligionists from northern France. Also, a number of words found either in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews or in their biblical glosses and translations show features related to phonetic shifts that took place in Old French during the first centuries of the Second Millennium, that is, during the period when Jewish communities in Germany were already well established and German-speaking. These elements are therefore clearly adstratal. Most likely, they were due to French migrants who joined communities of western Germany during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. For another, larger, series of words that came from ZARFAT, the length of their use by Ashkenazic Jews cannot be established with certainly. In principle, they could have been either borrowed during the early period of the existence of German-speaking Rhenish communities or inherited from previous generations. The consideration of their semantics can help distinguish between these two possibilities. Among the words in question, we observe the presence of several categories of items that are unlikely to be loaned. The first of them encompasses such basic words as bāfen ‘to drink,’ prāyen ‘to invite,’ and, most likely, onkel ‘uncle’ too. The second series includes words from the religious sphere. Among the examples are: porshen ‘to remove the forbidden fat and veins from meat,’ tetshen ‘to blow the Shofar,’ leyenen ‘to read,’180 almemer ‘reading desk in a synagogue,’ trop ‘the cantillation of the Bible and its notation,’ antshpoyzn ‘to become engaged,’ and tolm(e) ‘bridal canopy.’ Following some indirect factors and also by analogy with previous words, to the same oldest stratum should be assigned the verbs dormen ‘to sleep’ (to be added to the first of the above series), memeren ‘to conduct a memorial service,’ and ōren ‘to pray’ (both to be added to the second series). Formally speaking, no unambiguous evidence exists about their provenance from northern France. Their assignment to one particular Romance language on a phonological basis only is impossible. However, semantically speaking these Romance items are so important that it is hard to believe that we can be dealing here with several independent origins. The principle of OCCAM’S RAZOR forces us to assign them to a single Romance source, namely the Old French language (or its immediate Gallo-Romance predecessor). A consideration of the peculiarities of WY Romanisms allows us to establish approximate time frames for the development of the Romance substratum in the language spoken by medieval Jews of western Germany. According to several criteria, the eleventh century represents the terminus ante quem for the period when the Romance substratum of WY became independent of the phonological development of the Gallo-Romance ancestor of French. Indeed, during the twelfth century Old French underwent a number of shifts that are not observable in the oldest WY Romance elements, namely, (i) raising /o/ > /u/ [compare Proto-WY *Doltse and StY antshpoyzn]; (ii) vocalization of preconsonantal /l/ > /u/ after /o/ [compare *Doltse]; (iii) monophthongization /ei/ > /ε/ in words whose Latin ancestor had the -act- cluster [compare StY teytl], and (iv) /ei/ > /oi/ in numerous other words [compare Proto-WY *beiven, the etymon of WY bāfe(n)]. If we take into account the absence of traces of the shift /u/ > /y/ in the stressed vowel of WY porshen, the terminus ante quem moves two centuries earlier and becomes posited to the ninth century. Indeed, in French historical linguistics it is considered that this fronting took place before the ninth century. The terminus post quem for the same phenomenon of separation between Gallo-Romance and the Romance substratum of WY corresponds to the eighth century. It was during the seventh and eighth centuries that the
180
For the Middle Ages, this verb was mainly (or even exclusively) applicable to the reading of religious books.
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Romance elements
initial and postconsonantal Late Latin -g- and -c- before /a/ became palatalized in Gallo-Romance to /dž/ and /tš/, respectively. These changes are responsible for /š/ in porshen and /tš/ in tetshen. It was only during the eighth century that /e/ in open syllables became diphthongized in Gallo-Romance. We find traces of this shift in *beiven and the Jewish name for the Rhine river. The information given in the previous paragraph provides a strong corroboration for the provenance from northern France of basic WY Romanisms. It refutes the hypothesis by Fuks (.:) and Schwarzfuchs (:–) about their local Rhenish origin. Their theory can be valid only if during the eighth century an important part of the Christian urban population in the Rhineland was still speaking a Romance language that underwent exactly the same major phonetic shifts as the GalloRomance language used by Christians of neighboring northern France. By itself, the idea that before shifting to German, Christians of large towns in the valleys of the Moselle and the Rhine spoke a dialect closely related to the ancestor of Old French does not appear shocking. After all, in that region exactly as in the contiguous northern France the existence of a bilingual population is plausible and numerous changes in Vulgar Latin were influenced by the Frankish dialect of German. However, this theoretical possibility is refuted by the results of the only existing study that sheds some light on the peculiarities of the Romance language spoken in that area in earlier times. A careful investigation by Jungandreas () of toponyms from the Moselle valley makes plausible the survival up to the thirteenth century of a Romance idiom among Christians of certain villages around Trier and other discontinuous small rural areas between Trier and Koblenz. This scholar has shown (pp.–) that numerous phonetic shifts known for the Gallo-Romance ancestor of Old French were also valid for this Romance language. However, there were exceptions and several developments known for France were not followed in the Moselle valley (pp. –). Two of them are of particular interest for our topic. Firstly, the Latin -c- before /a/ remained pronounced /k/ and never became palatalized to /tš/ (p. ). We can also be sure that Latin -g- in the same position never turned into /dž/ either.181 Secondly, no prothetic /e/ appeared before /sp/ (p. ). If such developments characterized the Romance idiom of the Moselle valley, no doubt subsists concerning the absence of both these phonetic changes in the more distant Rhine valley. As a result, the hypothesis in favor of the local Rhenish origin of Ashkenazic Romance elements can explain neither /(t)š/ in WY porshen and tetshen nor the prothetic vowel in the early Jewish name for the town of Speyer and the ancestor of antshpoyzn. The time frames provide a second refutation of this hypothesis. As discussed in section .., it was before the eighth century that German became dominant, even in Trier. In other major towns of the area (except perhaps Metz situated in the immediate vicinity of the linguistic border between the Romance and German regions and for which no information is available concerning its exact linguistic past), the shift to German occurred even earlier. On the other hand, the rather late presence of a Romance language in the small rural areas of the Moselle valley discovered by Jungandreas is unlikely to be of any influence on the Jewish urban population.
.. Romance elements and modern Yiddish varieties The close links that existed in the Middle Ages between Jews from ZARFAT and their coreligionists from western German-speaking territories are still apparent in modern traditional Ashkenazic culture. Some of them are pan-Ashkenazic. To this layer belong the legacy of the French Tosafist school (with its important influence on the development of Ashkenazic religious scholarship), the Hebrew script, a set of shared given names, and a few lexical elements. As discussed earlier in the 181 Similarly, both stops in question were not affricated in a large part of Normandy and one area of the northern French provinces (Bourciez :–).
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Synthesis
chapter, the links in the domain of scholarship are clearly “horizontal,” while no definite paleographical information exists to evaluate the nature of the link concerning the script. The common onomastic items unambiguously indicate that for a portion of Ashkenazic Jews their ancestors lived in northern and/or southern France. For medieval Rhenish communities these given names were already common during the eleventh century, the period for which the earliest documented onomastic information is available. A phonological and semantic analysis of Romance lexical elements reveals that an important number of them were already used in the vernacular speech of Jews from western German-speaking territories from the turn of the First and the Second Millenniums. For western vernacular Ashkenazic idioms, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lexical elements inherited or borrowed from French-speaking Jews clearly belong to their substratum. They are regularly found in the oldest written sources compiled by Ashkenazic BNEY HES such as SAB, M, R, Le, R, and MinP. In the sixteenth century, Elia Levita, one of BNEY HES, uses some of these words in his WY writings. Quite logically, among modern Yiddish varieties, SWY—an idiom from the same lineage— encompasses the largest number of Romanisms. The set in question includes such basic verbs as dormen ‘to sleep’ and bāfen ‘to drink’ (both known since the Middle Ages), as well as memeren ‘to conduct a memorial service.’ From the first half of the eighteenth century we also have a reference, to the WY verb pretshen ‘to pray.’ For all of these Romanisms, we have no evidence of their possible use in Yiddish outside of western German-speaking territories. Several other verbs with Romance (and, more specifically, Old French) roots are shared by SWY and DuY: ōre(n) ‘to pray,’ tetshe(n) ‘to blow the Shofar in a synagogue,’ prāye(n) ‘to invite,’ dorme(n) ‘to sleep,’ and shorme(n) ‘to bewitch.’ For the three first items in the above list, we know of numerous references already in writings by medieval BNEY HES (M, R, R, MinP) as well as in various western sources from the sixteenth century. The first of these verbs (and, to a lesser extent, the second one too) belongs to the basic religious vocabulary. In modern times, it was commonly used in Prague. Yet, in the eastern Czech lands (including major communities of Moravia), it was unknown: the verb davenen has been used in the same semantic context.182 Such geography may imply that Prague, the largest community of this area, underwent during the last centuries some influence from the West, while the language in Moravia retained more archaic variants. For tetshen and prāyen, there are only sporadic references in books printed in Prague or Kraków at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries despite the fact that the language of various authors from these cities during the period in question underwent the significant influence of WY, partly related to written traditions (including that of biblical translations and glosses). Globally speaking, both are foreign for Eastern Europe as is (east of Prague) the verb ōren also. References for dormen and shormen are known only in SWY and DuY. The same geography is valid for sargenes ‘shroud’ in which, in theory, only the first consonant may after all be Romance. Independently of its exact etymology, this noun (references to which in the area of BNEY HES have been known since the mid-twelfth century) represents a lexical peculiarity limited to Western Europe. For onkel ‘uncle,’ piltsl ‘house maid,’ and porshen ‘to remove the forbidden fat and veins from meat,’ references in the Czech lands are rather exceptional and none is found in EY. All three are typical western words. The first two of them are regularly found in works written by BNEY HES. EY equivalents to WY praye(n), tetshe(n), sargenes, ōre(n), and porshe(n) are (far)betn, blozn (a) shoyfer, takhrikhem, davenen, and treybern, respectively.183 In the first two EY items, we are dealing with verbs from the German component and the third is from Hebrew. As a result, in theory, they
182 183
In Prague, actually both ōren and davenen were used (see footnote ). Both verbs are also known in DuY. See isoglosses in BA , , , and .
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Romance elements
could at some stage in the development of EY have replaced words cognate with prāyen, tetshen, and sargenes (if these words indeed were found in EY in earlier periods). Yet, for the last two verbs, the situation is different: davenen is of uncertain, most likely Semitic origin,184 while the root of treybern comes from Old Czech. Both of them are unknown in SWY. The second one (and, perhaps, the first too) belongs to the substratum of EY.185 Consequently, the odds are high that words cognate to ōre(n) and porshe(n) have never appeared in EY. Less than twenty old lexical items of Romance origin and/or coming from the vernacular language of Jews from medieval northern France are panYiddish.186 For many of them, words with the same roots are found in the everyday idiom(s) spoken by Ashkenazic Jews since the Middle Ages. In one case (‘reading desk in a synagogue’), the western variant almemer coincides with the historical form from which EY balemer is derived. Semantically speaking, all of them have a religious connotation, either direct or indirect. Some words related to certain aspects of Judaism could be borrowed by EY from WY “horizontally” due to the western provenance of numerous rabbis in Slavic countries and their prestige. Others could be brought by western immigrants to major Jewish centers of Bohemia and Moravia before the inception of ProtoEY, during the period when Czech Jews used in everyday life either a Jewish ethnolect of Old Czech or, later, the colonial Bohemian dialect of German.187 On the other hand, a few basic Romance (substratal) lexical items limited to Yiddish varieties of Western Europe that have no direct religious connotation (bāfen, dormen, onkel, piltsl, prāyen) are unknown in EY. The above factors corroborate the idea that SWY and EY do not descend from one hypothetical PROTO-YIDDISH. Originally there existed (at least) two different German-based Jewish languages that during the following centuries in some respects gradually got closer to each other due to inter-borrowing. According to its Romance elements, DuY is closely related to SWY. As discussed above, for a few words references are well attested in both DuY and SWY and unknown in Central and Eastern Europe. If the forms used in SWY and EY are phonetically distinct, DuY follows SWY. Compare: StY tsholnt versus western shālet, StY bentshn versus western benshen, StY balemer versus western almemer, StY leyenen versus western (variant) layen. Yet, both CzY and EGY are closer to EY than to SWY (or DuY). In EGY, we do not find any reference to forms cognate to ōren, piltsl, prāyen, sargenes, or tetshen: according to isoglosses related to these lexical elements EGY shows the same behavior as EY. In CzY, some of the above forms are unknown, while others are marginal (except for ōren in Prague). Yet, both CzY and EGY side with WY in the contrast between EY bentshn and WY benshen. CzY sholet represents a form intermediate between WY shalet and StY tsholent. Similarly, CzY alemer is intermediate between WY almemer (the oldest one) and EY balemer.
See the discussion of the feature {l} section ... See sections .. and ... 186 This list includes dialectal forms cognate to StY antshpoyzn ‘to become engaged,’ bentshn ‘to bless,’ leyenen ‘to read,’ milgroym ‘pomegranate,’ pen ‘pen,’ plankhenen ‘to lament,’ sarver ‘waiter,’ teytl ‘date (fruit),’ trop ‘the cantillation of the Bible and its notation,’ tsholnt ‘a Sabbath dish,’ and viren ‘to make lines,’ and a very few others. Actually, for certain words in the above set we have no modern reference outside of EY. This is the case for antshpoyzn, milgroym, sarver, teytl, and viren. However, for all of them their western references in western territories during the previous centuries are amply attested. 187 The phonetics of LitY tsholnt provides an example of a form that came to Eastern Europe many centuries ago. Note that the EY form retains two elements given in the Old French etymon: the initial affricate and the internal /n/. Both of them appear in the oldest reference to this word (צלנט, thirteenth century; see section .). None is given in modern Yiddish varieties from Western and Central Europe. 184 185
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Synthesis
.. The term “Romance component” Despite the substratal character of certain Gallo-Romance lexical elements in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews since the last centuries of the First Millennium CE, this language had no structural influence on Yiddish. As discussed in section ., the morphology of modern Yiddish varieties includes no elements of Romance origin. Moreover, for the medieval period we do not find in the language of Jews from western Germany any morphological feature that would be distinctively Romance. The same is generally speaking true for the grammar of the Ashkenazic vernacular language of the Middle Ages. It shows only features that are either German or Semitic. Only EY underwent major Slavic influence, especially during the last centuries. For these reasons, for EY it is appropriate to speak about German, Hebrew-Aramaic, and Slavic components. On the other hand, the term “Romance component” used by Weinreich does not appear to be linguistically adequate. Nothing corroborates his idea about the vernacular idiom of medieval Rhenish Jews (that he also calls “Yiddish”) being a “fusion” language with Germanic, Semitic, and Romance elements mixed together. We should avoid any confusion between the origins of people and those of their languages. When we speak about inheritance by Ashkenazic Jews of certain linguistic elements from the Jews from ZARFAT, we imply that the ancestors of (some) Ashkenazic Jews brought these elements when migrating to Germany from ZARFAT. These elements entered the vernacular language of Rhenish Jews during the period when these Jews were bilingual using both German and Gallo-Romance / Old French in their everyday life. For the German-based vernacular language in question, these GalloRomance elements should be considered as borrowed (and not inherited) since this language was not from the same lineage as Gallo-Romance. To illustrate this statement, one can reuse the analogy proposed by King (:). German has as many loanwords from Celtic as Yiddish has from Romance, if not more. Yet, it is linguistically unprofitable to speak about the “Celtic component” in German because Celtic had no structural impact on German. To make King’s analogy even more suitable for our topic, one can also add that this purely linguistic feature does not deny the possibility that genetically every German may have ancestors who at some moment shifted from Celtic to German. Similarly, it is not appropriate to speak about the “Gaulish” (Celtic) or the “Frankish” (Germanic) components of French. This language is derived from the Gallo-Romance version of Vulgar Latin. It borrowed hundreds of words from both Gaulish (its substratum) and Frankish (its superstratum). The latter also influenced a number of phonetic shifts found in Old French. On the other hand, Christians who lived in medieval France and spoke Old French were of different (often mixed) origins including Gaulish, Frankish, and Roman.
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5 Slavic elements .
MAIN ISSUES
Modern EY encompasses thousands of words and a few dozen given names of Slavic origin. Moreover, the influence of Slavic languages is also apparent in other, system-level parts of the language. The most detailed description of this influence is due to Weinreich. This scholar stresses that of all classes of words only articles, pronouns, and numerals remained unaffected by the Slavic influence. Slavic languages are responsible for major grammatical features of EY including “aspectoid” forms (resembling the Slavic notion of grammatical aspect), calques on Polish models using Germanic verbal prefixes, calques from Belarusian in expressions of LitY, changes of noun genders in comparison to German, borrowing of numerous suffixes (including -ev, -nik, and a large collection of diminutive and endearing suffixes), various syntaxic phenomena, a set of phonological traits (palatal consonantal phonemes, active use of /tš/ and /ž/, sibilant confusion in LitY, etc.1 This situation is quite natural: since the Late Middle Ages Jewish speakers of EY have lived in countries where the local Gentile majority would be speaking West or East Slavic languages. As a result, numerous Slavic elements found in EY may result from borrowing due to contacts that Yiddishspeaking Jews had with various Slavic languages. Similarly to the consideration of Romance elements in the previous chapter, when dealing with elements of Slavic origins, three basic questions need to be answered: () To what layer of Yiddish do these elements belong, and are they adstratal or substratal?; () To what particular donor languages are they due?; () At what period did the adoption into Yiddish take place? Important methodological difficulties and nuances associated to these questions are described by Weinreich (WG :). He points out that in certain cases several Slavic languages yielded different lexical variants within EY, sometimes with a semantic differentiation between these variants. In other cases, the exact phonetics of one EY word may be due to the influence of several Slavic donors. For example, StY breg ‘shore’ is ultimately derived from Polish brzeg though its /r/ in place of Polish “rz” may be due to the influence of East Slavic languages.2 Weinreich also emphasizes the possibility of a linguistic item taken over more than once, and each time in a different territory. For the first among the above questions, a distinction should be made between elements borrowed horizontally from neighboring Gentiles or substratal (that is, inherited in the territory in question from Jews who—before the arrival of Yiddish speakers in this area and/or the Yiddishizing of the local Jewish population—were using the Slavic language in question in their everyday life). As discussed in this chapter, this ambiguity exists for at least two independent regions, WEST CANAAN (modern Czech territories) and EAST CANAAN (territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus). In these two areas, Jewish
See details in WG :–, . Though the general idea by Weinreich is correct, in this particular case a purely Polish (without any influence of East Slavic) origin of Yiddish breg is more plausible (see Stankiewicz :). 1 2
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Methodology
communities (those of WEST CANAANITES and EAST CANAANITES, respectively) have existed since at least the tenth century, well before the arrival of western (Ashkenazic) migrants. The notion of first Slavic borrowings by Yiddish being made not from Slavic languages per se but from the language of WEST CANAANITES is due to Weinreich (WG :). He considered that this borrowing took place a number of centuries after the inception of Yiddish in the Rhineland as a separate language when one portion of the Yiddish-speaking Jews moved from western Germany eastward to the Slavic territories. The first contact was with (Old) Czech. Later Yiddish speakers entered the linguistic areas of other languages in the following chronological order: () Polish, () Ukrainian and Belarusian, and, much later, () Russian.3 Such a point of view mainly characterizes the approach of several other authors in the domain of Yiddish studies. A very similar picture appears in Birnbaum :–.4 Bin-Nun (BN –) describes the arrival of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Poland and the struggle of this language for survival in the Slavic environment, with the age of certain Slavic loanwords in EY measured in many centuries. Eggers (:) shows an interesting example of a set of EY words, with roots and suffixes of German origin, whose morphological structure nevertheless clearly follows a Slavic pattern. In this case, as well as globally, he considers the Slavic influence on EY to be adstratal. A totally different approach characterizes works by Wexler (, ). That author considers Yiddish to be a Slavic language and postulates that it appeared after a relexification of original Slavic words in German. According to him, one Slavic substratum is Upper Sorbian (Central Europe) and another is Polesian (East European). However, methods used by him to corroborate his conclusions contradict all general principles elaborated by historical linguists during the last two centuries. They cannot be taken seriously.5 Geller (:–) also considers that the German component of EY results from the relexification of the originally Slavic lexicon. Contrary to Wexler, she points to a Polish source. Section . presents general considerations about methodological aspects of the analysis of the history of Slavic component. Sections .–. discuss the oldest traces of influence of various Slavic languages on the development of Yiddish varieties: Old Czech, the language representing the ancestor common to modern Belarusian and Ukrainian, and Old Polish, respectively.
.
METHODOLOGY
The general development of the Slavic component in EY dialects is presented in Figure ..
3 WG :–, (on that page he writes “Ashkenazic community arrived in the Slavic areas with a full-fledged Yiddish language and the relations between Yiddish and Slavic could be established on the basis of vicinage”), –, and . 4 His arguments concerning a very old date (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) of incorporation into Yiddish of certain Polish words are erroneous. Firstly, the idea that the PolY reflex /r/ for Polish “rz” points to such a chronology is inappropriate (see section .. and arguments in Stankiewicz :). Secondly, the spontaneous fronting /u/ > /i/ in PolY cannot be that old (see the discussion of the feature {V} in section ..). 5 The whole analysis by Wexler is based on “parallels” he finds between linguistic phenomena in various languages. If, for example, he finds that something looks similar in Yiddish and Sorbian (or a dialect of Ukrainian), he does not really care to check that, maybe, (i) there are other Slavic languages that show here a behavior similar to Sorbian (actually, not a single linguistic phenomenon mentioned by him is specifically Sorbian), (ii) the exact age of the feature in question in both Yiddish and Sorbian. Moreover, historical documents show that the Jewish presence in medieval Sorbian lands is marginal. Major striking issues in Wexler’s logic are shown in numerous studies (for example, Eggers and Timm and Beckmann ).
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Slavic elements Polish Kingdom
Czech lands
Jewish ethnolect of Bohemian
Grand Duchy of Lithuania Proto East Slavic
Czech
ProtoEY
Polish
PolY
UkrY
Ukrainian
Belarusian
CzY LitY
FIGURE . Possible origins of Slavic elements in EY dialects
This scheme is divided horizontally into three parts, each of them dealing with one geographic area: Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), Polish Kingdom (including Red Ruthenia) and Grand Duchy of Lithuania (covering modern Lithuania, Belarus, and the main part of Ukraine). Vertically, this scheme illustrates the chronology of various developments, the upper layers corresponding to earlier times. It shows that the oldest Slavic layer was incorporated during the period when Jews were still speaking Bohemian. It corresponds to the Old Czech substratum common to all of EY. This period is necessarily posterior to the thirteenth century for which we have documentary proof about Jews in the Czech lands being Slavic-speaking. During the following centuries, for those Jews who remained in Bohemia and Moravia, Czech did not influence the local dialect of Yiddish, conventionally called CzY in this book.6 The second layer was acquired later, when a portion of Czech Jews migrated to the Polish Kingdom. In these new territories, they borrowed a number of elements from (Old) Polish, the language spoken by neighboring Catholics. The resulting dialect, ancestral for modern varieties spoken in Eastern Europe, may be called Proto-EY. This dialect—after migrations of one section of Polish Jews into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—later branched in turn into PolY and LitY. Both of them underwent the influence of various Slavic languages: Polish for both of them and Belarusian for LitY. The last dialectal branching corresponds to the creation of UkrY as an offspring of PolY. In theory, some of the lexical elements of Belarusian or Ukrainian origin could appear in the corresponding EY subdialects not because of the direct contacts with these East Slavic languages but due to the shift of EAST CANAANITES to EY. Since Polish was actively used by the Christian urban population in East Slavic territories, a number of Polish loanwords appeared in both UkrY and LitY centuries after the inception of these EY subdialects. The last layer, the most recent and for this reason absent from Figure ., corresponds to words borrowed from Russian and is related to the administrative and economic realities of the Russian 6 This is true at least until the nineteenth century. During that time period, Jews had lived mainly in towns in which German was the main language used by Christian neighbors.
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Methodology
Empire that incorporated at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries large territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In addition to the influences mentioned above, certain elements of Slavic origin could appear in various EY subdialects because of the inter-borrowing between these subdialects. The influence of Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian on EY was particularly strong during the last centuries. Jews living in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and later, after the partition of Poland, in the Russian, Habsburg, and Prussian empires, were regularly exposed to the vernacular languages of their Gentile neighbors. Results of this interaction may be found even in such subsystems of EY, relatively closed to external influence, as morphology, syntax, and phonology. The earliest Slavic layer in EY seems, however, to be limited to lexical and onomastic elements: all old sources written by Jews of Central and Eastern Europe in their vernacular language, the ancestor of EY, show typically German morphology and syntax. Moreover, even in our day, the grammatical elements that are of Slavic origin are somewhat exceptional in EY. As a result, the task of the assignment of various Yiddish elements of Slavic origin to one particular layer is mainly restricted to the lexicon. Several criteria help in distinguishing between the above layers. The first one (“comparative reconstruction”) analyses the phonology of modern words. It compares phonetic proto-forms (reconstructed according to the variants of the same found in various Yiddish dialects) with the information known to us about the historical development of the corresponding Slavic languages. The second criterion deals with semantics. The meaning of Yiddish words conforms better to the meaning of the cognate words in certain Slavic languages compared to other idioms. Also, elements from certain semantic fields are unlikely to be borrowed and most likely belong to the (Old Czech) substratum of EY. The semantic criterion is certainly to be used with greater caution than other criteria. On the one hand, we can never be totally sure that our knowledge is comprehensive concerning the semantics of various words in Slavic languages a long time ago. On the other hand, there is no semantic field from which a borrowing is totally impossible. The semantic criterion still provides, ceteris paribus, rules of preference between competing hypotheses. The third criterion is geographic. The main direction of the propagation of EY was from west to east. As a result, Old Czech items may be found in all subdialects. Words of Polish origin are mainly found in Poland and to the east of it. Their presence in the modern Yiddish spoken in Bohemia and Moravia is more limited. It is related not to the direct influence of Polish but to that of PolY. Items borrowed from East Slavic languages are normally not found either in Czech or in the Polish lands, being mainly limited to the territories that, during the nineteenth century, constituted the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The fourth criterion is chronological. Old references to forms having some specifically Jewish phonological, morphological, or semantic characteristics may be helpful in identifying the age of various elements in EY and in corroborating the results of a comparative reconstruction. Unfortunately, numerous words of Slavic origin are not attested in the oldest available EY documents. As a result, this criterion that could be one of the most powerful because it provides factual (rather than conjectured) information is often of little help in this specific domain. In rare available references, the emphasis on characteristics unknown outside of the Jewish context is of paramount importance. It allows us to avoid one important methodological pitfall. It is inappropriate to consider that the existence of an old reference to a word cognate with some modern Yiddish lexical element points to the old age of the latter in Yiddish.7 Consider an example. In works written by the Bohemian Jewish scholars of the thirteenth century Isaac ben Moses (Or zarua) and Abraham ben Azriel (Arugat
7
This error is made by certain authors including Wexler (:–) and Geller (:).
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Slavic elements Polish
bielmo
Eastern Yiddish
Jewish ethnolect of Old Czech Old Czech
bělmo = Jewish repertoire in Old Czech
belme
FIGURE . Possible etymons of EY belme
ha-bośem) we find among others the following Slavic glosses: ‘ ביילמוleucoma,’ ‘ יגודיberries,’ and ‘ לופטאspade.’ The glosses in question are certainly of interest for the history of Old Czech and that of WEST CANAANITES. Yet, they provide no information that would be relevant for the history of their StY cognates belme, yagdes, and lopete, respectively. Figure . illustrates this point for the first of these words. Indeed, these medieval glosses would be of particular interest for the history of Yiddish only in one of the two following situations. The first corresponds to the presence of these glosses in early texts written by speakers of EY. Yet, nothing indicates that the scholars in question were native speakers of EY. On the contrary, we know for sure that their first language was Slavic and not Germanic.8 In other words, we can be sure that the old Jewish references in question pertain to words found in the Jewish ethnolect of Old Czech and not those from EY. The second hypothetical situation corresponds to references that reveal some specifically Jewish peculiarity, unknown in Old Czech but also found in Yiddish. In this case, we could say that the old reference pertains to the specifically Jewish repertoire of Old Czech. In this situation, it would be appropriate to conjecture that there is a genetic link between the presence of this word in modern Yiddish and the old Jewish source in question. Yet, this is clearly not the case here: compare Old Czech bělmo, jahodie, and lopata, respectively, to which the above Slavic glosses fit perfectly.9 As a result, the presence of Old Czech cognates to Yiddish belme, yagdes, and lopete in glosses written by Bohemian Jewish scholars cannot be considered as having more relevance for the history of Yiddish than their presence in medieval documents written in Old Czech by Christians. For example (as illustrated in Figure .), ביילמוis no more than a respelling of bělmo in Hebrew characters. Moreover, the Polish words bielmo, jagody, and łopata (note that Polish was characterized by the initial stress position during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) can easily explain EY belme, yagdes, and lopete.10 As a result, for these words the medieval Slavic glosses of Bohemian Jewish scholars are simply irrelevant for the history of Yiddish. 8 Isaac ben Moses says explicitly that his Slavic glosses are given in “our language,” while Abraham ben Azriel illustrates with numerous Czech examples difficult grammatical and lexical questions on the Hebrew text (Jakobson and Halle :). 9 The Old Czech /h/ is regularly rendered by gimel in the works in question, compare ‘ גנויpus’ and ‘ נוגביציkind of socks’ (Markon :, ), whose Old Czech equivalents are hnoj and nohavicě, respectively. Note that Old Czech Christian names appearing in the documents from the same thirteenth century (Dudik ) also use “g” for /h/ (Bogdan, Bogumila, Dragan, Gostata), while “h” is used for /x/ (Dobrohna, Hualata, Hualena, Milohna, Voyteh). 10 On the other hand, the second of these words cannot be of Czech origin since Old Czech “h” gives /h/ or /x/ but never /g/ in Yiddish; compare hoyl, knihe, and nebekh discussed in the next section.
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WEST CANAANITES
.
WEST CANAANITES
.. Given names For Bohemia and Moravia, sources prior to the fourteenth century that include references to Jewish proper names are almost totally lacking. On the other hand, for the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries numerous documents survived. A large number of Czech Jews appear in these sources under Slavic names. Male examples include Beneš/Benesch (), Czirnoch/Schirnoch (, ), Ebrusch (), Francek (), Jaroš (), Januš (), Kokeš (), Koleš (), La(n)cusch (), Liczko (), Machacz (), Macus/Makusch (), Malek (), Manusch (), Maynuš (), Mikes/Mix (), Munka (), Pakuš (), Reyko/Rayko (), Tyczko/Ticzo (), Voszlab (), and Wawruss (). Female examples are even more numerous: Babka (), Baka (), Behanna/Behuscha (), Czierna (; modern spelling would be Černa) / Czirnka () / Crnka (), Dobrocha (), Duch(y)na (), Dušme (; most likely a corrupted form of Dušana/Dušena (compare דושנהin Prague in ), Henlaba (), Jachna (), Kaczka (), Krasna (), Května (), *Libica (ליביצא, ), Libusch (), Lidmila (), Machna (), Maminka (), Mlada (), Myrusch (), Pipka (), Radocha () / Raduchna (), Racusch (), Sdislawa (), Slava () / Slavicˇ ka (), Slunka () / Slunecˇ ka (), Stubna (), Vesela (), Waschna (), Zdena (), Zdobna (), and Zlatka (). During the same period, Slavic names also appear in various other provinces of Central Europe. Documents from Silesia give references to Benesch (), Bogomyla/Bohomila (), Clopicz/ Clapicz (), Cochancz/Kochancze (), Czhorna (; equivalent to Černa), Desslawa (; a variant of Sdislawa), Debruska/Dobrusca (), Dragana (), *Dražna or *Drašna (דרשנא, ), *Druchana (דרוחנא, ),11 Duchawa (), Ebrusch (), Franczko (), Jachna (), Kokot (), Kucz (), Libuscha () / ( ליבושא), Pichna (), Radochna (), Rachna (), Schidczinna (), Stanka (), Swetlicza (), and Waczka (; gender unclear). Sources from Görlitz, a town neighboring another German-Slavic (Sorbian) province of Upper Lusatia, mention Friczko (), Pryba (), and Zharnak (). In Kraków, the Polish city with the largest Jewish community in the Middle Ages, one finds Czarna () / Czirna (), Dobrensco (), Franczko () / Franczek (), Glownia () / Glowisch (), Kaczka (), Kaschiscza (), Latossek (), Lybusch (), Pipke (, ), Radochna (), Swonka () and Swenka/Zwonka (), Swyetla (), Vaczko (), Wilcz(c)o (), Witoslawa (), and Zasirka (). In Warsaw—at that time the capital of Mazovia—Dobruchna (), Panscha (fifteenth century), Slawa (), and Vitoska (; hypocorism of Witosława) appear in documents. During the fourteenth century, Maly is mentioned in Polish sources, while Chwalka occurs during the next century. A significant number of Slavic names are also mentioned in territories where the Christian population—living in localities with Jewish communities—was mainly German-speaking during this period. In the region that is part of modern-day Austria but in the Middle Ages was divided between (Low) Austria, Carinthia, and Styria, sources mention Bacula/Bakula (, ), Manusch (), Marusch (), Priba (), Qualma/Qwalma (, ), Tekan(us) (–; a migrant from Hungary to Vienna) / Techant (), and Tschakana ().12 Variants of forms 11 The Hebrew spelling is likely to result from a misinterpretation of either ( דרוהנאcompare below the reference from Hungary) or דרשנא. 12 Also note the presence of a Slavic-speaking Jewish physician in Salzburg at the beginning of the ninth century (Aronius :–).
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Slavic elements
mentioned here for the Czech territories are also found: Dreslin (; hypocorism of Dražna/ Drašna), Radochna (), Tuschana (; equivalent to Dušana), Slaba/Slava (), Slata (; equivalent to Czech Zlata) and its hypocorism Sletlein (), and Wessela (; Vesela). Data from Regensburg (Bavaria) provide references to Dobrizel (), Techan (before ), Disslaba (), and Qwalina (; a variant of Qualma cited earlier). The list of martyrs from München () contains the female name זלעלטלא, most likely a corrupted version of *Slät(e)le, derived from Czech Zlata. Lybka/Lyppka (, ), Manusch (), Slaba/Slava (), Sletel (; from Zlata), and Tesslabe/Teschlawe () appear in Christian documents from Hungarian towns. Jewish sources from the same country—most likely from the fifteenth century—mention *Chvališ ( )חוואלישand *Druhana ()דרוהנא. In the province of Braunschweig (now within Lower Saxony), we find Craske (), Prive (), Slatte (; a variant of Zlata), Tzorney (; compare Černa), and probably Cochauwe ().13 A number of references are found in East Germany. In Erfurt, the capital city of Thuringia, one finds Bakol (, a variant of Bakula), Bogslaba (), Czenner (, from Poland), Dobrische/Dobrusche/Dobrus/Dobruzze (), Ebrusch (, from Bohemia), Janke (), Kusicza (, from Bohemia),14 Lakusch (, from Moravia), Milnicz/Melencze (), Pichna/Pychena (), Czschyre (), Slabe/Slafa () and Slafeka/Slauka (), Slayta (; compare Zlata), Zcakana (, from Poland; equivalent to Tschakana), Czschorne (), Zcorna (), Czorneka (), and Czschornike/Schornike (), and Czerniczsche/Zcernycze (; compare Czech Černa). A tombstone inscription from Magdeburg () mentions *Kreslova ( ;קרסלזבאmost likely a misinterpretation of )קרסלובא. A man called Wessel () lived in the same town. References to women Drasana/Drasyna from Magdeburg (), Lybike/Libeke () / Lubecze (; compare Lybka above) and Merloba (), both from neighboring Merseburg, appear in documents from Erfurt. In the province of Brandenburg, one observes the presence of Benas (related to Czech Beneš) in Stendal (), Mache in Berlin (), and Mosco in Frankfurt an der Oder (). The last appellation is a hypocorism of the biblical Moses that uses Slavic suffix -ko. The forms Schmolke, cited in Berlin (), and Glomeke, known in Frankfurt an der Oder (), are more ambiguous—their suffix could be of either Slavic or Low German origin. The tombstone inscriptions on the cemetery of Spandau, now within Berlin, present the following collection of female names: *Drazna (דרזנאa/aדרזנה, , ), *Dušana/Dušena (דושנאa/aדושנה, , ), *Graska/ *Kraska(?) (גרסקא, ), *Libka(?) (לבקה, ), *Mlada (מלרה, ), Mladuša ()מלרושה,*Slava (סלווא, ), *Zdobna (זרובנא, ),15 most likely ( קושנה), maybe *Sira/Sera ( )שיראand its hypocorism *Sirka/Serka (סירקא, , ). Although several names from these lists could result from the Slavonizing of genuine Jewish names made by Slavic scribes, many of them were certainly used by Jews among themselves. This assertion is mainly supported by the existence of names with Slavic roots and/or suffixes in Hebrew sources as well as in Christian (Latin or German) documents from Germany, Austria, and Hungary where no Slavonizing was possible at that time. In principle, various names enumerated here could be due to several Slavic languages: Czech (spoken by Christians in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), Polish (Greater and Lesser Poland, Mazovia, and Silesia), Slovak (northern part of Hungary), Slovene (Styria), and vernacular tongues of different Slavic groups, often pagan, in East Germany such as Sorbs, Polabs, Havellans, and
Some letters in this name could result from a misinterpretation of “n” as if it were “u” and therefore it could have the same root as Cochancz cited above. 14 If the second letter results from a misinterpretation it would be related to the above reference to Kaschiscza. 15 In Brocke , in several names (Dušana/Dušena, Mlada, Mladuša, Zdobna) the letter daleth ( )דis misinterpreted as if it were resh ()ר. 13
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WEST CANAANITES
Obodrites. For several reasons, a majority of these appellations are likely to be of Czech origin, and only a small part of them are Polish. The first factor is geographic. As can be seen from data presented at the beginning of this section, one finds the Jewish appellations in question in various provinces situated around Bohemia and Moravia: East Germany (northwest), Silesia (northeast), Bavaria (southwest), Austria (south), Hungary (southeast), and Poland (east and northeast). The easiest way to explain this particular geographic distribution is that many names are due to the migration of Jews from the Czech lands. This conjecture is especially attractive for German-speaking areas such as Thuringia, Braunschweig, and Austria. Also note that a few Slavic names occurring in Hungary do not correspond to the area inhabited by Slovaks. The second factor is statistical: it was in the Czech territories that we observe the appearance of the most numerous references to names from this category. Moreover, those found in Austrian, Bavarian, Hungarian, and East German sources are not specific to these areas but are generally also known in Bohemia-Moravia. The third factor is onomastic: almost all of these names were not specifically Jewish, but used by Czech Christians too. We find the following Gentile forms: Baba (full form for Babka), Beneš (Czech hypocorism of Benedikt), Boguslava (compare Bogslaba), Bohumila/Bogumila, Cekana (compare Tschakana and Zcakana), Cernice and Crnka, Chvalka (hypocorism of Chvalicě; Chvališ could be another derived form), Chvalena (compare Qwalina/Qwalma16), Cohan (from kochan ‘beloved,’ compare Cochancz, with a diminutive suffix added), Crassena (compare Krasna17 and Craske/Kraska), Dobra/Dobrohna, Dobřusa/Dobruška, Drahna, Dražna, Duchna, Ebruš (hypocorism of Eberhard, a name of German origin, constructed using Czech suffix -uš), František (of ultimate Latin origin) and its hypocorism Francek, Fricˇ ek (compare Friczko derived from German Friedrich), Janka (hypocorism of Jana, the Czech equivalent to English Joan), Januš (hypocorism of Jan, the Czech equivalent to John), Jaroš (hypocorism of Jaroslav), Jaroslava (could be the base form for Jachna), Kacˇ a (hypocorism of Kateřine, the Czech form of Catherine), Kokot (Kokeš would be its hypocorism), Koleš (hypocorism for Mikoláš, the Czech form of Nicholas), Ľibuš (Ľibka and Ľibica could be other forms derived from the same root), Liczko, Lidmila, Macha and Machacˇ (hypocorisms of Matej, the Czech variant of Matthew), Machna (hypocorism of Markéta or Magdaléna), Majnuš (hypocorism of Majnard, of German origin), Makuš, Malek, Maminka, Manuš, Maruša (hypocorism of Marie; compare Marusch), Mikeš/Mikuš (other hypocorisms for Mikoláš), Milica (Milnicz/Melencze could be related to it, and, at least, also be derived from the root word milá ‘dear, kind’), Miruša (hypocorism of Miroslava), Mlada, Pribislava (for which Priba/Pryba/Priva could be a hypocorism), Quetana/Quetona (compare Kvetna), Rachna (hypocorism of any name starting with Ra- including various names related to Czech root rád/rad- ‘glad/joy’), Radochna, Pakuš (hypocorism of Pakomir or Pakoslav), Rejnuš (derived from German Reinhard, compare Reyko), Sdislava/Sděslava, Sera, Sirava and Sirce (potential full forms for Sira and Sirka), Slava, Stanka (hypocorism of Stanislava), Těchan (variants: Tehan, Decanus, and Děkan),18 Tycz, Václav (compare Voszlab) and Václava (plausible sources for the hypocorisms Vaczko and Waczka), Vavruš (hypocorism of Vavrinec/Vavrenec, the Czech variant of Latin Laurentius), Vesel (compare Wessel),
16
The idea that these obscure forms could have had a Czech etymon starting with chv- is due to MRPC. In principle, Krasna could be derived from Czech krásna ‘beautiful’ or its Polish cognate krasna. The Czech origin is, nevertheless, more attractive because of the geographic distribution of this name among Jews. Moreover, in some Czech sources from the sixteenth century Krasna can represent not a genuine Jewish name but a Czech calque (used to designate Jews only in Christian documents) of Yiddish Sheyne. 18 The exact etymology of this name is uncertain. For our context, however, it is mainly important to know that it had numerous Czech Christian bearers in the Middle Ages. 17
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Slavic elements
Wlczko, Zdena, and Zuinka (compare Swonka/Zwonka).19 We also find mentions of Czech male names Dušan, Slunecˇ ko, Zlat (related to Czech duše ‘soul,’ slunce ‘sun,’ and zlato ‘gold,’ respectively), Biehan (compare Behanna), Dragan, Druhan, Dieczyn/Dyeczyn (compare Schidczinna),20 and Křeslav, while Jewish occurrences are female. It should be noted, however, that in medieval Czech culture numerous male and female appellations were based on the same roots, and, as a result, the possibility of the existence of corresponding female Christian names is quite likely. On the other hand, in the most detailed sources for the analysis of the medieval names of Polish Catholics (Taszycki ), we find references only to a few names from our list: Bogusława (compare Bogslaba), Bogumiła (compare Bogumyla), Chwałka (hypocorism of Chwalisława), Franciszek (cognate to Czech František) and its hypocorism Francek, Fryczko, Jachna (hypocorism of Jadwiga and Jarosława), Janka (hypocorism of Johanna), Kasza and Kasia (hypocorisms of Katarzyna, compare Kaschiscza), Krzesława (appearing in sources of the fourteenth century as Crzeslawa, Crzeslaua, and Creslaua), Kucz, Latossek, Mały (cognate to Czech Malek), Sirosława (full form for Sira and Sirka), Stanka (hypocorism of Stanisława, the Polish name cognate to Czech Stanislava), Svynka (could be related to Swonka), Wacław and Wacława (equivalents to Czech Václav and Václava), Wilczko, and Witosława. Reichert () compiled a comprehensive study of given names used by Christians in Breslau, the capital city of Silesia, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A large majority of appellations, both masculine and feminine, are either of German origin or those of Hebrew, Romance, or Greek origins related to the common European Christian tradition of using names of biblical personages and saints. Some of them appear with the hypocoristic suffix -usch, of Slavic (Czech or Polish) origin. Only a few names have Slavic roots. Among them are: Pakusch (male), Boguslawa, Przibke (compare Priba), and Stanke (female). Among several hundred Slavic names found in medieval sources (ninth to fourteenth centuries) for the territory of modern Austria, four could, in principle, be relevant for our corpus of Jewish names: Dobriza (from the root meaning ‘good’ cognate to Czech Dobra, plus the Slavic suffix -ica), Krazza (from the noun meaning ‘beauty,’ compare Jewish Craske/Kraska), Slava/Zlawa, and Zirneca/Črnika (from the root meaning ‘black’ cognate to Czech Černa, plus the Slavic suffix -ika).21 The first of these names is of particular interest because it fits well with the reference to Dobrizel in Regensburg: (i) the Jewish name is derived from the Slavic stem (which already includes the Slavic diminutive suffix) to which Bavarian dialectal diminutive suffix -(e)l was added; (ii) Bavaria and Austria are neighboring provinces. One should note, however, that for all four names in question, we also find Czech names with corresponding roots. A dictionary of Sorbian personal names compiled by Wenzel () includes references to numerous names having the same roots as the Jewish appellations that are of interest: Benisch, Kochan, Fritzko/Friczko, Kokot, Lybus/Lybusche, Pakusch, Stank(e), Thiczko/Ticzko (all from the fourteenth century); Behan, Czornak, Dobrusch, Franczko, Janusch, Jarusch, Lankusche, Lubitcza, Machacz, Mirus (fifteenth century); Colisch (compare Koleš), Czschorna, Dobrisch, Glowis, Glouna and Hlouna, Katzschke, Kokisch, Kraska, Mache, Watzlaw, Waurisch (compare Wawruss) (sixteenth century); Baba, Chwalisch and Qualcka, Duschin, Kloppisch (compare Clopicz), Pipka, and Watzschke (seventeenth century). For several reasons, however, the importance of this correlation between Jewish Slavic names from Central Europe and those used by Sorbian Gentiles should not be
19 All Czech Christian names are taken from Dudik , Erben , Gebauer –, Karpluk , and Svoboda . The exact references can be found in Beider . The work by Karpluk is of particular interest because it provides a comparative analysis of female names used in various Slavic cultures, with numerous details concerning Polish and Czech appellations. 20 Alternatively, it could be related to Polish dziecina ‘baby’ (MRPC). 21 These references are taken from Kronsteiner :, , , .
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WEST CANAANITES
overestimated. Firstly, the book in question is more detailed than any available source of Czech names. It cites , Slavs from Low Lusatia (Niederlausitz), , from Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz), and , from the western part of Saxony (covering Wittenberg and Torgau). The documents in question date from the fourteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Some of the above references are several centuries more recent than the Jewish references. Secondly, the book by Wenzel does not distinguish between given names, nicknames, and family names. As a result, certain appellations (Baba, Czornak, Glouna, Hlouna, Katzschke, Kokot, Kraska, and Pipka) could actually have nothing to do with given names. Thirdly, the gender of these persons is unclear and, therefore, in some cases we can, in principle, deal with the absence of gender correlation between Slavic names from that area and Jewish names. Another argument—much more important than the previous one—takes into account the geographical-historical aspects. Names having Jewish equivalents mainly come from Upper Lusatia.22 This area was under Bohemian rule from the midtwelfth century until .23 As a result, the corpus of local names could be influenced by appellations used in Czech lands. In addition to the existence of cultural elements (including common onomastic traditions) specific to the two neighboring Slavic people, Czechs and Sorbs, some references may simply correspond to Czech migrants or their direct descendants.24 Finally, it should be noted that for several dozen Jewish Slavic names we have no Gentile correlates in the book by Wenzel. Some of these gaps are fundamental to our discussion: all female names from Spandau, such common appellations as Zlata, and various forms with the root Rad. It is also important to note that of three Slavic Jewish names known in Lusatia, only Friczko was used by local non-Jews, while Pryba and Zharnak (Czarnak) were unknown among them. The fourth series of factors important for our discussion comes from general linguistics. The presence of the letter ‘h’ in Behanna, Bohomila, Drahna, and Henlaba points to either a Czech or an Upper Sorbian origin: among the languages under consideration, it was only in these tongues that the proto-Slavic voiced velar sound shifted from plosive [g] to fricative [ɦ]. On the other hand, the letter ‘a,’ found in the first syllable of Drahna (from the root meaning ‘dear’) is compatible with Czech and Slovene only, but neither with Polish nor Sorbian because the languages in question have [o] in the corresponding words. For the same reason, forms Mlada and Zlata (corresponding words mean ‘young’ and ‘golden,’ respectively) may also be either Czech or Slovene. Both Lidmila (the first part comes from the root meaning ‘people’) and Libusch/Libuša (from the root ‘love’) are specifically Czech: other Slavic languages start not with [li] but either with [lu] or [lju]. Of particular interest are names derived from the Slavic root meaning ‘black.’ Some of them correspond to the Czech form cˇ erna: Czierna, Czirna, Czirnka, Czerniczsche, and Zcernycze (though in principle Slovenian root cˇr n could also be relevant in this context). Czarna represents the Polish (or Polonized) form. The Polabian and Lower Sorbian forms also have [a] in their root, though contrary to Czech, Polish, and Slovenian, their first consonant is the affricate [c], not [cˇ ]. As may be seen from the list of Jewish names presented at the beginning of this section, several female forms have, however, [o] in their root: Tzorney (Braunschweig), Czhorna (Silesia), Czschorne, Zcorna, Czorneka, and Czschornike (Thuringia). Only Upper Sorbian variant, cˇ orna, perfectly fits with the references in question. 22 For example, this is the case for all references to Baba, Czschorna, Dobrisch/Dobrusch, Franczko, Hlouno, Jarusch, Kraska, Langkische, Lybus/Lybusche, Pakusch, T(h)iczko, Waurisch, and Wat(z)schke, and almost all for Czornak, Colisch, Friczko, Glouna, and Mirus. 23 Some parts of Upper Lusatia were independent from Bohemia between the mid-thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century. 24 Note () the very small frequency (from one to three references) of Baba, Dobrisch, Dobrusch, Duschin, Glowis, Hlouna, Kloppisch, Jarusch, Langkische, Lubitcza, Mache, Pakusch, and T(h)iczko; () the presence of forms with Czech phonetic peculiarities such as Zcehrne, Zerne, and Zcernag (Wenzel ::); see the discussion of appellations with the root ‘black’ in the following paragraph.
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Several explanations may be taken into consideration. Firstly, one could suggest that these names are due to Jewish migrants from Sorbian territories, that is, the region of Lusatia. Geographically, this idea makes sense: that region is situated between Thuringia and Silesia and not far from Braunschweig. This first scenario has two variants: (a) the names originated among Jews of Lusatia;25 (b) after their inception in Bohemia-Moravia, these appellations were brought to Lusatia by Czech Jewish migrants; in the new region, their phonetics underwent adaptation to the local Slavic language and it is with this new phonetics that they later came from Lusatia to other areas. In the second scenario, the coincidence with the Upper Sorbian form might be fortuitous, while the names in question could still be of Czech origin because in Old Czech the root vowel was not yet the modern [e] but a very short sound: the words derived from the root ‘black’ begin with cˇ rn- in the dictionary of Old Czech (Gebauer ), with syllabic [r]. Since in East Germany and Silesia Christian scribes had no such sound in their native languages, either at all or at least in accented syllables, they necessarily would have introduced a vowel into their spelling. Note that in Erfurt we also find a form with [e] derived from the same root: Zcernycze. The first scenario appears more plausible: the number of [o]forms is too significant to be the result of a random decision of scribes. Among its two variants, (b) seems the more attractive. As noted earlier, Czech Jews also used a given name derived from the same root. The probability of Jews independently using, in two different Slavic regions, an appellation derived from a word meaning ‘black’ is highly implausible.26 Finally, one of the cited [o]-forms, Czschornike/Schornike, belongs to a woman who came to Erfurt from Prague, while another, Czschorne, was from Liegnitz (Legnica in Polish) in Silesia. The Slavic etymons mentioned earlier explain a majority of cited Jewish references. Among the non-covered appellations one can distinguish several groups. The first one encompasses names whose etymology is more or less clear. Some of them are more likely to be of Czech rather than Polish origin: Czirnoch (old Czech cˇ rnoch ‘black person’; Czenner could be a phonetic variant derived from it27 and Zharnak seems to be a German spelling of its Polonized form Czarnak), Swetlicza (Czech světlá ‘light-colored’ + suffix -ica)28, Vesela (Czech ‘joyful’; the Polish form would be Wesola), Zdobna/Stubna (Czech zdoba ‘decoration,’ + suffix -na). The male name Munka is derived from Šalomoun, the Czech variant of biblical Solomon. The root of Panscha comes from Czech or Polish panna ‘maiden.’ Its ending represents the German spelling of Slavic hypocoristic suffix (compare Polish -sia). Clopicz could be related to Polish chłopiec ‘lad, boy.’ Glownia comes from Polish głownia ‘firebrand.’ Most likely, it represents the Polish calque of the original name derived from Czech hlavně. Without this assumption, the explanation of the Yiddish name Khlavne, known in Eastern Europe from at least the sixteenth century, would present serious difficulties. The second group encompasses names with obscure roots that include in their structure Slavic diminutive suffixes: Lancusch,29 Racusch (Czech -uš/-uša or, less likely, Polish -uś/-usia), ( קושנהpossibly, the suffix -na or -ena), Waschna (its ending could correspond to the suffix -na; alternatively, it could be derived from Polish ważna ‘important’), Zasirka (suffix -ka), Bakula (perhaps, the suffix -ula, note the existence of the form Baka too), Pipka and Pichna This consideration might reflect the ideas exposed in Wexler . Such coincidence would be much more plausible for a name with such attractive meanings as, for example, ‘good,’ ‘kind,’ ‘beautiful,’ or ‘flower.’ 27 The idea is due to MRPC. The scheme could be: [cˇ ernox] > *[cˇ enəx] > [cˇ enər]. The first change concerns the loss of /r/ before a consonant and reduction of an unstressed vowel. The second one results from a confusion between [x] and uvular [R]. 28 For phonetic reasons, the corresponding Polish word światła is not a likely etymon, though other Slavic languages concerned also have [e]. 29 A reference to a similar name, Langkisch, borne by a Slavic Christian, appears in Berlin in (Jachnow :). 25 26
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(suffixes -ka and -chna). The Slavic origin of the obscure names Henlaba and Merloba is plausible but uncertain.30 The fifth factor is historical. For the whole of Central Europe, it is in the Czech territories that we find the oldest references to Jews. Moreover, facts of political history show the particular importance of the Bohemian kingdom for a large area in Central Europe covering numerous provinces where mention of Jews bearing Slavic given names appears in the sources.31 During the same period, the influence of the Polish kingdom on neighboring provinces of Central Europe was clearly less significant. The Slavic population of Austria and East Germany was of local importance only. The German (mainly, Bavarian) colonization of Austrian provinces occurred prior to the first references to Jews in that area. Large forests separated Bohemia from northern Austria and, as a result, before the German influx, the local Slavic population of that region was not large. In the South, in Styria, the Slovenes were not numerous. For example, in the town of Marburg (Maribor) in there were already twenty German households and nine Slavic, while in the surroundings of Judenburg at the end of the same century the names of the twenty-five villages were German and only two were Slavic (Higounet :). The proportion of Germans was especially large in towns, and the Jewish population was principally urban. As a result, any Slovene influence on the corpus of Jewish names in Central Europe is rather unlikely. On the demographic level, the situation in East Germany was different. Despite the massive arrival of Germans during the thirteenth century from the West, according to certain estimates, in the early fourteenth century, Slavs (Christian and pagan) still represented about one third of the total population of Brandenburg and more than one half in Saxony and Silesia (Higounet :). Jews lived, however, in the largest localities where the proportion of Slavs at the time of Jewish settlement was minimal. The majority of names mentioned until now were borrowed by Jews from their Christian Slavic neighbors, mainly in the Czech lands. One can conjecture that for many female appellations the borrowing was stimulated by the attractive semantics of names such as Mlada ‘young,’ Slava ‘glory,’ Zlata ‘golden,’ Bogumila ‘dear to God,’ Libuša, Dobrocha, Drahna, Dušana, and Radochna, from the roots meaning ‘love,’ ‘good,’ ‘dear,’ ‘soul,’ and ‘joy,’ respectively. Generally speaking, however, a large number of names used by Slavic Christians in the Middle Ages possessed obvious etymological, often pleasant, meanings. Consequently, we cannot discern here any specifically Jewish idiosyncrasy and, as a result, some of the names cited above in this paragraph could simply be fashionable, resulting from the borrowing of appellations most commonly used by Gentiles. Unfortunately, sources with large lists of medieval Slavs are lacking and, for this reason, it is difficult to determine whether a particular name was common or unusual among Christians. This factor makes it impossible to give a distinctive preference to any of the two suggested reasons for borrowing. In some cases, the borrowing could be for phonetic reasons: the corresponding Slavic name would sound somewhat similar to some Jewish appellation. Among the examples are Sira/Sera and Rachna, most likely evoking biblical Sarah and Rachel, respectively, and Ebrusch, chosen because of the existence of the name Abraham; note that the form Abrusch was also used by Jews in Bohemia and Moravia (, ). Manusch/Manuš, though also used by Czech Christians, in the Jewish context could have been adopted because of some Hebrew names whose first consonants sound alike, Menaḥ em or Manoaḥ .32
30
Some names—such as Merloba, Waschna, and Zasirka—appear in available sources only once and consequently they could result from some kind of misinterpretation. For example, Waschna could be from *Waschka: this form could be related to Waczka and/or Vaczko known from other sources. 31 See section C... 32 One bearer of this name in medieval Austria appears in Jewish sources as ( מנוחManoaḥ ).
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The very fact of the massive borrowing of given names is, nevertheless, an eloquent testimony to the linguistic assimilation of Czech Jews to neighboring Christian Slavs. The strength of this assimilation may be corroborated by additional factors. One observes a common presence in given names used by Czech Jews of the Czech diminutive suffixes -ka and -uš(a). Note that forms including in their structure these morphological elements are found not only in Christian sources (where, in principle, they could be due to some kind of Slavonizing or to the use of ready-made Czech hypocorisms) but also in medieval Jewish sources: compare סירקאa, גרסקאa, לבקהa, מלרושהa, ליבושא, already mentioned earlier. To these one may add two other forms from the cemetery in Spandau: *Raska/*Raška (רשקה, ) and *Rachelava ()רחלווה, both of which seem to have been created from biblical Rachel ( )רחלby the addition of Slavic the diminutive suffixes -ka and -ava (typically Czech), respectively. From the same full name, in principle, the form Rachna (suffix -chna) could also have been created. Smolka () and Slomko (), both from Silesia, are other examples; their diminutive suffix could, however, be of either Czech or Polish origin.33 The use of some Czech versions of the biblical names, such as Munka (a hypocorism of the Czech form for Solomon) is another trace of the linguistic assimilation of Jews to local Slavs.34 Mordusch (), a form derived from biblical Mordecai by the addition of -uš, is found in Moravian sources. Manusch, mentioned in the preceding paragraph, could be constructed from the base form Manoaḥ following the same pattern. Also note that Abraham ben Azriel, the thirteenth-century scholar from Bohemia already mentioned appears in Jewish sources under a nickname חלדיקthat corresponds to Czech Chládek constructed from the root meaning ‘cold’ and the substantive suffix -ek.35 Almost all Jewish names mentioned earlier are taken from sources after the thirteenth century, that is, from a period when numerous Jews with names of Germanic or Romance origin, typical of Ashkenazic communities of West Germany, already dwelled in Bohemia and Moravia.36 Consequently, Czech Jewish names known to us are mainly remnants from the previous period when their proportion was clearly significantly larger. This idea of strong linguistic assimilation echoes the results of the linguistic and historical analysis made by Jakobson and Halle (). These authors concluded—taking into account a number of factors complementary to those discussed above—that before the fourteenth century Old Czech was the vernacular language of Czech Jews.37 The group of traditional EY names with roots in medieval WEST CANAAN, still used at the beginning of the twentieth century, encompasses more than one dozen items (see Table .).38
33 Because of their initial consonantal clusters, both of them are derived from non-Christian forms of Samuel ( )ְׁשמּו ֵאלand Solomon () ְׁשל ֹֹמה, respectively. Consequently, they were certainly used by the Jews among them. Note that the consonantal clusters in question result from the elision of mobile shewa, a linguistic phenomenon typical of both groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews, BNEY HES and BNEY KHES (see the discussion of the feature {u} in section .). 34 Though this form appears as a given name in Christian documents only, we can be certain it was used by the Jews among them because a family name derived from it, Munk(a), starts to be mentioned in Christian and Jewish sources (where it is spelled )מונקas from the beginning of the sixteenth century (Beider :). 35 A derivation from a substantive based on the Old Czech adjective hladký ‘smooth, gentle’ is unlikely because at that time it would be written with initial gimel (see footnote above). 36 See Beider :–. 37 See also Bláha et al. a, Dittmann and Bláha , and Ulicˇ ná :–. 38 The information on given names appearing in the tombstone inscriptions of the old Jewish cemeteries in Prague and Hamburg or the engagement and marriage deeds of Amsterdam are taken from Beider .
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TABLE . Yiddish names of Czech origin Typical StY forms
During the th–th centuries
Related medieval forms
Prague
Amsterdam
Hamburg
Bobe
No
No
No
Babka
Dobrish, Dobre
Yes
Yes
No
Dobrocha, Dobrusca, Dobrische, Dobrusche
Drazne, Drezl(e)
Yes
Yes
Yes
דרשנא, Dreslin, דרזנא
Khvoles
Yes
No
Yes
חוואליש
Krase, Kresl
Yes
Yes
No
Krasna, Craske
Mamle
Yes
Yes
Yes
Maminka
Prive
Yes
Yes
Yes
Priba, Prive
Rodish, Rode
Yes
Yes
Yes
Radoch(n)a, Raduchna
Slave, Slove
Yes
Yes
No
Slava, Slaba, Slafa, סלווא
Tishle, Dishle
Yes
Yes
Yes
דושנה, Tuschana
Tsherne, Tsharne
Yes
No
No
Czi(e)rna, C(zi)rnka, Czschorne, Zcorna
Tsvetle
No
No
No
Swetlicza, Swyetla
Zlate
No
Yes
No
Zlatka, Slata, Slatte, Sletel
Beynesh
Yes
Yes
No
Beneš, Benesch, Benas
For all these names (of which only the last one is male, while all other are female), we know of old references to their early forms in Central Europe. The corresponding medieval forms are given in Table . in the last column. For certain appellations, no reference is found in the Czech lands (most likely because of the paucity of available sources), still the linguistic reconstruction shows that their Czech origin is plausible: male Khlavne39 and female Soye.40 Some names from this list could appear in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages due to migrations of Czech-speaking Jews. Others could be retained in Central Europe after the Yiddishizing of local communities and brought by Yiddishspeaking migrants several centuries later. It was not only specific names that survived in the Jewish corpus of Eastern Europe: several particular patterns for the creation of the derived forms are also due to Slavic-speaking Jews. The hypocoristic suffix -ke, extremely productive in contemporary Eastern Yiddish, is related to -ka/-ko, the morphological element commonly found in Jewish Slavic names of Central Europe already in the 39 40
No reference in Prague and Hamburg but known in Amsterdam. Perhaps, from Old Czech sojě ‘jay’ (MRPC).
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fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.41 When Yiddish-speaking Jews came from Central Europe to Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, they found both local Jews and local Christians (Poles and East Slavs) who also actively used the same morphological element. As a result, during the following centuries its use was reinforced. Consequently, its widespread use in contemporary Eastern Yiddish is likely to be related, at least partly, to both WEST and EAST CANAANITES. In both areas, we know about its presence in specifically Jewish names. On the other hand, a less common suffix -ush(e) seems to be more directly related to Czech uš(a) or, less likely, its Polish equivalent uś/usia. It is found in such forms as Berush, Leybush, Lipush, Mordush, Velvush, Ogushe (maybe from Hoger, the Yiddish form of Hagar), Vigushe (from Avigail), and Vitush.
.. Toponyms In medieval rabbinical literature, rivers from Central Europe are generally cited according to their Slavic names. Among the examples: the Elbe is called לבוin Or zarua by Isaac ben Moses,42 the name of its tributary the Vltava is spelled ( װלטװאFoges :), while the Danube appears as דונאי in a text depicting the events of the First Crusade (Neubauer and Stern :); compare Czech Labe, Vltava, and Dunaj, and German Elbe, Moldau, and Donau, respectively. Of particular interest is the fact that Maharil mentions the spelling דונאייfor the Danube River in a bill of divorce sent from Regensburg to Prague to Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen (Spitzer :). According to him, this spelling (corresponding to the Slavic name) was different from the one used at the same period (turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) by Jews in Austria, namely ( דונאוbased on German Donau), as specifically also mentioned by Maharil in this passage. When the Regensburg Jews were questioned about this spelling, according to this story they confirmed that this was their traditional name for the Danube in older bills of divorce.43 This story testifies to the fact that at some period before the fifteenth century Slavic-speaking Jews may have been dominant in the Regensburg community, and therefore, in theory, this community may have had the same roots as that of Prague, while, again in theory, those of Austria may have been a separate center of Jewish settlement.
.. Words For words of Slavic origin found in PolY, we explained in section . that, according to the geographic criterion, their origin in East Slavic languages is significantly less plausible than their provenance from the Old Czech substratum or their borrowing from Polish. This rule becomes particularly strong for words having diphthongs /ej/ or /oj/ in StY in places where their Slavic cognates have monophthongs. This group of words is fairly small: a large majority of Yiddish words of this type have the same monophthongs as those found in their Slavic etymons. Consequently, the forms with diphthongs belong to the most ancient layers of EY, those that could be influenced only by Old Czech or Old Polish. In both of these languages the stress position was initial. As a result, if we find initially stressed EY words whose cognates in East Slavic languages are stressed in other positions, we are again mainly dealing with words of Czech or Polish origin.44
בלומקא, found in Hungary (), represents one of the earliest examples of the use of a Slavic suffix in a name with a German root (blum ‘flower’). 42 Certains scholars consider this spelling to result from a misunderstanding of ( לביGJ ). 43 This passage from the Maharil work is known to me thanks to MRPC. 44 See section ... 41
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When identifying the source language for EY lexical elements one of the most difficult tasks consists in distinguishing those of Czech from those of Polish origin. Fortunately, several phonetic rules can be helpful here. The first rule concerns the realization of Proto-Slavic *g. In Old Czech it shifted to /h/ during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.45 In Polish, it remained /g/. For this reason, to the Old Czech substratum belong several Yiddish words with /h/ (in the initial position) or /x/ (in the final position) for Proto-Slavic *g. Polish etymons would give initial **/g/ and final **/k/. This series encompasses StY hoyl ‘bare, pure, hollow,’ knihe ‘ruminant’s third stomach, omasum,’ pan-Yiddish interjection nebekh ‘poor thing!,’ and maybe also tsvorekh ‘soft cheese’; compare Czech holý ‘bare,’46 kniha ‘omasum,’47 neboh ‘unfortunate fellow,’48 and tvaroh ‘soft cheese,’ respectively.49 The second rule concerns the realization of Proto-Slavic *’e and *ě. In Old Polish, before hard consonants /t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/, /r/, and /l/, the former was realized as io, while the latter as ia. The Old Czech reflexes are e/ě and ie/ě, respectively.50 Thanks to this criterion, we can assign to the Old Czech substratum such StY words as: meyre ‘the dough for baking matzot,’ khreyn ‘horseradish,’ preydik ‘front part of an animal or a fowl,’ and smetene ‘sour cream’; compare Old Czech miera ‘measure’ (Polish miara), chřěn ‘horseradish’ (Polish chrzan), přědek ‘front part, ancestor’ (Polish przodek), and smetana (Old Polish śmiotana).51 The third rule concerns the reflex of the palatalized /d/. In Polish, since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this consonant has been realized as the affricate /dz/,52 while /d/ was retained in Czech. This criterion allows us to consider the possibility of the Old Czech origin for StY deyzhe ‘kneading trough for bread; round water trough’; compare Old Czech diežě, Polish dzieża.53 See Lamprecht :. Note the diphthong in hoyl revealing its old age in Yiddish (see additional details in Eggers :–). Several authors—U.Weinreich :, Stankiewicz :, BN —suggest East Slavic etymons in which the initial consonant is also /h/; compare Ukrainian голий and Belarusian голы. Yet, this derivation sounds rather unlikely: it does not explain the presence of this adjective in PolY and its diphthong (we have no example of East Slavic /o/ that gave rise to Yiddish oy). 47 Note the fact that Czech kniha (exactly as in Yiddish) is singular while the corresponding East Slavic words are plurals (Eggers : -). However, the possibility of the link to Czech kniha should be considered with caution: we do not have evidence for the old age of this meaning either in Czech or in Yiddish. As a result, an East Slavic origin should not be totally dismissed. 48 This etymology of nebekh is suggested in WG :–. 49 The form tsvorekh appears in dictionaries of StY, though Birnbaum (:) states that tsvōrekh/tsvūrekh is specific to CzY only (implying that it is unknown in PolY). Phonetic variants tsvōrekh/tsvōrikh are found in CzY, AlsY, and SwY (BA ). As discussed by Eggers (:–), it was in several dialects of German that the initial /tv/ shifted to /tsv/. (See the exact geography of this shift in section .., feature {C}.) For this reason, Eggers suggests the intermediary of German. However, available dictionaries of German dialects make reference only to Zwarg, derived from Polish twaróg (note the final consonant). This leaves two possible scenarios. In the first, () Bohemian German borrowed the word tvaroh from Czech, () the initial /t/ shifted to /ts/ in Bohemian German, () Bohemian Jews borrowed from local German that (unattested) form. In the second scenario, there was no intermediary of Bohemian German. Jews () borrowed the Czech word, () the shift /tv/ > /tsv/ in the language of surrounding German speakers also affected all words of CzY, including those from its Slavic component. As a result, tsvorekh belongs either to the German component of EY (scenario ), or to the Old Czech substratum of EY (scenario ). 50 See details in Vaillant :, ; see also Lamprecht :. As follows from the transcription of about Polish toponyms and personal names in the bull issued by Pope Innocent III for the Archbishopric of Gniezno (), the Polish ia and io were already valid in the twelfth century (Stieber :–). 51 See also Eggers :–, –, WG :. In principle, the Yiddish word for ‘horseradish’ can also be derived from MHG chrên (that in turn is of Old Czech origin) (BN –). However, this intermediary role of German is implausible taking into account the exceptional character of the initial /xr/ in German and the fact that the forms starting with kh- are found in Yiddish dialects of Eastern Europe and eastern Germany only (see BA ). 52 See Stieber :. 53 This affricate gave /z/ in several old Yiddish toponyms whose Polish names start with Dzia- (WG :). As a result, the Polish etymon would give **zeyzhe in Yiddish. See also Eggers :– where the influence of German Dese is suggested. On the possibility of East Slavic origin of this word see section .. (footnote below). 45 46
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The combination of the two last criteria helps to establish the etymology of StY and DuY zeyde ‘grandfather’ (PolY zayde, EGY zayde or zeyde). For several reasons, the Old Czech root děd is more attractive here than Polish dziad, both forms derived from a Proto-Slavic word whose root vowel was ě. Firstly, the final vowel in Yiddish zeyde shows that the etymon was not a full nominative form but either the diminutive děda (Stankiewicz :), serving in familiar and colloquial contexts, or a vocative.54 We do not know the exact corresponding forms in Old Polish. If in the source form as a result of the addition of the final vowel the final consonant /d/ continued to be hard (as in the full nominative form), then, according to the second rule formulated above, its root vowel was already ia in Old Polish. This vowel could not give StY ey. On the other hand, if the addition in question softened the sound /d/, the root vowel in the source form would be ie (the corresponding sound conforms to the root vowel of the Yiddish form), but the final consonant would be palatalized to /dz/. Consequently, in this case, the Yiddish form derived from Polish would be **zeyze rather than zeyde. Secondly, one can observe that in CzY the word for ‘grandfather’ is deyde (BA ). This form (which is clearly derived from Czech) shares with StY zeyde two important idiosyncrasies: the presence of the final vowel and the root diphthong. This fact cannot be fortuitous: both forms necessarily had the same (Czech) source. The change of the initial /d/ to /z/ had already occurred in Poland under the influence of the Polish form dziad. StY srovetke ‘whey’ is related to Czech syrovátka: note that Polish syrowatka is a rare regional variant, while the main Polish variant serwatka is excluded from the list of potential etymons for phonetic reasons.55 StY pupik ‘navel, gizzard’ is either derived from Czech (pupek) or, less likely, is of East Slavic origin,56 while their Polish cognate pępik was borrowed only in its figurative meaning ‘squat fellow,’ giving rise to StY pempik. For (partly) semantic reasons, the Old Czech origin is plausible for several other words: • treybern ‘to remove forbidden parts from meat to make it kosher.’ The Old Czech třiebiti means ‘to clean, to uproot,’ while Polish trzebić only has the meaning ‘to uproot.’ Moreover, a verb with a meaning directly related to Judaism is unlikely to be borrowed. It is much more likely that it belongs to the substratum of EY.57 • beylik ‘white meat.’ There is no doubt that the root is derived from Slavic ‘white’: compare Old Czech biel-, Polish biał/biel-. The Polish noun closest to the Yiddish one is białko ‘white of an egg / eye, albumen’ whose Old Czech equivalent is bielek. The latter word (but not the Polish one) perfectly fits Yiddish beylik. • zodik ‘(butchery) hindquarters.’ The etymon is zadek ‘behind, backside’ found in both (Old) Czech and Polish. Note, however, that the Yiddish series of butchery terms also encompasses beylik, preydik, and treybern, which are all of Old Czech origin. It is unlikely that zodik, which belongs to the same semantic series, comes from a different language from the three others (WG :). • pleytse ‘shoulder’ from Old Czech plecě, with the same meaning. The earliest references in available EY texts appear in ZuR and MY. In these sources, it is found in the expression ‘ פליצא פליישmeat of (animal’s) shoulder.’ As a result, it is likely that this lexeme initially Note that vocative forms in both Slavic languages in question do have a vowel at the end (WG :). As noted in WG :, the form —סרובדקאappearing in Or Zarua by Isaac ben Moses—perfectly fits the Yiddish variant. 56 The word is known in all of EY, with /u/ in LitY and /i/ in PolY and UkrY (see WG :, where an East Slavic origin is suggested). Its presence in Poland and the existence of the /i/-forms indicate the old age of this word in EY and therefore make the Czech origin more attractive. 57 See also WG :, Eggers :–. The /r/ before /n/ in the Yiddish verb was introduced at some stage as a result of dissimilation of consonants; compare another example of the same phenomenon: StY plontern ‘to confuse’ < Polish plątać. 54 55
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belonged to the same series as the words considered above. Its use in EY for human shoulder could be more recent58 and partly due to the influence of Polish. • parev(e) ‘neither dairy, nor meat (food).’ In principle, it can be derived either from Czech párový ‘paired, two-fold’ (Eggers :), or from its Polish equivalent parowy. The Old Czech origin is more attractive because (i) this Yiddish word, directly related to Judaism, should belong to the substratum of EY; (ii) we find its phonetic variants in both CzY (parve in BA ) and PolY (parivi in Birnbaum :) • bobe ‘grandmother, midwife.’ In theory, both Old Czech bába and Polish baba may explain the phonetics of the Yiddish form. However, words for both grandparents are more likely to come from the same source while—as discussed above—the etymon for the Yiddish word for grandfather was Old Czech. The geographical factor points to the same source: CzY as well as Yiddish varieties in the neighboring German-speaking areas use a cognate form, bābe, of Czech origin (BA ), bōbe in EGY. Moreover, the long vowel of the Czech form provides an immediate explanation for the development of the Yiddish root vowel, while for the Polish etymon we need to introduce an additional hypothesis about the lengthening of /a/ in the open syllable (for which very few examples are found in the Slavic component of Yiddish). • pisk ‘mouth’; note the meaning of pysk in various Slavic languages: ‘lip’ in Old Czech, ‘animal’s face’ in Polish and Ukrainian (писк), and ‘cheek and temple’ in Belarusian (пыск). Either to the same WEST CANAANITE substratum or to borrowings from Old Polish to Yiddish the following belong: koylen ‘to slaughter,’59 koyletsh ‘twisted loaf of white bread eaten on the Sabbath or (in some areas) on holidays,’ and koymen ‘chimney.’60 The archaic Yiddish noun shkolnik61 represents an agentive derivative from either Old Czech škola or Polish szkoła, both having two This analysis of the references in ZuR and MY is taken from Neuberg :– and Neuberg :, respectively. Eggers (:) stresses that both Old Czech and Yiddish forms are feminine, while Polish plecy is plural. However, this argument is not cogent: in Old Polish the word has been feminine too (see the entry plec in Karłowicz ). 59 Bin-Nun (BN , ) assigns this word to the oldest Slavic layer in Yiddish and suggests the link to Proto-Slavic root kol-. Compare such forms of Old Czech kláti as koľu (first singular) and koleš (second singular). The modern Polish equivalent is kłuć/kłóć. However, in Old Polish, the singular forms are also likely to have been starting with kol-. 60 Compare Old Czech kolácˇ ‘cake’ and komín ‘chimney,’ Polish kołacz and komin, respectively. The word Ko(l)latsche/Golatsche ‘(Bohemian) cake’ is also a Slavism existing in German. However, it does not appear in MHG yet, and has a short, unstressed, vowel in the first syllable. The etymon for the Yiddish koyletsh necessarily had the stress on the first syllable and had entered Yiddish already in the Middle Ages (note that it is related to the religious domain and is also found in AlsY). One of its earliest references (spelled )קוילשappears in the RESPONSA by Rabbi Solomon Luria (–) (Kosover :). The diphthong given in the spelling of the gloss קוי״לושand its variants appearing in the commentary by Rashi (Darmesteter and Blondheim :) could not be valid for the time of Rashi. Eggers (:) suggests that in this word (and in hoyl ‘bare’ too) the original short /o/ was lengthened before /l/: this phenomenon is found in Bavarian. This explanation sounds unattractive. It can be seen that in the whole series of Yiddish words with the diphthong /oj/ in place of the Slavic /o/ the following consonant may be different from /l/; compare StY koymen ‘chimney.’ Moreover, it would be strange that a Bavarian phonetic phenomenon influenced only two words from the Slavic component of Yiddish having no impact on the German and Hebrew components. 61 Absent from modern Yiddish dictionaries, it appears—under the spellings שקאלניקand —שקולניקin KrJO in the meaning ‘bailiff of Jewish rabbinical court’ (Bałaban :, ; :). In the document in question written at the beginning of the seventeenth century for the internal needs of the Jewish community of Kraków, this word is the only one lexeme listed among communal occupational terms that does not belong to the Hebrew component. A Jewish document from the first half of the seventeenth century from the territory that now belongs to eastern Belarus includes the word שקאלניקas a designation of one of the officials of the local Jewish community in a direct quote from the Belarusian speech of a local Christian (Dubnov :). In numerous Polish documents from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from various parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the word szkolnik is mainly used in the meaning ‘sexton in a synagogue,’ equivalent to Yiddish shames, from the Hebrew component ()ַׁש ּ ָמ ׁש. The existence of the surname Школьниксон assigned in the same general area in which the final element represents a Russified form of either German Sohn or LitY zun ‘son’ (see the entry Shkol’nikson in Beider ) implies that the 58
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meanings: ‘school’ and ‘synagogue.’ Several early references to it date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.62 In Old Czech etymons cited earlier in this section for words having ey in StY, the root vowel is generally either ie (miera, diežě, bielek, třiebiti), or ě (přědek, chřěn, děda).63 Both these vowels were diphthongs in Old Czech, pronounced [ie:] or [ie], respectively. In the German component, the StY diphthong ey corresponds to MHG diphthong ei and MHG monophthongs ê or e (the last one only as a result of the lengthening in open syllables).64 This shows two global sources for StY ey. We are dealing either with an old diphthong /ej/ or with a former long monophthong /e:/ that became diphthongized in EY. For Yiddish words whose root vowel is derived from Old Czech ě we can be sure that during the initial development of these words in Yiddish this root vowel was not a diphthong. This follows from the earliest known references to these words in Jewish sources (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries): they do not have double yod, the standard Yiddish spelling for the diphthong /ej/.65 As a result, the Old Czech diphthong ě [ie]—for which no equivalent existed in Yiddish at the moment of borrowing—was incorporated as /e:/, the closest sound in the Yiddish vocalic chart of the time.66 Most likely, the Old Czech long diphthong ie [ie:] was also taken into Yiddish as /e:/. This follows from a consideration of the old references and modern realizations of the word cognate with StY treybern.67 As can be seen from the list mentioned, the importance of this group of words does not lie in the number of items it encompasses (that is rather small) but in their semantics. Here we are dealing, among others, with religious terms (including a large series of items related to food), words designating family members and parts of body. Such words, basic for the vernacular language of Jewish communities, could not be borrowed by Yiddish from Slavic languages. They were necessarily inherited from the language of WEST CANAANITES. The existence of this layer should not be underestimated. It implies an important role that the (former) WEST CANAANITES played in the creation
word *shkolnik was still found in the local subdialect of LitY at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Russian Jews received their surnames. 62 In , a document from Prague mentions Jacobus dictus Skolnyk (Bláha et al. b:). In German sources from Prague from the second half of the sixteenth century, a Jew called Herzman appears with a nickname Szkolnik in one document, while another document indicates his occupation as Schulklepper ‘one who knocks calling people to synagogue’ (Skála :). Its spelling variants appear in a Polish document from Warsaw (, Ringelblum :), the official edict by the Polish king Sigismund I the Old (, Bałaban :), and the Belarusian translation of the official letter sent by the Polish queen Bona in to Grodno (now Hrodna, western Belarus) where it is spelled школник (REA :). In principle, the word shkolnik did not necessarily appear internally to Jewish communities. It could start as a Christian administrative term used for the exchanges between the officials and the leaders of Jewish communities. 63 The only exception is StY pleytse, which may be based on Old Czech plecě. This word will be discussed in section .. (see footnote ). 64 See Table . in section ... 65 The form ( פרידיגrelated to StY preydik) appears in the RESPONSA by Solomon Luria (Dubnov :, Rubashov :). (The spelling פריידיגgiven for the same reference in WG : is modernized.) Among the earliest references to the ancestor of StY zeyde one finds ( זידאPrague, ) and ( זדהKraków, ) (Kerler :–). 66 This idea is influenced by Gajek (:–) who, however, suggests it when proposing not the Old Czech but the East Slavic origin. 67 In the book Seder-haniker bederekh ketsore (seventeenth century, Prague or Kraków) this word appears as *treben, with its root vowel expressed via a single yod (personal communication with Simon Neuberg). During this period in the area in question, the sound corresponding to E could not be expressed via yod: the most standard spelling was double yod. Such spelling appears in גיטרייבט, a participle of the same verb found in the RESPONSA by Rabbi Solomon Luria (Rubashov :, WG :). This spelling is compatible with “proto-vowels” E (original [ej]) and E, (original [e:]; for the latter, it would just indicate its diphthongization in EY. The variant treybern in EGY (BA ) conforms better to E, than to E. The latter would give [a:] in that region, exactly as all words from the German component whose stressed vowels correspond to MHG ei (see Table . in section ..).
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of the Yiddish variety of the Czech lands. It also represents a cogent argument about the importance of Jewish migrants from Bohemia-Moravia in the formation of EY.68
.
EAST CANAANITES
.. Given names Names of Slavic origin borne by EAST CANAANITES, that is, Jews who have lived in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus since the Middle Ages, have been known since the tenth century. As discussed in section .., *Gost(j)ata ()גוסטטא, a Jew of Kohen origin, appears among the community leaders who signed the “Kievan letter.” Among merchants from Volhynia who visited Danzig (Gdańsk) between and one finds Detko, Hollofene, and Magdon. Detko corresponds either to the common noun detko ‘child’ or, less likely, to dedko ‘grandfather.’ Hollofene is derived from an East Slavic equivalent of Glownia, known in Kraków during the same period.69 The etymology of Magdon is obscure. Perhaps it is related to Makedon, a name of Greek origin used by East Slavs. In the Russian-language documents from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the second half of the fifteenth century we find Богдан, Рижко/Рыжка, and Самоделка/Самодыка. The first of them, derived from the Slavic expression ‘God-given,’ was a common Gentile name in both Poland and Lithuania during the same period. There is no doubt that Jews borrowed it from their Christian neighbors.70 The second one is derived from the East Slavic adjective meaning ‘red-haired’ (compare Ukrainian рижий) by the addition of the substantive suffix -ko. The etymology of the last name is not totally clear. Its Slavic roots are, nevertheless, beyond dispute.71 During the fifteenth century, Christian sources of Red Ruthenia mention only several dozen Jewish names, mainly from Lwów, Drohobycz, and Hrubieszów. Apart from traditional Slavic forms of biblical names (that could be borne by Jews of any origin), we also discover some purely Slavic appellations: Bohdan (), Wolczko (), Dyetko (), Ded/Dyed (), as well as several names with the Slavic hypocoristic suffix -chno /-chna: Dachno (), and Schachno () that seem to be derived from the Hebrew names, David (or Daniel) and Shalom, respectively. The origin of Schano () is uncertain. A comparison of these names with those used by Lithuanian Jews during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shows the immediate kinship between the Slavic names of the two regions. There are Detko (=Dyetko) in Volhynia, several Богдан (=Bohdan) in Brest and Grodno, Вольчко (=Wolczko) in Pinsk and Bar, Шан/Шаня (=Schano) in Kiev and numerous
Roman Jakobson was among the first scholars to pay attention to the EY terms of Old Czech origin from the domain of butchery. In his unpublished lecture The Languages of the Diaspora as a Particular Linguistic Problem (), he stresses that, when Czech Jews migrated to other countries, the words in question “remained unchanged because it was not necessary to adapt these terms to the non-Jewish population, because the whole problem of butchers was an internal Jewish problem” (Dittmann :). 69 Compare Ukrainian головня ‘firebrand’ (see also section ..). 70 See Beider :–. 71 Samodel was a Czech Christian name in the thirteenth century. In a Jewish context, it could be taken because of its phonetic similarity with Samuel. All three appellations entered the Jewish corpus in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, Елень (compare Polish jeleń ‘stag’) seems to represent the direct translation from Yiddish (which means that its bearer was Ashkenazic). Indeed, during the following period, until the end of the eighteenth century, we regularly find it in Polish documents for people who in the Jewish context were called Hirsh or Hersh, from the Yiddish noun designating the same animal. Several Jews are also called Енька. This name represents a hypocoristic form of several Slavic Christian names created by using the suffix -ka. In the Jewish context, it can represent a Slavonized form of some similarly sounding Jewish name, most likely a form related to Jonah. In any case, during the later period we never find any mention of Jewish bearers of this name. 68
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forms in -хно/-хна including Шахно (=Schachno). Polish sources in Red Ruthenia mention Yseczko (, Isaac) and Chaczko (, most likely from Ezekiel). In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, one finds during the sixteenth century their equivalents Исачко and Хачко, respectively. This similarity is not surprising. Firstly, Red Ruthenia and Volhynia are neighboring provinces, and migration between the two regions was not prohibited. In both areas, the Christian population included numerous Orthodox people, the ancestors of modern Ukrainians. Finally, it is possible that the quoted names were created or borrowed by the Slavic-speaking Jews who lived in these provinces at the time when both were part of the same state (the Volhynian-Galician principality), that is, before the early fourteenth century. The latter hypothesis appears more attractive given the very early references to Wolczko and Dyetko in Lwów. Christian sources of the sixteenth century from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania mention several hundred names. A number of them are Slavic. These names can be divided into two categories. The first encompasses appellations also known among neighboring Slavs from whom Jews borrowed them. It includes: Богдан (common in Brest and Grodno where it was known already in the fifteenth century), its female counterpart Богдана ( Grodno), Андрей ( Belorussia; East Slavic variant of Andrew), Януш ( Lutsk, Podlasie; hypocorism of Eastern or Central Slavic equivalent of the English John), Игнат ( Grodno; Belarusian name derived from Latin Ignatius), Ванко ( Brest; hypocorism of East Slavic equivalent of John), Стасько ( Grodno; Polish Staśko, from Stanisław), and Каспер ( Grodno, , Podlasie; Belarusian name also used by Poles as Kasper). This category is also likely to include Яхно and Вихна, although—unlike all previous names—there is no direct proof of their use by Belarusian Christians.72 The origin of Голаш/Голош—cited several times in Brest and Grodno during the first part of the sixteenth century—is obscure. One also encounters this name among Russian Christians in the versions Галаш and Голаш, while the forms Holasch/Holasz and Golas/Goliasch also appear among Polish Christians. Доманя is mentioned twice during the s, in Podolia and Podlasie. From the documents, it is impossible to tell whether it was female or male. Yet, Poles and Ukrainian men used the name Doman. It can also be reconstructed from Belarusian family names (Biryla :). It these cases, it represents a variant of Damian, a name of Greek origin. For East Slavs, its most commonly used form was Демьян. The hypocoristic form of the latter, Демьянка, appears in in Volhynia as a Jewish name. This implies that Доманя is likely a male name, a hypocoristic form of Доман. It is possible that certain names cited do not constitute plain borrowings but instead were taken by association with other Jewish names. For example, Яхно is likely to be a hypocoristic form of Jacob. Others could correspond to Slavonized forms of authentic Jewish names, for example, Януш for Johanan. It is important to note that in the sixteenth century the proportion of these names compared to biblical and Germanic names was quite small. The second category of Slavic names encompasses forms unknown among Christians. Among them are Жидка ( Brest; perhaps from the feminine form of Belarusian жид ‘Jew,’ it could be a calque of Judith), Живьница ( Podolia; may be related to the East Slavic root жив- ‘to live,’ with Slavic suffix -ница added), Лиханка ( Podlasie; may be related to the Belarusian adjective лиха ‘bold’), Кривон, Кривоня, and Кривoнкo (– Grodno; may be an apotropaic name, from Belarusian adjective крывы ‘crooked,’ with East Slavic substantive suffix -on added), Дробна ( Grodno; Belarusian adjective дробна ‘small,’ or its Polish equivalent drobna). They seem to be created by Jews. Пчолка, also spelled Пщoлка and Бчoлка, appears as a male name in sources from mid-sixteenth-century Lutsk, Brest, and Grodno; its earliest
72 The only representative list of Belarusian given names, one compiled by Biryla (), is, however, far from exhaustive, and it is known that both Jachno and Wichna were common among Polish Christians.
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references Pszczolka and Bczolka come from Lwów (). It corresponds to Slavic ‘small bee’ (compare Ukrainian пчолка, Polish pszczółka). Perhaps it is due to the folk etymology connection of this Slavic noun and a hypocorism of Bezalel using the Slavic suffix -ka that could be pronounced as [btsalka]. This name was necessarily used by Jews among themselves because several variants of it—בצולקאa, פטשולקאa, בטשולקאa—are mentioned in Jewish sources of the seventeenth century. Certain phenomena peculiar to Belarusian phonetics influenced the pronunciation of several Jewish names. The introduction of the consonant [v] between two vowels is one example: Говаш ‘Jehoash,’ Новах ‘Noah,’ and Иовель ‘Joel.’ During that period Jews used numerous hypocoristic forms with Slavic suffixes -ацко/-уцко/-ацка73 and -хна/-хно.74 Some of them (such as Шахно) were not borrowed, but clearly constructed by Jews themselves. A number of StY given names are due to the legacy of EAST CANAANITES. Only one example is male: Shakhne. It corresponds to Шахно/Schachno found in old sources. Several examples are female. Among them are: Badane, Sakhne, Vikhne (their equivalents appearing in Cyrillic sources from the sixteenth century are Богдана, Сахна, and Вихна, respectively), and Yakhne.75 These names are found in LitY, UkrY, and southeasternmost areas of PolY. Ronye and Lane are both of uncertain, most likely Slavic origin.76 Found in Ukraine and Belorussia, in the nineteenth century these names were common in the area of PolY only in the easternmost provinces: eastern Galicia, Lublin, and Siedlce guberniyas. Moreover, the earliest reference to Lane is from Lwów (first half of the fifteenth century). As a result, both Ronye and Lane may also be related to EAST CANAANITES. It is to the same origin that the geographic distribution of LitY Tseytl / PolY Tshaytl point. In the nineteenth century, this name was found in LitY (including the northeastern guberniyas of the Kingdom of Poland), UkrY, and exactly the same southeastern provinces of PolY where Lane was common. Its initial affricate /tš/ cannot be of German or Hebrew origin. Its geography makes a Romance connection implausible. As a result, this name is likely to have a (non-identified) Slavic root. The situation with Drobne and Lyube is less clear. Drobne represents the Yiddishized form of Дробна (Drobna) whose only known reference before the end of the eighteenth century is the one listed earlier: , in Grodno. Such distribution makes the Belarusian origin the most likely. However, it is inappropriate to base the whole idea on one exceptional reference: the person in question could be a recent immigrant. Moreover, in civil records from the nineteenth century, we do not find any reference to this given name in Lithuania, very few references in all of the Kingdom of Poland, while in Galicia the name was common only in one place: the city of Kraków, that is, quite far from Belarusian territories. As a result, it is difficult to decide whether the name is of Polish or Belarusian origin. The name Lyub(k)e was common in LitY and UkrY at the turn of the nineteenth 73 Examples are: Яцко ( and Grodno; Podlasie; Brest), Лацко ( Grodno), Дуцко ( Brest), and Хацка ( Brest); as Jewish names they represent hypocorisms of the biblical Jacob, Eleazar (or Eliezer), David, and Anna (or Eve), respectively. 74 Examples are: Рухна ( Lutsk), Сахна ( Pinsk; from Sara), Стехна ( Brest and Lutsk; from Esther), Вихна ( Pinsk), Яхно ( Lithuania and , Lutsk; most likely from Jacob), Юхно ( Grodno; from Judah), Сахно ( Ratno, Volhynia; maybe, from Isaac), Смохно ( Grodno; from Samuel), Захнo ( Ruthenia; from Zacharia). In the seventeenth century there are Михне ( Kobrin; from Michael) and Якухно ( Lugin, Volhynia; from Jacob). 75 No reference to its East Slavic *Яхна appears in available Cyrillic sources from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, this given name was common among Christian women in various Slavic countries, known among Jewish women in the Czech lands and Silesia (see references to Jachna in section ..). Moreover, we know of several references to its male counterpart *Яхнo among East Slavic Jews. It is its geographical distribution during the nineteenth century among Jewish women that implies that this EY is more likely due to EAST CANAANITES than to WEST CANAANITES. 76 Both of them could be borrowed from Slavs as ready-made hypocoristic forms (see the corresponding entries in Beider ); compare Matrona and Verona, both of ultimate Romance origin and both possible full forms of the Slavic ancestor of Ronye.
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and twentieth centuries. In the area of PolY, it was common in Piotrków guberniya only, that is, again far from the former area of EAST CANAANITES. In this particular case, we cannot rule out the possibility of two independent borrowings from local Christians: one from Belarusians in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and another from Poles in western Poland.
.. Vernacular language of Lithuanian Jews Taking into account the information given in the previous section, it is reasonable to suggest that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a portion of the Jewish population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in their everyday lives spoke a Slavic language related to Belarusian and Ukrainian. (Nothing is known about the previous period.) This hypothesis can explain the popularity of Богдан, relating its common use to its pleasant meaning (God-given), the existence of calques and of the folk etymology form (Пчолка), the infiltration of the Belarusian phonetic phenomenon into the corpus of names, and the use of the East Slavic diminutive suffixes. The creation of the new names based on the Slavic vocabulary could be explained only by this conjecture. For the same period, from an analysis of the corpus of names, we can observe the presence in Lithuania of numerous Ashkenazic Jews, that is, those who came to the country from the West, from Yiddish-speaking communities, or their direct descendants. These individuals would bear names with either Germanic and Romance roots or the hypocoristic forms ending in the diminutive Yiddish suffix -l, or the non-Slavic forms of the biblical names. The geographic distribution of these names was not uniform. In the north of the Duchy, in the areas that today correspond to Belarus and Lithuania, Ashkenazic appellations were particularly common in Brest; a significantly smaller number of names from this category are also known in Grodno, Kobrin, Novogrudok, and Pinsk. In Tykocin (now in Poland) the proportion of westerners was significant as may be observed from a representative list of local householders compiled in . In the southern part of the Duchy, in Volhynia, numerous examples of Ashkenazic names appear in the census data of Kremenets (). Several explicit examples are also known for other places such as Lutsk, Vladimir, Ratno, Rovno, and Koshar.77 These examples confirm an Ashkenazic presence in all of the important communities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It is implausible that these individuals bearing names with typical Germanic or Romance roots, including Yiddish diminutive suffixes in their structure and/or representing the Yiddish dialectal forms, spoke only a Slavic language. It is much more plausible that they were either monolingual speakers of Yiddish or they were bilingual (Yiddish and East Slavic). Note that Christian sources of the sixteenth century cite no document that was written by Jews in the local Slavic language (called “Russian” in chronicles). On the other hand, some tell of letters written in the “Jewish” language (Hebrew or Yiddish?) or those in which the signatures in Hebrew characters are present.78 This analysis involves polemics between several authors who wrote about the Jewish history of Eastern Europe. In his introduction to REA (:), Garkavi mentions Slavic given names and sobriquets used by Lithuanian Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He concludes that they testify to the existence of Jewish linguistic assimilation to local Christians. Beršadskij (:) considers Russian to be the dominant language during the sixteenth century. He notes () the absence of translators among Jews and Christians, () two petitions written during the decade that followed 77
For all communities mentioned in this paragraph, the Ashkenazic names in question are listed in Beider :. 78 This collection includes three documents on the internal affairs of the community of Grodno (RN, REA :, ) as well as the financial commitment of Brest Jews to a noble Christian with a “Jewish” signature (REA :).
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the Lublin Union () by Jews from Vladimir and Troki asking state officials that the Polish and Latin documents be translated to Russian “for the better understanding,” as well as () Slavic appellations (a few given names and a dozen sobriquets used by Jews. Centnerszwerowa (:–) also extensively used appellations of Jews (taken by her exclusively from Christian sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to support her main thesis: until the beginning of the seventeenth century the vernacular languages spoken by Jews were Polish in Poland and Russian in Lithuania. Dubnov () was the main opponent of these views. According to him, Yiddish was the vernacular language of the majority of the Jewish population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To support his position, he quotes from a large set of transactions of rabbinical judgment courts of various communities studied by him. In these documents, one finds only one piece of direct proof of the existence of Jews from Eastern Europe who knew no Yiddish and only spoke a Slavic language. This was the case of a resident of Medzhibozh, Podolia, who testified in “Russian” (as it is said in the original Jewish document) before the rabbinical court in . His testimony was translated into Yiddish, apparently the language spoken by the judges. In , during another judgment, an individual from Vilna used several East Slavic words in his speech. In other documents of the same type, numerous words are written in Yiddish, the vernacular language of the Ashkenazic Jews. These sources correspond to Brest (), Yurburg, Lithuania (–), Mogilev, Eastern Belorussia (), Konstantinov, Volhynia (), Nemirov and Letichev, both in Podolia (early seventeenth century). Dubnov also correctly states that the factors mentioned by Garkavi and Beršadskij demonstrate that Lithuanian Jews were fluent in “Russian,” while they are not sufficient to draw the conclusion that these Jews were unable to speak Yiddish. Dubnov also rejects the onomastic arguments of his predecessors, saying that “personal names were generally translated into the language of the document. Thus, one obtained Огрон instead of Ahron, Яцек instead of Яков [Jacob], etc.” (p. ). Arguments suggested by Dubnov are stronger than certain ideas proposed by his predecessors.79 Indeed, taking into account the language in which a document is compiled—which at the same time represents the tongue of the Christian scribe—is of paramount importance when one wants to deal adequately with the proper names it mentions. Very often, the names are adapted to the language in question. This also occurred because the Slavic population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was unfamiliar with the proper forms of Jewish names.80 As a result, biblical names appear in Polish or Russian sources in their Slavic (or Slavonized) forms. In sources compiled centuries before us, 79 This statement primarly concerns Centnerszwerowa (whose arguments are not scholarly) and, to a lesser extent, Beršadskij. Yet the views by Garkavi are in some respects more nuanced than those by Dubnov. Garkavi suggests paying attention to Slavic given names such as Benesh, Zlata, Pava, Slava, and Cherna. He also correctly points to the necessity of comparing words from the oldest layer of the Slavic component of Yiddish to various Slavic languages and particularly Old Czech. He states explicitly that the available data do not allow us to provide an unambiguous answer to the question when the Jews of Eastern Europe shifted from a Slavic vernacular language to Yiddish (Garkavi :–). 80 Slavonization of Jewish names occurred particularly in localities where only a few Jews lived. Consider, for example, the names of Jews living in Moscow at the end of the seventeenth century (Kunin :–). These Jews had all been taken prisoner during the Russian–Polish War of – and were freed only after the deaths of their Russian masters. Censuses of and name the following Jewish burghers: Мат˛шка Григорьев, Федка Григорьев, Андр˛шка Лукьянов, Федор Иевлиев, Давид Тимофеев, Яков Самоилов, Семен Яковлев, Иван Яковлев, Иван Костянтинов, Владимир Елисеев сын Израилев, Степан Иванов сын Копьев. The genuine Jewish given name of some persons can be identified with a certain degree of probability only in a few cases— Давид (David), Самоил (Samuel), Семен (Simon), and Яков (Jacob). Other, non-biblical, names are purely Slavic, so one can only guess about the Jewish name. For example, it is possible that the initial letters of Jewish and Slavic names given here are the same, but it is also quite possible that these Slavic names were invented by former masters of these Jews and had no connection with the genuine name.
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given names of representatives of minorities were often replaced by local names having some phonetic similarities with them or being their calques. This kind of substitution was not necessarily made by Christian scribes. The appellations in question could simply be names under which Jews were known to local Christians and in principle they could be different from those internally used within the Jewish community. It is also important to stress that the majority of documents in which particular Slavic names appear during the sixteenth century deal with Jews who were in permanent contact with Slavs because of their occupations, such as tax collectors, merchants, and tavern keepers. The above points are not limited to given names: for sobriquets or nicknames they are really crucial. The inadequacy of the consideration of this layer of appellations by authors criticized by Dubnov can be easily demonstrated. During the subsequent two centuries, nicknames of Jews that appeared in Christian sources also were based on Slavic languages, although Jewish given names were already different from Slavic names. On the other hand, at least for the eighteenth century there is no ambiguity concerning the vernacular language: it was Yiddish. The approach by Dubnov possesses in turn some weak points. Firstly, his onomastic considerations are simplistic. Despite the factors enumerated in the previous paragraph, some names in the Christian sources may reveal genuine Jewish names. As shown earlier in the chapter, this is particularly true for appellations unknown among Christians and/or those that are mentioned in Jewish sources also. Secondly, transactions of the rabbinical judgment courts do not represent neutral sources. The fact that they mention numerous Yiddish words does not necessarily imply that Yiddish was the everyday language of all members of the communities in question. It shows that the elite of these communities was Yiddish-speaking. Onomastics shows that there is no doubt that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Lithuanian communities represented a mixture of two groups differing by their vernacular language, but it does not provide the direct answer to the question discussed by Dubnov and his opponents. From this source, it is impossible to tell which language was dominant during the sixteenth century. Actually, the question is not totally appropriate. The difference between these authors is not fundamental since, as was stressed by Weinreich (WG :), it concerns proportions only. No scientific method exists that would permit calculating such proportions since, due to the scarceness of available historical sources, we cannot proceed to any statistical analysis that would be valid for all of Lithuania. Onomastics, however, allows an illustration of the hypothesis in favor of the nonuniform geographic distribution of Slavic and Yiddish speakers. For example, the analysis of the corpus of the names borne in the sixteenth century in the two largest Jewish communities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Brest and Grodno, implies that, during that period, the dominant vernacular language was not the same in these two communities: certainly Yiddish for Brest and probably a Slavic language for Grodno.81 The first community was mainly composed of recent western immigrants, while members of the second had lived in the region for at least several generations.82 Slavic-speaking Jews merged with the newly arriving Yiddish-speaking migrants from the West during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. From the second third of the sixteenth century, the number of Slavic names (that were either borrowed from Gentiles or created by Jews) in available sources is significantly smaller than that of typical Ashkenazic names. No reference to a native Slavic-speaking Jew can be found in sources dating from the second half of See details in Beider :–. Schiper formulated a similar assertion, although he was speaking about the period – years earlier: the conclusions were drawn from his detailed study of the original texts of the privileges granted to Jews of Brest and Grodno by the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Vytautas, at the end of the fourteenth century. Schiper suggested that those from Brest were Ashkenazic, while those from Grodno were “indigenous” (cited in WG :). 81 82
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the seventeenth century.83 The largely quoted Responsum by Meir Katz—an Ashkenazic Jew who served in the early seventeenth century as rabbi in the town of Mogilev (now Mahilyow, in Belarus)—is the first and the last reference to Slavic-speaking Jews as a group. That rabbi wrote that Jews around him mostly spoke “Russian” and called the town Brest by its Russian name. He also expressed the desire for the time to come when all Jews would speak only Yiddish and would call the town by its Yiddish name, Brisk. To evaluate the importance of this sentence for the history of the Jewish communities of that period it is necessary to take into account the exact context. The Responsum in question affects only the spelling of the town name Brest/Brisk. Katz describes carefully and precisely the toponym used by Jews. His text implies that Jews around him speak “Russian”84 and, for this reason, they call Brest by its “Russian” name and not the Yiddish one. So they surely call the town just Brest, not Brisk. However, from this context we learn nothing about these Jews speaking or not speaking other languages besides “Russian.”85 Without any additional information, it is logically simpler to interpret the text as implying that these Jews spoke only “Russian,” not Yiddish. However, several indirect elements oppose this interpretation. The name Brisk was applied to the town in Lithuania rather late and this toponym was brought by Jews from Poland.86 In other words, Polish Jews started to call Brest Brisk earlier than local (Belarusian) Jews did. Katz (who came to Mogilev from the West) does not realize this and is exasperated by the fact that Jews around him do not use the same name as their coreligionists in Poland. The onomastics data dealing with Mogilev during the first half of the seventeenth century creates skepticism about the literal interpretation of Katz’s words. In , an anti-Jewish pogrom occurred in that town, the first known in the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. We know the names of members of ten families who were either injured or whose houses were damaged during the event (RN ). All but two of these families have names of Ashkenazic origin. During the same decade, Slavic sources also mention several other persons from Mogilev and, for all of these individuals, either their proper given name or that of their father, or both, are Yiddish.87 According to the names used in Mogilev in the mid-seventeenth century, the local community was typically Ashkenazic.
.. Words Before the sixteenth century, Slavic-speaking Jews shared in their vernacular life the language(s) of the surrounding Orthodox Christians. After the shift to Yiddish, local Jewish communities continued to live in immediate contact with Ukrainians and Belarusians. In this situation, it is understandable that in the Slavic component of modern Yiddish it is difficult to distinguish words inherited from the vernacular language of EAST CANAANITES from those borrowed by Yiddish-speakers from their Gentile neighbors during the previous centuries.88 As a result, it is difficult to find Yiddish elements 83 Evrejskaja enciklopedija (:) states that the total merging of both groups—the Russian-speaking Jews with roots in the South and the East and the western Yiddish-speakers—was not finished during the eighteenth century, yet, in many respects they were still different (given names, pronunciation of Yiddish, and even physical types of persons). This information has no documentary support, and it seems to represent pure conjecture by the author of that text. 84 According to modern terminology, it is more appropriate to call this idiom Belarusian. 85 Dubnov (:) also insists that this document does not indicate that local Jews did not speak Yiddish. Weinreich adds an ad hoc idea that the word “mostly” used by Meir Katz was due to the author’s temperament and to his negative reaction to the use of the non-Yiddish language (WG :). 86 In Yiddish it appeared, most likely, under the influence of German colonists (see section ..). 87 See details in Beider :. 88 Among the examples of East Slavic words for which their age in Yiddish is unclear are: bereze ‘birch,’ dub ‘oak,’ krie ‘floe,’ ozere ‘lake,’ and pyate ‘heel (of foot)’; compare Ukrainian березаa, дубa, кригаa, озероa, and п’ятаa, respectively.
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Slavic elements
that are due to EAST CANAANITES.89 In any event the older first layer is quite small (and may even be non-existent). Unlike the Old Czech layer discussed in section .., it does not include religious terms or other basic words. Weinreich (WG :) discusses the EY verb praven and notes the religious connotation of its meaning ‘to celebrate (for example, a festive Passover meal).’ Taking this semantics into account, Wexler (:) suggests that this word belongs to a Slavic substratum of Yiddish. If this idea were attractive, we would question the exact provenance of this lexeme, with the need for a choice between WEST CANAANITES and EAST CANAANITES. Yet, the idea as a whole is highly questionable. Indeed, the verb has a meaning much larger than the religious meaning noted by Max Weinreich. The dictionary by Harkavy () translates it as ‘to rule, administer’; ‘to do, perform.’ The dictionary by Uriel Weinreich () indicates the following meanings: ‘to observe, celebrate’; ‘to carry.’ The closest phonetic and semantic Slavic connection is Ukrainian (appearing in Hrinchenko ) правити ‘to officiate a religious service.’ In the absence of any detailed information concerning the geography and the age of the verb praven in EY, it is difficult to decide whether its etymon was borrowed from Christian Slavs or Slavic-speaking Jews. The western origin would be plausible in the event the verb is known in the CzY or, at least, in the Yiddish of western Poland. The eastern origin would be favored if the verb were limited to LitY and UkrY. Unfortunately, the exact geography of this word does not appear in available sources. The same is true for EY family terms plimenik ‘nephew’ and plimenitse ‘niece.’ Both are of East Slavic origin, compare Ukrainian and Belarusian племенник and племенница, respectively. If we can find evidence for their old age in LitY and/or UkrY, then they may belong to the linguistic legacy of EAST CANAANITES. Otherwise, they could be recent borrowings from East Slavic languages. Several EY words of Slavic origin, on the one hand, include the diphthong ey absent from the cognate Slavic lexemes, and, on the other hand, are known only in LitY and/or UkrY: kleyt ‘shop,’ kveyt ‘flower,’ and treyslen ‘to shake.’90 In the Slavic component of Yiddish, the diphthong ey generally corresponds to Proto-Slavic *ě and *’e. This phonological phenomenon was discussed in section .. with examples of Old Czech etymons. However, the geography of these three words makes any influence of West Slavic languages implausible: the etymons are to be sought in East Slavic languages, namely Belarusian and Ukrainian.91 In these languages, the Proto-Slavic *ě gave e ̇ (a sound between [e] and [i]) in Ukrainian that turned during the fifteenth century into /i/, /’e/ in Belarusian, and the diphthong [ie] in Polesia, a region on the border of modern Belarus and Ukraine.92 Slavic etymons of StY kleyt and kveyt are both directly affected by this distribution: compare Ukrainian клiть ‘cage,’ ‘shop,’ and квiт ‘flower.’ Since Yiddish never had a sound similar to the East Slavic diphthong [ie], it was natural for Yiddish to replace this diphthong with the closest element in the Yiddish vocalic chart, namely [ej].93 The paucity of the Yiddish sources from the area in question from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the total absence of them from earlier centuries, do not allow us to evaluate even the approximate age of kleyt and kveyt in EY. If these words entered EY merely a few centuries ago, then the borrowing took place from the East 89 Wexler (:–) wrote numerous pages on this topic, but, unfortunately, without a single reliable result. For certain words he suggests their belonging to the EAST CANAANITE substratum only because they can be found in the language of Christians from the region of Polesie in which—according to Wexler’s opinion—the hypothetical Jewish “descendants from Khazars” dwelled. 90 All of these words (also appearing in StY) are noted in WG : as unknown in PolY. However, note the presence of the verb treyslen in writings by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Geller :). 91 For kveyt, any influence of Polish is also excluded for phonetic reasons. As discussed in section .., it was already in the early stage of Old Polish that Proto-Slavic *ě gave /’a/ before several hard consonants including /t/; compare modern kwiat. 92 93 See details in Shevelov :–, , . See Gajek :–.
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Slavic dialect of Polesia. However, if these items are much older, we can conceive the possibility of East Slavic idioms having [ie] in a larger area and consequently a larger donor area for EY.94 Whatever exact scenario took place, nothing suggests any intermediary role for EAST CANAANITES between East Slavic languages and Yiddish.95 Certain lexical elements of EY have Turkic roots. Among them are: baraban ‘drum,’ kaftn ‘coat,’ kamish ‘rush (type of reed),’ tashme ‘ribbon,’ torbe ‘sack,’ loksh(n) ‘noodle,’ and yarmlke ‘Jewish skull cap.’96 Since similar words also exist in East Slavic languages and Polish, it is logical to assume that Jews borrowed them from their Slavic neighbors, who in turn took them from the Tatars or Turks. However, for the last two words, several authors assert their Khazar connection, assuming that Jews took these words directly from Turkic languages without any Slavic intermediary. The Yiddish word for ‘noodle’ has cognate Slavic forms with exactly the same meaning: Ukrainian локш(ин)а (singular), Belarusian локшыны (plural) / локшынa (singular), Polish łokszyny (plural) / łokszyna (singular). The Turkic etymon is lakcˇ a. We may observe that EY lokshn and the Slavic forms in question share three major peculiarities in comparison to this etymon: /o/ instead of /a/ in the first syllable, /š/ instead of /cˇ /, and additional /n/. According to OCCAM’S RAZOR, in this situation any possibility of independent borrowings from Turkic languages made by Jews and Slavs is excluded. At least, the East Slavic forms are general, having no connection to any particular Jewish meal. Nothing suggests that they could be borrowed from Jews rather than from Turkic people. As a result, we may conclude that Yiddish lokshn is a loanword taken by Jews from Slavs.97 EY yarmlke ‘Jewish skull cap’ also has cognate forms in Slavic languages; compare Ukrainian ярмулка, Belarusian ярмoлка and ярмулка, Polish jarmułka, and Russian eрмoлка. The Turkic etymon ya gmurluk ‘raincoat’ is distant from the above words both phonetically and semantically. As a result, it is absolutely clear that Slavic and Yiddish forms all have the same ancestor in which the 94 Similar arguments may be used to support the East Slavic origin of StY meyre and (less plausible because of the stress position) deyzhe, compare Ukrainian мiра (initial stress) ‘measure’ and дiжа (final stress) ‘trough,’ respectively. To evaluate the relative logical probabilities of the East Slavic or Old Czech (as proposed in section ..) origins, one needs to know the exact geography of these EY words. If a word is unknown in PolY or, at least, is primarily found in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus, then its East Slavic (adstratal) origin should be favored. If, on the contrary, we find such PolY lexemes as *mayre and/or *dayzhe, then the Old Czech substratal origin becomes more plausible. Unfortunately, such detailed geography cannot be found in the available literature and, as a result, the question remains open. (The East Slavic provenance of deyzhe is suggested in WG : on the basis that this Yiddish word cannot be derived from Polish.) 95 The exact etymology of EY treyslen ‘to shake’ is more obscure. Its root vowel corresponds to the Proto-Slavic nasal *ę and not *ě (see the entry trjasti in Vasmer ). Consequently, the phonetic development in East Slavic was different from that of the potential etymons for kleyt and kveyt; compare Ukrainian трясти and Belarusian тресць. The internal /l/ in the Yiddish verb was introduced at some point as a result of dissimilation of consonants; compare other examples of the same phenomenon: StY motlen ‘to gossip’ < Polish motać and/or Ukrainian мотати; StY dremlen/drimlen ‘to doze, nap’ < Polish drzemać and/or Ukrainian дрiмати. 96 See their etymologies in the following entries of Vasmer : барабан, кафтан, камыш, тaсма / тeсьма, торба, лапша, and ермолка. Note that, for example, Ukrainian барабан ‘drum’ is phonetically identical to StY baraban, while its Turkic etymon was either daraban or balaban. 97 The notion of independent Jewish and Slavic borrowings from the Turkic people is proposed by Wexler (:). It was developed in Timm and Beckmann :–. These authors suggested paying attention to the relative chronology of the first references to these words in the languages in question. In Yiddish, we find a reference from the end of the sixteenth century (RESPONSA by Moses Isserles, Kraków). Yet, all known Polish references are more recent and we do not find older East Slavic references either. Apparently, such relative chronology is partly fortuitous, being due to the paucity of East Slavic sources for the period in question. Timm and Beckmann also write that if Yiddish loksh (singular) were derived from Slavic /lokša/, its plural form would be **lokshes and not lokshn. However, the singular form loksh is almost unused in Yiddish: the main form is clearly the plural one, lokshn. The last one is based on a Slavic word in which /n/ is a part of the Slavic suffix -ina. Once borrowed from the Slavs, the final consonant was falsely re-interpreted as if it were the Yiddish plural suffix (of German origin). Later, this gave rise to a singular back formation loksh (Aslanov b:–).
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Turkic loanword acquired a new meaning ‘cap’ and a new form *[jarmulka].98 In theory, the borrowing could be either from Slavs to Jews or vice versa.99 Data available to us clearly point to the first possibility. Belarusian ярмулка means specifically ‘Jewish cap,’ but ярмoлка designates ‘felt peasant’s cap.’ For Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish words the meaning is more general, just ‘cap.’ However, Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries from the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century provide examples that are related to Jews. The decisive information comes from Polish. In that language (Karłowicz et al. ), jarmułka is used to designate various kinds of caps including those worn by Catholic priests, physicians, ill persons, and religious Jews. With such an array of meanings, it is impossible that originally the word meant just the Jewish skull cap and was borrowed from Jews. We can be sure that, on the contrary, Jews borrowed the word from Slavs. Taking into account the above information, the following scenario appears to be the most plausible. Initially, Ukrainians borrowed the word from the Turks or (Crimean) Tatars, and changed it to ярмулка ‘cap.’ Later, Poles borrowed this word from Ukrainians and Jews borrowed it from Poles and/or Ukrainians. For some reason, the word became commonly used by Jews to designate their religious caps. Slavs borrowed this meaning from Jews. Gradually, the word came to be used rarely in East Slavic languages in meanings others than the “Jewish” one. The word shabash means ‘tip given to musicians at a wedding’ in EY. This meaning is unknown in Slavic languages and WY. Yet, it is known in several Asian countries, including Iran.100 For the Jews of Eastern Europe this term has been known since at least the start of the sixteenth century.101 Consequently, the presence of this word in EY is unlikely to be related to Jewish migrations from the West, or to the intermediary role of Slavs. The language of the communities of EAST CANAANITES is the most plausible channel through which the word could enter Yiddish. However, nothing suggests any connection to the Khazar Kingdom. No evidence exists on the use of this word in medieval Khazaria. The earliest Jewish reference is distanced by many centuries from the time when this political entity disappeared. To explain how this Oriental word appeared in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, one can easily suggest numerous more plausible scenarios without any participation of Khazars involving the contact of local Jews either with their coreligionists in Asian countries or with Gentiles of Eastern Europe (Tatars, Turks, Gypsies, etc.), who in turn borrowed this word from some Oriental Gentiles or brought it to this territory. Without any knowledge of the exact area of propagation of this term (and the tradition of giving tips to musicians) among medieval Jews and Gentiles, any theory of this kind will remain purely speculative.
.
EARLY JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN POLAND
.. EY elements borrowed from Old Polish As discussed in previous sections of this chapter, the cultural and linguistic autonomy of WEST and EAST CANAANITES that they enjoyed themselves and in comparison to western Ashkenazic 98 We cannot be sure about the validity of this etymon. However, even if it was identified by Vasmer incorrectly and the actual etymon has been different, the general conclusion about the impossibility for Slavs and Jews to make independent borrowings from Turkic languages remains valid. Independent borrowings are plausible only in cases of clearly identifiable etymons, with neither phonological nor semantic changes in comparison to the source language. 99 Sand (:) assumes that the word came to Jews directly from Turkic languages. 100 The first analysis of the word shabash appears in Wexler (:–). Timm and Beckmann :– suggest corrections to inappropriate details of his analysis. 101 Garkavi (:) notes a reference ( )ַשַּבשin the text of by Moses ben Jacob “the Exile,” an Ashkenazic scholar from Lithuania who lived in Kiev and Crimea (about this scholar see Taube :–).
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communities is beyond question. Nothing suggests that the initial development of these two Jewish groups in Slavic territories was due to migrations from western German-speaking provinces. In both areas, local Jews spoke local Slavic languages in the Middle Ages. Traces of both Jewish groups can be found in modern Yiddish dialects and the corpus of the traditional Ashkenazic given names. To these groups certain spelling traditions maintained in PolY for centuries were also due.102 Yet, both the linguistic past of the earliest communities in Poland and their influence on modern EY are much more ambiguous. On the one hand, the creation of the early Polish Jewish communities may be explained by migrations of WEST CANAANITES, EAST CANAANITES, and Ashkenazic Jews (mainly BNEY KHES). The first argument comes from the consideration of the geographic distribution of Jewish communities known in the Polish Kingdom before the fifteenth century. One group of them (Kraków, Poznań, Kalisz, Pyzdry, and most likely Przemęt103) are located in the westernmost part of the country, not far from the Czech lands and East Germany, that is, areas whose Jewish communities are due to WEST CANAANITES and, later (especially beginning with the fifteenth century) Ashkenazic Jews. Another group belongs to Red Ruthenia, the southeastern part of the country, in the area of EAST CANAANITES. The only exceptions are the communities of Sandomierz and Lublin. The first city is, however, easily accessible from Kraków by way of the Vistula River; therefore, migrants from the Polish capital possibly created its community. In Lublin, both sources could be of importance. An illustration for this statement can be made using onomastics, providing additional arguments for the general idea formulated at the beginning of this paragraph. For example, Shalom Shakhno, who is often considered to be the founder of Polish rabbinical scholarship, lived in Lublin during the first half of the sixteenth century. He received his name (typical of Jews from Red Ruthenia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) in honor of his grandfather, who was a rich tax collector in the Lwów area about .104 Joseph, the son of the latter and the father of the famous rabbi, is mentioned in Christian sources under the Slavic hypocoristic form Jossko (REA :). On the other hand, the names of the mother of Shalom Shakhno, Golda, as well as that of his own son, Saul Fishl Ephraim, were typically Ashkenazic, and, therefore, ultimately due to migrations from the West.105 Globally speaking, almost all Slavic names used by Jews in communities from the Polish Kingdom belong to one of two categories: () “western” names also used in the Czech lands and found in all of Poland, or () “eastern” names limited to the southeastern part of the country (Lublin area and Red Ruthenia) and shared during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For this reason, these names were already discussed in sections .. and .. during the onomastic analysis of WEST and EAST CANAANITES, respectively. The “eastern” names correspond to communities that spoke an East Slavic language in their everyday life. The “western” names were brought to Poland by Jewish migrants from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. The earliest of these migrants spoke Old Czech. Those who came at the beginning of the fourteenth century would already be speaking a 102 Here belongs the use of heth to express the sound /x/. We regularly find this spelling convention in documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, ‘ חאטשיat least’ in MY (Neuberg :); several toponyms appearing in resolutions of the Vaad of Four Lands from the period between and such as חעלמא Chełm, װאלאח״ײWallachia, חורושטשChoroszcze, חענטשיןChęciny’ (but סאכטשובSochaczew; ACP , , , , ), װאליחײWallachia in the RESPONSA by Maharam of Lublin (Rubashov :), ‘ חענטשינרone from Chęciny’ in Beit Ḥ adash by Joel Sirkis written in the s (yet, in the same book one also finds װאליכײאWallachia) (Rubashov :). 103 See its discussion in section ... 104 He was mentioned in section .. as Schachno. 105 On this family see Bałaban :–. In the RESPONSA by Maharam of Lublin (–), we find a reference to a Jew whose name *Zalmen ben Jacob Pintshuk (זלמן בן יעקב פינטשוק,a Rubashov :) represents a curious example of merging of several linguistic layers. His given name, Zalmen, is purely Ashkenazic. Yet, his nickname, Pintshuk, is of Slavic origin, compare Belarusian Пинчук ‘one from (the town of) Pinsk.’
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German-based vernacular idiom, the ancestor of EY. For these migrants, their “western” Slavic names were substratal. These names were rare: the majority of names were Germanic or Hebrew. As a result, in western Polish territories, Slavic names became rather exceptional.106 On the other hand, the linguistic situation of Jewish communities in medieval Poland was heavily influenced by the colonial German (Silesian) dialect spoken in numerous Polish places where both Jews and Germans lived. As discussed in section ., because of this factor a significant number of Yiddish toponyms from the territory of Poland entered Yiddish through the intermediary of German. Despite important external influences, Jewish and non-Jewish, enumerated earlier, certain peculiarities are internal to Poland. A few Slavic names seem to start to be used by Jews locally. Among them are certain names appearing in medieval Kraków such as Swonka/Zwonka, Kaczka/ Kaschiscza,107 and Witoslawa. During the last centuries, only the last one survived, giving rise to EY Vite. The age of another EY female given name, Tsile/Tsilke, is unknown. Most likely, it was borrowed from Polish Christians for whom Cyla and Cylka are hypocoristic forms of Cecylia, a name of Latin origin. During the nineteenth century Tsil(k)e was particularly common in the Piotrków and Kielce guberniyas of the Kingdom of Poland. In principle, the borrowing could take place relatively recently (for example, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Numerous Yiddish toponyms are based on Polish without any intermediary of German. For example, among names enumerated in Table . (section ..), this is the case for several towns from (a) southwestern Poland: Bokhnye for Bochnia, Petrikev for Piotrków Trybunalski, and Pilzne for Pilzno; (b) Red Russia: Moshtshisk for Mościska, Premishle for Przemyśl, and Trebevle for Tre(m)bowla. The second series is of particular interest because it shows the Jewish preference for Polish toponyms not only over the German ones but also over the Ukrainian ones.108 The same phenomenon may also be observed for a few other towns in former Red Ruthenia: Yiddish Khelem109 from Polish Chełm (and not Ukrainian Холм) and Zikev from Polish Dzików (and not Ukrainian Дикiв). The number of words borrowed by Yiddish from Polish is very large. For example, no other Slavic language can be responsible for StY blote ‘mud,’ vontse ‘mustache,’ penkher ‘bladder,’ and sufit ‘ceiling.’110 However, for the specific purposes of this book, it is important to distinguish only the Names appearing in historical sources of Poznań may illustrate this point. On the one hand, we find such Ashkenazic “westerners,” often with typical suffixes of German origin, as Manlin in , Zyffrida in , Czawdelyn in , and Kouffman in (W , , , ). On the other hand, we find references from – to typical “easterners” as Schabda (a form of Shabbethai unknown in Western Europe; see section ..) from Lublin and Juschko from “Rubieschewo” (Hrubieszów) (W , ). 107 Swonka and Kaschiscza are names of two sisters mentioned in Kraków in . The second of them seems to represent a Slavic hypocoristic form of Catherine; this form is unknown among Polish Christians. The woman in question was the mother of Lewko, the royal banker who was the richest Jew of Kraków in the fourteenth century (Bałaban a.:). Among Jews, the second and last reference to Swonka (spelled Zwonka and Swenka in the source) corresponds to the wife of the same Lewko. Note that among the names of Lewko’s children, two sons used names specific only to Jews of Central Europe, Chanaan/Kanaan and Jordan (the latter given in honor of Lewko’s father) (these two names have been discussed in sections .. and .., respectively), while one daughter was called Golda/Golde, a typically Ashkenazic name. (Genealogical data about this family are extracted from Bałaban a.:, Wyrozumska :N , , .) The name of Lewko himself—Polish diminutive of ‘lion’—is ambiguous. In principle, it may represent the Polish calque of the Yiddish name with the same meaning (compare StY Leyb) and inside of the Jewish community he could be called after his Yiddish name. This data does not necessarily imply that the Jewish population of Kraków resulted from the local merging of heterogeneous elements. This type of “mixture” could have already existed in the country of origin (Bohemia-Moravia, East Germany). 108 Compare Ukrainian Мостиська (with /-st-/), Перемишль (with /pe-/), and Теребовля (with /te-/), respectively. 109 Spelled חעלמאin (ACP ). 110 See the discussion of these and other examples in WG :, –. 106
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TABLE . Development of stressed vowels in Polish
Century 15th
16th
17th–18th
Vowel chart and vocalic shifts i:
i e: e
a
a:
o
o:
ė e
a
å[ ]
o
o
i
i
e
a au/ou/å
o
u
u:
u
u
ą ą:
ąe ąo ę ą [õ]
oldest loanwords from Polish. In this context, a consideration of certain major elements of the historical development of the phonetics of the Polish language may be particularly helpful. In Old Polish, the stress position was movable. The accent became fixed to the initial position in the fifteenth century and to the penultimate one at the beginning of the seventeenth century.111 As a result, EY words whose initial stress cannot be explained from East Slavic languages were most likely borrowed from Polish before the seventeenth century.112 Among them are PolY (and StY) kápete ‘long coat,’ lópete ‘shade,’ máline ‘raspberry,’ nóvene/nóvine ‘piece of news,’ pódeshve ‘sole,’ pódleke ‘floor,’ and vétshere ‘supper,’ whose Polish etymons are kapota, łopata, malina, nowina, podeszwa, podłoga, and wieczerza, respectively.113 To the same group likely belongs StY kobrets ‘carpet.’ It is derived from either Polish kobierzec or Old Czech kobeřec.114 The chart of Polish stressed vowels also underwent major changes during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. One may distinguish three stages, roughly one per century (see Table .). Thanks to the treatise on Polish spelling written by Jakub Parkoszowic in the mid-fifteenth century, we know that at that period this chart consisted in twelve vowels that corresponded to six qualities (a, e, i, u, o, and nasal ą) and two quantities (long and short). The latest known Polish text with long vowels was printed in Kraków in . Generally speaking, sources from the sixteenth century (including the Polish grammar published in ) describe a system of ten vowels, all . distinguished only by quality and not by quantity: a, å, o, o , u, i, e ̇, e, and nasal ąe and ąo. In this . chart, new qualities resulted from the raising of former long vowels: å [ɔ] from [a:], o “narrow o” o from [o:], e ̇ “narrow e” from [e:], ą from [ã:]. During the seventeenth century, in Polish dialects, . “narrow” vowels e ̇ and o were mainly raised and merged with i and u, respectively. During the same century, å was diphthongized into [ou] or [au] in western Polish dialects, merged with /o/ in the east, while in some Mazovian dialects and in the territories of modern western Ukraine and western Belarus, it merged with /a/. It was only during the eighteenth century, that the latter pronunciation became standard for Polish.115
On the historical development of stress in Polish see Stieber :–, –. In theory, the initial stress can also be explained by the influence of the principal stress pattern of the German component of Yiddish that posits the accent on the first syllable of the root. Yet, the existence of numerous Slavic loanwords in Yiddish in which the stress is not initial shows that the influence of Polish on the phonetics of Yiddish words in question is the most plausible source. 113 Some of these examples appear in WG :–, –. However, the chronology suggested in that source is inaccurate: Weinreich considers that the borrowing of the forms with the initial stress and/or the entire pattern took place before the fifteenth century (WG :). 114 Its plural form ( קאבריציןcompare StY kobretsn) appears in ZuR (Neuberg :). 115 The information about the historical development of Polish stressed vowels is taken here from Stieber : –, , –, , –, Klemensiewicz :–, –. 111 112
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The vocalic quantities that characterized Old Polish influenced the development of Yiddish. The fact that PolY (in contrast to LitY and UkrY) retained a contrast between short and long vowels may be, at least partly, due to this phenomenon.116 Other influences may be discerned when analyzing individual words. However, since, on the one one hand, the development of Polish vowels was characterized by mergers and, on the other hand, for numerous Polish words no detailed information exists for the period before the seventeenth century, in certain cases it is not easy to identify the exact Old Polish reflex in the fifteenth century and thereafter relate the phonetics of certain EY forms to one of the first two stages indicated in Table .. . The situation is the easiest for the vowel that was o: during the fifteenth century and o during the sixteenth century. Indeed, in modern Polish, this vowel can still be distinguished graphically: though pronounced [u], it is spelled ó. As a result, when we find the EY diphthong oy in place of (modern) Polish ó, we can be sure that EY borrowed from Polish the ancestor of the word in question prior to the sixteenth century, when the reflexion [o:] was still valid for Polish. This is the case for such StY words as droyb ‘giblets,’ kloytsen ‘to stir vigorously,’ podoyl ‘plain at the foot of a hill,’ stoyg ‘pile of hay,’ and tkhoyr ‘polecat’; compare Polish drób, kłócić, podół, stóg, and tchórz, respectively. The same rule explains several Yiddish toponyms: Tshkhoyv, Boyberik, Z(h)idetshoyv, Libetshoyv and Ribishoyv whose Polish equivalents are Czchów (in Lesser Poland), Bóbrka, Żydaczów, Lubaczów, and Hrubieszów (all in Red Ruthenia).117 The StY nouns ployt ‘fence,’ koysh ‘basket,’ and knoyt ‘wick’ likely belong to this category too. Their modern Polish equivalents are płot, kosz, and knot, respectively.118 Yet, several factors imply the existence of old Polish forms with [o:]. For the first noun, the Old Polish pło:t was reconstructed by the Polish linguist Baudouin de Courtenay 116 Contacts with German colonists in medieval Poland whose Silesian dialect was also characterized by a similar contrast were important as well. 117 The Polish origin of the first two Yiddish toponyms is stated in WG :; see also Stankiewicz :. Yet, both Weinreich (WG :) and Stankiewicz (:) considered the last three Yiddish toponyms to be of Ukrainian rather than Polish origin. For both scholars, their preference is related to the final stress in these toponyms. Weinreich noted () the final stress in the corresponding Ukrainian toponyms; () the fact that, contrary to the three toponyms in question, Yiddish names never end in -oyv when the corresponding polysyllabic Polish toponyms from the ethnically Polish territories end in -ów. The first of the above arguments appears doubtful: at least, the modern Ukrainian place names Жидачiв, Л˛бачiв, and Грубешiв, all have the penultimate stress. This position is unlikely to be influenced by Polish since the stress position in Ukrainian toponyms from the same general area ending in -iv is free; compare Чорткiв, Куликiв, Топорiв, Борщiв (all with the final stress), but Болехiв, Радехiв, Магерiв, Хоросткiв, Немирiв, Гримайлiв, Угнiв, Сасiв, and Зборiв (all with the penultimate stress), Яворiв, Тартакiв, Ходорiв, and Золочiв (all with the antepenultimate stress). The second argument is not as strong as Weinreich thought: note that for no place listed in the previous sentence (all from ethnically Ukrainian territories), do Yiddish names end in -oyv. The particularity of Żydaczów/Žydácˇ iv, Lubaczów/Ljubácˇ iv, and Hrubieszów/Hrubéšiv consists in their presence in originally ethnically Ukrainian territories and the fact that these towns—known since , , and , respectively—were already important in the Middle Ages (for example, as illustrated in Table ., numerous references to them appear in Polish and German documents from the fifteenth century). Information available to us does not really allow us to decide whether their Yiddish names in -oyv are derived from Polish or from Ukrainian. For their Polish origin, we need to conjecture that in this particular area Polish toponyms had final stress in the fifteenth century (it was during that period that Jews are mentioned for the first time in all three towns; see Schiper :). By itself, such an hypothesis is not particularly bold: see footnote below. For their Ukrainian origin, we need to introduce several independent hypotheses, at least, for the fifteenth century: () the final stress; () the presence of the long vowel [o:] in the stressed syllable. The second hypothesis (supplementary in comparison to the theory about the Polish origin) is particularly implausible. Indeed, (a) no evidence exists for the presence of long vowels in the vocalic system of Ukrainian after the tenth century (Shevelov :); (b) during the seventeenth century the vowel given in the final syllable of the toponyms in question underwent fronting from [u] to [y] followed by unrounding to [i] (Shevelov :–); and (c) no document exists to confirm the idea that in the fifteenth century this vowel still had the /o/-quality. In this context, it is clear that the theory about the Polish origin looks significantly simpler and therefore more plausible. 118 The derivation of EY ployt and koysh from these Polish etymons is suggested in Sainéan :, BN , and WG : (without any explanation for theYiddish diphthong oy).
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(Łoś :). For the second noun, we find such dialectal forms as kós and kojsz.119 Moreover, Ukrainian equivalents, плiт, кiш, and гнiт, respectively, all have [i], that is, the sound that normally corresponds to Polish ó (former [o:]) and not to Polish o.120 In a number of PolY toponyms, the diphthong oy [oj] is unrelated to the phonetic phenomenon considered in the previous paragraph. Among them are: Bloyn for Błonie, Voydislav for Wodzisław, Bizoyn for Bieżuń, and Vloyn for Wieluń.121 In all of them, the presence of the diphthong instead of the original /o/ may be explained by its position before a palatalized consonant. Here we are dealing with an “anticipatory softening” that can be expressed by the following pattern: /VCj/ > /VjC/ (where V = vowel, C = consonant). Exactly the same process explains PolY Braynsk for Brańsk.122 On the other hand, in Ratshoynz for Raciąż we are likely dealing with oy derived from Old Polish ą:, which Yiddish, in which no nasal vowels exist, assimilated as /o:n/.123 The task of distinguishing between the vowels that were the Old Polish [a:] and [a] is more difficult: no graphic element in modern Polish (which would be somewhat similar to ó discussed in the previous paragraph) allows us to do this. Sometimes we can rely on Polish dialectal dictionaries. For example, LitY brom / PolY brūm ‘gate’ is related to Polish brama. The archaic form broma found in certain Polish dialects124 reveals that we are dealing with the root vowel that was [a:] in Old Polish (and å in the sixteenth century). Generally speaking, the long vowels in Old Polish could either be inherited from Proto-(Western) Slavic or they may already appear within Old Polish in some specific phonetic contexts. To establish the list of these contexts, historical sources may be helpful. In the treatise by Jakub Parkoszowic mentioned earlier, the author formulates the following general rule: before a voiced, nasal, or liquid final consonant, stressed vowels are always long.125 This rule explains the phonetics of LitY sod / PolY sūd ‘orchard’ and LitY ston / PolY stūn ‘waist (of a garment)’ related to Polish sad and stan, respectively.126 From several sources we also know that “a” in the final -acz was long in Old Polish.127 This rule explains Bitshūtsh, the PolY name for an old
See the entry kosz in Karłowicz . Gebauer (:) indicates the existence in Old Czech of two variants for the word meaning ‘basket’: koš and kóš. In theory, the second one, pronounced [ko:š], could also be an etymon for StY koysh. As discussed in TS , for semantic and geographic reasons, the provenance of Yiddish knoyt directly from German (compare MHG knote, NHG Knoten ‘knot’) is less likely than its Slavic origin. 121 The Polish etymons with for Yiddish Vloyn and Bizoyn were not the standard Polish forms with /u/ but their Polish dialectal variants in which /u/ was lowered to /o/ before a nasal consonant (WG :). 122 “Anticipatory softening” is also responsible for the form *baynkes (‘ )ביינקשcupping glasses’ appearing in SDEH. However, it is not found in StY bankes. The same effect may also explain the derivation of StY pleytse from Old Czech plecě as [pletsje] > [plejtse]. Alternatively, [ej] could appear in Poland because of the palatalized character of /l/ found in the Polish cognate word plec ‘shoulder.’ (Its plural form, plecy, is suggested as the etymon for the Yiddish word in both BN and WG :.) In other words, we may be dealing with the pattern [je] > [ej] discussed in section .. for Yiddish words having Old Czech etymons with ie or ě. Finally, one cannot rule out the third possibility: that of the lengthening /e/ > /e:/ in open syllables internal to Yiddish, as suggested in WG :. 123 Stankiewicz (:) speaks about “anticipatory softening” not only for Vloyn and Braynsk but also, for unclear reasons, for Ratshoynz too. Weinreich (WG :) explains the presence of oy in a number of other PolY toponyms—such as Koyl for Koło, Loyvitsh for Łowicz, and Moygil for Mogilany—as a result of lengthening /o/ > /o:/ in open syllables, a phonetic process internal to Yiddish. (The same explanation is suggested by him for Bloyne and Voydislav.) However, as discussed in section .., we have no corroboration of the idea that the lengthening in open syllables was operative within Yiddish. The form Stoypnits for Stopnica, also noted by Weinreich (WG :), remains unexplained. 124 125 See the entry brama in Karłowicz . Compare Stieber :–. 126 The form saad ‘orchard’ appears in certain old Polish documents (Łoś :). The same rule may also explain a number of PolY dialectal forms with /u:/ listed in WG : (along with Yiddish brom, sod, and ston mentioned earlier) such as būrsht ‘beet soup,’ dzhūd ‘old beggar,’ shchūv ‘sorrel,’ stūv ‘pond,’ yūn ‘St. John,’ and yūsh ‘ide (fish)’; compare Polish barszcz, dziad, szczaw, staw, Jan, and jaź, respectively. 127 Compare Łoś :, Stieber :, Stankiewicz :. 119 120
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town in Red Ruthenia called Buczacz in Polish and Бучач in Ukrainian.128 Similarly, the length of “a” in the Old Polish final element -al explains Kvūl and Skūl, the PolY names for the towns called Kowal and Sokal in Polish (Stankiewicz :). Note that these two localities were situated at the two opposite ends of the Polish Kingdom: the former in the northwest (Kuyavia) and the latter in southeast (Red Ruthenia). A significant number of other PolY toponyms in which /u:/ (sometimes with a secondary shortening to /u/) corresponds to modern Polish /a/ do not correspond to any rule known to us from the linguistic and historical literature. Yet, one may observe that a large series of them have a similar structure: the stressed vowel in question is given before two consonants of which the first is a sibilant. Among the examples are: Krūshnik, Kuzmark, Kuzmir, Lūsk, Pyūsk, Prūshke, and Prūshnits, whose Polish equivalents are Kraśnik, Kazimierz Dolny, Kazimierz, Łask, Piaski, Praszka, and Przasnysz, respectively.129 A similar phonetic context characterizes PolY tūtshke ‘wheelbarrow’ (Polish taczka).130 Another context in which we find the same effect corresponds to a position before /r/ followed by a consonant: compare PolY Dvūrt, Kūrtshev, Tūrne, and Vurke to the Polish names of the same towns: Warta, Karczew, Tarnów, and Warka.131 Stankiewicz (:) suggested that here we are dealing with a lengthening before /r/ internal to Yiddish. Alternatively, we may be dealing with a (non-identified) rule that characterized Old Polish. A close context, with the stressed vowel given before another liquid, /l/, followed by a consonant, is valid for LitY polke / Ukr pulke ‘drumstick of a fowl.’ Exactly the same meaning is known for Polish pałka.132 Most likely, Old Polish *pa:lka was the etymon for the Yiddish word.133 The Old Polish origin is without doubt for the verb meaning ‘to shave’ pronounced goln in LitY (and StY) and gūln in PolY (BN ). Indeed, its initial /g/ may be due neither to Czech nor to Ukrainian or Belarusian, all of which have /h/ and not /g/. We do not know the quantity of the root vowel in the Old Polish ancestor of modern Polish golić ‘to shave.’ If this vowel was short in the (Old) Polish etymon, then the lengthening /o/ > /o:/ was internal to EY. Independently of the length of the Polish vowel, we need to postulate that the diphthongization of EY /o:/ > /oj/ (found in words already discussed in this section) was no longer operative at the time when this Old Polish word was borrowed into EY.134 The same global explanation works for Krūshnevits, the PolY name for the town of Krośniewice (western Poland). In this toponym, /o:/ was, most likely, already present in the Polish etymon.135 This example is of particular interest because it implies the final stress in the Old Polish name for this town. The Ukrainian toponym is unlikely to be the source for Yiddish: it has a penultimate stress (as modern Polish) and we know of no particular lengthening rule for Ukrainian in this context. In the RESPONSA by Solomon Luria this town appears as ( ביצאץRubashov :). 129 Some of these Yiddish toponyms may be of German rather than Polish origin (see, for example, the discussion of Prūshnits in sections .. and ..). 130 One corroboration for the suggested general rule is found in the treatise by Parkoszowic: newaasta (with [a:] expressed via “aa”) ‘woman’ (Stieber :); compare modern niewiasta. This noun and all toponyms listed in the previous sentence appear in Stankiewicz : and/or WG : as examples of PolY /u:/ or /u/ for Polish /a/. 131 In this list, at least Tūrne may be of German rather than Polish origin (see section ..). 132 See the corresponding entry in Karłowicz . The main meaning of this Polish word is ‘stick.’ 133 No such word as **pálka or **palka is attested in Old Czech. 134 One can also imagine an alternative scenario. The form borrowed from Old Polish had a short [o] and the lengthening to [o:] had already taken place in PolY when the diphthongization from [o:] to [oj] was no longer operative. This scenario sounds less plausible because we know of no other examples of an internal Yiddish lengthening of this kind. 135 Note that this vowel precedes a cluster composed of a sibilant followed by another consonant, that is, we have the same context in which—as discussed in the previous paragraph—Old Polish vowels seem to have been long. The development of the PolY form with /u/ from former /o:/ can also be found in Drubitsh, the PolY and UkrY name for the town of Drohobycz in Red Ruthenia. As discussed in section .. (see Table .), the Yiddish name is based on the German or the Ukrainian names for this town. Here /o:/ was obtained from the original cluster -oho- in which the intervocalic /h/ was lost. 128
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In contrast to the relatively large series of PolY examples derived from Old Polish etymons with /o:/ or /a:/, the number of EY words revealing traces of Old Polish /e:/ is quite small. In section .., we discussed StY words (all of Old Czech origin) in which the diphthong ey corresponds to Proto-Slavic *’e or *ě. These words have ey in LitY and UkrY and ay in PolY. In section .., a few other examples from a similar category were discussed: they are unknown in PolY and derived from East Slavic idioms. One purely PolY example is Baylev, the name for Polish town of Bielawa. In this particular case, any German influence on Yiddish is unlikely: (i) the final /v/ is never found in German toponyms from Poland, (ii) no specific German name is known for this town situated in Mazovia where the German presence was marginal.136Another example may be Balsk, the PolY name for the town of Bielsko (Kuyavia). This name is likely derived from former *Baylsk,137 with the change from ay to a before a cluster consisting of three consonants. Actually, in both these examples we can deal not with traces of a hypothetical /e:/, but with the development of the diphthong /ej/ instead of the original /e/ because of the “anticipatory softening,” that is, due to the position before a palatalized consonant.
.. Vernacular language of Polish Jews As noted in section .., thanks to rabbinical sources we know that a regularly functioning religious court already existed in Kraków during the first half of the eleventh century, while from the end of the twelfth century onward references to Jews from that city are regularly made in historical documents. At that early period, Polish was the only language used by the local Christian population.138 For this rather isolated and most likely not populous139 community, it was totally natural to use exclusively in their everyday life the language spoken by the Catholic majority. Considering geographic criteria, local Jews could have come from the west (WEST CANAANITES), the east (EAST CANAANITES), and/or, less likely, the south (Jews from Byzantium). As a result, most likely these immigrants were Slavic-speaking already. This linguistic feature would facilitate the adoption of Polish as their vernacular idiom, abandoning their native Old Czech140 and/or East Slavic languages. Taking into account various data at our disposal, this theoretical scenario looks like the only plausible one. Yet, we have no formal confirmation of the existence of the Polish-speaking medieval Jewish community in Kraków or any other locality in Poland. The earliest documented trace of the Polish language as used by Jews corresponds to a signature from the mid-sixteenth century, while the oldest examples of Polish texts written in the Jewish communities date from the eighteenth century only.141 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an influx of German-speaking Christian migrants gradually made the Silesian dialect of German the principal spoken language in Kraków. Similar linguistic processes took place in numerous other large towns of Lesser and Greater Poland.142 They certainly affected local Jewish communities too. In addition to these factors, external to Jewish communities, beginning with the fourteenth century major linguistic changes also happened as a result of internal phenomena, namely an influx of Ashkenazic immigrants who See section ... This idea appears in Stankiewicz : (its criticism in WG .– uses arguments that do not appear cogent). 138 There is no data about any influx of Germans in Kraków before the thirteenth century (see Appendix B). 139 Note the total lack of references to Jews in Kraków (or any other Polish town) in Christian sources of that period. 140 In his unpublished lecture of , Roman Jakobson asserted that “Czech Jews in Poland for a longer time preserved their Judeo-Czech” (Dittmann :). In this context, it is perhaps not a mere coincidence that the word ‘king’ appears as קרלon coins made by Jewish minters from the courts of the Polish kings Mieszko III and Leszek the White at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century (Garkavi :). This spelling is much better correlated with (Old) Czech král than with Polish król that would normally give *קרול. 141 These documented traces correspond to Kraków and Poznań (see details in Bałaban :). 142 See Appendix B. 136 137
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spoke a German-based language, the ancestor of modern EY. As a result of the combination of these factors, Jews in western Poland gradually abandoned Polish and shifted to Yiddish. The scarcity of historical documents does not allow us to observe any detail of this process. We do not know during what century this shift took place. The sixteenth century—for which we know of numerous texts of various genres written in Poland including various communal records—can be defined as terminus ante quem for the process in question.143 Yiddish documents compiled in Poland have been known from the beginning of the previous century144 and traces of borrowing from Polish into Yiddish—as shown in the previous section—are also seen in the fifteenth century or even earlier. We do not know whether the shift took place directly from Polish to Yiddish or, perhaps, there was a transitional stage during which the Silesian dialect of German became the vernacular language of (some) Jews.145 Moreover, several more sophisticated theoretical scenarios could also be applicable such as the existence of periods, towns, and groups of Jews who were totally bilingual (Polish-Yiddish, or German-Yiddish); or different languages being vernacular during the same period in various towns of western Poland or for different members of the same large communities. After the incorporation of Red Ruthenia into the Polish kingdom in the mid-fourteenth century, Poland started to include a territory where certain EAST CANAANITE communities lived. As a result of significant growth of the largest towns of that region, and especially its capital city, Lwów, the ethnic and linguistic composition of the Gentile urban population changed dramatically. During the first half of the fifteenth century, the main languages used by Christians were already German and Polish and no longer any East Slavic language, the ancestor of modern Ukrainian. Descendants of EAST CANAANITES could not remain aloof from these linguistic changes. Moreover, Yiddish-speaking Jews came to this area from the west, formed their own communities and/or merged with local Jews. Because of these factors, the linguistic past of Jews in Red Ruthenia is at least as obscure as that of their coreligionists in western Poland. We have no piece of information that could allow us to determine the period when local Jews abandoned their original East Slavic idiom. We do not know the number of linguistic shifts they underwent. Before Yiddish became the only everyday language in that part of the Polish Kingdom, (some) local Jews could have been speakers of Polish and/or colonial German. Scenarios similar to those described in the above paragraphs could be applicable to other parts of Poland. From the linguistic point of view, they go from the simplest (the first Jewish communities established in a town were already Yiddish-speaking) to those, much more complicated, with vernacular languages being spoken in the same community changing over time and the existence of transitional periods during which the community in question was not linguistically homogenous. In the previous section, numerous traces of borrowings from (Old) Polish to EY have been discussed. Despite their interest for the general history of the development of Yiddish in Polish lands, they shed no light on the controversial question of the existence of Polish elements in Yiddish that could enter into this idiom when Polish-speaking Jews were shifting from Old Polish to Yiddish. Note that for Poland, unlike the areas populated in the Middle Ages by WEST and EAST CANAANITES, we have no clear examples of specifically Jewish given names created on the basis of the local Slavic language. There could be several reasons for this phenomenon. Firstly, in Poland, the Jewish See details in Dubnov :–. See also Altbauer :–. See details in Schiper b:–. This author (b:) states that Yiddish has become the vernacular language (a) since the second half of the thirteenth century in western and central Poland, (b) since the end of the sixteenth century in the southern and eastern parts of the country. However, he gives no argument to support his opinion. Similarly, no corroboration was provided by Bałaban (:) for his claim about Yiddish being used by Polish Jews in their everyday life from at least the mid-fourteenth century. On the other hand, arguments suggested by Centnerszwerowa () to support her idea about Polish being the vernacular language in Poland until the beginning of the seventeenth century are untenable (see their discussion in section ..). 145 See sections . and .. on the influence of that dialect on EY. 143 144
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population of that time was not large enough. Secondly, the continuous influx of new immigrants from the West prevented stabilization of local communities, while the latter process is favorable to the creation of new names. Traces of words that could be taken in EY from Polish-speaking Jews rather than from Polish Christians can be searched in the basic lexicon. Here, of particular interest, are such family terms as tate ‘father, dad’ and mame ‘mother, mum.’ In addition to EY, both of them are known as variants in EGY146 and CzY. Among German dialects, it is only in Swabian that we find phonetic forms cognate to both of them.147 However, for geographic reasons, any Swabian influence on EY is implausible. Moreover, we find neither tate nor mame in WY. As a result, the Slavic origin of these EY words is beyond doubt. Yet, the exact languages of provenance are uncertain; compare Czech táta, Polish tata, and East Slavic mama /tata/, all meaning ‘dad,’ and Czech mama, Polish mama, and East Slavic мама /mama/, all meaning ‘mother.’ In PolY, the East Slavic origin of tate and mame is unlikely. The most plausible sources are local, Polish, words. However, we can not exclude the original Czech origin either: note the presence of mame in CzY148 and the fact that EGY has tāte, that is, exactly the same long vowel as Czech táta.149 The semantics of certain EY verbs may also be interpreted as traces of the Polish-speaking Jewish communities. Indeed, a number of EY verbs all of whose morphological elements belong to the German component actually represent calques from the Polish verbs having the same meaning. A number of early examples, with the prefix iber- appearing as a calque of Polish prze- are found in ZuR.150 Evidently, these data are not decisive for the dilemma under consideration. The existence of these calques merely shows that before the seventeenth century some Polish Jews were fluent in both Polish and Yiddish. Formally speaking nothing suggests that Polish was their native idiom and Yiddish was only their second language.151 In theory, certain cases of the grammatical influence of Polish on EY could appear during the shift of communities in the Polish Kingdom from Polish to EY.152 Geller provides convincing arguments concerning the influence of Slavic languages in general and Polish in particular on the grammar of EY.153 By these examples, she claims to reveal the Slavic substratum of EY. To support her position, one needs to show that the grammatical features in question are many centuries old in EY. Yet, nothing indicates that their age is indeed old: we do not find these features in early Ashkenazic sources. As a result, it is more accurate to consider them to be innovations resulting from the influence of Slavic languages during the last centuries.154 146
Along with western ete and meme, respectively, both from the German component. See the discussion of features {L} and {L} in section .. 148 For CzY,we know three words for ‘dad’: tet, tete, and tate. The first appears in a Jewish prayer book printed in Prague in (Schnitzler :). The second is given in BA , with no source indicated (in the same source, tete is also said to be the main form in PolY; this information does not appear in other sources dealing with PolY). As a result, we do not know the exact word used by Jews in the Czech lands before the eighteenth century. The CzY form tate has been known from the end of the nineteenth century. 149 If the EY word for ‘dad’ were directly derived from (Old) Czech táta, we would expect to have StY **tote; compare StY bobe, from Old Czech bába, discussed in section ... Yet, in the Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian territories the root vowel could remain /a/ because of the influence of the corresponding local Slavic forms. Aslanov (:–) notes that in EY words for the four closest ancestors (two parents and two grandparents) are all of Slavic origin in contrast to words meaning direct descendants that are of German origin. The Slavic words in question are more intimate: they are used when adults speak to small children. For this reason, they belong to a substratum (rather than to adstratum) of EY. 150 See Neuberg :–. The general notion of calques and numerous modern StY examples appear in Landau :–; see also WG :, Geller :–. 151 Morever, a survey of bilingual Yiddish-English communities in the US shows that calques are more commonly made from the language of the Christian majority to the first language (Yiddish) than in the opposite direction (Rayfield :). 152 153 See Sainéan :. See Geller :, –, ; ; :–. 154 Geller (:–) provides reliable examples of calques from Polish appearing already in a medical manual of (SDEH). However, their value for the history of Yiddish is questionable. In principle, they can reveal individual 147
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Slavic elements
TABLE . Slavisms found outside of EY StY
Meaning
Etymon
Modern non-EY forms
nebekh
poor thing!
Old Czech neboh ‘unfortunate fellow’
CzY and WphY nebikh, AlsY and SwY nevikh/nebikh (BA ), DuY nebbish
khotsh(e)
at least, although
Polish chocia ‘though’
AlsY (Pfrimmer :), FrY (Copeland and Süsskind :), CzY,155 and DuY khotshe, EGY khotshe(k)
khapn
to catch, to snatch
Polish chapać ‘to snatch,’ Old Czech chapatti156
AlsY (Zivy :) and SwY khape, CzY (Kulke :), DuY and WphY khapen, EGY (uf)khapen
koyletsh
loaf of white bread
Old Czech kolácˇ ‘cake’ or Polish kołacz
AlsY (Weill :) kauletsh, SwY kouletsh
lokshn
noodle
Ukrainian локшинa ‘noodle’ (see section ..)
WphY (Weinberg :) and EGY lokshen
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SLAVISMS OUTSIDE OF EY
Contrary to EY, no ambiguity exists concerning the way some isolated Slavic elements, all lexical, penetrated WY. They were necessarily due to contacts of western Ashkenazic Jews with their coreligionists from Slavic countries. Table . lists the most commonly used among these words. References to certain words from the list in Table . appear in early Ashkenazic sources. For example, forms cognate with StY nebekh are found in PuV, Mel, ShB (spelled נעבוךin all three sources), MOld ()ֵניװאך, and GH (נעביךa),157 while those related to StY khotshe are present in PB and GH (חאטשיa).158
features of the author of this manual and not tendencies general for Polish Jewry of his time. Moreover, expressions found by Geller are not typical of modern EY. Only the expression *dos iz zer nit gut ‘this is really not good’ appearing in SDEH is close to StY dos iz zeyer nisht gut (though it uses nit instead of nisht). Geller also notes the neuter gender of the word milkh ‘milk’ as in Polish mleko. However, in modern EY, the gender is feminine, as in German Milch. Geller asserts that these examples “support the considerable command of the country language by Polish Jews” and “even more important, the slavocentric hypothesis on the origins of Eastern-Yiddish, viewing it as a language re-lexified from Judeo-Slavic.” Such extrapolations are speculative. The text in question just shows that the author of the manual was fluent in Polish and that he considered that about fifty Slavisms he introduced in his text (often, botanical or zoological terms) were understandable to his coreligionists living in Poland. On the other hand, nothing indicates the substratal character of Slavic syntax. For example, a number of persons who came from Russia to France at the end of the twentieth century (personally known to the author of this book) started to use French calques in their native Russian speech after no more than ten years of sojourn in their new country. 155 Tirsch (:) transcribes it “chodsche” in Latin characters and חדשיin Hebrew characters. 156 The Old Czech origin is less likely than the Polish one because of the long vowel in the Czech form. An additional hypothesis by U. Weinreich (:–) concerning the influence of the German verb happen ‘to bite, to catch (figuratively)’ sounds unnecessary. 157 See WG :–, :, TG , Timm :. 158 On the etymology of this word and its early references see Landau :, WG :, Wexler :, and Kerler :.
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Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts and Slavic elements
Globally speaking, Slavisms are rare outside of EY. This statement is valid even for CzY in which, in addition to family terms (deyde ‘grandfather,’ bābe ‘grandmother,’ tate ‘dad,’ and mame ‘mum’) only a few lexical elements are of Slavic origin. For example, in a large collection of private letters written in Prague in (PB), we find less that ten words with Slavic roots. Some of them were clearly brought by Jews from Poland:159 *mentlik (‘ )מענטליגsmall mantle’ < Polish mętlik; *pomnigl ()פאמניגל, a diminutive form of *pomnig ‘keepsake,’ ‘souvenir’ < Polish pomnik, *serdekl ()סערדקיל, a diminutive form of *serdak ‘kaftan’ < Polish serdak. Only a few Slavisms are known in EGY. In addition to family terms cited in sections .. and .. (tate ‘dad,’ mame ‘mum,’ zayde/zeyde ‘grandfather,’ bōbe ‘grandmother’), and a few words shown in Table ., one can cite only taterke ‘buckwheat’ (unknown in StY).160 In Yiddish varieties from Western Europe, words with Slavic roots are almost non-existent. In this context, a curious example is represented by the text of Simḥ at ha-nefesh, an ethical work by Elḥ anan Henle Kirchhan (Frankfurt-am-Main, ). In it, we find a large series of Slavisms including not only *nebekh (נעבך, )נעביך, *khapen ()חאפין, *lokshen ()לאקשן, *taterke ()טאטרקי, found in other non-EY sources as well, but also *indek (‘ )ינדקturkey cock,’ *ugerges (‘ )אוגרגיסcucumbers,’ *salat (‘ )סלאטsalad,’ and *kopretsen (‘ )קאפרצןcarpets’; compare StY indik, ugerkes, salat, and kobretsn, respectively.161 One may observe that—apart from kinship terms substratal to CzY and EGY—the largest group of Slavisms known outside of EY belong to the same semantic field: food. Apparently, migrations of EY speakers to the West were particularly important for the development of modern DuY. Only this factor can explain the fact that in DuY (Amsterdam) not only individual Slavisms are found but also morphological patterns typical of EY using such diminutive suffixes of Slavic origin as -nik, -tshik, -ke, and -enyu (Beem :).
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BASIC ASHKENAZIC VOCALIC SHIFTS AND SLAVIC ELEMENTS
Table . in section .. lists the main vocalic shifts in the German component that are valid for numerous Yiddish varieties. Some of them are also relevant for Slavic elements that were part of the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews at the moment of the corresponding phonetic changes. Vowels lengthened in open syllables (shift #) are known in a number of EY words of (Old) Czech or Polish origin, with a few also known in CzY. Three global approaches may be suggested to explain these reflexes. Firstly, one can imagine that when EY had already become an idiom having system-level differences with respect to any existing German dialect, the process of lengthening vowels in open syllables (inherited from German dialects underlying it) continued to be operative for a certain period of time. As a result, it influenced the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Western Slavic items borrowed from local Slavs during the period in question. Secondly, certain Slavic lexical elements can belong to the German component of Yiddish. They were borrowed by Yiddish not directly from Slavs but through the intermediary of Christians living in these countries and speaking Bohemian or Silesian dialects of German. It was in these dialects that vowels became long in open syllables and the resulting ready-made forms entered Yiddish. Thirdly, certain words were borrowed Their list is given in Landau and Wachstein :XLI where their Polish origin is emphasized. This word is derived from Polish tatarka ‘Tartarian buckwheat.’ It is not found in StY, which uses another Slavism, retshke (from Ukrainian гречка [hrecˇ ka]), instead. Friedrich (:) also mentions yatke ‘butcher’s shop’ saying that this word is used by Jews in Poland. As a result, this reference is irrelevant for EGY. (This word together with ufkhapen and khotshe(k) shown in Table . appear in the list of Slavisms extracted by Weinreich (:–) from Friedrich .) 161 This list was sent to me by Simon Neuberg (personal commucation). Note that indik is also known in Silesian German (SchlesWB). 159 160
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Slavic elements
from Old Czech or Polish with long vowels already appearing in the source languages. For the analysis of the development of Yiddish, for vowels in words from the first group, it is appropriate to use the subscript and call them A, E, I, O, and U. For stressed vowels in words from the second and the third groups, it is more appropriate to use the subsript : when these words entered Yiddish, they were already long. For example, as shown in section .., the intermediary of German is beyond question for PolY Poyzn ‘Poznań,’ Rayshi ‘Rzeszów,’ and Graydi(n)k ‘Gródek Jagielloński’; these place names appear in medieval German sources from Poland as Posenaw, Resche, and Grödik, respectively. Since the forms borrowed by Jews from Germans likely already had long vowels, it is logical to call this vowel O (for the first example) and E (for the latter two examples). For a number of words the exact assignment to one of the above three categories (and, as a result, to proto-vowels with the subscript or ) is uncertain. Among them: • A or A: StY kores ‘crucian carp’ (MHG karaʒ /karas, Polish karaś); toter ‘Tartar’ (Polish tatar); kotsher ‘drake’ (Czech kacˇ er, Polish kaczor); PolY toponyms Rūdem ‘Radom’ and Kūlish ‘Kalisz’;162 • E or E: PolY tandayt ‘old clothes’ (from Polish tandeta, BN )163 and the male name StY Beynesh / PolY Baynish (Old Czech Beneš/Beniš, a hypocorism of Benedikt). Note that Benusch was also used in medieval Silesia by Germans who borrowed it from Slavs. Numerous Jewish bearers of its variants spelled Benesch/Beneš, Benisch, or Benusch/Benuš are known already during the fourteenth century in the Czech lands and Silesia. Forms from seventeenthcentury Prague spelled with yod in the second position rather than ayin—such as בינושand —בינשimply that its root vowel was pronounced either /ej/ or /e:/; • I or I: StY bideven, PolY bīdivin ‘to be miserable’ (compare Polish biedować, Ukrainian бiдувати Ukrainian); StY rike, PolY rīki ‘river’ (compare Polish rzeka, Ukrainian рiка);164 and StY abi, PolY abī ‘but, any’ (compare Ukrainian аби, Belarusian абы, Polish aby);165 • O or O: hoyl ‘bare, hollow’; koylen ‘to slaughter’; koyletsh ‘twisted loaf of white bread eaten on the Sabbath or (in some areas) on holidays’; koymen ‘chimney’ (see section ..).166 The actual process of lengthening in open syllables during the period immediately following the inception of Yiddish cannot be taken for granted: in a series of words borrowed into Yiddish from Western Slavic languages the stressed vowel in the first syllable (open in the Slavic etymon) remained short. Among the examples are: StY kapete ‘long coat,’ maline ‘raspberry,’ and female 162 These toponyms could, in principle, be due to the medieval Silesian German forms *Ra:dem and *Ka:lish. Moreover, some aforementioned common nouns could also enter Yiddish from German and not directly from Slavic. For example, note that the form tater for ‘Tartar’ is known in MHG and Silesian. 163 The proto-EY form is *tandeyt. StY/LitY tandet may be influenced by тандэт, the Belarusian cognate of this word. 164 The presence of the same words meaning ‘to be miserable’ and ‘river’ in LitY makes the Ukrainian etymons less attractive than the Polish ones (this assertion disagrees with the Ukrainian etymon suggested in BN for ‘river’). The /i:/ in these two words could appear because of the palatalization of the previous consonant in the Polish etymons. A similar development may explain /i/ in the LitY toponym Bilsk ‘Bielsk,’ in Podlasie, that is, an area that before was within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. (On a similar phenomenon in Silesian German, see footnote in section ...) 165 The lengthening of the final (stressed) consonant in this word may be secondary (rather than present in ProtoEY) and related to a particular role that element plays in a sentence. Also it is to a secondary lengthening (this time, before /x/ or /r/) that /i:/ seems to be due in several other PolY examples (that are mentioned in BN together with all other PolY forms—all known in Galicia—cited in this paragraph): vīkher ‘whirlwind’ (also known in StY) (from Polish wicher and/or Ukrainian вихор) and pidvīri ‘yard’ < Ukrainian пiдвiр’я. 166 StY soybl ‘sable’ may be of blended Slavic-German origin. Its initial vowel reveals a Slavic influence; compare Polish soból, Ukrainian соболь. Yet, its diphthong may be due to the vowel becoming long in the German cognate form (compare NHG Zobel); in this case its root vowel corresponds to O. However, if it appears to be of purely Slavic origin, this vowel is more likely to become long inside the Jewish community (O).
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Basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts and Slavic elements
name Zlate (A); lopete ‘shade,’ podeshve ‘sole,’ and kobrets ‘carpet’ (O); nebekh ‘poor thing!’ and vetshere ‘supper’ (E). In this list, of particular interest are items of Old Czech origin: Zlate and nebekh, substratal for EY.167 In a number of EY words of Slavic origin the raising [a:] > [ɔ:] > [o:] took place. Yet, as already pointed out, for some of these words it is difficult to decide whether their stressed vowels should be assigned to A or A. The first possibility is valid if the long vowel [a:] was already present in forms borrowed into EY. The second possibility applies if the lengthening [a] > [a:] was internal to EY. Depending on the scenario, the raising in question corresponds to shifts # (followed by #) or #, respectively. In other cases we can be sure that the elements in question were borrowed by Yiddish already with long vowels, and, as a result, we are dealing with A. Here two groups can be distinguished. The first encompasses elements of Old Czech origin: StY female given name Bobe, Khvoles, Krose, Rode, and Slove as well as the common nouns bobe ‘grandmother, midwife’ and zodik ‘(butchery) hindquarters.’ For etymons of all these items, the Czech stressed vowel is á [a:]. Inside of Yiddish, they underwent shifts # ([a:] > [ɔ:]) and # ([ɔ:] > [o:]). The second group includes elements whose Old Polish etymons had [a:] such as StY brom ‘gate,’ polke ‘drumstick of a fowl,’ sod ‘orchard,’ ston ‘waist,’ and a dozen toponyms.168 For these words, we cannot be sure about the exact reflex of their stressed vowel at the moment of their borrowing by Yiddish. From the history of Polish vocalism, we know that during the fifteenth century [a:] gave rise to [ɔ]. However, as noted in WG :, such a direct change is impossible: between the two sounds there certainly was an intermediate stage of [ɔ:]. As a result, in principle, EY could borrow the words in question with ready-made [ɔ:] during the fifteenth century. According to this scenario, during Yiddish history these words underwent shift # but not #. On the other hand, if the borrowing from Old Polish took place earlier, that is, when these words still had [a:] for Poles, then the shift [a:] > [ɔ:] (shift #) inside of EY would be parallel with the similar process in Polish. No early examples of diphthongal realizations of E, or O, (shift #) found in Yiddish words or names of Slavic origin appear in available sources.169 For several reasons, the diphthongs in a few relevant lexical elements from the Slavic component of Yiddish—such as, for example, words cognate with StY zeyde ‘grandfather,’ pleytse ‘shoulder,’ koymen ‘chimney,’ and hoyl ‘bare’—are not seen in early Yiddish sources from Eastern Europe. Firstly, Yiddish authors of that time avoid mentioning Slavic words in their texts. Secondly, for a few available references, their exact pronunciation is made obscure by the graphic conventions used by Jewish scribes or printers. We know of a few Slavic examples of the diphthongization of [i:] and [u:] (similar to shift #a that affected MHG î and û). Two of them correspond to toponyms from Eastern Europe; compare PolY Vāslits ‘Wiślica’ and Pāzer ‘Pyzdry’ (both formerly with /aj/), Tsouzmer ‘Sandomierz’ and Loutsk ‘Łuck’ (Polish spelling, Ukrainian Луцьк). However, as discussed in section .., actually these toponyms had already been taken by Jews with ready-made diphthongs not from Slavs but from German colonists. If StY gdoyl ‘sort of pear’ were directly derived from Polish gdula, it would be a unique example of a Yiddish Slavism in which a diphthongization had taken place, a situation rather
See sections .. (Zlata/Zlate) and .. (nebekh). The discussion of all other words appears in section ... See section .., with the list of these toponyms and a brief exposal of the history of Polish stressed vocalism (Table .). 169 Various sources from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth compiled during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mention only monophthongal forms of the male name cognate with StY Beynesh. This fact should not be taken as evidence for the absence of the diphthongization in this Jewish name during the period in question. The forms found in Christian documents—Belarusian Беняш and Polish Bieniasz—actually correspond to names used by local Slavs. These names are cognate with Czech Beneš from which the Yiddish name is derived. They do not reflect the exact Yiddish pronunciation. 167 168
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Slavic elements
strange and therefore implausible. Moreover, we have no corroboration of the presence of a long sound [u:] in this word in Old Polish. More likely, the Yiddish word is either based on the cognate Czech form (Old Czech kdúle that turned into kdoule during the fourteenth century) or on some unattested form, already with a diphthong, used by German colonists in Poland or BohemiaMoravia.
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SYNTHESIS: STATUS OF SLAVIC ELEMENTS IN YIDDISH
As discussed in this chapter, before the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe had become Yiddish-speaking, there were two separate regions where during a period several centuries long local Jews spoke in their everyday life languages of their Slavic Gentile neighbors. The first region corresponds to Bohemia and Moravia where members of Jewish communities spoke Old Czech before the fourteenth century. Migrants from this region played an important role in the Jewish settlement of a large part of Central Europe: several provinces in Eastern Germany (including Brandenburg and the Elbe-Saale area), Silesia, and western Poland. Jews from that area, WEST CANAAN, had close links with their coreligionists from Austria and the area of Regensburg, in Bavaria. The second region, EAST CANAAN, is composed of territories that until the thirteenth century belonged to Rus. In the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries they were parts of two political entities: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish Kingdom (and, more precisely, its southeastern province of Red Ruthenia). In this region, Jews spoke the East Slavic language that was the ancestor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian. In the area intermediate between those populated by WEST and EAST CANAANITES covering ethnically Polish territories, little doubt remains about the existence of medieval Polish-speaking Jewish communities. Gradully, all these Slavic-speaking communities either disappeared, or shifted to other vernacular languages. During the fourteenth century this process affected the Czech lands where local Jewish communities started to use a German-based language, the ancestor of modern EY. The same shift took place in the Polish Kingdom during a period that is difficult to identify. In both areas, these linguistic changes were influenced by the same processes, namely, the Germanizing of the Christian urban population and the influx of western Jewish immigrants whose first language was Germanbased. In the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania that were parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and where the presence of German Christians was rather marginal, (East) Slavicspeaking Jewish groups subsisted for a longer period. Yet, after the seventeenth century, no Jews who would be native speakers of Slavic languages were left in Eastern Europe either. All Jews would use Yiddish dialects in their everyday life. This shift can be explained only by western migrations, from Poland and Central Europe. The “Slavic” period of the history of local communities left, nevertheless, a number of traces in the Yiddish dialects of Slavic countries. The most easily discernable heritage concerns the corpus of given names. A number of names of Old Czech origin remained in use not only in the Czech lands but, due to migrations eastward, in the whole area in question. A few names of Polish origin spread within in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Several Slavic names of medieval origin continued to be borne in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Several factors allow us to be sure that these names, as well as those of Old Czech origin, were not borrowed by Yiddish-speaking Jews from Slavic Christians but were inherited from EAST/WEST CANAANITES. On the one hand, these names are known as having been used by Jews who were not Yiddish- but Slavic-speaking. On the other hand, the corpus of names of these Slavic-speaking Jews was not identical to that of their Gentile neighbors: (i) only a small subset of non-Jewish names was borrowed by Jews, and (ii) some Slavic names were created by Jews.
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Synthesis: status of Slavic elements in Yiddish
The situation is much more complicated in the domain of the lexicon: here, the same sources, Czech, Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian compose several layers. The oldest (that is also the smallest one) is related to Old Czech. It mainly consists of several basic family terms and a series of words related to food, some of which have a direct religious connotation. For both CzY and EY these words of Old Czech origin are substratal. Their presence in Yiddish is due not to the idiom spoken by Christians in the Czech lands but to the vernacular language of Jews from that territory (WEST CANAANITES) who shifted from Old Czech to the German-based idiom that was the immediate ancestor of EY. During the following centuries the Czech language—from the Middle Ages until the end of the eighteenth century marginal for the Christian population of major towns of Bohemia and Moravia in comparison to German—exerted no influence on CzY. Because of the absence of the Slavic environment and migrations to the Czech lands of Jews from other German-speaking areas, the volume of the Old Czech substratum in CzY decreased dramatically. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Slavisms found in sources from Prague were already mainly of Polish rather than Old Czech origin and were due to contacts of local Jews with their coreligionists from the Polish Kingdom. In Silesia, Greater Poland, and the western part of Lesser Poland, the earliest Jewish communities appeared during the time when in Bohemia and Moravia Old Czech was still the vernacular language of local Jews. Because of the contribution of these Czech-speaking Jews to the development of communities in western Polish territories, Jews in Poland could inherit certain Old Czech linguistic elements even at that time. Yet, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which Old Czech continued to be used as the first spoken language in Poland. Much more likely, Polish Jews shifted to Old Polish, another West Slavic language, the one used by the Christian majority. During the following centuries, Jewish communities in these territories ceased to be Slavic-speaking. This was due to both the Germanizing of the Gentile population (almost total in Silesia and significant in major localities of Lesser Poland and Greater Poland) and the continued influx of Jews from the Czech lands, this time already speaking no longer Old Czech but a German-based idiom based on the Bohemian dialect of German. In the Polish Kingdom the de-Germanizing process took place much earlier than in Bohemia and Moravia. Numerous towns in Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, and Kuyavia were already completely Polonized by , while in Poznań and Kraków the Polish language regained its prestige. In Mazovia, the presence of German has never been substantial. During the following centuries, Polish continued to influence Jewish communities. Because of this “non-linear” linguistic past it is often difficult to assign Polonisms present in EY to one particular period. Certain lexical elements were clearly borrowed by EY from Old Polish before the sixteenth century. We also know of examples of Polish calques that appeared in Yiddish no later than the sixteenth century. However, we have no decisive argument that would force us to consider that the loanwords and calques appeared not due to contacts of Yiddish-speakers with Polish Catholics but rather during the shift of Polish-speaking Jews to Yiddish. No such ambiguity exists for the subsequent period during which numerous Polish words were clearly borrowed from the speech of the Catholic Poles. The dilemma of distinguishing between inherited and borrowed lexical elements is particularly acute for the territory of modern western Ukraine and western Belarus. Here, we know about the continuous presence of Jewish communities from the Middle Ages and their gradual shift from East Slavic to Yiddish under the influence of western migrants mainly coming from Poland. No information in our possession indicates the existence of any linguistic particularity of the Slavicspeaking Jews who lived in these areas in comparison to their Gentile neighbors. As a result, in modern LitY and UkrY it is impossible to distinguish words borrowed from Belarusian and Ukrainian by Yiddish-speaking Jews from those that Yiddish acquired during the shift to it of EAST CANAANITES from their East Slavic language(s).
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Slavic elements
It is in Red Ruthenia that the linguistic past of the Jewish communities was particularly sophisticated. Local communities were originally composed of EAST CANAANITES who spoke in their everyday life the East Slavic ancestor of modern Ukrainian. After the incorporation of these territories into Poland during the mid-fourteenth century, in the biggest towns the role of Polish and colonial German became particularly strong and the presence of East Slavic speakers rather marginal. During the same time, the Jewish population grew due to migrations from the West. As a result, during the following period, the linguistic environment of local Jewish communities would change several times in a similar way to major urban centers of the neighboring Lesser Poland. Outside of the domain of onomastics, no traces of the East Slavic past of Jews in these territories can be found, while the problem of distinguishing the Old Polish elements borrowed from Christian Poles from those of former Polish-speaking Jewish communities (if they ever existed in Red Ruthenia) is as insoluble as it is for other regions that constituted the Polish Kingdom between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Only a few isolated words of Slavic origin are found in SWY or WphY. They were borrowed from EY and/or CzY. In DuY, the Slavic component is more significant though it seems to be relatively recent. In EGY, exactly as in CzY, the number of Slavic elements (all lexical) is quite small, but some of them correspond to basic family terms that may be substratal. Those for which one can distinguish the exact origin are derived from Old Czech. Globally speaking, the use of the notion of SLAVIC COMPONENT is appropriate in connection with EY only. For its subdialects—PolY, LitY, and UkrY—it is primarily related to the significant influence of Polish after the fourteenth century and that of Belarusian and Ukrainian after the fifteenth century resulting not only in many hundreds of loanwords but also in numerous morphological borrowings, grammatical and phonological changes. For EY as a whole, the Slavic substratum is Old Czech and it is limited to a few elements from the domains of the general lexicon and given names. The same substratum is valid for CzY and EGY. These Yiddish varieties also include a small Polish adstratum that is due to migrations of Polish Jews into these territories. Properly speaking, it would be an exaggeration to use the term SLAVIC COMPONENT in application to these two dialects: no system-level change in them is due to Slavic influences. The same is true for western subdialects in which one finds only a few adstratal Slavic elements, all of them being due to contacts with Jews from the East including the migrations of the latter to Western Europe.
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6 Sound changes and dialects .
MAIN ISSUES
Chapters to considered the main linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish elements of German, Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic origins, respectively. This consideration by language (or group of related languages) of origin was useful because certain important questions to be answered for an understanding of the development of Yiddish varieties are not necessarily identical for these four origins. For all Yiddish dialects, the German component represents by far the most important part, responsible for a large majority of their system-level characteristics. Numerous questions important when considering the Hebrew component are irrelevant for other components since at least the High Middle Ages Hebrew has been the main cultural (and not vernacular) language for all Jewish communities that contributed to the development of Yiddish. Hebrew was not the first spoken language for Jews and, unlike German, Romance, and Slavic languages, it was not used by Gentiles. Because of this particular status, throughout its history the Hebrew component was more significantly affected by norms (some of which changed through the time) than the Yiddish layers of other origins. The question of the relationship with the idioms of the Gentile majority is crucial for elements of the German, Romance, and Slavic origins only. Ancestors of Yiddish speakers used in their everyday life either Romance or Slavic languages. Because of this fundamental feature, several aspects of the analysis of Romance and Slavic elements found in the Yiddish varieties are quite similar. Despite the importance of these aspects justifying separate discussions depending on origin, several facets of the development of Yiddish dialects as idioms structurally distinct from any known German dialect should be addressed globally, independently of the origin of their constituting elements. After all, the separation by origin is purely a theoretical tool useful for the analysis of certain specific aspects. The average native speaker of any language does not care about the etymology of any particular element of his/her vernacular idiom and deals with any linguistic item independently of its origin provided that this item is totally integrated into the idiom. For an analysis of the development of Yiddish dialects, the choice of the domain of phonetics is particularly advantageous. According to the NEOGRAMMARIAN PRINCIPLE, among various categories of linguistic changes a sound change (and more precisely, its principal type, that of the gradual alteration of a phoneme) is the only one that is regular. It affects the same phonetic context in the same way in all words affected independently of their semantics and origin. Unlike other kinds of linguistic changes in the focal area of innovation its results are independent of psychological and sociological factors.1 In Yiddish studies, particular emphasis is placed on the development of vowels. Here the most detailed theory dealing with proto-vowels is due to Max Weinreich and his school. Its principal aim consists in explaining all phonetic realizations of stressed vowels in all Yiddish varieties, modern as 1 See in Hock :, , – the discussion of the NEOGRAMMARIAN PRINCIPLE and the justification of its use for historical linguistics because it provides an appropriate description of the ultimate outcome of complex sociolinguistic factors determining the actual changes that were discovered by Labov and his school.
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Sound changes and dialects
well as those that existed in the past, as being from the same set of “proto-vowels.” The main controversial issue concerning this theory consists in deciding whether (i) Weinreich’s scheme describes an historical reality (maybe in an idealized form) and therefore represents the result of a linguistic reconstruction having a realistic value for the diachronic analysis of the development of Yiddish dialects, or (ii) simply represents a set of useful formal short designations instrumental when describing different vocalic phenomena in Yiddish varieties, synchronic or diachronic, but having no real explanatory role. A detailed consideration of sound changes is important to shed light on another major issue in Yiddish studies, namely the classification of Yiddish dialects. Here two global approaches may also be possible. Firstly, one may consider that the classification should directly reflect diachronic processes and therefore correspond to the LANGUAGE TREE approach linking Yiddish dialects according to their real past. Secondly, a classification may be purely conventional: useful just for making quick references to groups of Yiddish varieties when discussing some of their characteristics. Here again the paradigm dominant in modern Yiddish studies mainly follows Weinreich’s approach based on the reflexes of a very few proto-vowels. This paradigm distinguishes between (i) EY spoken during the nineteenth century in the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Moldova, Romania, and eastern parts of Hungary and Slovakia, (ii) WY spoken in Germany, France (Alsace), Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and western parts of Hungary and Slovakia. As discussed in section .., only Birnbaum () and Katz () speak about three major subdivisions: EY, WY (western part of Weinreich’s WY area), and Central or Transitional Yiddish (the Czech lands, western Hungary and Slovakia). The aim of this chapter consists in providing information to shed more light on the controversial general question concerning the unity of the Yiddish varieties and particular issues related to certain of its aspects mentioned in the two previous paragraphs. The suggested approach provides a synthesis of the results obtained in previous chapters and supplies—on the basis of linguistic reconstruction—complementary data linking vocalic charts valid for modern Yiddish dialects to theoretical schemes proposed for stressed vowels of Proto-EY and those underlying CzY and WY. The consideration of these phonetic processes allows us to suggest a classification of Yiddish dialects that is not purely conventional but takes into account processes of their real past.
.
VOCALIC CHANGES
.. Reality of basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts In Table . of section .., the list of basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts was suggested. The information provided in previous chapters2 firmly corroborates the actual existence of these changes throughout the history of Ashkenazic vernacular idioms. No direct evidence is extant for the first two shifts only: merging of MHG æ, ä, and ë in open syllables (#) and monophthongization of MHG ie and uo (#). For all other processes, information based on the analysis of lexical elements of nonGerman (Hebrew, Romance, and/or Slavic) origins and/or analysis of early Ashkenazic written sources and onomastic data provides unambiguous confirmation. For the study of Yiddish dialectology, the importance is not the same for the various basic shifts. For the first four shifts, all pan-Yiddish, we have no data in our possession that would imply the existence of particularities in the Ashkenazic vernacular idioms that would not be valid for the
2
See sections ., ., ., and ..
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German-speaking Christian majority. Here Jewish speech clearly followed changes that took place in local German dialects. Moreover, shifts # (raising of MHG â) and # (lengthening) have been valid for almost all High German dialects. Shifts # and # also characterized a vast area that encompassed a large majority of Ashkenazic communities extant at that time. Only those westerners who lived in the areas of Ripuarian and Alemannic were not really affected by shift #, while shift # was nonapplicable to those from Central Franconian, Swabian, and Bavarian. Shifts #– are much more relevant despite the fact that all of them except for # and # are still pan-Yiddish. A detailed consideration of the chronology of shift # (diphthongization of MHG î, û, and iu)3 shows that it reached the communities of Nürnberg and Frankfurt with an interval of more than two centuries: beginning of the fourteenth century for the former and end of the sixteenth century for the latter. Moreover, in both areas (and actually in all regions for which relevant data are available) the change in question was not internal to Jews. It simply followed a shift that characterized the everyday speech of the local Christian majority. Shift # (unrounding) is of particular interest because at least for Frankfurt and certain other western Ashkenazic communities, Jewish speech retained for a period longer than a century (namely, up to the mid-seventeenth century) a major phonological feature that apparently was no longer valid for WCG dialects spoken by local Christians (but continued to be valid in East Franconian).4 This system-level difference necessarily implies that we are not dealing anymore with a Jewish ethnolect of local German but with a separate idiom. Shift # (raising of the first vowel of MHG ei and ou) is not pan-Yiddish. Indeed, no piece of evidence at our disposal indicates that it ever affected EY. EY exhibits here features that are unique in comparison with both German dialects and other Yiddish varieties. They result from the internal development of EY, with its synthesis of various German dialectal influences, mainly Bohemian and Silesian. This factor implies that at the moment of shift #, EY was already an independent tongue, separate from all contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish idioms.Yet, for all other Yiddish varieties, this raising—with definite earliest references corresponding to the fifteenth century (and the lack of any evidence for the absence of this phonetic process in early periods)—characterizes coterritorial German dialects too. In other words, in this respect Jewish speech followed the development of the local vernaculars spoken by non-Jews. For this reason, it should not be taken as evidence of the unity of the genesis of all Yiddish varieties different from EY. On the one hand, the reflex [a:] got stabilized only during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. On the other hand, it is likely to have two independent German sources: () for WY: southeastern part of WCG and East Franconian; () for CzY: speech influenced by Bavarian in large cities of the Habsburg Empire.5 Shift # (raising of A) did not affect WY. Even if it was probably inspired by close processes in certain German dialects (Bavarian, ECG, and, most likely, Bohemian), its specific results, with a total merging between the reflexes of lengthened MHG a and MHG â (as well as the absence of raising for non-lengthened MHG a outside of UkrY) are internal to Yiddish. For this reason, it is unlikely that the same major phonological feature could appear in various Yiddish varieties independently of each other. It is much more plausible that it appeared in one region, namely the Czech lands, before spreading to other areas: Eastern Europe, eastern Germany, and later to the Netherlands. Shifts # (diphthongizations of E and O) and # (raising [ε:] > [e:] for E and [ɔ:] > [o:] for A) are also internal to Yiddish, though the first of them could be inspired by similar processes in German dialects. In the next three sections, vocalic charts of various modern Yiddish dialects will be presented. The stressed vocalism of all these idioms may be explained taking as starting points schemes for ProtoEY and idioms underlying WY and CzY given in section ... All these schemes were constructed 3 4 5
See the chronology of references to various forms related to StY name Fayvush in section .. See the discussion of feature {V} in section ... See the discussion of feature {V} insection ...
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by taking into account all the relevant basic Ashkenazic shifts. For all additional changes described later, the question of their reality and their internal character for Yiddish is beyond doubt. Indeed, all of them were applied in the same way to words independently of their origin. As a result, we find traces of these shifts in numerous words from the Hebrew component as well as in lexemes of Romance and Slavic components.
.. Derivation of vowels in EY The initial chart for the development of stressed vowels in all EY subdialects is presented in Table . of section ...6 Very few additional developments occurred in LitY. The first series of changes affected the pronunciation of the diphthong [ou] valid for the phoneme resulting from the merging of O and O. Both its elements were fronted and rounded (a process similar to German umlaut) yielding [øy].7 This diphthong survived in Courland. In western Lithuania (Samogitia), it gave rise to [eu].8 In the remaining part of the LitY area it was unrounded to [ej]. Most likely, in this region it also passed through the [eu] or [ew] stage, as follows from references in Volhynia and Belorussia to phonetic variants of certain biblical names having ḥ olem in Hebrew: Мевша ‘Moses’ () and Неух ‘Noah’ (first half of the eighteenth century). Moreover, in a prevocalic position, O and O gave rise to [ev], not to [ej] (LCA ). In Russian-language civil records from the nineteenth century we also find references to Двейра ‘Deborah’ and Гревном (of uncertain origin), while for both these names the forms in other EY subdialects have [oj]. The fact that all stages of the shift from [ou] to [ej] had taken place already in the region of LitY follows from several LitY town names such as Meytshet, Steybts, and Sharkeyshtshine, all with [ej], whose Belarusian names are Моўчадзь [mowcˇ adz’], Стоўбцы [stowbtsɨ], and Шаркаўшчына [šarkawšcˇ ɨna], respectively, all historically with [ow].9 Since the sound [w] is marginal to LitY,10 this Belarusian combination was interpreted as equivalent to LitY [ou]. It is clear that Belarusian toponyms were integrated into LitY before the shift [ou] > [øy] (> [ej]) for O, . The second series of changes deal with U whose Proto-EY reflex was [au]. Outside of Courland this phoneme was pronounced [ou] after this place in the vocalic chart became vacant. The last reflex remained in Samogitia without additional changes. In other areas, additional shifts from [ou] to [oj] or [uu] took place. The unusual diphthong [uu] was unstable and turned to [uj]. Gradually the form [oj] was diffused in the former [uj]-territory.11 The reality of the series of changes [au] > [ou] > ([oj] and
6 The main part of the information of section .. appears in this book only (a) to present the possibility of the derivation of modern EY dialects from the theoretical schemes of section .. and (b) to give a general picture of the stressed vocalism of these dialects. A more detailed description of processes that led to modern EY dialects appears in Herzog :–; and Jacobs :–. In contrast to these studies, section .. corroborates the reality of the existence of various suggested shifts by data taken from the non-German components of Yiddish. 7 It is unclear whether Courland German was of any influence here; see also an explanation suggested in Jacobs :. 8 The information on Courland and Samogitia is based on U. Weinreich a:. It seems to be valid for the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the decades that followed, these systems were replaced by a more general LitY type. As a result, very few peculiarities of these two regions can be found in LCA where the information is based on oral testimonies collected after World War II (see maps , , ). 9 In the past, the last Belarusian toponym had [ow] instead of today’s [aw]; compare Polish Szarkowszczyzna, Russian Шарковщина. If LitY informants for YIVO spoke about Sharkeyshtshine, Stankiewicz (:) notes the form Sharkoyshtshine. This form could result from a recent influence of Slavic forms with [o]. 10 On contexts where [w] occurs in EY see LCA pp. , ; Jacobs :, . 11 After that diffusion, the variant [uj] remained valid only in several remote regions such as the Pinsk area and strips in eastern Belorussia. The described scenario is due to Herzog (:–) who partly based it on ideas exposed in U. Weinreich (a). Both these authors also postulate that [uj] was at some moment valid for all of LitY,
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TABLE . Vowel chart of LitY Diphthongs
[ej] E, , O,
Front vowels
Back vowels
Diphthongs
[i] I,
[u] U,
[uj] U (rare)
[e] E,
[o] O, A,
[oj] U (main)
[aj] I
Central vowels
[a] A
TABLE . Vowel chart of Yiddish in Courland Diphthongs
[ej] E, ; [øy] O, [aj] I
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i] I; [i:] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e] E; [e:] E
[o] O; [o:] A, [a] A
Diphthongs
[au] U
[uj]) in the territory of Belorussia is strongly corroborated by the existence of LitY regional variants with [oj]/[uj] whose etymons had either [aw] or [av]. Among them are male given name Khloyne (StY Khlavne, of Old Czech origin), and the verbs hoyken/huyken ‘to bark’ (Belarusian гаўкаць [hawkats’]) and doynen ‘to pray’ (StY davenen). A series of LitY village names from eastern Belorussia have [uj] in place of Belarusian [ow]. It is clear that the names of these small places were integrated in LitY after the shift [ou] > [øy] for O, and [au] > [ou] for U. For this reason, their phonetic development was akin to that of LitY words whose root vowel corresponded to U (that is, MHG û) rather than to O, .12 The third, and most dramatic, change (that could chronologically be the first) was the loss of the vowel length causing merging of all long and short vowels that had the same quality: it affected the whole area except for Courland. The resulting vowel chart of LitY (outside of Samogitia and Courland) includes the elements appearing in Table .. The chart for the subdialect Samogitia is characterized by the same distribution but for two exceptions: [ou] for U (instead of [oj]) and [eu] for O, (instead of [ej]). In Courland, one finds the vowels shown in Table .. Changes undergone by PolY were significantly different. On a global scale, one may identify two independent series of shifts, both of which had dramatic consequences. The first series globally corresponds to the chain [ou] > [o:] > [u:] > [i:] in which different proto-vowels were involved. while [oj] appeared later (most likely in the area of Brest) as a form intermediate between PolY [ou] and LitY [uj]. This scenario sounds plausible. However, we cannot exclude a possibility that both [oj] and [uu] appeared at the same time. Initially the latter variant (after turning to [uj]) became more widespread, but later the variant [oj] gradually superseded it. In certain former [uj]-areas, [uj] was replaced with [oj] even in some words of Slavic origin, compare Yiddish name Babroysk for the Belarusian town of Babruysk. 12 All examples mentioned in this paragraph are taken from Timm and Beckmann :–. See the geography of doynen in LCA .
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It started with the fronting [u(:)] > [y(:)] that was later followed by the unrounding [y(:)] > [i(:)].13 This qualitative shift affected both long (U) and short (U) vowels. Numerous Yiddish toponyms of Polish origin can illustrate the fact that this change had already taken place in Poland. Among them are: Kitne, Litevisk, and Tshītsh whose Polish etymons are Kutno, Lutowiska, and Czudec. The same fronting is also observed in numerous words of Hebrew origin.14 It is also responsible for the shift from [ou] to [oj] of O, . In the next stage, the merged A and A—whose previous reflex was [o:]— were raised and took the now vacant place of [u:]. Among the examples are PolY Lūsk ‘Łask,’ Pyūsk ‘Piaski,’ Prūshnits ‘Przasnysz,’ and Rūdem ‘Radom’ (all with A or A), as well as numerous words from the Hebrew component.15 The analysis of the spelling of Jewish names in Christian sources shows that the raising took place at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.16 In PolY, exactly as in LitY, U turned from [au] into [ou].17 PolY toponyms Tsouzmer and Loutsk whose Polish equivalents are Sandomierz and Łuck (Ukrainian Луцьк), respectively, corroborate the reality of this change. Indeed, as discussed in section .., the etymons for these two Yiddish toponyms are not Slavic names but colonial German forms with [au] or [aw]. This process was partly followed by the monophthongization [ou] > [o:], filling the place that became vacant after the shift [o:] > [u:]. The second series of changes encompasses the following chain: [e:] > [ej] > [aj] > [a:]. It was initiated by the monophthongization [aj] > [a:] for I. The reason for this change is clear: before that shift, there was no [a:] in PolY, making the vocalic system incomplete. To this shift are due PolY town name Pāzer ‘Pyzdry,’ river name Vāsl (StY Vaysl) ‘Wisła’ (English Vistula),18 noun tāster ‘purse’ (Polish tajstra, BN ), as well as the male name Fābish (compare a reference to Fabisch, Poznań, ), a phonetic variant of StY Fayvush, of Romance origin. The results of the same process are apparent in PolY words of Hebrew origin such as mākhl ‘food’ ( )ַמֲאָכלand kāri ‘collection’ (ְקָע ָרהa)19 whose LitY equivalents are maykhl and kayre, respectively. This means that the monophthongization in question is necessarily more recent than the merger of the reflexes of MHG î and those of (pataḥ + [ayin, alef or he] + ḥ aṭef-pataḥ ) and several other Hebrew combinations.20 Since after the monophthongization the diphthong [aj] did not appear in the vocalic chart of PolY anymore, the lowering [ej] > [aj] for E, could occur. Among its results are PolY toponyms Pshaytsh ‘Przedecz’ and Baylev ‘Bielawy’ and numerous words from the Hebrew component.21 The reference to the male name Шнаер [šnajer] (Volhynia, ) represents one of earliest traces of this shift.22 The resulting vacant position of [ej] was later taken by E,, which underwent
See feature {V} in section ... See examples in BN : their LitY equivalents have no fronting. Some of them—with no raising in LitY—appear in BN – and Birnbaum :. 16 Numerous /o/-forms appear in Poland and Ukraine during the second half of the seventeenth century. The /u/forms have become commonplace since the s. For example, Polish sources from the southeast of the country mention Ruchla ‘Rachel’ in , Nuchym ‘Nahum/Menahem’ about , and Cudyk ‘Zadok’ in . In Volhynia, there is Сруль ‘Israel’ in , Сухар ‘Issachar,’ and Муниш(ко) in . Note that eighteen years earlier, sources from the same town cite a Jew called Монеш who, in principle, could be the same as Муниш(ко) of (Beider :–). 17 The validity at some stage of the reflex [ou] for U in the whole area of EY (outside of Courland) follows from the comparative analysis. Note [ou] in Samogitia, [oj] in LitY (outside of Samogitia and Courland), [ou] and [o:] in PolY, variant [ou], [oj], and [u] in UkrY. Only the hypothesis of [ou] being their common form can easily explain this distribution. 18 As discussed in section .., the vowels in these two Yiddish toponyms are not due to Slavic names but to colonial German forms, Peisern and Weichsel, respectively. 19 These forms are taken from Birnbaum :–. 20 21 See feature {v} in section ... See examples in BN – and Birnbaum :. 22 The LitY form of this name of Romance origin is Shneyer/Sneyer (see section ..). 13 14 15
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TABLE . Vowel chart of PolY Diphthongs
[ej] E [aj] E,
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i] I, U; [i:] I , U
– ; [u:] A,
[e] E; –
[o] O; [o:] U (partly)
Diphthongs
[oj] O, , [ou] U (partly)
[a] A; [a:] I
diphthongization from [e:]. The earliest reliable reference to a diphthongized form is the andronymic Зейличка (Podolia, ).23 PolY toponyms Reydim ‘Radymno’ and Heylitsh ‘Halicz’ (Ukrainian Галич) also result from the same diphthongization.24 Numerous words with segol in their Hebrew etymons followed the same change.25 The resulting vowel chart of PolY includes the elements appearing in Table .. Numerous shifts that occurred in PolY are also valid for UkrY: the change [au] > [ou] (U), the frontings [u] > [i] (U) and [u:] > [i:] (U), the raising [o:] > [u:] (A, ),26 the monophthongization [aj] > [a:] (I), and the diphthongization [e:] > [ej] (E).27 All these shifts occurred after the Lublin Union (), when the territories populated mainly by Ukrainian Orthodox peasants were given to Polish Catholic nobles. As known from numerous historical sources, often these nobles encouraged Jews to become intermediaries between them and the peasants as managers of their lands and houses. This privileged position attracted numerous Polish Jews who migrated eastward to Ukraine. After the Cossack wars of the mid-seventeenth century, migrations were more often oriented from Ukraine westward. For this reason, from the mid-sixteenth century and until the partitions of Poland during the last third of the eighteenth century, numerous linguistic processes were the same for PolY and UkrY. The diphthong [ou] for U gave rise in UkrY to three regional variants: [ou], [u], and, only in the northern strip, [oj].28 Modern UkrY shares one important feature with LitY too: at some point in its history, UkrY lost the distinction between long and short vowels.29 This loss in UkrY is, however, more recent than in
In Eastern Slavic languages, this name means ‘wife of Zeylik’ where PolY/UkrY Zeylik (LitY Zelik) is a male name with E as the root vowel: it is derived from MHG saelecman ‘blessed man.’ 24 See the discussion of these Yiddish toponyms in section ... 25 See examples in BN and Birnbaum :. 26 In nineteenth-century civil records and census data from the Kremenets district of Volhynia we find the following pairs of variants of the same surnames: Гоз and Гуз, Борвес and Бурвис, Одлер and Удлер, Фодим and Фудим. The first variants correspond to the StY/LitY nouns meaning ‘hare’ (hoz), ‘barefooted’ (borves), ‘eagle’ (odler), and ‘thread’ (fodem), respectively, while the second variants are identical to the UkrY equivalents. These pairs of surnames testify to the fact that in the area in question the change from the /o/- to the /u/-quality was not totally stabilized even at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the mass surname adoption took place. 27 See Herzog :–, . 28 See details in U. Weinreich a, LCA . 29 For both Yiddish dialects, this process could be influenced by the absence of quantitative contrasts in local East Slavic languages (U. Weinreich a:). Belarusian was important for LitY and Ukrainian for UkrY. On the other hand, PolY kept its phonemic distinction between long and short vowels because such distinction existed in Old Polish (see section ..) and in Silesian spoken by German colonists in Polish towns (both Old Polish and Silesian are also mentioned in King :, ). U. Weinreich (:–) suggests that the retention of the length in PolY was also reinforced by the continuing replenishment of the Polish Jewish communities by the immigrants from the German and the Czech lands with well-established length distinctions. 23
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TABLE . Vowel chart of UkrY Diphthongs
[ej] E, E,
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i] I, U; [I] I, U
[u] A, ,U (partly)
[e] E
[o] O, A
Diphthongs
[oj] O, , U (north); [ou] U (partly)
[a] I
LitY. For several reasons, it did not cause any merging.30 On the one hand, some of the potential mergings were prevented by shifts shared by PolY and UkrY. On the other hand, phonemic differences between () /i:/ and /i/ and () /a:/ and /a/, both appearing in PolY because of quantitative contrasts, were both maintained in UkrY as regards qualitative differences. Before /i:/ lost its length, its short equivalent shifted from front [i] to near-front [I]: compare [zin] ‘son’ and [zIn] ‘sun.’ Note that [I] (Cyrillic letter и) and [i] (Cyrillic letter i) are two different phonemes in Ukrainian. The raising [a] > [ɔ] > [o] for A (provoking eventually its merger with O) is unique to UkrY.31 Its first stage, [a] > [ɔ], clearly preceded the loss of the length [a:] > [a] for I because otherwise the resulting [a] would have also been raised to [ɔ] and later to [o], a phenomenon that is not observed. The resulting vowel chart of UkrY appears in Table .. The vowel charts presented in Tables .–. are incomplete because they do not take into account the special developments of various vowels before /x/ and uvular /r/. In this environment, the short vowels corresponding to I, E, and U shifted to more open vowels [e], [a], and [o], respectively.32 For a number of words, the lowering is pan-EY. Even if certain German dialects, primarily, ECG and Bohemian, could influence this phonetic development, as a whole we are dealing with a process internal to Yiddish.33 For other words the change is regional. Two regular lowerings, [e] > [a] and [i] > [e] characterize both PolY (except for its northeastern part) and UkrY.34 Among PolY examples are: shlakht ‘bad,’ hersh ‘deer,’ and gidekht ‘dense’ whose StY/LitY equivalents are shlekht, hirsh, and gedikht, respectively. In certain cases, two consecutive changes took place [i] > [e] > [a]. Again, we have, on the one hand, a number of pan-EY examples,35 and, on the other hand, regional cases: PolY fartsik ‘forty’ (LitY fertsik, MHG vierzec), lakht ‘light’ and tsarkl ‘compasses’ both found in the western fringe of PolY (lekht and tserkl in UkrY and the main part of PolY, likht and tsirkl in LitY, MHG lieht and zirkel).36 The shift [u] > [o] is regular in PolY only, as in korts ‘short.’ The existence of this reflex indicates that in this subdialect the lowering in question took place before the spontaneous fronting of U from [u] to [i], the process that occurred after the separation of PolY and LitY. The LitY form is kurts, phonetically identical to the German etymon; compare MHG and NHG
30 Merging did occur in some regional varieties, especially those from areas transitional between UkrY and LitY (see details in Gasser :–). 31 The shift did not occur before /r/, /x/, /ng/, /nk/ (WG :), /cˇ /, /š/, /j/, /g/, /k/, and /l/ (LCA , ). 32 See the detailed description of this phenomenon in Weinreich and WG :– where special designations I, E, and U for the contexts in question are introduced. 33 See the discussion of the feature {V} in section ... 34 See LCA –. 35 They appear in section .. and include among others barsht ‘brush’ (MHG bürste) and dar ‘thin’ (MHG dürre). 36 These examples are taken from Birnbaum :, .
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kurz. In the Brest-Kiev strip, on the border between LitY and UkrY, the dialectal variant is kirts, that is, with the fronting but without the lowering. In UkrY and the northeasternmost strip of PolY, the same word ‘short’ is pronounced kerts. This means that in UkrY the lowering of U from [i] to [e] took place after the fronting [u] > [i].37 In theory, forms from the German component of PolY, with vowels lowered before /r/ or, to a lesser extent, /x/, could correspond to ready-made Central German phonetic variants. If this scenario were true, we would need to consider the notion of Proto-EY as being senseless because PolY and LitY would have no common Jewish ancestor. Yet, this scenario is implausible. For example, in CzY, PolY, and UkrY we know about the /e/-forms in place of MHG i only after the mid-sixteenth century, with examples of /i/ found even during the first half of the seventeenth century in Red Ruthenia and during the first half of the eighteenth century in Ukraine.38 The fact that the shifts mentioned in the previous paragraph had occurred already in the area of PolY/UkrY may also be illustrated by taking examples of local toponyms; compare PolY Orits ‘Uherce,’ Korev ‘Kurów,’ Zherdev/Zhardev ‘Żyrardów,’ Tereve ‘Tyrawa,’ Skernevets/Skarnevits ‘Skierniewice,’ Mekhev ‘Michów,’ Makhev / Mekhev ‘Miechów,’ UkrY Varkhivke ‘Verkhivka’ (Ukrainian Верхiвка, in Podolia). Note also PolY shtshor ‘rat,’ zavarokhi ‘snow storm,’ pokh ‘down, fluff,’ and serip ‘syrup’; compare Polish szczur, zawierucha, puch, and syrop, respectively.39 In the Slavic component of UkrY, we also find a number of words in which the root vowel underwent a lowering before /r/; compare hert ‘wholesale,’ terme ‘prison,’ and sekher ‘rusk’ (Ukrainian гурт, турма, and сухарь, respectively).40 Another special context corresponds to /e/ and /a/ before /nk/ and /ng/ that tend to diphthongize in LitY and (partly) UkrY.41 37 Weinreich () presents a map (p. ) and suggests (p. ) that the fronting in the Brest-Kiev strip took place during the nineteenth century only. However, he provides no argument that would show that the reflexes in question could not have already appeared during the seventeenth century when both the fronting and the lowering occurred in PolY and UkrY. 38 See the chronology of various forms of the given name Hirsh/Hersh in section ... 39 The PolY examples (except for pokh) are taken from BN . Birnbaum (:, , ) provides examples of changes [u] > [o], [e] > [a], and [i] > [e] before /r/ and /x/ in PolY words of Hebrew origin whose LitY equivalents have no lowering. Weinreich (:–) also provides a few examples of this kind and mentions PolY pokh ‘down, fluff.’ However, he considers that the variants with the lowered root vowel are importations (“certain” for words from the German component and “probable” for those of Hebrew origin) to Eastern Europe from western Germany, and, more precisely, from the Rhenish Jewish communities in the area of WCG, while the Slavic examples joined these series in situ. According to him, it was around the seventeenth century that lowered variants eventually prevailed in PolY and UkrY, while the non-lowered ones became dominant in LitY. This approach appears implausible. Note that Weinreich’s ideas are purely theoretical: he does not provide a single piece of evidence for the presence of /e/-forms in the area of LitY and does not suggest any factual corroboration for the chronology proposed by him. Moreover, his postulate about lowered forms in German being limited to WCG only is erroneous (see the discussion of {V}). His explanation of lowering found in PolY words of Slavic origin—by a phonetic phenomenon brought from the Rhineland that continued to be operative centuries after these putative migrations—sounds particularly unattractive. 40 In all of them, the fronting /u/ > /i/ preceded the lowering /ir/ > /er/. These (except for sekher) and several other examples appear in Weinreich :. Several particular additional realizations are also found before /r/ and/or /x/ in EY. In PolY, [a] has an allophonic variant [a:] before /r/; compare vārim ‘warm’ (MHG warm), nār ‘fool’ (MHG narre), gārn ‘to yearn’ (MHG gërn ‘to desire’), and dār ‘thin’ (MHG dürre ‘lean’) (Birnbaum :, WG :). BN and WG :– also mention the lengthening of /a/ before /r/ in PolY. In the subdialect spoken in northern Ukrainian territories, E before /x/ gave rise not to the usual [ej] but to [e]. As a result, we find forms such as vekh and tsekhn instead of StY veykh ‘soft’ (MHG weich) and tseykhn ‘sign’ (MHG zeichen), respectively. In the same area, some words whose stressed vowel corresponds to O, also contain the /e/-reflex. For example, [ex] is cognate with two StY words: hoykh ‘high’ (MHG hôch) and oykh ‘also’ (MHG ouch). In these instances, we can be sure that this result was obtained via the intermediary stage of [ej], the LitY reflex of O, (WG :). 41 According to informants for LCA , , the diphthongization characterized the territory of modern Belarus and northern Ukraine, but not Lithuania. Jewish surnames clearly show that in the past the phenomenon covered a larger area. Indeed, we find surnames revealing such Yiddish forms as Beynkl, Freynk, Freynkl (Russian Фрейнкель, German Fränkel, Fränckel), Kreynker, Rapeyng (from the village of Ropengi) and Tifbeynkl not only in Belorussia and
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Sound changes and dialects
The phonetics of a few lexical and onomastic elements in LitY do not conform to the chart of Table .. The root vowel [i] instead of *[u] in LitY zidlen ‘to revile’ (cognate with NHG sudeln ‘to soil’) can be explained only via interdialectal borrowing from PolY or, less likely, UkrY.42 The same scenario is also valid for such lexemes of Romance origin as stirdes ‘defiance’ / stirdish ‘defiant’ and sarver ‘waiter’ / sarvern ‘to serve,’43 as well as LitY gram ‘rhyme.’44 The realizations of the root vowel of StY gikh ‘quick’ (MHG gæhe, NHG gäch) outside of LitY correspond to those of E. They are well correlated with æ found in its MHG etymon. Yet, in LitY (and, for this reason, in StY too) the main form is gikh and not **gekh. This form may also be due to interdialectal borrowing.45 The phonology of a number of rabbinical surnames commonly used in Eastern Europe also reveals dialectal features not from the area of EY but from western territories from which they were brought during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; compare LitY Halpern (from the town of Heilbronn)46 and Averbakh /Averbukh (from the town of Auerbach, Bavaria).47 The number of words whose phonetics in LitY and PolY cannot be neatly linked to one common ancestor is very small. Among the examples are LitY nedan ~ PolY nadn ‘dowry’ (Hebrew ) ָנָדן, LitY Tuvye ~ PolY To(y)vye ‘Tobias’ (Hebrew טֹוִבָיהa),48 and the rabbinical surname LitY Hur(e)vits ~ PolY Horovits / Horevits (from the town of Horowitz, Bohemia). In the latter case, the stressed [u] in LitY could be of hypercorrect origin. It could be introduced because of the existence of a large series of PolY words in which /or/ descends from the etymological /ur/ that was retained in LitY.
Volhynia (which would correspond to maps of LCA) but also in Lithuania and Podolia. Bearers of the name Фрейнкель already appear in the civil records of Lithuania during the s. Moreover, the surname Frejnkiel (Polish spelling) was found (from at least the s) in the area of LitY corresponding to the Suwałki guberniya of Congress Poland. In all these areas, the diphthongized forms were rare. For example, Russian Френкель and Polish Frenkiel were much more common forms in the same regions than Фрейнкель/Frejnkiel. No diphthongized forms appear in available sources in Ukraine (Volhynia, Podolia) before the mid-nineteenth century. As a result, we cannot rule out the possibility that here the surnames were initially adopted with monophthongs, while the diphthongal forms developed only during the nineteenth century as their phonetic variants. 42 This example is taken from WG :, : where the conjecture about dialectal variants with [i] or [y] being brought from the Rhineland to Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages is considered to be more plausible than the idea of the borrowing from PolY. Yet, the former scenario is significantly more complex and therefore implausible. Firstly, we do not have a single piece of evidence for the use by medieval Rhenish Jews of forms with the fronted vowel. Secondly, no specifically Rhenish word is known in EY. 43 See the discussion of their etymologies and references in early Jewish sources in section .. Note that the reflex [a] was not yet valid for the word ‘waiter’ in KrJO compiled at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see footnote in section .). 44 The LitY form results from the borrowing of PolY gra:m whose vowel (I) is neatly derived from the root vowel of MHG gerîme (WG :). The elision of the pretonic vowel in both PolY and LitY represents an additional factor showing the common ancestry of forms used in both EY dialects (see the discussion of feature {U} in section .). 45 See the discussion of this word in section . (feature {L}). Stankiewicz (:) suggests the same explanation also for LitY atsind ‘now’ and umzist ‘free,’ ‘in vain.’ However, no cognate form to atsind is known in MHG (it is in NHG that we find jetzund and itzund), and, more importantly, Harkavy () still gives the LitY form as atsund. For umzist, we find in MHG not only umbe sust but also ümbe süst. As a result, LitY [i] may, in theory, be directly related to German ü [y] rather than to the fronting [u] > [y] > [i] in PolY conjectured in Sapir :. Of course, a borrowing from PolY is possible as well. On the other hand, the idea of the medieval Rhenish origin suggested in WG : for this and a few other forms is unattractive (see footnote ). 46 The root vowel of the toponym corresponds to MHG ei, which is normally associated to E and therefore the regular variant in LitY would be **Heylpern. 47 The root vowel of the first part of the toponym corresponds to MHG ou, which is normally associated to O that gives ev in a prevocalic position (LCA ). Consequently, the regular variant in LitY would start with **ever, not with aver. 48 See section ...
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Vocalic changes
TABLE . Vowel chart of SwY Diphthongs
[εj] E [aj] I53
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i]52 I; [i:] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e] E; [e:] E
[o] O; [o:] A (partly)
Diphthongs
[ɔu] U, O, A (partly)
[a] A; [a:] A, O, E
.. Derivation of vowels in WY As discussed in section .., the term “Southern western Yiddish” (SWY) characterizes the speech of Jews from Alsace (AlsY), Switzerland (SwY), and Eastern Franconia (FrY). Its modern reflexes can be drawn from Table . of section .., with two additional shifts: from [au] to [ou] for U and (partially) from [o:] to [ou] for A.49 Examples of the resulting diphthong appear in PhilogLottus (); compare chous’n ‘bridegroom’ (Hebrew )ָחָתן, kousch’r ‘kosher’ (ָּכ ׁ ֵשרa).50 In the diphthongs whose first elements are mid-vowels, the non-phonemic raising of the mid-vowels took place: [ej] > [εj] and [ou] > [ɔu]. No more changes occurred in SwY. Its vocalic chart appears in Table ..51 In FrY, in addition to processes known for SwY, E raised from [e:] to [i:] merging with I though the forms with [e:] continued to exist as phonetic variants.54 As a result, if in the chart appearing in Table . we add the new [i:]-reflex for E, we will obtain a scheme valid for FrY. 49 On the diphthongization of A in modern SWY, see BA and , GGA , , ), TG –, Timm : (with corrections to BA), and Zuckerman :–. The development [a:] > [o:] > [ou] for MHG â is known in North Bavarian and the German dialect of Nürnberg as well as in parts of Hessian (Moser :, MV ). This German dialectal phonetic phenomenon could influence this SWY shift. The choice of the editors of LCA of the word ‘ ָחָתןbridegroom’ for the illustration of typical reflexes of A in WY does not seem to be appropriate for the diachronic analysis. In a large area of WY during the Proto-WY period, the vowel in the word in question was not A but an [e]-colored vowel due to E-EFFECT (see references in section ..). Several authors (BA , Zuckerman :) indicate [o:] as the regular reflex in modern SWY for qameṣ in open syllables, though the same authors (BA , Zuckerman :) state the phoneme /ou/ (pronounced [ɔu] or [ou]) as the regular reflex for MHG â and also provide examples found in the same Hebrew context (but in different words). Yet, in all other Yiddish varieties the same reflexes are observed for MHG â and qameṣ in open syllables. Most likely, the diphthongal reflexes result from regular phonetic shifts, while the [o:]-reflexes appeared under the influence of WHOLE HEBREW rules asking for a distinct pronunciation of qameṣ (A) and ḥ olem (O). Note that Weill () when he presents AlsY forms of Hebrew origin (mainly being based not on their vernacular but rather WHOLE HEBREW pronunciation) is regularly using “o” for qameṣ (A) and “au” for ḥ olem. 50 Yet, the earliest references of diphthongal forms are already known during the first half of the sixteenth century. The combination vav–yod in place of MHG â appears a few times in Par and ShBLR (TG ). 51 In this section, the information on the vowels in SwY is taken from Guggenheim-Grünberg :–. 52 For certain speakers of SwY, the phonemes /i/ and /u/ are pronounced as [I] and [u], exactly as in AlsY (see below). A pronunciation of /i/ close to [e] is attested in a Christian source quoting the name of a Swiss Jew in (Guggenheim-Grünberg :). 53 In SwY (as discussed at the end of section ..) not all E are realized as [a:]. Those whose ancestor was MHG öu gave rise to [aj] merging with I. This nuance is ignored in Table .. 54 As noted by Copeland and Süsskind (:) in the rhymed comedy Esther by Joseph Herz (Fürth, ) the same diphthongal reflexes ויappear for U, O, and A. The same authors (p. ) indicate the presence of [i:] for MHG ê (E), giving the verb cognate with StY lebn / NHG leben as an example. Yet, the MHG form was lëben and therefore
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Sound changes and dialects
TABLE . Vowel chart of AlsY Diphthongs
[εj] E, E (main) [aj] I
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[I] I; [i:] I; [y:, y] U
[ʊ] U; –
[e] E; [e:] E (rare)
[o] O; [o:] A (partly)
Diphthongs
[ɔu] U, O, A (partly)
[a] A; [a:] A, O, E
AlsY underwent a series of additional changes in comparison to SwY. Firstly, E was mainly diphthongized from [e:] to [ej].55 The second group of shifts affected the phonetic reflexes of several phonemes without causing any merging between phonemes. I was lowered to [I], which corresponds to a sound between [i] and [e]. Here, it followed the dialectal development of the local German dialect that has [e] in this position.56 Similarly, the reflex for U was lowered to [ʊ], which corresponds to a sound between [u] and [o]. Thirdly, in AlsY one also observes the fronting from [u:] to [y:] for U (shortened in certain contexts to [y]). This process was also due to the influence of local German.57 The resulting vowel chart appears in Table ..58 Before /r/ and /x/, the realizations of SWY stressed vowels are different from those given in Tables . and .. In SwY, the phonemes /i/ (before /r/) and /e/ (before /r/, /x/, and /j/) both have the allophonic variant [ε]; /o/ and /o:/ are raised to [ɔ] and [ɔ:], respectively, before /r/ and /x/; /u/ is also raised to [ɔ] before /r/. In FrY, we find numerous forms with [a] before /r/ corresponding to MHG ë, e, or even ü and i. Examples: fa(r)tik ‘ready,’ ha(r)ts ‘heart,’ shta(r)n ‘forehead,’ har ‘lord,’ and karpes ‘pumpkin,’59 whose MHG equivalents are vertec, hërz(e), stirn(e), hërre, and kürbiʒ , respectively. AlsY is characterized by the following allophonic variants: • • • • •
[å:] instead of [ɔu] for A, O (both before /r/ and, less regularly, /x/), and U (only before /x/); [ε:] instead of [εj] for both E and E (both before /r/ and /x/); [ɔ] instead of [ʊ] for U before /r/ and instead of [o] for O before /r/ and /x/; [ε] instead of [e] for E before /r/ (and nasals); [a:] for A before /r/ and /x/.
The first of these rules explains AlsY ōren ‘to pray,’ of Romance origin.60
we are dealing with E and not E. On the existence of the variant [i:] for E see Beranek :, BA, and LCA . Also note the indication by Chrysander (:) of WY “mihl” (that is, /mi:l/) for MHG mël ‘flour.’ 55 Since this change is symmetrical with the pan-SWY diphthongization of A, it is possible that both these shifts occurred during the same period. For E, Zuckerman (:, ) notes () in the Hebrew component (for segol), many examples for diphthong and one example for monophthong (before /r/); () in the German component, diphthongs or monophthongs depending on words. Most likely, the existence of monophthongal reflexes in words of German origin is due to the influence of local German. 56 BA refers to the [e]-reflex here, identical to the local Alsatian Christian dialect. However, according to Zuckerman (:–), the /I/-phoneme of AlsY did not merge with /e/. 57 See the discussion of {V} in section ... 58 The vocalic chart of AlsY is based on Zuckerman :–. 59 FrY examples are based on Beranek : and Copeland and Süsskind :, , . 60 As explained in section ., its root vowel corresponds to O whose realizations are identical to those of O in all Yiddish varieties.
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Vocalic changes
TABLE . Vowel chart of WphY Diphthongs
[ej] E+ [aj] I
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e:] E; [e] E
[o] O; [o:] A [a] A; [a:] A, E, O
Diphthongs
[au] U, O
The development of the vowels of WphY also follows the scheme in Table ., with very few additional shifts. Firstly, the change [ou] > [au] for O took place. Secondly, the phoneme corresponding to E had a tendency to be pronounced as [aj]. Note that both these changes are symmetrical and could both be influenced by German. The resulting chart appears in Table ..61 The area situated geographically between that of SWY and that of WphY covers Hessen (Frankfurt, Fulda) and the Rhine Palatinate (Worms, Mainz, Speyer). For several reasons, our knowledge of the phonetic development of the local WY variety is quite fragmentary. In contrast to SWY, DuY, and EY, in the twentieth century it was no longer a living idiom but merely the remnants of one. As a result, the German component in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was heavily influenced by local German dialects and (especially for the twentieth century) standard literary German. The specifically Jewish repertoire of the Jewish speech in this area was mainly limited to words from the Hebrew component. Yet, this one underwent the important influence of WHOLE HEBREW norms. For example, in Tendlau , the richest collection of specifically Jewish lexical elements from the area, those from the Hebrew component are given according to the pronunciation that is not strictly vernacular but instead follows these norms. In contrast to FrY, we have no important literary works from the nineteenth century. Moreover, no detailed linguistic study of the local Yiddish is available that would be on a scale comparable to that carried out by Weinberg () for WphY. All available sources unanimously point to reflexes similar to those of Table . for all short vowels, as well as for A, E, O, I, U, and I. For other phonemes, their exact realizations are uncertain. To analyze these vowels in that area we may proceed to theoretical reconstructions comparing Jewish references from various periods to each other and, for the German component, with local Rhine Franconian German dialects.
61 Weinberg () regularly uses the signs ō (sound [o:]) and au for the reflexes of qameṣ and ḥ olem, respectively, both in open syllables. He also notes the [o:]-pronunciation of MHG â (pp. –). He often gives two alternative spellings, ei and ëi, for the reflexes of ṣ ere in open syllables. Examples: cheischek/chëischek ‘desire’ (from Hebrew שק ׁ ֶ )ֵחand treife/trëife ‘non-kosher food’ ()ְט ֵרָפה. According to his system of designations, these two diphthongs correspond to [aj] and [ej], respectively. Note also the spellings geien and gëin ‘to go’ (MHG gên), schëin ‘beautiful’ (MHG schoene) (p. ). This author deals not with a living Yiddish variety but with remnants of it found (but for a few exceptions) within the Hebrew component only. As a result, the information provided by him cannot help to determine the exact reflexes of U that correspond exclusively to the German component. For A, the rare examples from the Hebrew component, namely those cited in Table . of section . (‘rabbi,’ ‘people of the community’), appear with [a:] in WphY. For I, words from the corresponding Hebrew pattern mentioned in Table ., namely pataḥ + (ayin, ale for he) + ḥ aṭef-pataḥ , are all listed by Weinberg with variants having [aj]; compare WphY words meaning ‘arrogance,’ ‘story,’ and ‘claim’ in Table . of section ...
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Sound changes and dialects
For E, informants (GGA –, LCA –) give either the monophthong [e:] or a diphthong ([ej], [εj], or [aj]). The same reflexes appear in BA . In local German, [e:] is the main reflex for MHG ê.62 It could be responsible for the development of the same reflex in the German component of Yiddish. For O in the Hebrew component (ḥ olem) informants from various cities (including Frankfurt and Worms) interviewed after World War II speak about two possibilities: a diphthong ([ou], [au], or [ɔu]) or a long monophthong [o:] (GGA –, LCA ). In the German component, the reflex [o:] is indicated by informants from various cities (including Frankfurt and Worms). Yet, the diphthong /ou/ appears in a nineteenth-century book from the Worms area (GGA ). The monophthong is the most usual realization of MHG ô in local German.63 BA gives both /o:/ and /ou/ for words in the area independently of their origin, German or Hebrew. Taking into account all the above information, it is logical to suggest that the diphthongal realizations of E and O (found in both components) are more archaic, while the monophthongal ones represent innovations. This idea is also corroborated by the diphthongal reflexes in both WphY and SWY (that is, in the areas between which the region under analysis is situated geographically), diphthongs found in a few available texts from that area compiled during the first half of the nineteenth century,64 and the spellings ee and oo in Tendlau () for words from the Hebrew component. For A, the informants for GGA – mention [ɔ:] in the German component (MHG â) and [o:] in the Hebrew component (qameṣ ). The reflex [o:] appears in BA and LCA , though for several words of Hebrew origin BA and LCA find traces of /ou/. For the German component, BA – speaks about [o:], the reflex specific to local German,65 though the same atlas also mentions traces of the diphthongal reflex /ou/ or /au/. Though the latter information does not appear in other sources, several additional factors imply that the diphthongal reflexes for A characterized in the past the area under analysis. Firstly, the presence of these reflexes in the Hebrew component cannot be due to WHOLE HEBREW norms: note the spelling o for qameṣ in Tendlau . Consequently, they reflect an archaic colloquial pronunciation. The second argument comes from the consideration of the exact geography of the subdialect conventionally called SWY in this book and characterized by the diphthongal reflexes of A and O that merged between them. It covers two geographically unrelated areas: () a compact region covering Alsace and Switzerland and () parts of East Franconia. In the first of them, Yiddish was still a living language in the twentieth century for which we have detailed phonological descriptions. In the second of them, mere traces of Yiddish were found in the twentieth century. Informants from that area (for example, those from Fürth) who contributed to maps appearing in GGA and LCA mention reflexes of numerous vowels (including E, O, and A) that are much closer to those provided by informants from such cities as Frankfurt and Worms than by those from Alsace or Switzerland. Yet, from literary works from the nineteenth century whose authors lived in the area in question we can be sure about the idiosyncrasies specific to SWY. The notion of the independent inception of these unusual characteristics in Eastern Franconia and Alsace-Switzerland sounds impossible. Geographically, the two areas are separated by Swabia in whose internal areas the Jewish presence has always been almost non-existent. The only plausible way allowing us to establish geographic links between the two groups of communities in question passes through the central part of western Germany, the area covering Frankfurt, Worms, and
62 The diphthong [εj] for MHG ê (E) only characterizes southern Hessian and southeastern Palatinate German (Žir , Wies ). 63 It is valid for both Frankfurt and Worms. We find [ɔu] for MHG ô only in southern Rhine Franconian (Wies , Žir ). 64 This is, for example, the case of a manuscript from by a Jewish author from Hessen and a Christian parody published in in Speyer (Fleischer and Schäfer :, ). 65 See Wies , Žir .
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Vocalic changes
Heilbronn. As a result, a hypothesis implying the existence of the diphthongal reflexes of A (merging with those of O) in that area appears particularly attractive. Thirdly, traces of the formerly diphthongal realization of qameṣ appear in the Yiddish of Amsterdam. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the local Ashkenazic community was mainly formed by migrants from the northern and central parts of West Germany (with the communities of Hamburg and Frankfurt being the most important sources). The idea of the diphthongal reflex being due to migrants from the area of SWY sounds implausible because the presence in Amsterdam of Jews coming from that area was rather marginal.66 Consequently, a hypothesis implying that during the period of the formation of the Ashkenazic community of Amsterdam the diphthongal pronunciation of qameṣ was also common in Frankfurt and surrounding Central German communities appears particularly attractive. Fourthly, in Gilardone , a text published in Speyer and written in Latin characters by a Christian author as a parody of Yiddish, we regularly find “ou” for qameṣ and MHG â.67 We cannot be sure that the text reflects the Yiddish of its place of publication. Moreover, the author makes regular explicit references to “Itzik Veitel Starn,” that is, Itzig Feitel Stern, the pseudonym of an anti-Semite author from Fürth who wrote during the same time several parodies of the Jewish speech of Franconia. However, in the text by Gilardone, Speyer is mentioned as the place of residence of his personages and the diminutive suffixes used (-che, -elche, and -chen) are also local and certainly not taken from works by Stern.68 These considerations show that in the past the SWY vocalic characteristics were actually not limited to certain southwesternmost areas (Alsace and Switzerland), but were valid for a much larger WY territory covering southern and central Germany where they were gradually abandoned during the process of assimilation to the culture of the surrounding German Christian majority.69 Communities in the northern part of western Germany (including those from the area of WphY) are much more recent than those of its central part. Depending on the time of their creation, their original vocalic charts could be close to schemes appearing in Tables . (older) or . (more recent). The phonetics of certain words found in WY subdialects do not fit the rules exposed earlier in this section. Their vowels seem to be due to interdialectal borrowing. For example, to this category belong WphY forms with [i:] instead of [u:] for U and [i] instead of [u] for U. Among them are: besīle ‘virgin’ (Hebrew )ְּב תוָּלהand menige ‘afflicted’ (Hebrew )ְמ ֻנ ָגּע. These forms with fronted vowels could be due to the influence of CzY and/or PolY.
See the discussion of DuY in sections .. and ... Examples: “kouchem” ‘sage’ (Hebrew )ָחָכם, “kouscher” ‘kosher’ ()ָּכ ֵׁשר, “Pounem” ‘face’ ()ָּפ ִנים, aanmoul and ahnmoul ‘once’ (MHG einmâl) (Gilardone :, , , , ). Among other features of this text are “aa” or “ah” [a:] for E and O, “ou” for O, “ei” for E (Fleischer and Schäfer :–). 68 Compare Warkche ‘small work,’ Schmuhlchen ‘diminutive of Samuel,’ and Jüngelche ‘small boy’ (Gilardone :, ) to the names of the personages of Stern (:, , ) such as Itzigle, Frummele, Löserle, Blümle, Ziehrle, and Gütele. 69 This conclusion is well correlated with maps of two kinds. The first of them (Lowenstein :–) separates— on the basis of linguistic and cultural parameters—southern (Switzerland, Alsace, Baden, Rhine Palatinate, Hessen, and East Franconia) and northern (Cologne area, Westphalia, Low Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Netherlands) Ashkenazic communities in West Europe. Maps of the second kind (Andree for the nineteenth century, Lowenstein : for the second half of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century) deal with the density of Jewish population. They show the existence of a few separate compact areas where the Jewish population was particularly dense in proportion to the total population. One of these areas covers not only Alsace, northern Baden, and East Franconia but also the Rhine Palatinate and Hessen. 66 67
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Sound changes and dialects
.. Derivation of vowels in CzY, EGY, and DuY The development of vowels of CzY starts with the scheme given in Table . of section ... The shifts that followed were not specific to CzY but shared with PolY and UkrY. The first change corresponds to fronting to [y] that affected the phonemes pronounced as [u] (U) and [u:] (U), as well as the second element of the diphthong [ou] (O). Among the examples of forms in which we can observe traces of these shifts one may cite bsyle ‘maiden’ (Hebrew ְּב תוָּלהa)70 and a number of toponyms from Bohemia or Moravia such as Bymsl (German Jungbunzlau, Czech Mladá Boleslav), Krymenau (German Mährisch-Kromau, Czech Moravský Krumlov), Ytits (German Wotitz, Czech Votice).71 The second change, more recent, consists in a partial raising of merged A and A from [o:] to [u:]. Toponymic examples are: Nūkhit (German Nachod, Czech Náchod), but Plōn (German Plan, Czech Planá). The resulting vowel chart of CzY dialects includes the elements given in Table ..72 The vocalic chart of EGY is derived from the same starting point as that of CzY: the scheme in Table .. However, here the changes that followed were different from those of CzY. The first shift was from [ou] to [au] for O.73 Most likely, it provoked a merging of O and U. Another change was still in progress at the moment of the compilation of Friedrich , the source from which our TABLE . Vowel chart of CzY Diphthongs
[ej] E [aj] I
70
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i] I; [i:] I; [y] U; [y:] U
[u] – ; [u:] A, (partly)
[e] E; [e:] E
[o] O; [o:] A, (main) [a] A; [a:] E, O
Diphthongs
[oy] O [au] U
Tirsch (:) gives the transcription bsülo. Note the surnames of Jews from seventeenth-century Prague drawn from the names of the corresponding towns: בומסלא,aקרומענוי, and ( אוטיץUtitz in Latin characters) respectively. In this section, Yiddish toponyms from the Czech lands are taken from Birnbaum :–, while the discussed Jewish surnames from Prague from Beider . A number of sources mention the existence of rounded reflexes [y], [y:], and [oy] in CzY. In addition to the aforementioned Birnbaum and Tirsch , direct references also appear in Beranek (see also BA , , ), Kulke , Benno , and Ehrlich . Trost (:–) questions the universal character of this rule in CzY. However, the sources quoted by him provide information that is either indirect (references to Jewish speech in non-linguistic works by the nineteenth-century Christian authors from Bohemia or Moravia), or too recent (his own testimony about forms with [y(:)] being considered in Czech towns immediately before World War II as funny and appropriate to Polish Jews only. The latter consideration is inadequate because at that moment [y(:)] was not found in PolY: it had been unrounded to [i(:)] more than two centuries earlier. Trost also interprets the fact that in all entries of the dictionary by Tirsch () there is no mention of [y(:)] as a sign of the general absence of fronting to [y(:)] but for a few exceptional words such as “bsülo” mentioned in the introduction to the same book (see the previous footnote). This interpretation is inappropriate since, globally speaking, Tirsch provides the pronunciation based on the WHOLE HEBREW norms that were unaffected by the fronting in question. 72 This chart ignores the reflex [i:] for E valid for central Bohemia. As discussed in section .., regional equivalents are also known in both PolY and UkrY. 73 In Friedrich , the reflexes corresponding to both MHG ô and qameṣ in open syllables are regularly spelled with au; compare graus ‘big’ (MHG grôʒ ), hauch ‘high’ (MHG hôch), maure ‘fear’ (Hebrew )מֹו ָר א, and zaucher ‘merchant’ (Hebrew )סֹוֵחר. 71
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Vocalic changes
TABLE . Vowel chart of EGY Diphthongs
[aj] E
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i:] I; [i] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e:] E; [e] E
[o] O; [o:] A, [a] A; [a:] E, O, I
Diphthongs
[au] U, O
knowledge about EGY mainly comes: monophthongization [aj] > [a:] for I.74 It was followed by the lowering [ej] > [aj] for E.75 Note that both these shifts also characterize PolY. The resulting chart appears in Table ..76 Friedrich () describes his own native vernacular tongue used in East Prussia. Globally speaking, its development is similar to that of Yiddish in other parts of eastern Germany. Note that this author (pp. –) says that his dialect is also valid for all of Prussia except for the town of Halberstadt where Jews speak an idiom similar to the “Swabian” dialect of Yiddish (called SWY in this book).77 For example, in Selig () we also find [a:] for MHG ei (E) and ou (O), [au] for MHG ô and ḥ olem (O).78 The only significant difference with respect to Friedrich is the regular “ai” for the combination (pataḥ + guttural + ḥ aṭef-pataḥ )79 showing that in the subdialect described by Selig the monophthongization [aj] > [a:] for I did not take place. Before /r/ and /x/, the behavior of CzY is in many respects similar to that of PolY discussed in the previous section: (i) regular reflexes [o] for U80 and [e] for I; (ii) [a] for E before /r/ in a number of words for which all EY subdialects (including LitY) also have [a]. EGY shows reflexes identical to those of CzY before /r/. Yet, there is no evidence of any lowering before /x/.81
74 Among the examples of [a:] for I found in Friedrich are: frah ‘free’ (MHG vrî), lahb (known along with the variant leib) ‘body’ (MHG lîp); gâwe ‘arrogance’ () ַגֲּא ָוה, and masse ‘story’ ()ַמ ֲע ׂ ֶשה. 75 The orthography ei or ey regularly used by Friedrich is ambiguous: it may correspond to either /ej/ or /aj/; compare eil ‘cubit’ (MHG elle), schney ‘snow’ (MHG snê), and chein ‘grace’ (Hebrew )ֵחן. On the /aj/-reflex in eastern Germany see Lowenstein :. 76 The use by Friedrich () of the letter “i” for a few words with MHG ë should not be interpreted as a shift from [e:] to [i:] for E. The examples (also appearing in Weinreich :) are: billen ‘to bark,’ gilten ‘to be valid,’ and schilten ‘to curse’ whose MHG equivalents are bëllen, gëlten, and schëlten, respectively. Here we are dealing with [i] appearing in closed syllables and not with examples of [i:] for E found regionally in several other Yiddish varieties in open syllables. Note that the StY/LitY cognate forms of these verbs are biln, giltn, and shiltn, all with [i], while E corresponds in LitY to [e] (see Table .). This [i] may result from the influence of [i] in the third and the second present singular forms in MHG (see TS ; with references to the [i]-form of the verb ‘to bark’ found in R, MM, Pr, and ZuR). 77 Halberstadt was the largest Jewish community in Prussia during the eighteenth century and renowned as a center for Torah study and philanthropy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Encylopedia Judaica :). This particular status would make it attractive for migrations of Jews from western German communities. These migrations may explain its dialectal peculiarity noted by Friedrich. 78 See Selig :; see also Weinreich :. 79 Examples: gaiwa ‘arrogance’ ( ) ַגֲּא ָוהand taino ‘claim’ ()ַט ֲע ָנה. 80 This implies that the reflex [o] was already valid before the CzY fronting [u(:)] > [y(:)] took place. A direct corroboration of this appears in NH (): it has [or] instead of [ur], but still no trace of the fronting. Among toponymic examples are Torne and Niklsporg, the CzY names for the towns called (respectively) Turnau and Nikolsburg in German, Turnov and Mikulov in Czech. 81 For example, Friedrich gives the spellings licht ‘light’ (MHG lieht, StY likht) and tuech ‘cloth’ (MHG tuoch, StY tukh). These forms likely correspond to [lixt] and [tu:x], respectively.
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Sound changes and dialects
The development of vowels of DuY can also be most easily described following the scheme of Table .. One of the idiosyncrasies of DuY unknown in other Yiddish varieties consists in the [εj]reflex of I and [ɔu]-reflex of U instead of [aj] and [au], respectively, given in all PROTO-YIDDISH dialectal schemes.82 As a result, one could suppose that, unlike other dialects, DuY retains the value of the intermediate stage of the phonetic shift from [ej] to [aj].83 This is, however, rather unlikely. Firstly, the Ashkenazic community of the Netherlands is much more recent than, for example, those from western and southern Germany, Bohemia, or Poland. In this situation, it is implausible that the modern reflex could correspond to some archaic form unknown in other varieties. Secondly, in the Netherlands the [εj]-reflex is also valid for the Hebrew combination pataḥ + (ayin, alef, or he) + ḥ aṭef-pataḥ , whose reflexes merged with those of MHG î in the German component. Yet, there was no reason for that combination to merge with MHG î when the last one was realized as [ej] or [εj]. The merging necessarily took place when MHG î (the basis for I) had already been realized as [aj]. These factors imply that the modern DuY reflex [εj] is an innovation, most likely related to the fact that there is no phonemic contrast between [ej] and [aj] in Dutch, where only the diphthong [εj] is found.84 For the same reason, the DuY reflex of E is [εj] and not [ej]. A similar explanation fits for the merging of diphthongs ending in [u], namely a single reflex [ɔu] for both U and O (instead of former [au] and [ou], respectively). Indeed, in Dutch one finds only one diphthong of this kind, the one spelled ou. In DuY, we also find peculiarities also known in AlsY such as (i) the existence of two kinds of back mid-vowels, the open one [ɔ] for O and the closed one [o] for U;85 (ii) the lowering of I to [I] or even to [e]. Yet, these features are unlikely to be due to any influence of AlsY: one can observe that in DuY the short front and back vowels are lower than their long counterparts, a phenomenon that is not valid for AlsY.86 The vowel chart of DuY includes the elements shown in Table .. The scheme shown in Table . describing modern DuY cannot be explained taking as a starting point the scheme underlying WY (Table .) because in DuY, unlike the scheme in question and exactly as in Proto-EY (Table .) and the scheme given in Table . as underlying CzY, A merged not with E and O but with A. However, in the past the situation could have been significantly different. Indeed, as noted by Beem (:), if the modern DuY form of Hebrew TABLE . Vowel chart of DuY Diphthongs
[εj] E, I
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[e] I; [i:] I
[o] U; [u:] U
[ε] E; [e:] E
[ɔ] O; [o:] A,
Diphthongs
[ɔu] O, U
[a] A; [a:] E, O
See Tables ., ., and .. If we use the conventional terms introduced in section .., then one could say that in this dialect the Ashkenazic basic shift #c never did occur. 84 This idea is due to MRPC. In Dutch, this diphthong is spelled either ij as in tijd ‘time’ or ei as in ei ‘egg.’ 85 The fact that for DuY, Beem (:) refers to the sound [ɔ] and [o], while for AlsY Zuckerman suggests [o] and [ʊ], respectively, is of no phonemic importance. In both cases, we have a contrast between two rounded back vowels, whose articulation is mid-open/mid-close. (On the other hand, BA makes no distinction between these two kinds of /o/, for either AlsY or DuY.) 86 See Table .. 82 83
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Vocalic changes
‘ ָּכ ֵׁשרkosher’ is kōsher, the archaic one was kousher. Note also that this older variant has been
borrowed into Dutch as kousjer.87 In this word, we observe the diphthongal reflex for A that is specific to SWY. As a result, it is possible that, in its early stages, DuY followed the same development path as SWY, while the reflexes of A changed from /ou/ to /o:/ later, due to the influence of immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe and, in the case of words from the Hebrew component, following the WHOLE HEBREW rules (MRPC). Additional examples of different influences may be found in the Hebrew component. As discussed in section .., DuY follows SWY in its pronunciation of the names of the letters alef and dalet (Table .), the words meaning ‘people of the community’ (Table .) and ‘religious fast’ (Table .). Yet, the DuY form for ‘rabbi’ is similar to that of CzY/EY and not to SWY (Table .).
.. Status of proto-dialects and proto-vowels Table . in section .. enumerates what was conventionally called basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts. Since one of these shifts did not affect EY (#, started well before ), while another is unknown in WY (#, valid for the Czech lands also before ), the existence of three PROTO-YIDDISH dialects may be postulated: Proto-EY and those underlying CzY and WY. Their suggested vocalic charts are given in the same section. These charts were drawn for the period when all basic Ashkenazic shifts had already been completed. In sections ..–.., the vocalic charts of all modern Yiddish varieties have been explained, taking each time period as a starting point of one of the three proto-schemes and proposing a series of additional shifts. No doubt exists about the reality of these shifts for all varieties.88 However, to corroborate the reality of the existence of the proposed proto-dialects, all these additional shifts must be more recent than all of the basic Ashkenazic shifts of Table .. Among various processes enumerated in section .. when constructing the vocalic charts of EY subdialects, the earliest are the following: () loss of quantitative contrast in LitY; () fronting and rounding [u] > [y] for U, [u:] > [y:] for U, and [ou] > [oy] for O, in PolY and UkrY; () fronting and rounding [ou] > [øy] for O, in LitY. According to references available to us from written sources, the last change can be posited between the middle and the end of the seventeenth century. The second change took place before the end of the seventeenth century because it preceded (and maybe even provoked) the raising [o:] > [u:] for A, . Note that it was shared with CzY. Yet, in documents from Prague from the seventeenth century this process is hardly seen. Indeed, we know about a few references (some of them uncertain) in Pr and BZV, but no examples in PB, BZP, ShL, and NH. This information implies that the completion of the fronting of [u] and [u:] cannot be posited before the mid-seventeenth century. As seen from Table ., by that time all basic vocalic shifts applicable to EY had already been completed.89 87
Today’s Dutch word koosjer results from a recent renorming (MRPC). The only exceptions are EGY and DuY because for both of them no data is available about their past. The information about EGY is mainly taken from a single work: Friedrich . The detailed descriptions of DuY all date from the twentieth century only. 89 According to the available information, the pan-Yiddish unrounding of former rounded MHG vowels (basic shift #) is posited in Table . to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Yet, as discussed in section .. (feature {V}), the end of this period (seventeenth century) corresponds to WY. In Central and Eastern Europe, this process was already completed earlier than in WY. For example, for NH it was finished. Table . also posits the end of processes that yielded reflexes [aj] for I and [au] for U to the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. This long period was needed to cover all Yiddish dialects. Yet, as discussed in section .. (feature {V}), for EY these reflexes were already generalized in the sixteenth century. 88
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Sound changes and dialects
Consequently, the scheme of Proto-EY vocalism suggested in Table . may indeed describe a certain synchronous phonetic reality showing the chart of stressed vowels used around the midseventeenth century in the whole territory of EY, that is, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Of course, this description is an oversimplification. The phonetic reality was certainly more complicated. Our scheme ignores the fact that certain shifts would be ongoing. Several phonetic variants of the same phonemes—corresponding to the realizations of these phonemes before and after the changes in question—were co-existent. Their distribution certainly depended on region and maybe also on social strata. Having this nuance in mind, we can still assert that, globally speaking, after the separation of EY from Bohemian German and until approximately the mid-seventeenth century any basic Ashkenazic vocalic shift, once started in a certain region, would gradually spread to all Yiddish-speaking communities that existed in Eastern Europe. After that period, PolY and LitY had already been in many respects independent of each other. In other words, we may speak, following the LANGUAGE TREE model, about the branching of EY into these two dialects. Of the three shifts enumerated at the beginning of this paragraph as being the earliest of the changes that were not pan-EY, the first, the loss of quantitative contrast in LitY, could be the oldest. Once it had occurred, the number of phonemes in the vocalic chart of LitY decreased dramatically. For this reason, this dialect could resist the second shift, namely the fronting and rounding of /u/-vowels: this change would provoke several additional mergings of phonemes giving rise to an idiom whose understanding would be difficult for its own speakers. Yet, the tendency of fronting/rounding could be general for EY: it may represent a factor for triggering the third shift in the above list, concerning the phoneme [ou] and specific to LitY only. The considerations appearing in the previous paragraph deal with the general vocalic charts constructed for Proto-EY and modern EY subdialects. Yet, they ignore one special context: the one before /r/ and /x/. As explained in section .., the change /ur/ > /or/ in the southern and western parts of the PolY territory occurred earlier than the fronting/rounding that affected both PolY and UkrY. Since both these processes are irrelevant for LitY, no data is available to determine whether the lowering /u/ > /o/ before /r/ in parts of PolY occurred before or after the loss of the quantitative contrasts in the vocalism of LitY. If the former took place earlier then, according to the consideration of vocalic features, the first branching in EY corresponds to the split between one part of PolY and the remaining parts of EY.90 However, if the relative chronology had been opposite, then the first branching separated LitY from the dialect representing the common ancestor for PolY and UkrY.91 Yet, even in this case, the idea that an important number of vocalic shifts occurred in this hypothetical ancestor before it split into PolY and UkrY would not correspond to historical reality: the lowering of /u/ before /r/ in parts of PolY preceded these shifts. Consequently, independently of the exact scenario, all processes in UkrY shared with PolY should be formally described as waves coming from Poland to Ukraine (or vice versa). Among processes enumerated for CzY in section .., the earliest one is the fronting and rounding [u] > [y] for U, [u:] > [y:] for U, and [ou] > [oy] for O, shared by CzY with PolY and UkrY. As discussed in the previous paragraph, the end of this change should be posited after the mid-seventeenth century. At that time, the monophthongization to [a:] of phonemes corresponding to E and O (that is, basic Ashkenazic shift #c) was still ongoing. The shift #c—yielding reflexes [aj] 90 This is the general opinion of M. Weinreich (:) formulated by him on considering only the lowering before /r/ and the fronting of /u/. 91 This hypothetical common ancestor is called “Proto-Southern Yiddish” in U. Weinreich a:, Herzog :–, and Jacobs . A construction of an idealized scheme of “Proto-Southern Yiddish” vowels (such as those given by these scholars) may be instrumental in describing in a concise way the development of vocalisms of both PolY and UkrY.
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Vocalic changes
for I and [au] for U—was uncompleted also: it is more recent than shift #c. This means that the scheme in Table . cannot correspond to a synchronous phonetic reality: it ignores any fronting/ rounding but includes the results of several other more recent processes. On the other hand, the scheme in Table ., or one intermediate between those of Tables . and . (with shifts #, and maybe also #b/# completed, but not #c and #c) may indeed describe in a realistic way the vocalic chart valid circa mid-seventeenth century for the common ancestor of CzY and ECG that can be conventionally called Proto-CzY.92 It is unlikely to be valid for older stages of DuY.93 Among processes enumerated for WY in section .., the earliest one seems to be the diphthongization from [o:] to [ou] for A. Though the earliest references to it have been known from the first half of the sixteenth century, regular mentions of the diphthongized forms are found in the eighteenth century only. At that time, exactly as discussed in the previous paragraph for CzY, several basic Ashkenazic shifts, namely #c and #c, had not been completed yet. All other basic shifts (including the most recent of them, namely the unrounding of rounded MHG vowels, #) had already taken place. As a result, Table . is unlikely to depict a synchronous phonetic reality: it ignores the diphthongization in question but includes results of more recent processes such as #c and #c. The scheme in Table ., or one intermediate between those of Tables . and . (with shifts #, and maybe also # completed, but not #c and #c) can roughly depict the vocalic charts valid at the end of the seventeenth century for the whole territory of WY. Table . is in addition a better candidate for representing a pan-WY scheme than Table . for several additional reasons indicated at the end of section .., namely a particular development of MHG öu in SwY and the idiom of PuV. Globally speaking, this “Proto-WY” chart is much more idealized than those suggested in the two previous paragraphs for Proto-EY and Proto-Cz. Indeed, in western German-speaking territories, certain changes became valid in various regions with a difference of several centuries. The diphthongization of MHG î and û (shift #a) provides an example that is particularly eloquent. In the Frankfurt area, it became valid only during the sixteenth century, for both Jews and non-Jews. In the Nürnberg area, the diphthongized forms had already existed since, at least, the beginning of the fourteenth century. As discussed in section ., globally speaking, for western Ashkenazic communities we cannot observe any linguistic unity before the sixteenth century. Their idioms were similar to those used by local Christians, with fundamental differences (in both vocalism and consonantism) between Central and Upper German dialects and even among certain subdialects of these two major subdivisions of High German. In this context, any scheme for “Proto-WY” can be no more than an idealization. It would be inadequate to state that (i) there was a moment in the history of local communities when for all of them the vocalic chart was the same, and (ii) this common Jewish idiom branched into WY subdialects during the following period. Such an approach corresponding to a classical LANGUAGE TREE model may be roughly applied for dialects derived from Proto-EY and Proto-CzY. For WY, it is appropriate only on a very limited scale and may be related to certain migrational movements inside of the WY territory. Yet, nothing in the history of Jewish settlement indicates that the Jewish communities in the whole area in question are principally due to migrants from East Franconia. For this reason, it is much more worthwhile to consider that during the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries the vocalism of various western Jewish idioms underwent gradual changes making adaptations to some forms of speech that were considered more “correct” and/or more prestigious. This (unconscious) renorming represents a major factor for creating a situation in which, in retrospective, vocalic charts of WY subdialects look as if they were derived from some proto-chart. For this reason, the use of the theoretical idealized “reconstructed” schemes like those
92 93
At that time, this general chart was not necessarily valid before /r/. See section ...
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Sound changes and dialects « Proto-WY »
Time
Modern WY varieties
FIGURE . Development of WY vocalism
shown in Tables .–. may be instrumental in explaining global trends in the development of vowels in various modern WY subdialects. Figure . illustrates these considerations. Its vertical axis corresponds to time, while the width of the figure shows, for any given moment, the degree of variation in vocalism of WY. One can distinguish two periods. During the first, this variation, which was wide in the Middle Ages, diminishes: it is the process of renorming. During the second, the variation increases: this is the process of the development of vocalisms of modern WY dialects that look as if they were all derived from one “Proto-WY.” This “Proto-WY” vocalism shows close similarities with East Franconian only. Yet, this resemblance may be also partly superficial: note that East Franconian is often seen as intermediate between Upper German and Central German, creating some sort of synthesis of various processes that originated in areas situated west, south, or north of it. We cannot a priori exclude the possibility of WY creating a synthesis of its own whose results are in many respects similar to those obtained in East Franconian. As may be seen from this discussion, a number of identical phonetic shifts took place in several Yiddish varieties at that time when these varieties would already have distinct vocalic charts. Consequently, these changes cannot be assigned to some proto-dialects representing ancestors common to these dialects. A number of examples are enumerated in Table .. Some of the changes in Table . could occur in different dialects independently of each other. For example, this is almost certainly the case of the shift from [u:] to [y:] for U in AlsY, under the influence of local German but independently of a similar shift in CzY and PolY. Similarly, as explained in section .., most likely the same shift #c in CzY and WY underwent under the influence of similar processes in their respective coterritorial German dialects rather than under (or, in addition to) the influence of each other. It is not out of the question that the change from [ou] to [au] for O in EGY and WphY could represent independent adaptations to the vocalic charts of local German dialects rather than the results of the same phonetic process internal to Jewish communities. The loss of quantitative contrasts in UkrY is also not necessarily directly related to the same effect in LitY. The influence of the phonology of Ukrainian could be another factor. Nevertheless, numerous
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Vocalic changes
TABLE . Vocalic changes shared by several Yiddish varieties Change
Yiddish varieties
Situation when it occurred
Monophthongization of reflexes of MHG ei and ou (basic shift #c) and the [a]-reflex for the first element of the diphthong corresponding to MHG î and û (basic shift #c)
All except for EY
These varieties had already branched into several WY subdialects, CzY, and EGY
Numerous shifts
PolY and UkrY
Reflexes of the original /ur/ were already different in these two EY subdialects
Fronting/rounding of U, U, and the first element of the diphthong [ou] for O, raising of A, from [o:] to [u:]; raising of several vowels before /r/ and /x/
CzY and PolY (The change from [u:] to [y:] for U, also characterizes AlsY.)
At least the realizations of E and O in these two idioms were already different
Loss of quantitative contrasts
LitY and UkrY
UkrY was already characterized by a series of shifts unknown in LitY
Shift from [au] to [ou] for U
EY outside of Courland
After [ou] for O, shifted to [oy] in PolY and to [øy] in LitY
Monophthongization from [aj] to [a:] for I
PolY and EGY
Realizations of E and O were distinct in these varieties
Shift from [ou] to [au] for O
EGY and WphY
A and O merged already in WphY, but not in EGY.
Diphthongization of E and O (basic shift #); raisings [ε:] > [e:] for E and [ɔ:] > [o:] for A (basic shifts #)
Pan-Yiddish
At least three Yiddish varieties were already extant: WY, CzY, and EY
Unrounding of several rounded MHG vowels (basic shift #)
Pan-Yiddish
In WY, only during the th century when WY, CzY, and EY were already all three (partly) separated from each other
changes enumerated in the aforementioned list occurred in Yiddish varieties spoken in adjacent territories. Moreover, many of them are unknown in local German dialects, or they occurred (as is the case of LitY and UkrY) in areas with no significant German-speaking population. We may assume that these changes correspond to waves that, once started in one region, gradually reached areas where Jewish communities would be speaking another Yiddish dialect. Because of the existence of such phenomena, it was possible to construct vocalic charts—such as those in Table . (common to CzY, EGY, and DuY) and Table . (for all of WY)—which actually never corresponded to any
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Sound changes and dialects
TABLE . Vowel chart underlying Yiddish Diphthongs
[ej] ei;[ou] ou;[øu] öu
Front vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[i] short i;[i:] ie and lengthened i;[y] short ü;[y:] üe and lengthened ü;[I:] î;[Y:] iu;
[u] short u;[u:] uo and lengthened u;[U:] û;
[e] short e;[e:] ê and lengthened e;[ø] short ö;[ø:] œ and lengthened ö;
[o] short o;[o:] ô and lengthened o;
[ε] short ë and ä;[ε:] æ, lengthened ë and ä
[ɔ] – ;[ɔ:] â [a] short a;[a:] lengthened a
synchronous phonetic reality but still could be instrumental in describing in a concise way the major features of the development of all affected dialects. A chart that would be valid as an ancestor of all Yiddish varieties should be posited before shift #, and therefore before . By that time, of all the basic Ashkenazic shifts listed in Table . only #, #, #, and # seem to be already completed everywhere. Application of these four shifts to the classical scheme of MHG vowels (Table .) yields the chart shown in Table .. In Table ., three long vowels are conventionally designated as [I:], [Y:]; and [U:]. Their qualities were close (but not identical) to those appearing in the same table as [i:], [y:], and [u:], respectively. In every one of the three pairs in question, we cannot be sure which one of two vowels was more open, the one designated here with a lower-case letter, or the one given as the corresponding upper-case letter. For Central German, the existence of pairs of this kind is beyond doubt. Indeed, in this dialect the monophthongization of MHG ie and uo (shift #) clearly took place before the diphthongization of MHG î, iu, and û (shift #a). Yet, there was no merging either between the reflexes of MHG ie and î or between those of MHG uo and û. As a result, the monophthongized realizations of MHG ie and uo underwent no diphthongization. No data in our possession formally precludes the idea that during the fifteenth century the vocalic chart of the idiom spoken by Jews in Frankfurt was in many respects similar to that of Table .. As mentioned above, shift #a was completed in that area only during the sixteenth century. However, in numerous other Jewish communities the process in question ended long ago. From the analysis of H, a Jewish document that was most likely compiled circa in the Czech lands, we know that in certain communities of Central Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, the process of the diphthongization to [a:] of the reflexes of MHG ei and ou (shift #c) was already well under way. Consequently, in these communities the corresponding phonemes had no longer been pronounced as [ej] and [ou] for a long time. As a result, a scheme close to that of Table . could not be valid for these Jews after, at least, the mid-fifteenth century. At that time, as can be seen from several early Ashkenazic sources compiled in the Upper German territories, another important feature of Table ., namely the monophthongization of MHG ie and uo (shift #) was not valid yet. Also, as explained in detail earlier, “Proto-WY” is by itself an idealization. Consequently, any attempt to construct a “PROTOYIDDISH” scheme synchronically valid for one precise period for all Ashkenazic communities will simply bring us to the classical vocalic scheme of MHG (Table .). To avoid this, one could be tempted to postulate that before the sixteenth century many Ashkenazic communities would be speaking idioms that were not from the same lineage as Yiddish, while only in some specific areas
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were Jews speaking a language whose vocalic chart (for example, somewhat similar to that of Table .) can be called “PROTO-YIDDISH.” This ad hoc approach is, however, not judicious. On the one hand, a scheme like that in Table . has nothing specifically Jewish. On the other hand, “ PROTO-YIDDISH” vocalism would represent a theoretical construction much more artificial even than “Proto-WY,” a kind of definition rather than a scheme corroborated by factual information available to us. We must conclude that any attempt to construct a vocalic system unifying Proto-EY (Tables .–.), Proto-CzY (Tables .–.), and/or “Proto-WY” (Tables .–.) is not worthwhile: it cannot be fruitful. The biggest obstacles to constructing a “PROTO-YIDDISH” vocalic chart correspond to the reflexes of the following two groups of MHG vowels: (i) î, iu, û, and (ii) ei, öu, ou. In the history of idioms spoken by Jews, the first group underwent diphthongization and additional qualitative changes that followed it (shifts #), while the second one is characterized by certain qualitative changes ending up (outside of EY) in the monophthongization to [a:] (shifts #). The geographic/dialectal peculiarities concerning the exact changes as well as their chronology are particularly striking. According to the conventional designations proposed by Max Weinreich, the MHG vowels in question all correspond to Yiddish “proto-vowels” with the subscript : I (î and iu), U (û), E (ei, öu), and O (ou). It is clear that the upper-case letters chosen for what he called “Yiddish proto-diphthongs” are all directly based on the designations of the corresponding MHG non-rounded vowels. For other MHG vowels, the development in various Yiddish communities was significantly less heterogenous. The reflexes suggested for them in Table . may indeed be considered as (idealized) values of the corresponding proto-vowels valid for all modern Yiddish varieties. If we exclude from Table . the reflexes of MHG î, iu, û, ei, öu, and ou, and replace the remaining MHG vowels with the Yiddish proto-vowels that correspond to them,94 we obtain the scheme shown in Table .. The scheme in Table . is entirely equivalent to that of Table . (section ..), which in contrast to Table . uses designations for MHG vowels and not those for Yiddish proto-vowels. As already explained, in theory, Tables . and . may be depicting a kind of synchronous phonetic reality valid at some moment for all Yiddish varieties. It is evident that from the point of view of practical usefulness, the former is significantly better than the latter. Table . includes nine times TABLE . Monophthongs underlying Yiddish (Stage ) Front rounded vowels
Front non-rounded vowels
Central vowels
Back vowels
[y] part of I; [y:] part of I
[i] part of I; [i:] part of I
[u] U; [u:] U
[ø] part of E; [ø:] part of E
[e] part of E; [e:] part of E
[o] O; [o:] O
[ε] part of E; [ε:] E
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A [a] A; [a:] A
94 They were taken from Table with one global change carried out: for all vowels except for A, the subscripts and were put together as one single subscript . This modification was done because, globally speaking, for the history of Yiddish vocalism there is little need to distinguish, as did Weinreich, E from E, I from I, O from O, and U from U (see section ..). Distinctions between E and E, as well as between O and O may be of some use only when discussing certain phonetic nuances of words borrowed by Yiddish in the Middle Ages from Slavic languages (see section .) and, to a significantly lesser extent, for Yiddish Romanisms (see section .).
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Sound changes and dialects TABLE . Monophthongs underlying Yiddish (Stage ) Front
Central
Back
[i] I; [i:] I
[u] U; [u:] U
[e] E; [e:] E
[o] O; [o:] O
[ε] –; [ε:] E
[ɔ] –; [ɔ:] A [a] A; [a:] A
the ambiguous expression “part of” whose understanding remains obscure without using an additional table of correspondences to the MHG vowels concerned (Table .). Table . indicates these MHG vowels explicitly. If to the scheme corresponding to Table . and Table . we add two additional basic Ashkenazic shifts, namely # (unrounding of front rounded vowels) and # (raising from [ε] for [e]), we will obtain Table .. The scheme shown in Table . is identical to that of Table . (section ..), but for one detail. Instead of the designations E, , I, , O, , and U, in Table ., Table . uses E, I, O, and U,respectively. The designations appearing in Table . better reveal pan-Yiddish mergers and contrasts than those of Table .. In Table ., the usefulness of designations introduced by Weinreich is particularly apparent. It presents in a compact way a global chart from which the development of the stressed vocalism of all modern Yiddish varieties (except for four phonemes with the subscript ignored in this table) may be explained. Moreover, the same scheme allows us to easily explain changes between vowels given in base forms and those appearing in words derived from them after the application of the functional umlaut, typically diminutives or plurals. These rules appear in Table ..95 They are of particular interest for words of non-German origin revealing their phonetic past.96 From Table ., we can see that several aspects of conventional designations introduced by Weinreich for Yiddish proto-vowels are attractive: . The first character roughly characterizes the quality. As a result, A, E, I, O, and U have been chosen by him as corresponding to the [a]-, [e]-, [i]-, [o]-, and [u]-qualities, respectively. . The subscript serves to indicate the quantity: vowels with the subscripts and correspond to short and long vowels, respectively. Only three proto-vowels do not follow the above rules: A, A, and E. As seen in Table ., if we follow Weinreich’s two general ideas concerning these designations, but not his desire to keep the first character related to the MHG vowel to which it corresponds (which actually contradicts his first rule), it would be more appropriate to call these proto-phonemes ɔ, A, and ε, respectively. It is not a coincidence that Weinreich’s A and E have subscripts that are actually not needed for other
They were stated by Weinreich: the first two columns in Table . (as well as a few examples from the fourth column) are taken from WG :. 96 For words from the German component, the links in question are well known for the corresponding MHG vowels. The same is true for two other rules indicated in WG :: umlaut-forms for U and O are I and E, respectively. For these vowels definite examples exist only in the German component. 95
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TABLE . Proto-monophthongs and umlaut Vowel in base form
Vowel after the umlaut
StY example: base form ‘meaning’ – diminutive (or plural)97 German component
Hebrew component
A
E
bank ‘bench’ – benkl
pshat ‘sense’ – pshetl
O
E
kop ‘head’ – kepl
kol ‘voice’ – keler
A and A
E
hon ‘cock’ – hendl
rov ‘rabbi’ – revl
O
E
broyt ‘bread’ – breytl
U
I
hunt ‘dog’ – hintl
U
I
zun ‘son’ – zindl
Slavic component
sod ‘orchard’ – sedl koysh ‘basket’ – keyshl
Yude ‘Judah’ – Yidl
qualities. This fact reveals that these phonemes were designated by him in a way that makes their use non-intuitive. Unlike Table ., Table . cannot depict any synchronous phonetic reality that would be pan-Yiddish. For Proto-CzY, it is not synchronically applicable at all. Indeed, here the reflex [a:] for A (absence of shift #a) could be valid only before . Yet, at that time the unrounding (shift #) had not yet been completed. For Proto-EY, it was clearly inapplicable after the midsixteenth century when the reflexes of O and E (shift #) became diphthongized. But even for the preceding period, its application is highly questionable because for EY we do not know the relative chronology of shifts # and #a. If the former took place after the latter, then Table . cannot depict any synchronous Proto-EY chart either. For “Proto-WY,” it cannot be valid before the seventeenth century when the completion of shift # took place. Despite this, Table . is still quite useful. It is instrumental in describing in a concise way the development of large portions of the vocalic systems of different Yiddish varieties. Its importance also lies in the fact that it allows us to cover the process of fusion of the vocalic systems within both the German and the Hebrew components. Elements that do not allow us to consider this scheme to provide a realistic synchronous chart for the totality of “PROTO-YIDDISH” stressed vowels are: unrounding (shift #) and development of diphthongs (shifts # and #). Note that none of them affects Hebrew vowels.98 For long vowels, it presents seven qualities that are exactly the same as those found in the TIBERIAN system of the pronunciation of Hebrew. For this reason, schemes equivalent to it (Tables .–.) were important for an understanding of the inception of new Ashkenazic norms of Hebrew pronunciation.99 The usefulness of introducing simple schemes of proto-vowels instrumental in explaining the development of the stressed vocalism in Yiddish varieties has been recognized by numerous
The plural forms appear only for kol ‘voice.’ For all other words, Table . presents diminutives. Except for I, with reflexes of certain Hebrew combinations that merged with the reflexes of MHG î. Yet, this merging is relatively recent (see feature {v} in section ..). 99 See section .. and especially Tables . and .. 97 98
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scholars who have worked in the domain of Yiddish studies. Max Weinreich (b) created the first theoretical scheme of Yiddish proto-vowels and suggested extensive lists of exceptions to basic rules he postulated in his scheme. Actually, he was not the first to speak about proto-vowels. The first totally conventional designations (numbers) for these proto-vowels were suggested by his son, Uriel Weinreich (a). Herzog () proposed a new system of designation, a compromise between those by U. and M. Weinreich. He takes the system of the former as a basis and replaces its first letters with numbers: , , , , and instead of A, E, I, O, and U, respectively. Both U. Weinreich and Herzog also provided the first derivational schemes for modern EY dialects (in many aspects similar to those appearing in section ..). Katz fixes a number of issues in Weinreich’s scheme of proto-vowels (assignment of long Hebrew vowels to the subscript rather as was thought by Weinreich and eventual elimination of the subscript for all proto-vowels except for A). He also introduces the idea that in closed syllables, Hebrew vowels had become short already in the preAshkenazic period. Jacobs () completes this theory with an important hypothesis about the pre-Ashkenazic character of the lengthening of Hebrew vowels in open syllables. He does not suggest any changes in designations of Yiddish proto-vowels: he always uses those introduced by Herzog. Yet, in his paper he proposes exact reflexes for proto-vowels that are quite close to those appearing in Table .. Bin-Nun (BN) gives similar reflexes though often he does not distinguish explicitly between general rules and exceptions. Table . presents a synthesis of views of these scholars.
TABLE . Designations and values of Yiddish proto-vowels Conventional designations
Mixed designations
Phonetic designations/values
U. Weinreich (a:–)
Herzog (:)
M.Weinreich (WG :–)
Bin-Nun (BN –)
Jacobs (:, )
This book
,
A
a
a
a
-
A
-
-
a:
A
ǫ̂
å: or ɔ:
ɔ:
O
o
o
o
O,
ôu
o:
o:
U
u
u
u
U,
û
u:
u:
E
ę̂
æ: or ε:
ε:
E
e
e
e
E,
êi
e:
e:
I
i
i
i
I,
î
i:
i:
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As seen in Table ., there is no substantial difference between the suggested phonetic values and those used by Bin-Nun and Jacobs except for the fact that neither of these scholars mentions any equivalent for M. Weinreich’s A.100 As already discussed, Table . does not include four phonemes, those considered by M. Weinreich as Yiddish “proto-diphthongs”: E, I, O, and U.101 Herzog and Jacobs who follow him also refer to proto-diphthongs common to WY and EY. They posit [uu] and [ij] for U and I, respectively. These reflexes seem to point to the period of MHG because they make us immediately think of MHG û and î, respectively. The diphthongs in question are limited to the German component. However, we do not find any mention of [uu] or [ij] in the history of German dialects. This can mean either that in Herzog’s and Jacobs’s opinion, Jews created these sounds themselves or that the approach of these authors to the phonology of “PROTO-YIDDISH” is in terms of correspondences rather than derivation. Globally speaking, their considerations are unattractive. Designations with the subscript suggested by Weinreich describe heuristic diaphonemes, useful for finding correspondences in various dialects even if within Yiddish varieties their realizations were already different during their respective proto-periods. As can be seen from the tables appearing in sections .. and ..–.., the corresponding phonemes went (at least partially) through the following chains: () both E and I: [ej] > [εj] > [aj] (> [a:]); () both O and U: [ou] > [ɔu] > [au] (> [a:]). A fundamental difference between EY and non-EY dialects consists in the relative position of the two phonemes inside of these chains. The first chain provides the most explicit example. In EY, the reflexes of E are always less advanced within this chain than those of I. In LitY, the reflexes of E and I are [ej] and [aj], respectively. In PolY, another subdialect of EY, the realizations eventually reached the extreme right end of the chain: [aj] for E and [a:] for I. Yet, in CzY and WY the tendency is the opposite: in the chain in question, the reflexes of I are always situated left to those of E. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one observes [aj] for I and [a:] for E. Circa , H has [ej] (or [εj]?) for I and [aj]/[a:] for E. In these conditions, the introduction of specific designations with the subscript common to EY and WY is purely mnemonic. These designations have no explanatory role.
.
CONSONANTAL CHANGES
The historical analysis of consonantal changes in Yiddish varieties has to be totally different from that of the vocalism of these idioms. We can suggest neither “basic Ashkenazic consonantal shifts,” nor a general (even idealized) scheme of Yiddish proto-consonants. This is due to several factors, some of which are external and others internal to Ashkenazic communities. The external factors are determined by the particularities of the development in High German dialects of consonants in comparison to vowels. In the territories in question, numerous vocalic changes occurred during the High Middle Ages and especially Late Middle Ages when populous Jewish communities existed there. These changes affected all long vowels and diphthongs, as well a portion of short vowels. Some of them were so fundamental that in German historical linguistics they serve as criteria for distinguishing between the MHG and NHG periods. It is mainly for this global
100
Jacobs considers EY only. For this reason, he does not need to discuss A. U. Weinreich (a:–) designates them by the numbers (also used for E), /, (also used for O), and , respectively. 101
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reason that it is possible to speak about “basic Ashkenazic vocalic shifts”: actually very few of these shifts are known in Yiddish only. Yet, the consonantal process called HIGH GERMAN (or SECOND GERMANIC) CONSONANT SHIFT, serving in Germanistics as the formal criterion for distinguishing between Upper and Central German subdivisions of High German, took place much earlier, mainly during the First Millennium CE. Details concerning its exact results are also used to distinguish between the subdialects of Upper and Central German. Because of its old age, we do not find any influence of these changes on non-German elements in Yiddish. For example, in the Hebrew component no example is known for the following shifts: (i) from [p] to [pf] or [f], (ii) intervocalic [k] to [x], and (iii) initial [t] to [ts].102 For the same reason, the initial consonant in words cognate with StY plankhenen ‘to lament’ remained [p] in all Yiddish varieties. When this word appeared in the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews living in the Upper German territory, the shift from [p] to [pf] was no longer operational there. Certainly, a number of additional consonantal changes occurred in High German dialects during the High and Late Middle Ages too. Yet, their impact on the development of dialects was significantly smaller than that of the vocalic shifts of the same period or the HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT. Often, they affected specific contexts. For Jews, some of these changes took place before the fusion of the German and Hebrew phonetic systems. As a result, they had no influence on the pronunciation of Hebrew words governed by WHOLE HEBREW norms.103 A number of more recent changes took place in contexts that are unknown in the Hebrew component. Moreover, in contrast to vowels, numerous German consonants or their combinations underwent no changes at all. Another group of factors are internal to Jews. In the domain of stressed vocalism, from at least the end of the Middle Ages Jewish speech has often been different from that of coterritorial German Christians. Autonomy—at least partial, concerning certain specific aspects or some particular Yiddish varieties—of Jewish vocalic developments is apparent in a number of basic Ashkenazic shifts: from # to #. Moreover, regional changes that occurred after the mid-seventeenth century and have been described in sections ..–.. are almost all specifically Jewish. Nothing similar can be said about consonantism. In this domain Jewish particularities of Yiddish dialects of Western and Central Europe in comparison to the behavior of local German dialects are rather limited. The number of internal Yiddish innovations is small and many of them can be seen as minor. As discussed in section .., for a number of major characteristics the consonantantism of idioms used in western Ashkenazic communities has always been different from that of communities living in Bohemia, Moravia, or Poland. Unlike vowels, we rarely find examples of identical consonantal shifts taking place in several Yiddish varieties at the time when these varieties were already having system-level differences between them. For all these reasons, there is no sense in speaking about pan-Yiddish proto-consonants. Any mention of this kind will necessarily be totally artificial. In the history of Hebrew pronunciation, we know about the existence of three major vocalic systems: PALESTINIAN, TIBERIAN, and BABYLONIAN. The passage from a system akin to the first one to a system similar to the second was crucial in the development of the vocalism of the Hebrew component and the fusion of the vocalic charts of the German and the Hebrew components. This fusion was fundamental for the development of Yiddish varieties as idioms having, on the one hand, close links with each other, and, on the other hand, being separate from all contemporary German dialects. Nothing similar can be said about consonants. For a large number of them, the pronunciation in various Jewish communities is close or even identical. Only a few sounds characteristic of medieval Ashkenazic Hebrew had no direct equivalents in their vernacular German-based idiom See the discussion of these shifts in section ... For example, we do not find traces of change from [d] to [t] in the initial or internal position in the area of WCG (see feature {C} in section ..). 102 103
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(interdental reflexes for tav and daleth, affricate /dž/ for double yod),104 but by the end of the Middle Ages, their pronunciation became stabilized following the pan-Ashkenazic norms elaborated on the basis of phonemes extant in the German component. These norms became fixed in the WHOLE HEBREW pronunciation and from that period on we observe very little variation (in comparison to vowels) in the reflexes of the same Hebrew consonants in different Yiddish dialects. As explained earlier, traces of various consonantal shifts in the German component are rarely found in other components. Changes of the initial sound from [b] to [p] and from [d] to [t] influenced by vocalic charts of Bavarian and neighboring German dialects105 are among the oldest. Among the examples are several female given names of Romance origin: (i) *Pel(e)te ( פעלטא) along with ( בעלטא), both in Nürnberg, from Belette, its hypocoristic form Peltlin (Austria, s); (ii) *Ponefile פונפילאalong with בונפיליא, both in in East Franconian territories, from Bonefilie; and (iii) Toltse from Doltse.106 In civil records from nineteenth-century Poland, we find references to hundreds of bearers of female Yiddish hypocorisms derived from Old Czech Dušana, either with the initial [d] (Dishke, Dishe, and Dishle) or [t] (Tishle, Tishe, and Tishke).107 Most likely, forms with [d] were brought to Poland earlier than those with [t].108 A few examples are also found in the Hebrew component and, more precisely, in hypocorisms of biblical names: (i) טבורלאand טבערליין, both cited in western Ashkenazic rabbinical treatises of the seventeenth century, from Deborah (( ;)ְּד בֹו ָרהii) StY Tevl from David ( ;)ָּד ִודand (iii) StY Pesl from Bathsheba (ֶׁשַבעaַּב תa).109 For the first of these three names, we find no reference with /t/ in Eastern Europe. Yet, the two others were both common in EY. Their initial consonants survived despite the fact that they do not conform to the biblical spelling of their full forms. This absence of renorming to /d/ and /b/, respectively, could be due to a loss of an etymological link between these hypocorisms and their biblical etymons.110 In a work by Menahem Oldendorf (, northern Italy) we find the spelling ֵניװאךfor a word of Old Czech origin cognate with StY interjection nebekh ‘poor thing!’ It reveals the shift from the original stop [b] to a fricative consonant characteristic of a large part of the High German area.111 The medieval change from [ht] to [xt], valid for all High German dialects except for Ripuarian, was important for the phonetics of the pan-Yiddish verb shekht(e)(n) ‘to slaughter’ that appeared in the area of BNEY HES for whom heth was pronounced as [h].112 It remains unclear whether the introduction of /n/ between /j/ and /s/ or /š/ in a group of words of German origin played any role in the inception of a series of nasalisized forms in the Hebrew component.113 The opposition ich-laut ~ ach-laut known in the German component of SWY, DuY, and EGY affected other components too. As a result, in these Yiddish varieties after the front vowels or consonants we find [ç] or [š] instead of [x] specific to EY and CzY.114 Among the examples are 105 See sections .. and ... See features {C, C} in section ... Forms with /t/ have been known from the fourteenth century onward; compare StY Toltse. 107 They appear in Polish spelling as Dyszka, Dysza, Dyszla, Tyszla, Tysza, and Tyszka, respectively. 108 Note that all references to the full form on Jewish tombstones from Central Europe (earliest from the Berlin area, fourteenth century) start in daleth. Yet, in Austrian Christian documents from the second half of the fifteenth century we find references to Tuschana, Tuschel, and Tischel. In Prague from the sixteenth century onward we also find only hypocoristic forms Tishl(e), starting in “T” in Christian sources and teth in the Jewish ones. 109 Among the names of Jewish victims of Rindfleisch (, southern Germany), we find eight references to forms related to this name, all with the initial pe ()פעסלין. 110 The derivation of Tevl from David ( )ָּד ִו דrather than Tobias ( )טֹוִב ָיהis beyond question. Indeed, Teyvl is the PolY equivalent to LitY Tevl. Consequently, the root vowel in this given name corresponds to E. Yet, E in diminutive umlaut-forms results from A in the basic form (see Table . in section ..). This A is corroborated by qameṣ appearing in the stressed syllable of the Hebrew spelling of David, but does not conform to ḥ olem found in Tobias. 111 See feature {C} in section ... On this and other WY references to this Yiddish word see section .. 112 See sections .. (feature {C}, German change) and .. (feature {v}). 113 See sections .. (feature {C}, German change) and .. (feature {v}). 114 See sections .., feature {C}. 104 106
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Sound changes and dialects
phonetic variants of StY nebekh ‘poor thing!,’ shidekh (‘ ) ׁ ִשּד וְּךmatch, marriage,’ and shatkhn ‘matchmaker’ ()ַׁשְּד ָכן, both from the Hebrew component.115 A specific development of MHG v, f, and w exerted a particularly strong influence on Jewish linguistic elements of non-German origin. It represented an important factor for the /f/-realization of Hebrew vav and veth in medieval Ashkenazic communities that survived in SWY. MHG v in the initial position gave rise to pan-Yiddish [f], while in the intervocalic position it became realized as [f] in SWY, [v] in CzY, EGY, and EY, and [b] (derived from former [v]) in DuY.116 This distribution may explain the dialectal forms of the male given name ultimately derived from Latin Vivus (StY Fayvush). In western Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it appears as Vifes, Fifus, Feyfus, or Feyfis. Its hypocoristic form Fayfel (that is, with exactly the same internal devoicing as in words of Hebrew origin) was used in AlsY (Zivy :). In Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century onward this given name invariably appears with initial [f] and internal voiced [v] (or even [b]). Also note the spelling Slafa (Erfurt, ) for a female given name derived from Old Czech sláva ‘glory.’ The absence of initial [s] in German (and, therefore, in the German component of Yiddish) influenced the inception of the affricate reflex [ts] for the original [s] in certain words and names from other components. For elements of Hebrew origin, this effect is common in CzY and EGY and by no means rare in WY. Yet, in EY we find examples only in given names.117 The only Slavic example also has to do with a given name derived from Old Czech sláva; compare Zlawa (Christian source from Austria, ) and EY variants Tslove (LitY) and Tslūve (PolY). A consideration of the historical development of Yiddish consontantism reveals the existence of a few other cases in which a process once started in one Yiddish variety gradually penetrated other varieties making their behavior distinct from that of local German dialects. These are enumerated in Table .. The phenomena given in Table . are of particular interest because they are rarely found in High German dialects. As a result, the fact they are shared by a group of the same Yiddish dialects cannot be due to independent factors. We can be sure we are dealing with mutual influences between these dialects. In theory, we cannot rule out the possibility that for at least some of these processes their inception is due to factors internal to Jewish communities. However, even in cases of internal phenomena, the existence of external stimuli is always of paramount importance. Two kinds of external sources may be relevant here. The first corresponds to coterritorial German dialects. From the last column in Table ., it can be easily seen that the Silesian dialect—spoken by German colonists in medieval Polish towns—is the only German dialect that can be treated as coterritorial for all changes except for the last one. Moreover, Silesian may, in principle, be the source (or, at least, a source) for all of them.118 The second external source is related to Slavic languages in which there were no such sounds as [pf] or [w] and a clear distinction existed between voiced and voiceless consonants. Of all Yiddish varieties listed in the third column of Table . only for EY do we find coterritorial Slavic languages that exerted an important influence on local Yiddish. Taking into account the facts that of all EY subdialects only PolY 115 See maps GGA , BA , and LCA . The DuY form for ‘matchmaker’ was shadyen (Beem :, LCA ), shadshen (BA ), and shadkhen (LCA ). If the first two variants are colloquial, the last one is due to the WHOLE HEBREW norms. 116 See sections .. (feature {C}, German phenomenon) and .. (Hebrew). 117 See section .., feature {c}. 118 In theory, for two effects listed in Table ., those related to features {C} and {C}, DuY could be influenced by Dutch as well as by Ripuarian and Low German. However, this is implausible. Note that the same influence cannot be valid for the other phenomena appearing in the same table. Moreover, globally speaking, we do not find any particular affinity between the consonants of DuY and those of the aforementioned idioms.
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Consonantal changes
TABLE . Internal Yiddish diffusion of consonantal phenomena Reflexes
Feature
Yiddish varieties affected
German dialects with similar reflexes
[f] for initial MHG pf
{C} section ..
EY, CzY, DuY
ECG
Contrast between k, t, p and g, d, b, respectively
{C} section ..
EY, CzY, EGY, DuY
Silesian, Ripuarian
Initial /p/ instead of /b/
{C, C} section ..
EY, CzY, EGY, DuY
Silesian, Bavarian, Bohemian (?)
Plosive reflexes for intervocalic MHG b
{C} section ..
EY, CzY, EGY, DuY
Silesian, Swabian, High Alemannic, South Bavarian
Voiced reflexes for intervocalic MHG v
{C} section ..
EY, CzY, EGY, DuY
Silesian, Ripuarian
Internal /p/ instead of /b/ in words meaning ‘navel,’ ‘fog,’ and ‘fork’
{C} section ..
CzY, EY
Bavarian
(i) has always had close links with CzY119 and (ii) corresponds to territories neighboring those of CzY and EGY, we must conclude that Polish is the only Slavic language whose impact could be of some importance. As a result, according to both possible external sources, German and Slavic, we must posit EY, and more precisely, its subdialect spoken in Poland, as the area where the first five consonantal changes listed in this table started.120 The last change could start in CzY: we have no information about the exact reflexes of the words in question in Bohemian German; yet, we know that Bavarian exerted an important influence on it. Note that for all phenomena enumerated in Table ., the behavior of SWY is different from that of other Yiddish varieties and similar to that of coterritorial western German dialects. Table . presents information concerning innovations shared by several Yiddish dialects.121 Those shown in the last two lines are surface-level because they affect a few particular words. The negative prefix um- is partly known in AlsY too. However, it is not found in other SWY subdialects, as well as in DuY and EGY, and, moreover, is unknown before the seventeenth century. Main results of the regular change from [s], [š], and [z] (after [n] or [l]) to affricates [ts], [tš], and [dz], respectively, are found in the German component and also, most likely, in the StY verb bentshn, of
For example, see the analysis of vocalic shifts in sections .., .., and ... Since the changes in question took place in CzY after the mid-seventeenth century, at least some of them can, in theory, also be influenced by changes that occurred during the same period under the influence of ECG (and, more precisely, Silesian) in the German colonial dialect spoken by Christians in the Czech lands. For example, Mitzka (:–) indicates the existence (especially after the Thirty Years’ War of –) of changes of this kind for several of the most important towns of Moravia: Brünn (Czech Brno), Olmütz (Olomouc), and Iglau (Ihlava). 121 All features mentioned in this table are discussed in section ... 119 120
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Sound changes and dialects
TABLE . Yiddish consonantal innovations Reflexes
Feature
Yiddish varieties affected
Negative prefix um- instead of un-
{C}
CzY, EY, and (partly) AlsY
Affricates [ts], [tš], and [dz] after /l/ and /n/
{C}
CzY, EY
Diminutive suffix -dl (instead of -l) if the stem ends in /n/
{C}
CzY, EY
Voicing /s/ > /z/ in StY verbs lozn ‘to let’ and muzn ‘must’
{C}
CzY, EY, EGY, and DuY
Particular consonants in entfern ‘to answer’
{C}
CzY, EY
Romance origin. Several EY toponyms also underwent the same change: Pintsk and Mintsk, variant forms used for the Belarusian towns of Pinsk and Minsk, Beldz / Belts for Ukrainian Белз (Polish Bełz), as well toponyms in Poland such as Kintsk for Końskie, Nasheltsk for Nasielsk, Plintsk for Płońsk, and Shrentsk for Szreńsk.122 Also compare PolY vontse ‘moustache’ < *vonse < Polish wąsy. In western territories, we have only a few examples in APf (). However, for that source this phenomenon is not general: it affects only a few particular words (all with [nš] > [ntš]) and seems to be influenced by local German dialectal phenomena.123 A number of consonantal processes are restricted to EY. The effect often called sabesdiker losn (a shibboleth, literally ‘Sabbath language’) is specific to LitY only. It consists in the loss of any contrast between the pronunciation of hissing and hushing sounds. As a result, in this dialect the following pairs of phonemes—distinguished in PolY and UkrY—merged: /s/ and /š/, /z/ and /ž/, /ts/ and /cˇ /. Several theories were suggested to explain that phenomenon. Bin-Nun (BN ) stated that it was essentially due to the influence of the medieval German in which the sound /š / was absent. It is generally admitted, however, that during the thirteenth century the /š / was already established in German. Yet, an origin that old for a phenomenon that exists only in LitY is implausible. Analysis of vowels given in section .. clearly shows that the three EY subdialects all descend from the same ancestor. Consequently, sabesdiker losn, known exclusively in the area of LitY, would have to be more recent. To counter this objection, Bin-Nun added two additional hypotheses, ad hoc: () in certain dialects the absence of /š/ was maintained several centuries later, and () a dialect from that group influenced LitY. The only plausible explanation is due to U. Weinreich (:). He relates this feature to the Polish phonetic phenomenon called mazurzenie whose results are identical to those observed in LitY, namely the loss of any contrast between the hushing and their corresponding hissing sounds. Today, it is mainly characteristic of dialects in Mazovia (where it has been known since, at least, the fifteenth century) and Lesser Poland (where it appeared after the Middle Ages).124 The presence of Germans (who distinguished between hissing and hushing sounds) in Mazovia was minimal and, as a result, here—in contrast to western and southern Polish territories—Yiddishspeaking Jews of that province have been under the influence of the local Polish dialect only. This factor strengthened the mazurzenie effect among Mazovian Jews. Jewish immigrants coming from Mazovia to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania introduced the sabesdiker losn to their new country.
122 Some of these Yiddish toponyms are mentioned in Stankiewicz :. In that source, the presence of the affricate /ts/ is explained inadequately. 123 See sections .. (feature {C}; German phenomenon) and . (bentshn). 124 See Stieber :–.
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Consonantal changes
In the Yiddish of Mazovia itself, the difference between /s/ and /š/ was reestablished later as a result of the arrival of immigrants from other areas for whom these two sounds differed.125 Sources from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania demonstrate the existence of forms created from that confusion during the second half of the sixteenth century. One finds in the territory of modern Belarus and Lithuania such forms as Солом, *Смерл (patronymic Смерлович), Фисель, Пешах (all in texts written in Cyrillic characters), Sloma, and Seymin; compare the StY forms Sholem, Shmerl, Fishl, Peysekh, Shloyme, and Sheymen. One of the principal peculiarities of UkrY consists in the weak or even absent articulation of its initial /h/. The name Ирш (a variant of Hirsh), mentioned in the late sixteenth century in Volhynia, represents the earliest evidence. The same name is mentioned according to its Polish spelling, Irsz, during the s in Red Ruthenia. The exact geography of this phenomenon is particularly striking. In addition to UkrY, it is applicable to a long narrow corridor going from the area of UkrY through eastern Poland as far as the East Prussian frontier (LCA ). As with the sabesdiker losn, here the only plausible explanation of this effect and its particular geography is also due to U. Weinreich.126 He considers that the loss of the phonemic /h/ took place in Poland under the influence of the absence of any direct equivalent to this sound in Polish. Jewish emigrants from Poland brought the phenomenon to Ukraine. During the next stage, /h/ was mainly restored in PolY by Jewish immigrants from other areas who had /h/ in their vocalic chart. The /h/-less area in eastern Poland represents a vestigial region.127
125 U. Weinreich (:, :) suggests that during the fifteenth century Yiddish-speaking immigrants from western German provinces to Poland acquired mazurzenie from their Polish neighbors and brought it to Lithuania, while the reestablishment of the contrast in Poland itself during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was due to the Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Bavaria and Austria. In contrast to his general idea about the link between mazurzenie and the sabesdiker losn that is particularly attractive, these chronological and geographical details are questionable. We have no documented evidence about Jews coming to Poland from western Germany, Bavaria, or Austria. For several reasons, contrary to the opinion of U. Weinreich, it is more appropriate to posit the influx of Jews to Lithuania from Mazovia (instead of Poland generally speaking) to the first half of the sixteenth century. This chronology takes into account (i) the existence of the period when all Lithuanian Jews were expelled from the country (–) and (ii) mass expulsions of Jews from Mazovia after the death of the last Duke of Mazovia from the Piast dynasty () and its annexation by the Polish kingdom (Bałaban :). (See Ringelblum :, , on expulsions of Jews from Warsaw in , , and finally in .) This is also corroborated by the examples of sabesdiker losn appearing during the second half of the sixteenth century only. The re-establishment of the contrast between the hissing and hushing consonants in Mazovia itself may be easily explained by (i) the expulsions of local Jews during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (when numerous local towns boasted of the privilege De non tolerandis Judaeis allowing urban authorities not to tolerate the presence of Jews) and (ii) later (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) influx of Jews from other parts of Poland whose dialect was not characterized by the confusion in question. Note that even at the end of the eighteenth century the number of Jews in Mazovia was small in comparison to other parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For example, only , Jews were counted during the census of (Bałaban :). 126 It appears in U. Weinreich :–; see also his convincing analysis of theories of his predecessors on pp. – of the same paper. 127 U. Weinreich posits the migrations of Polish Jews with no /h/ to Ukraine roughly to the period – and considers /h/ to be restored in Poland in the course of the sixteenth century under the influence of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from countries situated west of Poland. Contrary to his general (attractive) idea, some of these details are implausible. For all other features, migratory waves from Poland to Ukraine having a particular impact on the local Yiddish dialect can be posited only to the period that followed the Lublin Union (). During the previous period, any flow of Polish Jewish emigrants would influence Yiddish in Belorussia/Lithuania in a similar way as in Ukraine. Two scenarios may be suggested for the restoration of /h/ in PolY. Firstly, it could be due to the influx to southwestern Poland during the century that followed the Lublin Union of Jews from the neighboring Czech lands (with phonemic /h/). Under their influence, the restoration of /h/ began and the wave corresponding to it gradually reached the whole area of PolY except for the corridor between Eastern Prussia and Ukraine. Secondly, one may conjecture that the loss of /h/ occurred initially only in eastern Poland and it is precisely from that area that migrants came to Ukraine. Later,
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Sound changes and dialects
At least three consonantal processes are shared by LitY and UkrY, being unknown in PolY. The first of them corresponds to the shift [ji] > [i] in the initial position. For example, compare LitY id ‘Jew,’ ingl ‘small boy,’ and Isroel ‘Israel’ to its PolY equivalents yid, yingl, and Yisrūel, respectively. This change can be easily explained by the influence of local Slavic languages in which the combination [ji] is impossible.128 The second effect corresponds to the loss of final devoicing. For example, the final consonant in pan-EY barg ‘mountain’ is pronounced [k] in PolY but [g] in LitY and UkrY. U. Weinreich (:) writes about the influence of East Slavic dialects.129 The final voicing was also originally valid for Polish from which it disappeared during the fifteenth century. As a result, in Poland Jews were initially also exposed to the same rule. According to U. Weinreich, either this period was not too long for Polish Jews to abandon their final devoicing, or it was abandoned but restored under the influence of new Yiddish-speakers coming from western territories.130 The third phenomenon corresponds to the voicing of a word-final unvoiced consonant if the following word starts with a voiced consonant. M. Weinreich (WG :) emphasizes that exactly the same effect is known in East Slavic languages, while the behavior of PolY—unlike that of LitY and UkrY—does not conform to the language of the coterritorial Slavic majority (Polish for PolY) but is well correlated with German dialects. Actually, the behavior of PolY in all three cases could also be influenced by the Silesian dialect of German colonists in Poland. Yet, no such influence existed in the region covering LitY and UkrY. This region also differs from the PolY area (except for eastern Galicia that formerly corresponded to Red Ruthenia) because in the past one part of it had been populated by EAST CANAANITES. As a result, in theory, one cannot exclude the possibility of their substratal influence on the development of local Yiddish dialects. However, this scenario remains questionable. We know about mass migrations of Polish Jews to Ukraine. As a result, a putative influence of the EAST CANAANITES is more likely to be researched in phenomena that are limited to LitY only. The changes in question could be fairly recent. Nothing indicates that we should favour
the corresponding area inside of Poland was significantly narrowed because of the influence of Jews from southern and western parts of Poland for whom /h/ has never been lost. 128 During the first half of the twentieth century, this phenomenon was valid for LitY and UkrY except for Polesia, a region on the border between modern Ukraine and Belarus (LCA ). 129 At the present time, this phenomenon characterizes—according to the information collected by U. Weinreich (:) from unpublished sources—Christian dialects spoken in northern Ukraine and southern Belorussia. This area looks as vestigial as centuries ago, when Yiddish first became exposed to the influence of East Slavic languages; the absence of final devoicing was valid in a region much larger than today (U. Weinreich :). (See Herzog : on its validity in the Belarusian dialect spoken in Podlasie.) U. Weinreich (:) also emphasizes the existence of an additional factor that could favor the acquiring of the final voicing by LitY and UkrY. Note that it is precisely in these two dialects that the quantitative vocalic contrasts have been lost. The final voicing allowed one to obtain a different pronunciation for words distinguished in PolY because of the vowel length. For example, compare LitY /lip/ ‘lip’ and /lib/ ‘love,’ PolY /lip/ and /li:p/, respectively. The restoration of final voiced consonants was done morphophonemically, by analogy with inflected forms (Sapir :). As noted by U. Weinreich (:), in contrast to this process, lost /h/ and the phonemic distinction between sibilants could not be restored in UkrY (under the influence of Ukrainian) and LitY (under the influence of Belarusian), respectively, because no morphophonemic information could be helpful for such a restoration. The distinction between hissing and hushing sibilants as well as the phonemic /h/ were lost in all contexts. 130 A different explanation is suggested by King (, ). He considers that the rule of final devoicing was lost in Germany before the arrival of Yiddish speakers to Eastern Europe. In LitY and UkrY, voiced final consonants were retained, while in PolY final devoicing appeared under the influence of Polish between circa and . The theory by King is significantly less plausible than the idea by U. Weinreich. In principle, the conjectured loss of final devoicing in German-speaking countries (for which there is no evidence) could happen only under the influence of Bavarian, the only High German dialect in which lenes consonants are possible in final position (after a long vowel or a diphthong). However, the Bavarian rule is applicable not only to the final position: it is general and no equivalent of it is found in Yiddish (see feature {C} in section ..). Moreover, as discussed in sections ..–.., Bavarian is one of those High German dialects whose direct influence on Yiddish was particularly small.
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Borders between EY subdialects
the idea of the Jewish speakers of East Slavic languages shifting to Yiddish over the possibility of the direct linguistic pressure on Yiddish exerted by East Slavic languages spoken by the Christian majority.131
.
BORDERS BETWEEN EY SUBDIALECTS
Table . shows regional realizations of a number of major phonological features (primarily, reflexes of proto-vowels) in various areas inside the EY territories. From Table . one can see that the dialects described by the last column (covering Lithuania, central and eastern Belarus), the fourth column (Podolia), and the third column (western and southern Poland, Galicia) differ significantly. It is quite normal that in Yiddish studies they are considered to be distinct dialects. In this book, they are called LitY, UkrY, and PolY, respectively.132 We cannot say that the corresponding areas are linguistically totally homogeneous. For example, in the territories of LitY we find certain regional peculiarities such as the /uj/-reflex for U. The sabesdiker losn phenomenon, one of the most striking idiosyncrasies of LitY, is unknown in the southern strip of the LitY territory. As described in section .., major regional peculiarities exist in Samogitia (with [ou] for U and [eu] for O, ) and Courland (with vowels roughly corresponding to the previous stages of the development of LitY). We find differences between western and eastern parts of Podolia affecting the final devoicing and realizations of U. In both cases, western areas of Podolia exhibit a behavior similar to that of PolY, while the eastern ones show reflexes typical of LitY. If the reflex /ou/ for U is valid in a large part of PolY, the realization /o:/, a regional innovation, characterizes the area around Warsaw. It is also sporadically found in other places including Kraków. Eastern Galicia is an integral part of PolY: according to all the criteria used in Table ., the phonology of the local dialect is similar to that from western and central Poland. However, we do not find in Eastern Galicia the pronouns ets and enk ‘you’ that characterize the remaining part of PolY and result from a wave that penetrated these territories from the Czech lands. In this instance, we may speak about the existence of a regional particularity in PolY of Eastern Galicia. Yiddish varieties in Chorzele (north of Warsaw) and Radzymin (northeast of Warsaw) each have only one important difference with respect to that of Warsaw: loss of /h/ (Chorzele) and /i/ (instead of /o/) for U before /r/ (Radzymin). Formally speaking, we may still consider these realizations as regional variants of PolY. However, in the immediate vicinity of these towns we also find multiple other isoglosses that separate reflexes typical of PolY from those specific to LitY. The whole area covering this bundle of isoglosses and including such towns as Ostrołęka, Maków, Brok, Węgrów, Drohiczyn, Siedlce, Łosice, Biała Podlaska, and Łomazy should more appropriately be called 131 Louden () favors the substratal influence of EAST CANAANITES not only for the first two of the above three phenomena but also for the sabesdiker losn and the loss of /h/, as well as the loss of the vocalic quantitative contrasts in LitY and UkrY (discussed in section ..). In all cases in question, he sees a simplification of structural patterns that, according to him, may be more easily explained via the shift of EAST CANAANITES to Yiddish than through the influence of the Slavic majority. His general idea remains speculative, while his assertion that “Slavic-derived loans are relatively few in number”—his main argument against the possibility of the direct influence of East Slavic languages—has no basis. For the sabesdiker losn and the loss of /h/ his explanation is particularly unattractive: structurally identical phenomena are unknown in East Slavic languages and therefore they are unlikely to be valid for EAST CANAANITES either. 132 A number of grammatical features absent from Table . placed LitY apart from other EY subdialects. Among them are, for example, the absence of the neuter gender, the merger of dative and accusative forms of personal pronouns, a unique form for reflexive pronouns. These features result from innovations in LitY that often tend to a simplification of the grammar. (Compare also the set of grammatical changes in the Yiddish dialect—with no relationship to LitY—spoken today in the US by certain orthodox Jews and described in Krogh :–.)
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Sound changes and dialects
TABLE . EY regional realizations Phonological features
map in LCA
Poland (Warsaw || Lwów)
Podolia (KamianetsPodilskyi || Vinnytsia)
North eastern Ukraine (Zhytomyr || Kiev)
South western Belarus (Brest)
Lithuania (Pinsk || Vilnius)
A
a
o
o
a
a
A,
u:
u
u
u
o
U
i
i
i
i
u
E
ej
ej
i
ej
e
I
a:
a
aj
aj
aj
E,
aj
ej
ej
ej
ej
O,
,
oj
oj
ej
oj
ej
U
o: || ou
ou, u || oj
oj
oj, ou
oj, uj
I before /r, x/
,
e
e
i
i
i
U before /r, x/
o
e
i
i
u
vocalic quantities
Yes
No
No
No
No
final devoicing
Yes
Yes || No
No
Yes
No
sabesdiker losn
No
No
No
No
No || Yes
loss of /h/
No
Yes
Yes || No
Yes
No
transitional between PolY and LitY (see Map .). Nothing precludes our assigning Chorzele and Radzymin to the same area. Several towns in southwestern Belarus also belong there. Brest (for which data in the second to last column of Table . are given) is one of them.133 For several centuries, this community was, on the one hand, closely related to other communities from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania situated in the territories of LitY, and, on the other hand, was separated both politically and geographically from Polish communities. For these reasons, we can be sure that in earlier times local Yiddish was similar to LitY. Gradually, because of migration and the diffusion phenomena, numerous features of PolY and/or UkrY penetrated the Brest area.
133 The information concerning reflexes in northeastern Poland and southwestern Belarus is taken here from Herzog :–. Map . represents a compilation of several maps from the same source.
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Borders between EY subdialects Myszyniec
Szczuczyn
Kolno
Chorzele
Lomza
LitY
Ostroleka
Sielc
Jablonka
Tr an
Maków
si
tio
na
Brok
la
Bielsk
re a
Radzymin Jadów Wegrów Warsaw
PolY
Drohiczyn Siedlce
U1, O2 A2, E5 I4 U4 E2 U1 before /r/ Vowel length
Losice Brest Biala
Luków
Lomazy
MAP . Vocalic isoglosses (border between PolY and LitY)
The idiom of northeastern Ukraine (described in the fifth column of Table .) is also a typical transitional area. No Jews apparently lived there before (with the notable exception of Kiev), while during the following centuries migrants from both northern (LitY) territories and those coming from the west (western Volhynia) and the south (eastern Podolia) created a mixed idiom there, with reflexes of O, and I being due to LitY and those of A, and U, coming from UkrY. The /i/-reflex of E represents a general innovation that appeared in the transitional area along the borders of LitY and was still valid at the beginning of the twentieth century for older generations of Jews in Węgrów.134 Borders around the area delimitating LitY are easy to see because of a bundle of closely situated isoglosses defining a large series of system-level differences. In the south, LitY is separated from UkrY. This border is directly related to the frontier between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Crown Poland established in . In that year, the Lublin Union assigned to Poland several formerly Lithuanian territories: the Kiev area, Volhynia, eastern part of Podolia (which became Bracław voivodeship), and Podlasie. After , numerous linguistic phenomena valid for Yiddish in Crown Poland and those from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were independent of each other. As discussed above in this section, the transitional area between LitY and UkrY covers precisely the northern part of the Kiev area and northern and eastern Volhynia (including Zhytomyr).
134 See Herzog :. See also Gasser for a description of the idiom in this and several other areas transitional between UkrY and other EY subdialects.
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Sound changes and dialects
On the west, LitY is separated from PolY. Here, the border deviates significantly from the frontier between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Crown Poland established in . In the north, LitY penetrated the northeastern part of Mazovia covering such towns as Łomża, Kolno, Szczuczyn, and Myszyniec. In this area, Jewish settlement is more recent than in neighboring Lithuania. Dialectal features of local Yiddish, together with the relative chronology of the first references to Jews in northeastern Poland as a whole, strongly imply that local communities were created by migrants from Lithuania who moved westward. In the south, the situation is the opposite one. Here PolY penetrated well beyond the border of .135 For example, numerous PolY features are found in the region encompassing Łomazy and Biała Podlaska that was a part of the Lithuanian territories until the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century. In , this region was attached to the newly created Congress Poland, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. Administratively it became a part of the Siedlce province that also included territories which historically belonged either to Lesser Poland (Siedlce, Łuków) or Podlasie (Węgrów). Many nonLitY characterictics in the Łomazy area could appear after . Moreover, as mentioned earlier in this section, a number of these characteristics also became valid for Brest. The area covering Brest and Łomazy is transitional par excellence: it is the region where all three major subdialects of EY met: LitY, PolY, and UkrY. The middle part of the line separating LitY and PolY cuts the historical province of Podlasie into two. The idiom of the northern part of that province (encompassing Bielsk and Jabłonka) mainly shows LitY features. Here the oldest communities were created before when this area still belonged to Lithuania. Moreover, from the time of the Tilsit Peace Treaty () until the Bolshevik Revolution (), the main part of that territory belonged to the Jewish Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. In all adjacent areas of the Russian Empire Jews would be speaking LitY. Until the s, migrations of Jews from the Congress Poland (an autonomous part of the Russian Empire, with Warsaw as its capital city) to the Pale of Settlement were prohibited. As a result, some PolY features that could penetrate northern Podlasie between and would disappear from it during the nineteenth century because of the diffusion of LitY there. The idiom of the southern part of Podlasie (including Węgrów and Łosice) is closer to PolY. This can be explained by its administrative affiliation to Crown Poland between and the end of the eighteenth century and to Congress Poland in –. Multiple linguistic phenomena common to PolY and UkrY are due to migrations and diffusion inside of a country having no internal administrative borders between the Lublin Union () and the First Partition of Poland (). The largest number of migrants came from Poland to Ukraine during the period starting with and ending with the Cossack wars of the mid-seventeenth century.136 As a result, numerous vocalic innovations that initially appeared in Poland were spread to Ukraine too. We can be sure that these changes reached Ukraine not just as ready-made words resulting from the shifts in question but as working rules. This becomes clear from the consideration of local toponyms; compare UkrY Dinevits, Tshidniv, Skver, and Zherin, whose Ukrainian forms are Дунаïвцi,Чуднiв, Сквира, and Джурин, respectively. In all of them we find changes from [u] to [i] and/or from [ir] to [er], typical of both UkrY and PolY. Certainly, we should not imagine that PolY and UkrY had become at some point homogeneous from the lexical point of view. Indeed, a number of lexical elements borrowed from local Slavs existed in various parts of the territory in question. In Poland, these loanwords were due to Polish, while in Ukraine some of them were due to Ukrainian. The influx after of numerous Jewish migrants from Poland to Ukraine did not 135 Historical factors (before the end of the sixteenth century) determining the border between PolY and LitY are covered in Herzog :–. 136 See also Herzog :– on migrations within this area related to the expansion of the Hasidic movement.
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Borders between EY subdialects
provoke a dramatic change in this domain. For example, UkrY mitshen137 ‘to torture, torment’ is related to Ukrainian мучити (and not to its Polish equivalent męczyć). Its root’s /i/ (instead of the etymological /u/) shows that the borrowing took place before the end of the seventeenth century.138 Also, numerous UkrY toponyms are based on the Ukrainian rather than the Polish names of the corresponding places; compare UkrY Ostre (Ukrainian Острог [ostroh], Polish Ostróg [ostrug]) and Le(ti)tshiv (Ukrainian Летичiв, Polish Latyczów). Differences between PolY and UkrY go well beyond the lexical and toponymic domains. One finds a series of major system-level (phonological) differences too. The main bundle of isoglosses corresponds to the following distinctions: () () () () () ()
PolY /aj/ versus UkrY /ej/ for E; PolY /o/ versus UkrY /e/ for U before /r/ and /x/; Phonemic /h/ extant in PolY and absent from UkrY; Quantitative vocalic contrasts found in PolY and absent from UkrY; PolY /a/ versus UkrY /o/ for A; /u/-reflex for U known in UkrY and unknown in PolY.
Geographically, the northern part of the border in question is close to the frontier that existed between Crown Poland and the southern regions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before .139 For PolY features distinct from those of UkrY that came into being before the Lublin Union during which Ukraine was annexed by Poland, the border that was valid before was a natural obstacle for their expansion. However, for the change /ej/ > /aj/ for E this possibility is refuted by the relative chronology of several vocalic changes. This lowering was clearly more recent than the monophthongization /aj/ > /a:/ for I (otherwise the two phonemes would merge). Yet, the latter process is unknown in LitY and therefore it could not have taken place in Ukraine before when Ukraine still was within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. As a result, /ej/ > /aj/ is also more recent than . To these theoretical ideas, we may add the fact that the earliest references to forms with one of these two changes date from the eighteenth century only.140 The northern border between PolY and UkrY is directly correlated with the frontier that existed after the Third Partition of Poland () between the Austrian and the Russian Empires. PolY is valid for Austrian Galicia. UkrY is valid for the Russian provinces of Volhynia, Kiev (except for the northern parts, transitional between UkrY and LitY), and Podolia. The border in question is, therefore, between, on the one hand, Galicia and, on the other hand, Volhynia and Podolia (–). Only the northernmost part of the border between PolY and UkrY was, in –, internal to the Russian Empire separating the Lublin guberniya of Congress Poland (PolY) from Volhynia (UkrY). As mentioned earlier, because of the autonomous status of Congress of Poland, before the s the border in question was a real administrative barrier.141
UkrY forms are taken here from Lifshits . Yet, UkrY dembe ‘oak’ (StY demb) is of Polish and not Ukrainian origin; compare Polish dąb (plural dęby) and Ukrainian дуб). 139 The southern border is less distinct: the corresponding isoglosses deviate significantly from each other. They mainly pass through modern Transcarpathian Ukraine and Romania. If the northern border separates areas where Jewish communities had already existed for centuries, the southern border lies inside the territories where numerous Yiddish-speaking communities have developed since the end of the eighteenth century only. They therefore relate to rather recent migrations. 140 See section ... 141 Political borders established at the end of the eighteenth century only may explain a number of other dialectal peculiarities observed during the twentieth century. For example, Yiddish in Poznań, a city of Greater Poland that became Prussian only after the Second Partition of Poland (), sides with the varieties spoken in Silesia and Eastern 137 138
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Sound changes and dialects
All the six differences between PolY and UkrY enumerated may be explained by the existence of the political frontiers in question. The three related changes /e:/ > /ej/ > /aj/ > /a:/ originated in Poland from where they were brought to Ukraine between and . The earliest one (monophthongization /aj/ > /a:/ for I) and the most recent one (diphthongization /e:/ > /ej/ for E) are highly in evidence in modern UkrY. The following scenario may explain the apparent (and surprising) absence of the middle one. Phoneticaly, the change /ej/ > /aj/ for E, may be presented as [ej] > [εj] > [aj]. It was the intermediate realization [εj] that was brought to Ukraine. Between and , the change from [εj] to [aj] was gradually completed in the whole area of PolY. During the same period, in the zone of UkrY, the opposite process took place: E, returned from [εj] to [ej] merging with the reflex of E.142 The history of the second distinction—PolY /o/ versus UkrY /e/ for U before /r/ and /x/—is partially different. Between the two World Wars, the reflex /o/ dominated the whole PolY territory. However, such a large expansion seems to be fairly recent and, as a result, political barriers extant during the nineteenth century may be entirely relevant for explaining the position of the modern isogloss. Here, of particular interest for the history of EY are the toponyms Terzhe ‘Turza’ (a town in Greater Poland near the border with Kuyavia), Ger ‘Góra Kalwaria’ (a town in southern Mazovia), and berkes ‘beets’ in the region of Mława (in northern Mazovia), from Polish buraki. In all of them we observe /e/ instead of the etymological /u/, exactly as in UkrY, instead of the usual PolY reflex /o/; compare PolY bor(i)kes ‘beets.’ Weinreich (:–) discovered these exceptions from the general PolY rule (the latter valid in the area in question for a majority of words) and suggested a convincing scenario. Firstly, the /o/-forms from southern and western Poland did not reach Mazovia, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Secondly, a wave provoked the fronting /u/ > /i/ in the whole of Poland and Ukraine.143 Thirdly, in all of PolY and UkrY the lowering /ir/ > /er/ took place. Finally, the /o/-forms brought from other Polish regions to Mazovia replaced the older /e/-forms in the general lexicon. The /e/-forms survived there only in a few old Slavisms. As a result, the relative unity of modern PolY is partly due to the realignment of the dialect originally spoken in Mazovia to the norms valid in the western and southern parts of the Polish kingdom. To these positions elaborated by Weinreich, we may add that the /o/-forms did not penetrate UkrY because the realignment in question had already taken place after . The scenario explaining the third difference—the existence of /h/ in PolY and its absence from UkrY—could be somewhat similar. As discussed in section ., the loss of phonemic /h/ originally occurred in Poland before being brought to Ukraine by Jewish migrants. During the later period, in a large part of the PolY territory, /h/ was re-established because of the diffusion from southwestern
Germany (EGY), all of which also belonged to Prussia during the nineteenth century, but contrasts with PolY; compare LCA –, , –, , –, , –, –, –, , –, , –. 142 Spellings used in the Yiddish dictionary compiled by Lifshits () may serve as an indirect corroboration of this theoretical scenario. Indeed, this author uses ayin for E, ayin-yod for E, and double-yod for E. In the preface to his dictionary, Lifshits explains that the second sign means /ej/, while the last one can be read as /ej/, /aj/, or /a/. (The last two possibilities, most likely, correspond to I for which the same double-yod is also used.) From this, we can see that for Lifshits, a native speaker of UkrY, E, , and E are unlikely to correspond to the same phoneme. In theory, we cannot rule out that the difference in spelling happened taking into account the distinction existing in LitY. However, for U, Lifshits, in perfect correlation with UkrY, uses yod. On the other hand, the diphthongization of E in the area of UkrY only during the second half of the nineteenth century is inconceivable: diphthongized reflexes were commonplace already at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; compare the UkrY given name Zeylik (census of Ostrog, ) and a number of surnames assigned in the area in question after the law of including UkrY Beyder ‘bathkeeper,’ Leyder ‘leather,’ Treyger ‘carrier.’ 143 This had no impact on LitY because it occurred after .
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Borders between EY subdialects
regions. The borders between, on the one hand, the Austrian Empire and the Lublin guberniya of Congress Poland and, on the other hand, the Russian Pale of Settlement, prevented the diffusion of this phenomenon to Ukraine. The last three differences between PolY and UkrY all represent regional innovations that (contrary to the three features discussed above) originated in Ukraine. The political borders current during the nineteenth century prevented the diffusion of all of them to Poland. The loss of quantitative vocalic contrasts in the northern part of the UkrY territory was stimulated by a similar phenomenon in the speech of local Ukrainian Christians. This process was directly responsible for the raising [a] > [ɔ] of the reflex of A, thus, allowing one to avoid its merging with I (formerly /a:/).144 The /u/-reflex for U remained internal to the UkrY territories. The zone with the loss of the rule of final devoicing of consonants, another innovation of UkrY (shared with LitY), also covers only a part of UkrY. The information provided earlier in this section allows us to explain, by facts from the political and administrative history, as well as the history of Jewish settlements, the placement of three bundles of isoglosses. It is natural to take these bundles as borders between LitY and UkrY, LitY and PolY, and, finally, PolY and UkrY. A classification disregarding these extra-linguistic details and being formally established on the basis of a few particular isoglosses may be little value or even misleading for an analysis of the history of a language. For the last hundred years, in Yiddish studies, it has been usual to establish internal borders between EY subdialects according to the reflexes of the following phonemes:145 () MHG ei (E) allows us to tell PolY (with /aj/) from LitY and UkrY (both with /ej/) () MHG â (A) allows us to distinguish LitY (with /o/) from PolY and UkrY (with /u:/ or /u/). The two corresponding isoglosses divided the whole area of EY into three continuous areas. For numerous communities, the classification made following this approach yields the same results as the less formal and partly extra-linguistic classification into LitY, UkrY, and PolY already suggested in this section. However, one notable exception exists. A long strip covering such eastern Polish towns as Brok, Węgrów, Siedlce, Łosice, and Drohiczyn clearly represents a zone transitional between PolY and LitY.146 The region covering the Polish towns of Biała Podlaska and Łomazy, as well the Brest area of southwestern Belarus, is transitional between all three major EY subdialects. Yet, according to the reflexes of E and A only, all the aforementioned towns should be assigned to the same dialect as the one spoken in Podolia and the main part of Volhynia, that is, UkrY. From the point of view of the history of Yiddish, this assignment would be of little sense. Any similarity between the phonological behavior of the two areas in question is very partial. For example, we do not find in the zone transitional between PolY and LitY such typical UkrY developments as /o/ for A or the /u/-reflex for U. Moreover, the sharing of certain features is partly fortuitous. For example, the loss of vocalic quantities and/or the existence of final voicing of consonants in some of the towns from the transitional zone are related to the influence of LitY and not that of UkrY.
See section ... See classification by Birnbaum () and Prilutski () in Table . in section .. 146 Herzog (:) conventionally calls this dialect “North-Central” in order to distinguish it from Northeastern and Central dialects (which in this book are called LitY and PolY, respectively). 144 145
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Sound changes and dialects
.
SYNTHESIS: CLASSIFICATION OF YIDDISH DIALECTS
.. General classification A number of classifications of modern Yiddish dialects have been suggested in the past by linguists who worked in the domain of Yiddish studies.147 Generally speaking, when classifying modern Yiddish dialects, two fundamentally different aspects should be treated separately: () determining geographic boundaries of dialects and subdialects, and () naming them. The second aspect is purely conventional and is, to a great extent, a question of taste. For example, Birnbaum () directly indicates in the names he suggests the exact reflex of MHG â and distinguishes between “O-dialect” and “U-dialect.” Boroxov () prefers to indicate the exact provinces where this or that dialect is spoken and writes about “Polish,” “Volhynian,” and “Lithuanian” dialects. These names provide an approximate answer to the question related to the first of the aforementioned aspects of the process of classification. Starting with Prilutski (), it became common using such general geographic notions as “West(ern),” “Central,” and “East(ern),” sometimes introducing additional details yielding designations like “West Central,” Southeastern,” or “Midwestern.” This way of naming possesses one advantage in comparison to previous classifications. It appears more flexible: changes either in phonetic realizations (contrary to a classification like that of Birnbaum ), or political geography (contrary to terms like those used by Boroxov) are irrelevant to it. The first aspect can be either conventional, or substantial, or a combination of both. A classification according to political geography represents an example of the conventional approach. Its main advantages—the fact that it is mnemonic and the fact that for any specific period of time it is unambiguous—are particularly appreciable to laymen. Moreover, numerous differences between idioms having the same ancestor are often related to their separation in space. As is well known from the history of different languages, once two groups of speakers of the same tongue are placed in distinct geographic areas, their speech patterns tend to deviate from each other following the general tendency for any language to change. As a result, there is often a correlation between geography (political or otherwise) and genetic links. Yet, this correlation is not general and therefore a classification based on geography can only be misleading in our understanding of the linguistic past of modern dialects. For this reason, it is rarely used by linguists: they generally prefer addressing phenomena that are system-level for language (typically, phonological, morphological, or, rarely, syntactic) rather than surface-level (lexical or semantic) processes. In contrast to political geography, these criteria are linguistic and structural for any language. Here two main variants may be distinguished: synchronic and diachronic. The former has to a great extent to be conventional because a priori it is not clear which one of various criteria should be seen as the principal one that will determine the first level of the classification into dialects, which one will serve for determining subdialects, which one will be used for sub-subdialects, etc. The diachronic approach includes important substantial elements. An analysis following the LANGUAGE TREE model, classical in diachronic linguistics, consists of several steps: () drawing isoglosses for various criteria that should be system-level (typically, phonological or morphological) rather than surface-level (lexical or semantic); () determining the relative chronology of the splits corresponding to various isoglosses; () making a tree-like classification whose first branching corresponds to the oldest split, second branching to the second split, etc. 147
See the discussion in section .. and especially Tables . and ..
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Synthesis: classification of Yiddish dialects
This approach possesses a number of limitations and its own conventional elements. We should not forget about the existence of such methodological difficulties as the fact that any process lasts decades or even centuries and that it spreads in waves from one small area to other regions. A significant variation may exist for various social groups even inside of the same area. As a result, the application of this method results from a theoretical abstraction that disregards these issues— though being aware of them—and deals with changes as if they were instantaneously covering the whole territory and all population strata. Another kind of abstraction (with a presence of conventional elements) is needed in order to take into account situations when for a selected criterion we can deal not with an array of discrete realizations but with a continuum. In these situations—which are not unusual for phonetic criteria—one should introduce separating points into this continuum. A theoretical abstraction, again with certain conventional elements, is also needed to address the following issue: for Yiddish (as for many other languages), a direct application of the LANGUAGE TREE model approach in a purist way will yield a large number of levels and hundreds if not thousands of sub-subdialects, each of them differing from the others according to at least one system-level criterion. A tree with a huge number of levels and elements makes little sense. To fix this issue, one needs—exactly as in the synchronic approach—to select a limited number of system-level criteria and ignore all the others. To make a classification useful, one should base it on a set of bundles of stabilized isoglosses. This aspect introduces an important (partly) conventional element in the diachronic analysis as well. As in the case of a synchronic analysis, the bigger the number of features covered by a single bundle and the smaller the distance between isoglosses assigned to a single bundle, the more appropriate the classification is. All these difficulties should not be used as a reason to abandon the diachronic approach altogether. In comparison to other approaches, for specific aims of historical linguistics, it is significantly less arbitrary. Even without forgetting about all these issues, the criterion of relative chronology, central in its application, still remains to a great extent factual and therefore crucial for our understanding of the historical past and genetic links that exists between various dialects. Some previous classifications of Yiddish dialects discussed in section .. are either purely conventional or based on a synchronic analysis of modern reflexes of certain stressed vowels. Those by Bin-Nun, M. Weinreich, and Katz, all based on systems of stressed vowels, are among the exceptions. These scholars discussed certain diachronic elements, namely the values of various vowels during the “PROTO-YIDDISH” period. Several other linguists—U. Weinreich, Herzog, and Jacobs—did not suggest new classifications but developed schemes of derivation from EY “protovowels” to their reflexes found in modern EY subdialects.148 Nevertheless, none of the aforementioned scholars addressed the question of classification of Yiddish dialects according to the LANGUAGE TREE method, proceeding to an analysis of relative chronologies of various system-level processes. Moreover, WY varieties have often been ignored. As a result, their classifications may be seen as based on criteria that are to a great extent conventional. We can postulate that two Yiddish varieties may be placed into the same branch of a tree if and only if the German dialects underlying them (that is, the linguistically structural elements belonging to the category of the LANGUAGE TREE heritage) as well as their non-German substrata are the same.149 Details of our analysis presented earlier in this chapter as well as in Chapters – provide information shedding light on this question. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that is, the period for which one can first observe apparent system-level differences between the vernacular speech of Ashkenazic Jews and German dialects,150 one can distinguish two significantly distinct groups of Jewish communities: western and eastern. The former were mainly located in the
148
See section ..
149
See section ...
150
See section ...
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TABLE . Western and eastern Ashkenazic communities: a linguistic comparison Feature
Sections
Western communities
Eastern communities
Closest modern varieties
..
SWY
CzY and EY
Closest German dialects: overall comparison (for both early sources and corresponding modern varieties)
..
East Franconian and, to a lesser extent, Swabian and Palatinate German
Bohemian and, to a lesser extent, Silesian
Systems of stressed vowels
.., ..
“Proto-WY” close to East Franconian
Proto-CzY and Proto-EY, both close to Bohemian
General consonantal features
.., .
Different from those of CzY and EY
Many are shared by CzY and EY
Diminutive singular suffixes
.
-le
-(e)l
Basic lexicon: ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’151
., ..
East Franconian
Based on (West) Slavic
Basic lexicon: ‘uncle’
.
Romance
Of German origin
Non-Hebrew substratal lexical elements
.., ..
Romance (mainly Old French)
Old Czech
Non-Hebrew substratal given names
.., ..
Romance (mainly Old French)
Old Czech
Rhineland, Franconia, Swabia, and northern Italy, while the latter existed in the Czech lands and Poland. A comparison between them is given in Table .. In addition to items listed in Table ., one should take into account Hebrew substratal elements. One may observe that during the fifteenth century the territories in question roughly corresponded to the dichotomy between BNEY HES (western communities) and BNEY KHES (eastern communities).152 For these two groups of medieval Ashkenazic Jews, several major rules of Hebrew pronunciation were originally distinct. Important differences existed in the corpus of Hebrew given names used in these communities.153 However, a large number of peculiarities in phonology, semantics, and 151
Terms designating grandparents have been chosen here because their etymological links to precise non-Jewish idioms is clear. This is not true of words for parents (see the discussion of features {L–L} in section .). 152 The geography indicated immediately after Table . for western and eastern Ashkenazic Jews conforms to the geography of medieval BNEY HES and BNEY KHES, respectively. However, we cannot assert a total correlation between these subdivisions. As indicated in section .., during the fifteenth century, the area of BNEY KHES covered not only the Czech and Polish lands (called “eastern communities” in Table .), but also Austria, Hungary, and the town of Regensburg. For local Jewish communities, numerous elements given in the last column of Table . may be invalid. We have no information either that would imply that their linguistic behavior was somewhat similar to that of “western communities” described in the third column of Table .. For the history of modern Yiddish varieties, the exact history of languages of these medieval Danubian communities in non-Slavic lands is marginal. 153 See section ...
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morphology were shared by BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. Some of them clearly look like “shared abberancies” being non-compliant with general rules. Certain elements of this kind could be inherited from an ancestor that may have been the same for the Hebrew of these two Jewish groups. Other common elements were often due to migrations of BNEY HES eastward, to the areas originally populated by BNEY KHES, and the cultural prestige of Rhenish Jewry. A large number of hybrid forms composed of morphemes of Hebrew and German origin, as well as patterns for creating such forms, were also propagated from West to East. During the sixteenth century, the final general differences in the Hebrew pronunciation disappeared, with western communities adopting eastern norms. As a result of all these processes, only a few differences between western and eastern communities can be observed in the Hebrew component of modern Yiddish varieties. Moreover, these distinct features are mainly lexical.154 According to all the aforementioned major criteria dealing with elements belonging to the LANGUAGE TREE heritage (High German) or substrata (Romance, Slavic, and Hebrew), we face the necessity of considering the inception of the vernacular languages of western and eastern Ashkenazic Jews to be fundamentally independent of each other. In a tree covering idioms having MHG as their ancestor, these Jewish languages should be placed into different branches. The one spoken by medieval western Ashkenazic Jews, the ancestor of modern WY, primarily looks like representing a specifically Jewish offspring of East Franconian. The one used by eastern Ashkenazic Jews, the ancestor of modern CzY and EY, arose as a Jewish offspring of Bohemian. It is important to stress that this conclusion is based on two complementary kinds of data of a totally different nature that both corroborate each other: early Ashkenazic written sources and theoretical reconstructions of proto-vowels. The absence of phonological or syntactic innovations in the German component that would already be shared by the two groups in the Middle Ages represents another important argument for treating them as independent idioms having no common Jewish linguistic ancestor. On the other hand, it was already during that period that a large number of lexical, semantic, and onomastic innovations in the German component, as well as a few morphological particularities, were shared by both western and eastern communities. In these instances, the direction of the diffusion was clearly from West to East.155 In sections . and ., we discussed theories by Weinreich and Katz who place the birth of Yiddish in the Rhineland and in the Danube area, respectively. The scenario suggested here is partly correlated with the ideas of both scholars. On the one hand, the pan-Yiddish (mainly lexical and onomastic) particularities within the German component that result from Ashkenazic innovations almost exclusively took their roots from western communities. Exactly like numerous idiosyncrasies within the Hebrew component and new hybrid words, they are due to the language of BNEY HES. This position agrees with the theory by Weinreich. Yet, these shared peculiarities are mainly lexical and semantic: they are situated on the surface level of the language. In those parts of the language that are system-level (such as phonology and grammar) no fundamental unity is present in the German component of modern Yiddish varieties that would be similar to that observed in the Hebrew component. Here the idea by Katz of the two originally independent languages, those of BNEY HES and BNEY KHES, appears fruitful. However, our scenario does not share the opinion by Katz about the language of BNEY KHES gradually supplanting that of BNEY HES. The German component of WY descends mainly from the German component of the language(s) of BNEY HES, while that of CzY and EY has the German component of the language of BNEY KHES as its ancestor.156 See section ... See sections . (features {L, L}), . (feature {M}), and .. (given names). 156 Actually, this difference in comparison to Katz’s scenario is partly due to the confusion made by Katz about the exact borders between the territories of BNEY HES and BNEY KHES. He includes in the latter not only Austria, 154 155
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The first branching internal to Jews affected the eastern Ashkenazic communities only. It corresponds to the inception of Proto-CzY and Proto-EY. The first of them was a direct continuation of the original eastern Jewish idiom that appeared in Central Europe: it remained coterritorial with Bohemian. Yet, Proto-EY appeared in Eastern Europe, in Polish-Lithuanian territories. It underwent the important influence of both Silesian (colonial dialect of German) and Polish. Numerous innovations appeared in this tongue with respect to Proto-CzY, its sister-idiom, including the creation of a different chart of stressed vowels.157 For western communities, for the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries we are dealing with a process that looks opposite to branching, namely, a gradual renorming of different linguistic varieties to common standards. For example, it is as a result of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that the charts of stressed vowels in modern WY subdialects look as if they had descended from one “Proto-WY” vocalism related to East Franconian. During the following stages, modern Yiddish dialects were created. Proto-CzY gave rise to CzY and EGY. Proto-EY split into LitY, PolY, and UkrY. Modern WY subdialects—including AlsY, SwY, and FrY (for all of which one can posit a common ancestor, Proto-SWY), WphY, etc.—appeared, all related to “Proto-WY.” Several mixed varieties came into being, including DuY. The resulting classification corresponds to that given in Table . (section ..) and depicted in Figure . (section ..). As can be seen from the previous discussion, for all Yiddish dialects, the possibility of their attachment to a specific Yiddish proto-dialect principally comes from the consideration of their systems of stressed vowels (sections ..–..). This method is appropriate because throughout Yiddish history system-level changes of reflexes of vowels (especially the long monophthongs and diphthongs) have always been more numerous, more structural (because of phonemic mergers and the chain effect for a series of shifts) and have had a bigger scope than those in the domains of consonantism or grammar.158 Yet, even if this general rule is globally applicable to a description of the branching of Yiddish varieties, certain exceptions to it do exist. For example, we have no direct evidence of any major difference between the vocalic charts used in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the mid-seventeenth century.159 This means that, in theory, the branching of Proto-EY into LitY, PolY, and UkrY could be posited during the second half of the century in question. Yet, the sabesdiker losn consonantal phenomenon has already been known in the territory of modern LitY from the second half of the sixteenth century. As a result, according to this criterion, the split giving rise to LitY must be posited about one century earlier than according to the consideration of vowels.160
Regensburg, Bohemia-Moravia but also much of Franconia (encompassing Nürnberg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber), which actually—as shown in Chapter —was a part of the BNEY HES area. The consideration of the system-level elements of the German component shows that Katz is correct when he stresses (unlike Weinreich) that the Rhineland could not be the cradle for modern Yiddish. Katz is right in his consideration that all Yiddish dialects have their roots in the area situated east of the Rhineland. The language spoken in the sixteenth century by BNEY HES was based on the East Franconian dialect of German. The language spoken during the same period by BNEY KHES was based on Bohemian colonial German. 157 Compare Table ., which, as discussed in section .., could be valid in the mid-seventeenth century. During the same period, Proto-CzY stressed vocalism was characterized by a scheme intermediate between those of Tables . and .. 158 The same is roughly true for the development of High German dialects spoken by Christians during the same period. On the other hand, the consonantal changes whose isoglosses determine borders between these dialects mainly occurred before the inception of Yiddish. 159 Among various vocalic changes in EY, the best candidates to have occurred before the mid-seventeenth century are (i) the loss of quantitative contrasts in LitY and (ii) [u] > [o] before /r/ and /x/ in a part of PolY. 160 Another consonantal phenomenon, the loss of the phonemic character of /h/ in (a part of) PolY (before this phenomenon was brought to Ukraine) could also be earlier than all known vocalic splits.
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Yiddish varieties are characterized by the existence of a large number of phonological shifts unknown in German dialects that, once started in one particular variety, gradually spread to several others during the periods when the varieties in question were already separated from each other according to certain system-level criteria. The most important vocalic processes of this kind are listed in Table . (section ..). Among those that could not take place in different varieties independently (being unknown or totally unusual in dialects spoken by German Christians), the most numerous and important are those shared by CzY and PolY. They include: spontaneous fronting of U and U, lowering of several vowels before /r/ and /x/, and raising of A, from [o:] to [u:]. This sharing is not really a surprise because these two dialects correspond to neighboring countries between which migrations of Jews have been regular. Moreover, mutual influences were made easier because these idioms were structurally similar. Both of them had the same ancestor: Bohemian dialect of German. At least, for the diffusion of pronouns ets ‘you (nominative),’ enk ‘you (dative and accusative),’ and enker ‘your’ the direction of the propagation was from CzY to PolY and not vice versa. For Christians, these forms originated in Bavarian from which they came to Bohemian, while they were unknown in ECG.161 Yet, the spontaneous fronting of U, U, and the second element of the diphthong corresponding to O could also have started in PolY before spreading to CzY.162 A number of particular consonantal phenomena—mainly due to external (Christian) influences and enumerated in Table .—spread from EY to CzY (and to EGY and DuY also). The exact direction of diffusion of consonantal innovations shared by EY and CzY and listed in Table . is uncertain. For only one of them, the prefix um- instead of un-, we also find references in AlsY. However, in this dialect they are not regular and appeared rather recently. Also note that certain Slavic lexical elements are shared by EY, CzY, and EGY. A few substratal ones are due to Old Czech and therefore CzY was the first to incorporate them. Others, derived from Polish, are adstratal and they spread from EY to CzY and EGY.163 All of this information demonstrates that according to numerous factors nothing precludes the consideration of EY (with all its subdialects), CzY, and EGY as dialects of the same Jewish language. According to numerous phonological and morphological criteria, WY remains separate from all of them. Nevertheless, multiple other criteria—such as the sharing of a large number of lexical and semantic particularities, unity between the Hebrew component and hybrid HebrewGerman lexical elements, the sharing of given names, using the same alphabet, and having similar spelling rules—link WY to both CzY and EY and make it completely distinct from any German Christian dialect. Multiple shared elements are due to migrations. As evidenced by the analysis of given names, numerous migrants came from West to East before the Cossack wars of the midseventeenth century. On the other hand, during the period that followed, the direction of migrations changed dramatically. A number of common elements in modern Yiddish varieties from Western and Central Europe—unattested in early western sources—result from these, more recent, migrations.164 The linguistic influence of eastern communities was also indirect. For example, from a testimony written at the end of the seventeenth century, we know that Dutch Jews were regularly sending young men to Poland to learn, while numerous scholars, teachers, scribes, and printers from Slavic countries were resident in Western Europe.165 During the previous period, the direction of this kind of cultural influence was the opposite one.
161 See the discussion of the feature {M} in section .. The presence of these forms in Poland is apparent from the end of the sixteenth century. 162 163 See the discussion of the feature {V} in section ... See section .. 164 See examples from the Slavic component in section .. 165 See Landau :, TG – (footnote , on the influence of eastern scribes and printers on the changes of spelling rules in the area of WY).
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Moreover, East Franconian and Bohemian, the two German dialects basic for the formation of the German components of idioms spoken in western and eastern Ashkenazic communities, both represent dialects in many respects intermediate between Central German and Upper German. As a result, numerous elements in them are identical or quite close. Consequently, even the basic elements of the German components of WY and EY are quite similar. The last, but not least, series of arguments are purely sociolinguistic. Users of all Yiddish varieties considered all of these to correspond to the same language. A rich literature on religious and profane topics was available to all Ashkenazic Jews independently of the Yiddish variety they used in their everyday life. Weinreich’s notion of the existence of an intimate link between Yiddish and the way of life of Ashkenazic Jews and the essence of their culture is not an exaggeration. It is well known that a formal distinction between two dialects of the same language and two languages is impossible without introducing some extra-linguistic criteria.166 The factors exposed here are more than sufficient to consider all modern Yiddish varieties as dialects of the one language, Yiddish, even despite the fact that—unlike many other languages—this idiom never had “an army and navy.”
.. Transitional and mixed dialects Due to the natural tendency of any language to change, the same idiom placed, because of historical circumstances (typically, migrations), in two geographically separated areas will branch into easily identifiable dialects. However, in a continuous area the direct application of the LANGUAGE TREE method for classifying dialects possesses several difficulties. Some of them were already mentioned in the previous section. A system-level innovation initially appears in a small geographic area from which it spreads as a wave to neighboring regions. Its diffusion can take decades or even centuries. If we determine the branching of an idiom into two dialects based on this innovation, we need to take into account the fact that the corresponding isogloss defining the border between these dialects is fluid. Drawing isoglosses for various individual features is important for the study of the history of an idiom and is appropriate for atlases dealing with the idiom. Yet, to avoid dealing with hundreds or thousands of dialects we cannot take any individual isogloss as a criterion for defining a branching. If in two neighboring areas, the vernacular idioms differ only according to one feature, it is appropriate to mention the existence of regional variants inside one dialect rather than to speak about two dialects. Classification by dialects allows us to analyze the development of a language on a macrolevel. Only bundles of stabilized isoglosses are appropriate to divide a continuous territory into areas corresponding to different dialects. Since within a bundle isoglosses for various features are often not totally identical, we find transitional areas situated within the bundle. An area of this kind is particularly conspicuous if it corresponds to an initially Jewishless region situated between two regions whose respective Jewish communities use different dialects. Migrants from these two regions meet in the area in question. This immediate contact may yield a mixed dialect in which certain system-level phenomena are due to one donor dialect and others to another donor dialect. Such a mixed dialect with several mother-idioms cannot be properly classified following the LANGUAGE TREE approach according to which every new dialect appears as a result of a branching and therefore can have only one mother-idiom.167 Mixed dialects are not limited to transitional areas. Evidently exactly the same scenario may be valid for the language of a new community populated by
See section ... Section . provides examples of this kind for the border area between PolY and LitY. On transitional and mixed dialects (though formally defined in a way different from the one suggested in this section) see also Jacobs :–. 166 167
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Jews coming from various regions that can be quite distant. Morever, a mixed dialect can also appear in a region as a result of the local community being composed of several migrational waves. A new wave brings a different dialect and its interaction with the local dialect may yield a dialect in which certain major features are inherited from the previous stage, while other important characteristics are due to new migrants. Weinreich (, WG :–) assumed such a scenario for UkrY. He considers it a mixed dialect, with certain features being due to LitY and others to PolY, suggesting distinguishing three periods important for the formation of UkrY. During the first stage, before the Lublin Union (), its development was similar to that of LitY. To that period, Weinreich places the loss of the opposition between short and long vowels) shared by LitY and UkrY, as well as the original absence of fronting [u(:)] > [i(:)] in UkrY. During the second stage, between and the First Partition of Poland (), an influx of Polish Jews to Ukraine brought numerous PolY elements there and provoked multiple changes in the local Yiddish idiom. The third stage corresponds to the nineteenth century when, according to Weinreich, numerous migrants from the area of LitY came to Ukraine and introduced certain features of their speech in that territory. In this scenario, the first split inside of EY was between PolY and the dialect representing the common ancestor of LitY and UkrY. Weinreich also admits that, in theory, a chronology of the development of the vocalic features in UkrY could be the opposite to what he suggests: the contrast between long and short vowels brought from Poland to Ukraine and later the phonemic difference had already been lost in Ukraine. According to this second scenario (seen by Weinreich as less plausible than the first one), the first split inside of EY was between LitY and the ancestor common to PolY and UkrY. Available data indicate that—contrary to Weinreich’s opinion—the second scenario sounds better than the first concerning the loss of quantitative vocalic contrasts. A consideration of the details of this process shows that a striking structural difference exists here between LitY and UkrY. In LitY, we are dealing with a plain merger of all long and short vowels having the same qualities. Yet, in UkrY, the difference between the phonemes /i:/ and /i/ (extant in PolY) was transformed into the difference between the phonemes /i/ and /I/, respectively. In other words, the quantitative contrast was replaced by a qualitative contrast.168 Before this change took place, /i:/ was already valid for both I and U, while /i/ corresponded to both I and U. As a result, the loss of quantitative contrasts in UkrY is clearly more recent than the spontaneous fronting of former /u/-vowels U and U, a process that characterizes both PolY and UkrY but is not valid for LitY.169 Globally speaking, no information is available that forces us to postulate that EY was already split into several subdialects at the time of the Lublin Union (). In other words, the fact that before the area of UkrY and LitY was within one state (Grand Duchy of Lithuania), while PolY corresponded to another (Polish Kingdom) may be of little importance for the development of these three EY subdialects. In theory, we cannot rule out that the lowering /ur/ > /or/ in one part of PolY (most likely, the earliest vocalic split inside of EY) was even older than the stabilization of the sabesdiker losn phenomenon in LitY (the earliest identifiable among EY dialectal consonantal phenomena).170 However, even if this appears to be the case, taking into account all the phonological systems of the three major subdialects of EY, it is much
168 Similarly, the quantitative distinction between /a:/ and /a/ was replaced by a qualitative one (see details in section ..). 169 In addition to these factors, one can also add the remark by U. Weinreich (:) about the presence of a long vowel /a:/ in a subdialect of UkrY spoken in Moldavia. Consequently, he suggests the possibility that the quantitative distinction in UkrY was lost more recently than in LitY and could even be due to the pressure of LitY after the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. 170 These changes are discussed in sections .. and ..
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more appropriate to treat PolY and UkrY as sister-idioms and LitY as their cousin-idiom than to see UkrY as a mixed dialect.171 EGY is another dialect whose affiliation is controversial. Weinreich considered it to be a part of WY, while Katz placed it among idioms transitional between WY and EY. In this book, EGY is seen as a sister-dialect of CzY: both are derived from the same ancestor conventionally called Proto-CzY. This link follows from the central criterion in our classification, namely the analysis—presented in section ..—of the system of stressed vowels. Another important argument comes from the consideration of the feature {C} that corresponds to the realization of Old German /p/. Here, the reflexes found in Friedrich (), the principal source for the analysis of EGY in this book, conform, on the one hand, to Bohemian, that is, the German dialect that is basic for both CzY and EY, and, on the other hand, to reflexes found in several early Ashkenazic sources from both Prague and Kraków. This characteristic shows a close link between EGY and both CzY and EY and the absence of a link between EGY and WY. Yet, formally speaking it does not allow us to be categorical in placing EGY together with CzY on the same Proto-CzY branch separately from Proto-EY. We cannot be sure about the exact source of these consonants in EGY. Their reflexes could be brought to East Prussia not only from the southwest (Bohemia-Moravia) but also from the southeast (Poland). Moreover, as explained in section ., for a number of other consonantal features listed in Table ., the idea of their provenance from EY (and, more precisely, from PolY) before spreading to EGY (as well as CzY and DuY) appears particularly attractive. Other evidence showing that—at some point—the influence of PolY on EGY was stronger than that of CzY comes from the consideration of the word meaning ‘grandfather.’ The initial /z/ in the form zeyde/zayde, shared by both EY and EGY, is different from /d/ appearing in CzY deyde.172 In EGY, EY, and CzY we find the same words tate ‘father, dad’ and mame ‘mother,’ unknown in WY. Yet, in EGY we also find— as lexical variants—the typical WY words ete ‘daddy’ and meme ‘mummy,’ too. The consideration of Romance elements shows the close affinities of EGY to EY and CzY and its major differences in comparison to WY.173 Globally speaking, EGY looks like an offspring of Proto-CzY with later admixtures from EY (major) and WY (minor). DuY is seen by both Weinreich and Katz as a typical WY subdialect. Yet, according to its modern vocalic chart, DuY looks like a sister-dialect of both CzY and EGY, all three of them having the same ancestor (Proto-CzY). Nevertheless, the situation was different in the past: we have clear indications about the existence of archaic reflexes akin to those specific to SWY.174 As mentioned in the previous paragraph, a number of DuY consonantal characteristics (listed in Table .) are due to interdialectal waves that seem to start in Poland. Yet, there is at least one major consonantal feature—internal /št/ {C}—according to which DuY sides with WY and remains separate from Yiddish varieties of Central and Eastern Europe. The same is true for the introduction of /d/ between /n/ and /l/ {C} and /eš/ instead of /aš/ {V}. During the eighteenth century, in DuY (exactly as in WY) both kinds of forms, with /n/ and without it, would co-exist. A good correlation to WY is also apparent in Romance lexical elements found in DuY as well as in words meaning ‘dad’ and ‘mummy.’ Yet, for ‘grandfather’ DuY uses a word of Slavic origin cognate with StY zeyde. Moreover, the morphology of modern DuY is characterized by the presence of a number of suffixes of Slavic origin. As indicated at the end of section .., among Hebrew idiosyncrasies found in DuY, some are typical of WY, while others are known only in Yiddish varieties of Central See the detailed analysis of these subdialects in sections .. and .. As indicated there, the lowering /ur/ > /or/ initially was a regional feature inside of PolY: it seems to cover the entire territory of PolY only after the end of the eighteenth century. 172 On basic family terms see sections . (features {L–L}) and ... 173 174 See section ... See section ... 171
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and Eastern Europe. DuY and EGY have one major feature in common: their main diminutive singular suffix is -khe(n), distinct from -l(e) found in other Yiddish dialects. Yet, this shared feature is not necessarily related to their mutual influences. Note that this suffix is standard in all Central German dialects except for Silesian. As a result, DuY could be influenced by WCG, while EGY by Upper Saxonian and Thuringian. Moreover, the same suffix was quite common (without being the principal one) in the Jewish community of Frankfurt, being responsible for about twenty percent of local female names during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The results of a statistical analysis of the female given names appearing in the engagement and marriage deeds from Amsterdam between and also show a similarity to Frankfurt and dramatic differences with respect to the Slavic countries.175 To these onomastic and linguistic features, one may add the results of genealogical studies that exist for Amsterdam, by far the most important community of the Netherlands. Four thousand, four hundred Ashkenazic Jews are mentioned in the publications of banns in that city between and . Of them, about , came from abroad, , were born in the Netherlands, while for about the geographic localization of their native places is unclear. Among the foreigners, about , were born in the territory of modern Germany of which, in Hamburg or Altona, in Frankfurt,176 in Emden, in Fürth, in Kassel, in Berlin, in Mannheim, and in Koblenz. Less than four percent of the total originated from the Czech lands (among them, more than two thirds, namely, individuals, were born in Prague). The numbers of migrants from the Polish Kingdom and Silesia are fairly similar; together they also constitute less than four percent. Jews from Alsace and Lorraine contributed only about one and a half percent.177 From this information, it becomes clear that during its early stages DuY was very close to the WY dialects spoken in western Germany. The role of Frankfurt was of crucial importance because of the direct migrations from that city and the role the community of Frankfurt played in the formation of Jewish communities in northern Germany and more particularly of Hamburg. As shown earlier, before the role of migrants from Slavic countries was minimal and the community of Hamburg represents the only channel through the intermediary of which certain linguistic elements from Slavic countries could penetrate DuY.178 It was during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century that DuY acquired its mixed status. However, we know of no mass migrations of Jews from Central or Eastern Europe to the Netherlands at that period. The explanation of this change is related to the socio-cultural history of Dutch Jewry. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the bulk of Dutch Jews of German origin—in a similar way to their coreligionists in Germany—followed the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (HASKALAH) and became acculturated in many respects (except for the religion) to the Christian majority. They mainly abandoned Yiddish and used Dutch and/or German as their vernacular languages. Dutch Jews who had originated in Eastern Europe did not necessarily follow the same trend: many of them remained orthodox. They played an essential role in the major changes of the local dialect of Yiddish, this role being disproportional to their percentage in the Dutch Jewish community. These considerations show that, globally speaking, modern DuY is a mixed dialect, with its oldest stratum being due to WY and new elements being due to the influence of EY. The merger of the reflexes of the A and A represents one of the system-level elements related to that influence. It results from the change of the pronunciation of words from the German component whose stressed
See the discussion of the feature {M} in section .. Some of them could be from Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, but a large majority were from Frankfurt-am-Main. 177 These calculations are based on Verdooner and Snel .:–. I would like to thank Jits van Straten who indicated to me the existence of that source and provided me with his own statistics by country of origin based on it. 178 See the discussion of Yiddish in Hamburg later in this section. In principle, migrants from Hamburg could be partially responsible for the merging of A and A in DuY. 175 176
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vowel corresponds to the lengthened MHG a (A).179 Yet, it is precisely because of this merger that the vocalic chart of DuY cannot be neatly derived from “Proto-WY.” Consequently, the derivation of DuY vocalism from the Proto-CzY chart outlined in section .. was purely instrumental. It does not correspond to the real history of the development of DuY, an idiom with no particular genetic link to CzY. Modern DuY, a dialect resulting from a mixture of WY and EY, looks as if it were derived from Proto-CzY only because the Proto-CzY scheme is intermediate between those of “Proto-WY” and Proto-EY. This example provides an eloquent illustration of the weakness of a purely theoretical linguistic reconstruction that is not founded upon factual information on the linguistic and demographic past of the community under analysis. As discussed in section .., Katz places into the same entity “Northwestern Yiddish” both Yiddish in the Netherlands (called DuY in this book) and the idiom of northwestern German provinces. Yet, according to the classification suggested in this book (Table .), at least Yiddish from Westphalia (conventionally called WphY) is a part of WY and, therefore, separate from DuY. The reason for this separation lies in the analysis of stressed vowels. The chart suggested for DuY (Table .) is derived from Proto-CzY, while the chart for WphY (Table .) is related to “Proto-WY.” The only important factor in such a consideration corresponds to reflexes of A. In DuY, this proto-vowel merged with A as a single phoneme /o:/, while no such merger is known in WphY. However, as discussed in the previous paragraph, this merger in DuY could be a relatively recent phenomenon provoked by the influence of Yiddish dialects from Eastern and Central Europe. Consequently, properly speaking, it cannot serve as a cogent argument for considering WphY and DuY to have different sources. Any comparison of consonantal phenomena is difficult because our knowledge about WphY is quite fragmentary. It is due to Weinberg () who noted peculiarities valid during the s. Yet, at that time, in contrast to DuY, WphY was not a living idiom any longer. Weinberg describes a specifically Jewish repertoire—to a great extent limited to elements of Hebrew origin—of an ethnolect valid for some Jews in that area. As a result, we know almost nothing about specifically Jewish peculiarities that were valid for the German component of WphY when it was still a living language, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Hebrew component, differences between WphY and DuY are quite limited and their existence may in theory be due to recent changes.180 However, this feature is not a cogent argument for positing the common origins of just these two varieties that distinguish them from others: as shown in this book, the Hebrew component is relatively homogeneous for all Yiddish dialects. Globally, we can say that the information provided by Weinberg does not allow us to consider WphY (unlike DuY) a mixed Yiddish variety. For example, we do not find any trace of the influence of EY, with no Slavic elements except for a few words. Yet, as explained earlier, the elements testifying to the mixed character of DuY appeared precisely during the period when WphY had already ceased to be an everyday specifically Jewish idiom. As a result, formally speaking, the question of the original unity of WphY and DuY (and the existence of the putative “Northwestern Yiddish” posited by Katz) remains open.181 179 Note that in Witz, a poem composed in Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, words whose stressed vowel corresponds to the lengthened MHG a (A) rhyme only with each other and never with MHG â (A). Certainly, the language of this author could be reflecting dialectal peculiarities of Yiddish not from Amsterdam but from his native Hessen. The existence of the DuY form of Romance origin shālet ‘a Sabbath dish,’ with [a:] for A provides another argument (see section .). 180 For example, as discussed in section ..: (i) ‘rabbi’ is /ra:v/ in WphY (exactly as in other WY subdialects), while in DuY we find the form /ro:v/, as in CzY and EY (see Table .); (ii) in contrast to DuY, no nasalization is observed in WphY words meaning ‘arrogance’ and ‘story’ (see Table ., feature {v}). This absence of nasalization in WphY could be due to a relatively recent renorming based on WHOLE HEBREW rules. 181 See also Aptroot :–.
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Synthesis: classification of Yiddish dialects
Yiddish in Hamburg is also considered by Katz as a subdialect of “Northwestern Yiddish.” For that city, the available information corresponds to several periods. Memoirs written at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Glückel of Hameln (GH), a native resident of Hamburg, represent one of the earliest available sources.182 In that source, we find several features typical of WY such as the GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS, /eš/ instead of /aš/, and the suffix -khen.183 Other features are not limited to WY being also specific to CzY: /a:/ for MHG ei and ou, niks ‘nothing,’184 ōren ‘to pray’ (of Romance origin), but no davenen. The initial /tf/ in place of Old German p is derived from former /pf/ that was commonly used in early Ashkenazic documents from both Western and Central Europe.185 She uses no Slavic words, except for two commonly found in other western sources also, numerous Hebraisms fully integrated in her text, and only about fifty Low German words. Globally speaking, her text, though partly Germanized, looks like a typical WY source.186 Yet, we cannot a priori take it as totally representative of the period. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hypocoristic forms of female given names appearing in the inscriptions of the cemetery of Altona, near Hamburg, also provide important information about the local dialect of Yiddish.187 We find a feature shared by this community and those from the areas of CzY and EY (and its difference with respect to Amsterdam and the area of WY): the introduction of /d/ between /n/ and /l/.188 Also, from the analysis of suffixes, we can see that the local community was transitional between that of Frankfurt (large number of names ending in -khe(n)) and Prague (common use of the suffix -(e)l almost unknown in Amsterdam during the eighteenth century), while names with the typical SWY suffix -le (also commonly used in Amsterdam) were almost non-existent there. It is also important to note that there is no significant change in the frequency of various suffixes during that period. For example, we observe no dramatic increase of the popularity of the suffix -(e)l in the eighteenth century when compared to the seventeenth century. From these onomastic materials, we can see that, unlike the language of the Ashkenazic community of Amsterdam with its noticeable WY basis, the linguistic situation in Hamburg was partly mixed even before the nineteenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century, the HASKALAH movement affected Hamburg in the same way as other major western Ashkenazic communities. Numerous local Jews became culturally and linguistically acculturated to the German majority. As a result, in a similar way to the situation in Amsterdam, the role of the more orthodox eastern Jewish migrants became particularly important for the later development of the local dialect of Yiddish. Rée () provides information about Yiddish in the Hamburg of his time. In addition to certain features already known from GH,189 he mentions the /o:/-reflex for the lengthened MHG a (A), another feature that links this dialect to CzY (and LitY) and contrasts to WY.190 It is not clear whether this was an innovation (under the influence of CzY, EGY, and/or EY), or rather a feature that was already valid at the period of the compilation of GH. Similarly to DuY, we find the reflex [ɔu] for O.191 In more recent references from Hamburg, 182 The name of this woman is usually transcribed in Yiddish studies as Glückel or—following StY norms—Glikl. Yet, as noted by Landau (:), her name never appears in this form in the original source where it is actually given as *Gliklkhen ()גליקליכין, *Gliklkhe ()גליקליכי, later *Glükkhen/Glikkhen ( )גלוקכיןand *Glükkhe/Glikkhe ()גלוקכי. Her father was the first Ashkenazic Jew to receive an authorization to live in the city of Hamburg (TG ). The analysis of her language appears in Landau and Timm . 183 See features {C} (section ..), {V} (section ...), {M} (section .). 184 See features {V} (section ..), {C} (section ..). 185 186 See features {C} (section ..); see also TG . See section . and Timm :–. 187 See features {M} and tables for Prague, Frankfurt, and Altona in section .. 188 See feature {C} in section ... 189 For example, [a:] for MHG ei and ou as in all non-EY dialects (Rée :). 190 See Rée :, , BA , , and the feature {V} (section ..). 191 Rée (:) writes about the diphthong “au” in which the first element is a sound between [a] and [o]. In GH, we also find a diphthongal realization of O.
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Sound changes and dialects
we find numerous examples of PolY influence. For example, [aj], [oj], [a:], and [i:] appear already as variants (along with more usual [a:], [a:], [aj], and [u:]) for MHG ei, ou, î, and uo, respectively.192 Of EY origin are also Ōr(e)n and Ūr(e)n ‘Aaron.’193 For ‘daily prayer book,’ ‘neither dairy, nor meat (food),’ ‘to pray,’ and ‘nothing,’ one finds in Hamburg both the western forms (tefile, minikh, ōren, niks, and nedinye) and the eastern ones (sider, parve, davenen, nisht, and nedan).194 The same is true for the indefinite article: both WY/CzY e and EY a are attested.195 Several words of Slavic origin, specific to EY, also appear in that city.196 Similarly to EY and CzY (but in contrast to SWY and DuY), we find in Hamburg only the velar /x/ and no trace of ich-laut.197 The form tsukes ‘Sukkoth’ is known only in that city and EGY.198 At the same time, a number of other elements are typically WY.199 Globally speaking, we can assert that the Yiddish variety of Hamburg, as DuY, is transitional between WY and those of Central (CzY, EGY) and Eastern Europe (EY). Moreover, we have no information about Yiddish being a living language in Hamburg during the twentieth century. A majority of local Jews were already culturally assimilated into German culture and were using German as their first language, with a specifically Jewish repertoire that included a number of words of Yiddish origin. Only a small fringe of the Hamburg Jewish community could be really Yiddishspeaking.200 See BA , , , . The reflex [aj] for MHG ei (attested in GGA as well) may be also due to the influence of standard German. 193 See BA ; compare {v} (section ..). 194 See BA , , , , GGA ; compare {l} (section ..), {C} (section ..), see also sections .. (about par(e)ve) and .. (about ōren). 195 See BA ; compare {U} (section .). 196 See BA . The exact sources used to construct maps given in BA are unknown. As a result, we do not know the time to which these references correspond and whether they are due to informants or to the analysis by Beranek of written documents. Moreover, in certain cases he clearly does not base his isoglosses on the available information but extrapolates certain data to neighboring regions. Consequently, we cannot be sure about the characteristics of Yiddish in Hamburg such as, for example, /p/ in the final and the internal position and the initial /f/ for Old German p, as well as the absence of GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS (BA –; see features {C} in section .. and {C} in section ..). With the same caution one should approach the information that (similarly to EGY) the Yiddish dialect in Hamburg had several words, of both western and eastern origins, for basic family members: ‘dad’ (tete, also known in CzY, and ete, typical of WY) and ‘mummy’ (mame, as in CzY and EY, and meme, as in WY) (see BA , , and the features {L, L} in section .). Similarly, it is not clear whether the PolY form zayde ‘grandfather’ (BA ) was really found in Hamburg. To avoid this pitfall here only those references from BA were taken for which Beranek indicates explicitly that they correspond precisely to Hamburg. A global comparison of data appearing in BA with those extracted from other sources shows that the information he provides is generally reliable. 197 See GGA , ; compare {C} (section ..). 198 See footnote (section ..). 199 See GGA (parnes ‘head of community’), (sargenes ‘shrouds’), (shānes ‘twigs for the Sukkoth holiday’), (oumern ‘to count’), (berkhes ‘Sabbath bread’), and (memern); on sargenes and memern see also section .. 200 Timm (TS ) presents two lists of twenty-two expressions combining [noun (mainly from the layer of religious terms) + verb from the German component], one list in EY, and another list by an Israeli woman who originated from Hamburg written in her native Yiddish variety. Verbs used are the same in all but one of these expressions while, in principle, other verbs with a close meaning exist in Yiddish. As a result, the selection of identical verbs cannot be fortuitous: this is clearly related to a common tradition. According to Timm, this comparison shows the unity of the German component of WY and EY and, therefore, of Yiddish as a whole. From a synchronic point of view this argument is convincing. However, it should not be extrapolated to draw such a general conclusion about the genesis of WY and EY. Indeed, here we are dealing with expressions directly related to the religious sphere, which is a domain in which a kind of uniformity obtained that may easily be explained not via common roots but via gradual changes due to the mobility of Ashkenazic rabbis and religious scholars and teachers (see the discussion of feature {L} in section .). Even more importantly, as discussed in this section, in no case can the variety of Hamburg be considered as representative of WY. Here, one example is particularly instructive. Among the expressions cited by Timm, one means ‘to blow Shofar.’ For this, a geographic distribution appears in BA . We can see that the verb appearing in the reference from Hamburg is cognate with StY blozn (also found in CzY) while the verb typical of WY is tetshen (of 192
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Synthesis: classification of Yiddish dialects
The concepts of mixed dialects used above to characterize DuY and the dialect of Hamburg can be expressed in both absolute and relative terms. Using absolute terms, we may call a variety “mixed” if we can distinguish several chronologically distinct layers that were due to influences coming from different directions. This is clearly the case for Yiddish dialects in Amsterdam and Hamburg. For both of them, one may discern older layers related to WY and, in the case of Hamburg, maybe to CzY too, as well as more recent layers due to migrants from Eastern Europe and the importance of scholars and teachers from Poland. The relative sense of the word “mixed” stems from a comparison of Yiddish varieties to each other. For example, we can say that in the following chain (SWY and LitY) — (PolY and UkrY) — CzY — EGY — (Yiddish in Hamburg and DuY) the degree of “mixity” increases from left to right. SWY and LitY are particularly homogeneous, a characteristic that is, at least partly, due to their geographic position, westernmost and easternmost, the relatively old age of the local Jewish communities, and, most importantly, an absence of several important independent waves of immigration to these areas. PolY, though having the same ancestor as LitY, underwent—most likely, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—additional changes that originated in the area of CzY (with which it also shared a common ancestor, though one step removed in comparison to the ancestor shared with LitY). UkrY is basically a sister-dialect of PolY and numerous (but not all) changes that started in Poland were later brought to Ukraine too. Since the Czech lands are situated in the central part of Europe, CzY underwent influences from both EY and WY. On the one hand, certain consonantal changes shared by PolY and CzY originated in Poland. The same direction seems to be valid for the verbal infix -en-.201 On the other hand, of all Yiddish varieties in Central and Eastern Europe, CzY includes the largest number of Romanisms brought from the West and a certain number of Hebraisms typical of WY.202 Moreover, a number of characteristics are specific to CzY being related either to the influence of the Bohemian dialect of German or to local internal Jewish innovations.203 Note that the three most “mixed” varieties in this chain, all having many features in common, cover northern Ashkenazic communities going from East (East Prussia) to West (the Netherlands). Local communities are relatively more recent than those in other areas under consideration. They were created by Yiddish-speaking migrants coming from various parts of Europe. It is no surprise that in all of them we find alternative WY and EY variants for basic family terms.
Romance origin, see section .). Note also that the religious customs of the community of Hamburg were transitional between those of West Germany (“Minhag Ashkenaz”) and those of Eastern and Central Europe (“Minhag Polin”) (Lowenstein :, ). 201 See section .. (feature {m} and Table ., from both of which it is clear that -en- was less common in CzY than in EY. 202 Examples: the variant rāv ‘rabbi,’ taynes ‘religious fast’ (Tables . and . in section ..), avze ‘goose’ (feature {l}, section ..), revitsin ‘wife of rabbi’ (Table . in section ..); note the intervocalic /v/ instead of /b/, while this change is not valid for CzY (compare the feature {C} in section .. ). 203 See features {C} (section ..), {C} (section ..), {V} (section ..), and {L} (section .).
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Conclusion The results of the linguistic analysis of Yiddish suggested in this book shed some light on the controversy concerning the linguistic aspects of the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES, corroborate some major positions of one or both theories in question, disagree with certain other positions, and provide numerous additional details that were not covered by these theories. Following the LANGUAGE TREE approach, classical in historical linguistics, all varieties of modern Yiddish have a High German basis. An important amount of surface-level lexical and semantic features (and even a few morphological idiosyncrasies) originated in western Germany. The biblical translations extensively studied by boys in Jewish elementary schools represent the main channel through which they became widespread in Ashkenazic communities, often acquiring the status of pan-Yiddish. This phenomenon—extensively studied by Timm—supports the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. Yet, the global emphasis on the Rhineland made by Weinreich within the framework of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS is untenable: Yiddish links to West Central German dialects are marginal. The dialectal geography proposed by proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS is much more appropriate. However, it is incorrect to assign a special significance to Bavarian with which Yiddish has striking structural differences. German dialects from neighboring areas, Bohemian and East Franconian (themselves influenced by developments that often started in Bavarian) were crucial for the development of Yiddish. Bohemian represents the basis for both EY and CzY. Numerous major features of WY are correlated with East Franconian. These links explain a large number of system-level characteristics from the domain of phonology and grammar. The existence of two independent basic German dialects implies the polygenesis of Yiddish as a whole. This feature amply discussed in the book represents a major difference with respect to scenarios suggested within the framework of both the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES.1 The notions of “Proto-Yiddish” and Yiddish “protovowels” introduced by Weinreich and developed by other scholars may be crucial for a simplified description of the development of vocalic charts of different Yiddish varieties. Yet, these notions do not correspond to any synchronic reality in the history of idioms used by Jews. Moreover, even “Proto-WY” has never existed. Vocalic charts of WY subdialects look as if they were derived from the same proto-chart, but in reality their unity results from a gradual unconscious renorming. On the other hand, a proto-dialect representing an ancestor common to EY and CzY could indeed have existed in the past. During the second stage of its existence, EY underwent the significant influence of the Silesian dialect of German spoken by German colonists in medieval Polish towns. A second major difference with respect to the points of view of the main authors adhering to the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES corresponds to the estimation of the age of Yiddish. For these authors, Yiddish was born about one thousand years ago, that is, roughly during the period when the earliest important Jewish communities appeared in Germany. The consideration of Yiddish as primarily a “fusion” language rather than an idiom having a common ancestor with modern German is not based on any linguistic evidence. If we speak about the birth of Yiddish in terms of branching within the LANGUAGE TREE model, it is appropriate to trace the genesis of its western and eastern varieties to the fifteenth century only. No data in our possession indicate that any systemlevel difference existed between Jewish speech and that of Gentile neighbors during the previous period. Texts written in the vernacular language(s) spoken by Ashkenazic Jews before the sixteenth century are generally closely related to the German dialects used by the Christian majority in the areas where the Jewish authors in question originated. They present no linguistic unity. Beginning with the sixteenth century, the unity is perfectly apparent inside of the two following groups: () sources from western Germany and northern Italy (whose language represents an ancestor for WY), and () sources from Prague and Kraków (both directly related to CzY and those from Poland already showing certain features specific to EY). The consideration of the Hebrew-Aramaic component of Yiddish reveals important differences in the points of view of various scholars. Yet, contrary to the German component, here the distinction is independent of the dichotomy between the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES. The opinions depend on the author, with Weinreich and 1
A dichotomy of a similar kind was also proposed in BN and Blosen .
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Conclusion
Katz being the linguists whose concepts on this topic are the most elaborate. In several major aspects, they oppose each other. The first domain of controversy concerns the geographic origins of the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew. Weinreich asserts that it is mainly inherited from the Hebrew used by medieval Rhenish Jews. He postulates that during the thirteenth century the original PALESTINIAN-like system of Hebrew pronunciation, with five vocalic qualities, was replaced by a new, TIBERIAN-like, system, with seven vocalic qualities. Weinreich relates this change, as well as a number of other modifications in the Hebrew pronunciation, to the influence of scholars who migrated to Western Europe from the Middle East and labels BABYLONIAN RENAISSANCE the general process in question. Katz’s general concepts are fundamentally different. He considers that the difference between the two vocalic systems is not the question of time but rather that of space. He postulates that the system with seven qualities was valid for Danubian BNEY KHES (from whom this feature was inherited by Yiddish) while that with five qualities characterized Rhenish BNEY HES (whose language, according to Katz, had no influence on Yiddish). The analysis carried out in this book corroborates the main ideas of Weinreich though some of Katz’s thoughts provide an additional important insight into major characteristics of the processes in question. On the one hand, the passage between the two vocalic systems was primarily a question of time and it lasted several centuries. In partial correlation with the ideas of Katz, the duration of the transitional period was particularly long in western territories. As suggested in this book, the vocalic chart of the German component of the Ashkenazic vernacular speech (and not a putative BABYLONIAN RENAISSANCE) was a decisive factor in this passage. On the other hand, numerous idiosyncrasies of the modern Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew spread from Western Europe to Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, in good correlation with the geography suggested by Katz, a number of fundamental new norms (encompassing the pronunciation of heth and shin) became adopted among BNEY KHES from the Danubian area earlier than among BNEY HES of western German communities. This book shows that the notion, shared by both Weinreich and Katz, of the common origins of the Hebrew component of all modern Yiddish is certainly true. Moreover, our analysis demonstrates that the unity in question was already to a greater extent valid in the Middle Ages when the dichotomy between BNEY HES and BNEY KHES was still extant. Opinions by Weinreich and Katz about the sources for the Hebrew-Aramaic (LOSHN-KOYDESH) component of Yiddish are also dramatically different. Weinreich presents the whole component as if it would result from a merger of the two Semitic languages in question. He also points out that often various words and expressions can be traced to the Bible, the Talmud, or other fundamental texts of Judaism. Yet, Katz insists on oral transmission. In his approach, he goes even further, conjecturing that Yiddish was created in the medieval Danubian communities as a result of a fusion between local Upper German linguistic elements and those coming from Aramaic that, according to him, was the vernacular language of Jews who migrated to that region. The analysis suggested in this book shows that numerous elements in the LOSHN-KOYDESH component of Yiddish are clearly due to the oral tradition that already existed in the Middle Ages. However, nothing corroborates Katz’s notion of the vernacular character of Aramaic elements. Between the two extremes—texts and colloquial language—numerous intermediary oral contexts also exist. Moreover, the textual origin of other elements is also undeniable, while within the language pair, Hebrew and Aramaic, the role of the former was by far the more important. It is primarily for this reason that within this book the component in question is called Hebrew rather than Hebrew-Aramaic or LOSHN-KOYDESH. The merger between the two Semitic languages in question never did take place. According to Weinreich, quantitative differences appeared in Hebrew vocalism under the influence of the German-inspired lengthening in open syllables. Katz demonstrated the inadequacy of this opinion: the distinction between long and short vowels clearly already existed during the pre-Ashkenazic period. To the same period he posited the rule of shortening of formerly long vowels in closed syllables conjectured by him. To this, Jacobs later added the notion of the pre-Ashkenazic character of the lengthening of vowels in open syllables. As discussed in this book, the notions by both Katz and Jacobs are particularly attractive. Considerations of Romance elements found in Yiddish often depend on the general approach of authors to the history of Yiddish. Opinions of proponents of the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES differ significantly. The former insist on the early age of Yiddish Romanisms and relate them to the vernacular languages of migrants who came in the Middle Ages to the Rhineland from northern France and, maybe, also northern Italy. For Weinreich, Romance elements are extremely important. He speaks about the existence of the Romance (LOEZ) component.
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Conclusion
According to his approach, it was one of the three components (the two others being the German and LOSHNKOYDESH components) that contributed to the inception of a new “fusion” language, Yiddish. For authors who adhere to the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS, Romance elements are marginal for the history of Yiddish. They are mainly adstratal and considered to be of Balkan and/or northern Italian origin. Finally, there exists a third approach that considers that unique Yiddish Romanisms represent a substratum due to the Romance idiom (vulgar Latin) spoken in the Rhineland in Antiquity and during the Early Middle Ages. The linguistic analysis undertaken in this book yields results that are roughly compatible only with those advanced by the proponents of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. The small set of Yiddish elements of Romance origin is mainly due to migrants from northern France. However, the importance of these elements should not be overestimated. All of them belong to the lexicon only and are, therefore, surface-level for the language. No one system-level influence of Romance languages can be discerned in Yiddish: no traces can be found in phonology, morphology, or grammar. For WY, these lexical elements are substratal. The presence of some of them in CzY and EY was due to western migrants. Certain Slavic elements found in CzY and EY were inherited from WEST CANAANITES and are of Old Czech origin. This point was already partly noted by Weinreich. However, because he posited the inception of Yiddish in western Germany at the turn of the First and Second Millenniums CE, he considered these words adstratal to Yiddish. In this domain, the approach of certain proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS is similar. For them, all Slavic elements in Yiddish are adstratal, with those of Old Czech origin being the oldest loanwords and features borrowed from Polish and (later) East Slavic languages being more recent. In this book, CzY and EY words of Old Czech origin are considered substratal. This distinction represents a direct consequence of a dramatically different definition of the notion of YIDDISH introduced in this book, a definition that closely follows the classical LANGUAGE TREE approach to historical linguistics. This approach relates mother and daughter idioms ignoring whether their respective speakers are genetically related or not. It also focuses on purely linguistic factors disregarding Jewish specificity and other extra-linguistic factors. In the history of Yiddish studies, its application corresponds to the GERMANISTIC APPROACH followed by a number of major linguists (including Landau and Fischer/Bin-Nun) before World War II. This approach contrasts in a number of major methodological positions to the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH developed by Weinreich and Birnbaum, having a sociolinguistic basis, and followed by a number of other Yiddish scholars (including Katz and Jacobs). The classification of Yiddish varieties suggested in this book is close to the classification suggested by Katz. The existing differences are directly related to the difference in methodological approaches. Since the one proposed here is primarily based on genetic links between idioms established according to the LANGUAGE TREE method, CzY is not seen as a transitional dialect between WY and EY as proposed by Katz, and not as a subdialect of WY as considered by Weinreich, but rather as a dialect that shares the same ancestor with EY but not with WY. Yiddish in Eastern Germany is derived from the same lineage as CzY. On the other hand, the dialect used in the Netherlands (DuY) is mixed: its most archaic features are typically WY, but a number of relatively recent system-level characteristics are due to the influence of EY. Generally speaking, a number of basic ideas introduced by the representatives of various schools in Yiddish studies should not be seen as alternative but rather as supplementary to each other. For example, the method of viewing Jewish languages from “within” that is typical for the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH—valid for both the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES—represents by itself a major contribution to our knowledge of Yiddish. It introduced the notion of “fusion” that may indeed be an appropriate theoretical tool for studying certain aspects of the development of Yiddish. Similarly, a consideration of the uninterrupted chain of languages spoken by Jews sheds light on some factors that were not apparent within the framework of the more traditional GERMANISTIC APPROACH. Yet, to consider that the links in this chain are as important for the structure of Yiddish as the genetic links in the LANGUAGE TREE model can only mislead linguistic research. Links between languages spoken by Jews primarily provide us with information about the genetic relationship between the people and not languages concerned. In other words, the methods introduced by the JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH can be helpful and may be used, but one should not be restricted only to these methods and, moreover, they should not be central to an analysis of Yiddish focused on its linguistic rather than sociolinguistic features. Numerous basic positions of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS remain valid. Only a few results obtained by the proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS represent real alternatives to the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. They are mainly limited to the Hebrew component. Other results are either invalid or come up with information that is complementary rather than alternative.
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Conclusion
The principal ambitions of this book are purely linguistic: they are oriented to providing a better and more profound understanding of the development of Yiddish varieties. Any application of the linguistic and onomastic results obtained in this book for elucidating the origins of Ashkenazic Jewry can only be carried through on a very limited scale. Linguistic processes are only partially related to the history of the settlement and demographic characteristics of Jewish communities in non-Mediterranean Europe. No numerical estimates concerning the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry may be made based on the history of Yiddish. However, linguistics and onomastics supply cogent arguments refuting the “revolutionary” theories advanced by certain authors who denigrate the contribution of migrants from Central and Western Europe to the Jewish settlement of Eastern Europe. No data available to us force us to abandon the paradigm of the Rhenish origin of Ashkenazic Jewry dominant in historiography. Yet, thanks to our analysis of the history of Yiddish we learn numerous additional details about the past of Ashkenazic Jews. Discovering these details was the main motivation for writing this book.
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Appendix A: Yiddish dialect of PhilogLottus In , a book entitled Kurtze unde gründliche Anweisung zur Teutsch-Jüdischen Sprache was published in Freiberg (Saxony). The author used the pen name PhilogLottus.1 Several characteristics imply that he describes a WY variety. In the book in question, we regularly find /f/ for veth. Among examples are: chafrusse ‘society’ ( )ַחְברוָּתאand afnet ‘girdle’ (( )ַאְב ֵנטpp. , ). Of all the Yiddish varieties known in the twentieth century, the reflex /f/ for veth is known only in AlsY and SwY. During the first half of the nineteenth century, this reflex was also specific to FrY, another subdialect of SWY, and a reference is found in a work written by Gilardone (), a Christian author from Speyer.2 Yet, sources from certain other regions do not have /f/ even during the eighteenth century. Among them are: Selig , Friedrich , and Tirsch who describe Yiddish in Saxony, East Prussia, and Prague, respectively. All of them, exactly like PhilogLottus , address a Christian audience. As a result, it is appropriate to consider that the variety described by PhilogLottus was different from that covered by the three books in question. PhilogLottus uses the spelling ou not only for ḥ olem but for qameṣ also. Among the examples are: chous’n ‘bridegroom’ ( )ָחָתןand kousch’r (‘ )ָּכׁש ֵרkosher.’3 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the merging of phonemes corresponding to these Hebrew vowels (proto-vowels O and A, respectively) again represents an idiosyncrasy of SWY only. However, indirect data indicate the possibility of the same phenomenon being valid in the past in the middle Rhine area too.4 Initial /si/ in sikes ‘Sukkoth (Jewish holiday)’ (p. ) is specific to SWY and the middle Rhine area. However, it is unknown in WY of northern Germany, EGY, and CzY.5 The same geographical area applies in the case of the GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS for which a number of examples are found in the book in question: beire ‘fruit’ (p. , )ְּפ ִריand moute sey ‘to admit’ (p. , ;מֹוֶדהcompare StY moyde zayn).6 The presence of /e/ instead of /a/ before /š/ in the spelling wäschn ‘to wash’ (p. ) connects the idiom covered by PhilogLottus only to Yiddish varieties known in Western Europe. In Central and Eastern Europe, the cognate form has /a/; compare StY vashn.7 Among other typical WY particularities are: • /a:/ in raaf ‘rabbi’ (p. ) known in all of WY; see feature {v} in section ..; • /o/ in doleth ‘daleth’ (p. ) specific to SWY, WphY, and DuY; see feature {v} in section .. (Table .); • Elision of final /n/ in sey ‘to be’ (pp. , , etc.) known in WY and CzY; see feature {C} in section ..; • Romanisms ohr’n ‘to pray’ and praijn ‘to invite’ (pp. , ) found mainly in WY and DuY and rarely in CzY; see section ... The form bsulchen (p. ), a diminutive of ‘virgin’ ()ְּבתוּ ָלה, is the only element that contradicts SWY. Indeed, it includes the suffix that appears in Jewish sources only in the area of Central German (to which it is limited in dialects spoken by German Christians), as well as in northern German provinces and the Netherlands where
1 Usually in Yiddish studies, it is considered that his real name was (most likely) J. Ph. Lütke; see, for example, Weinreich :, :, Birnbaum :, and Katz :. This idea was suggested in Avé-Lallemant :. 2 See feature {c} in section ... 3 In numerous other words, qameṣ is expressed via o: compare bosor (‘ )ָּבָׂשרmeat,’ chosid (‘ )ָחִסידpious man,’ zohof (‘ )ָזָהבgold,’ rosch haschono (aַה ּ ָׁש ָנהa)ֹראׁשa ‘Jewish New Year,’ meschores (‘ )ְמ ׁ ָש ֵרתservant,’ and brocho (‘ )ְּב ָרָכהbenediction.’ 4 See sections .. and .. (feature {V}). 5 See footnote for Table . (section ..). The form sikes is also valid for PolY and UkrY. However, these forms are irrelevant to our context: PhilogLottus is certainly not describing a dialect of EY. 6 See feature {C} in section ..). These examples are due to Weinreich (:). 7 See feature {V} in section ...
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Appendix A
Jewish communities were created by migrants from Central Germany.8 We cannot be totally sure that this suffix was indeed used in the dialect described by PhilogLottus. In principle, he could have taken this form from the vernacular speech of some Saxonian Jews (note the form bssulche in Selig :), or even some written sources. However, if his book does not represent a compilation from other authors and he really does describe just one specific variety of Yiddish, then the variety in question most likely corresponds to the Frankfurt-MainzWorms area. Only this region may (in theory) be compatible with all the features enumerated above.
8
See feature {M} in section ..
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Appendix B: Germans and German language in Poland In Kraków and Sandomierz, the main cities of medieval Lesser Poland, the first known German colonists arrived during the first half of the thirteenth century, mainly from Silesia. In Kraków, the capital city and the most populous locality of the country, their proportion grew particularly rapidly.1 For the whole of the fifteenth century, people having typical German given names and/or surnames represented a large majority in the city. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the role of Germans was also important in many other towns of Lesser Poland. This was true for the largest places such as Nowy Sącz, Stary Sącz, Bochnia, Wieliczka, Tarnów, Biecz, Opatów, Olkusz, and Lublin. The German presence was also quite conspicuous in numerous smaller localities, some of which were even founded by them and received names based on the German language.2 Starting from the second half of the fourteenth century and for a period that lasted about two centuries, German colonists became predominant in many localities of Red Ruthenia, that is, the territory of several old Russian principalities that were incorporated into the Polish state during the s. These families mainly originated from Silesia, Lesser Poland, Saxony, and Bohemia. During that period, often as a direct consequence of the influx of German immigrants, numerous local towns were granted the Magdeburg rights, the set of urban laws known in Poland as “German law” (in Polish: prawo niemieckie). In the largest cities of the area, Lwów and Przemyśl, in the fifteenth century Germans accounted for about seventy to eighty percent of the total population. Their number was also significant in Przeworsk, Mościska, Tyczyn, Krosno, Jarosław, and Busk. Certain local towns (including Łańcut < German Landshut) were founded by Germans.3 Another influx of German colonists affected medieval northern Polish territories. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a large number of German-speaking migrants came to Greater Poland with numerous places receiving at that time the Magdeburg rights. The presence of Germans is particularly conspicuous in the largest cities, including Poznań, Pyzdry, Kalisz, and Gniezno. In Kuyavia, they also became particularly numerous in the largest cities: Brześć-Kujawski, Włocławek, and Inowrocław. In , in the immediate vicinity of Bydgoszcz, a new and important German settlement Brahenburg (future Bromberg) was founded that gradually merged with Bydgoszcz. The German presence was particularly large in Pomerelia and the neighboring Chełmno Land where Teutonic knights, German clergy, and numerous other colonists had been established. As a result, during the fourteenth century, Germans represented a large majority in the biggest cities of the area (Gdańsk, Chełmno, and Toruń) and were commonly resident in many other localities. In Mazovia, their role was significantly more limited. There were large numbers of Germans in Płock during the fourteenth century. During the same period they were very conspicuous in Warsaw.4
1
Among geographic nicknames appearing in the oldest Kraków books written in German (–), sixty are derived from places in Silesia, nine from the Czech localities, and six from towns in Thuringia. Another group of nicknames of German colonists living in Kraków at that time is based on toponyms from Poland. The German origin of numerous other individuals mentioned in these books is revealed by their given names (Kawczyński :). 2 See details in Lück :–, –. This book is often ignored by contemporary scholars. The main reason is likely to be the personality of the author. An activist for German minority cultural organizations in Poland during the s, after the beginning of WWII he became an active member of the Nazi party. SS-officer Lück was killed in on the Russian front. These personal facts should not prevent us using his writings for scientific studies in the domain of history and linguistics. The book by Lück provides the most detailed available description of early German settlement in Eastern Europe. No particular apology for the role of Germans is apparent. The reader may often adhere to his conclusions simply because the author supplies numerous details obtained by him during his meticulous fieldwork in the Polish archives. Globally speaking, the factual information in the book in question appears to be reliable. 3 See details in Lück :– (with numerous tables). 4 See details in Lück :–. For a general discussion of medieval German settlements in Poland see also Kaczmarczyk (, with map on p. ).
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Germans and German language in Poland
Taking these facts into account, it is not surprising that until the beginning of the sixteenth century for the urban population in many places of Lesser Poland, Red Ruthenia, northern Polish territories, as well as in certain cities of Greater Poland, the German language was of paramount importance. In Kraków, German remained the administrative language for several centuries. The oldest municipal documents from Poznań (from the end of the fourteenth century and the first third of the fifteenth century) are written in German or (rarely) in Latin (W). Both languages are also used in other sources from the same city dating from the fifteenth century and the start of the sixteenth century (W, K). The oldest municipal books of Lwów from the end of the fourteenth century (Cz) are written in Latin. Those from the first quarter of the following century (Cz, Cz) already include certain German texts. The totality of materials from the s dealing with the local jurisdiction in relationship to the Magdeburg rights (Cz) appear in German. All these texts were published in their original spelling. The large majority of people (local citizens as well as merchants coming to Lwów from other places) are unambiguous Germans. Poles and Armenians are significantly less numerous. The number of references to Jews and Ruthenians (ancestors of modern western Ukrainians) is even smaller. This distribution is valid for all the aforementioned Lwów documents, that is, both Latin and German. On the other hand, sources of a similar kind from Przemyśl from the first half of the fifteenth century (ST) are mainly written in Latin. Only a few documents are in German. Numerous references to toponyms appear in the sources in question. Generally, the language of the document is determinant for the spelling used. In Latin documents, place names often appear in their Latin or Latinized forms. For example, in Cz we mainly find: Cracovia for Kraków, Leopolis for Lwów, Primislia for Przemyśl, Sandomiria for Sandomierz, Nova Civitas for Nowe Miasto (literally: ‘new town’), Poznania for Poznań, and Wratislavia for Wrocław (Silesia). It is clear that such forms are purely bookish: they were not used in everyday conversations. However, Latin names have existed only for the most important places. For smaller towns, toponyms found in Latin documents do not have any special Latin suffix. They correspond to either Polish or (rarely) German names.5 Yet, no ambiguity exists for toponyms found in German documents. They clearly reflect the way the same places were called by persons who used German as their vernacular language. Most likely, the names for small localities were known only to Germans who lived in the area. On the other hand, the names for cities were also known to Germans well outside of the region in question. For example, we find similar forms in Prussian official documents from the times of the Teutonic Order (T, T, T, and KDL).6 The Silesian dialect of German was basic for the colonial tongue in Poland; see Anders (especially his conclusions on pp. –) for medieval Poznań and Kawczyński (especially pp. –) for an analysis of the German language in Kraków (–). Cz complements these two sources dealing with westernmost Polish cities permitting an analysis of the German dialect used in Lwów, that is, in the southeasternmost part of Poland. That collection reveals the following features whose combination is purely Silesian (every reference is followed by the corresponding page number): • • • • • • • •
diminutive suffix -el (Jekil , Nickil , Stenczel , Hanczel ); /e:/ for MHG ei (clede ‘clothes’ , czwe ‘two’ ); /e/ for MHG i (regular smet ‘smith’ , occurrences of czweschen ‘between, among’ ); /o/ for MHG u (regular zon ‘son’ , occurrences of scholdig ‘guilty’ and kopper ‘copper’ ); internal /pp/ for MHG pf (kopper ‘copper’ , topper ‘potter’ ); initial /f/ for MHG pf (phfaffe ‘cleric’ , phande ‘pledge’ ); ‘eu’ for MHG ou (vorkeuffen ‘to sell,’ heupt ‘head’); unrounding (bemesche ‘Bohemian’ , mechtig ‘mighty’ ).
These data are well correlated with the general assertion that German immigrants from Silesia were of particular importance for all of western and southern Polish territories.7 5 Among collections of sources used for this book, it is only in ST that German or Germanized forms are common in Latin documents; compare Warso for Warszawa (p. ), Drobicz for Drohobycz (p. ), Rubeschaw for Hrubieszów (p. ), Tharnow for Tarnów (p. ), Landishuth for Łańcut (p. ), and Schedlisk for Siedliska (p. ). See also in footnote (section ..) examples of definite German forms for Lublin (namely Lubleyn and Löblyn). 6 In the towns founded by the Teutonic Order, ECG was spoken (Mitzka :). 7 Mitzka (:–) writes about the importance of migrants from Upper (southern) Silesia for the settlement in Lesser Poland and Red Ruthenia and those from Lower Silesia for Greater Poland.
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Appendix B
With the rise of the Polish urban middle class, gradual de-Germanizing took place. In a number of towns from Lesser Poland (including Miechów and Wiślica) this process was finished by . During the second half of the fifteenth-century, many other formerly important centers of German colonization, such as Brześć Kujawski and Bydgoszcz in the North, and Lublin and Sandomierz in the South, were completely Polonized (Lück :). At the same period, the urban population in Mazovia was predominantly Polish.8 During the first third of the sixteenth century, the influence of German declined even in Poznań and Kraków: this language gradually ceases to be used in administrative documents and is replaced there by Latin, and later Polish.9 However, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries a new second wave brought to Poland an important number of German immigrants. Unlike the medieval influx, this one primarily affected only northern areas. Migrants from Germany and Silesia came to Greater Poland and from the Prussian provinces to the Toruń area and from there to Mazovia (see the map in Kaczmarczyk :). During the second half of the sixteenth century, Protestant immigrants played a significant role in the growth of the towns of Leszno (German Lissa) in Greater Poland, Lewartów in Lesser Poland (now Lubartów, Polonized by the mid-seventeenth century), and Zamość in Red Ruthenia (Lück :). However, the linguistic impact of these immigrations was limited and unlikely to have any influence on EY. The third wave of German-speaking migrants corresponds to the period of partitions (–). It was targeted at the northwestern region that received the name of West Prussia and at former Lesser Poland and Red Ruthenia, the area taken by Austrians that received the name of Galicia (see the map in Kaczmarczyk :). During the following period until World War I the provinces that were taken by Prussians, that is, West Prussia and Posen (Polish Poznań), underwent Germanizing.
See details in Tymieniecki :. The author shows that in Mazovia and neighboring parts of Podlasie Germans were found in the fifteenth century only in Warsaw, Goniądz, Nur, and Zakroczym, while his study of sources from numerous other towns of the area reveals that their population was overwhelmingly Polish. 9 See numerous details concerning the Polonizing of Greater Poland in Tymieniecki . 8
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Appendix C. Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry C .
MAIN ISSUES
Several independent definitions of the word ASHKENAZIC can be found in the literature. The “psychological” one—persons are Ashkenazic Jews if they consider themselves Ashkenazic Jews—is surely unambiguous, but, at the same time, it does not stimulate any scholarly discussion. Lay people usually apply a definition closely related to recent history: ASHKENAZIC Jews and their descendants are those who lived during the last centuries in Slavic- and German-speaking countries. Often a specific emphasis on Eastern Europe is included. This approach can be called “demographic” because it is closely related to demography: the majority of contemporary Jews who consider themselves Ashkenazic indeed have sources in that area. In medieval Jewish literature, the term ASHKENAZ covers the German-speaking provinces. For the Middle Ages, ASHKENAZIC Jews are opposed in Europe to those from the Iberian Peninsula (SEPHARDIC Jews), northern France (ZARFATIC Jews), southern France, Italy, Greek-speaking territories (YAVANIC Jews), and Slavic countries (CANAANITES). In modern times this “historical” definition is of little value. To follow a purist approach, one ought to apply the term ASHKENAZIC only to persons whose ancestors lived in the medieval ASHKENAZ. A practical application of this criterion is impossible. On the one hand, but for a few famous rabbinical families, genealogical trees and/or family histories prior to the eighteenth century are unavailable. On the other hand, no genetic study has ever been done to compare the characteristics specific to contemporary Jews to those of Jews who lived in various parts of non-Mediterranean Europe in the past. According to the “religious” definition, an Ashkenazic Jew is one who follows the so-called ASHKENAZIC rite. In this context, the notion of Ashkenazic Jews is mainly opposed to that of Sephardic and Yemenite Jews in terms of the respective order and inclusion of prayers. According to this definition, Jews from medieval northern France are also sometimes considered to be Ashkenazic because their rite was particularly close to that of their coreligionists who lived during the same time in the Rhineland.1 Finally, a “linguistic” definition considers that Ashkenazic Jews are those who speak Yiddish themselves or those whose ancestors spoke that idiom. Even if, formally speaking, the five definitions mentioned above designate different groups of the Jewish population, a large overlap exists. Indeed, in our day for numerous persons who consider themselves Ashkenazic Jews (“psychological” criterion), their direct ancestors going back no more than four generations lived in Slavic or Germanic countries (“demographic” criterion) and followed the ASHKENAZIC rite (“religious” criterion).2 Moreover, for those from Eastern Europe the native language of their close ancestors was Yiddish (“linguistic” criterion). For those from Western and Central Europe, close ancestors were often speakers of German having a specifically Jewish repertoire that was inherited from their Yiddish-speaking ancestors. The “historical” definition is the only one for which the correlation with other definitions is far from trivial. Indeed, for persons who may be called ASHKENAZIC according to other criteria, it cannot be taken for granted that their ancestors necessarily dwelled in medieval ASHKENAZ. Yet, such a simplification is often made in various texts written about Jews, including textbooks and encyclopedias. One can distinguish three dramatically different approaches to this issue found in Jewish studies. For all of them, opinions and arguments suggested by Yiddish linguists are fundamental. This situation is no surprise: the “linguistic” criterion is well correlated with “psychological,” “demographic,” and “religious” criteria. The first approach is closely related to the historical aspects of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS discussed in section .. of this book. It also corresponds to the paradigm that currently dominates Jewish
See details concerning various rites in Goldschmidt . Beginning with the end of the eighteenth century, one group of Ashkenazic Hasidic Jews from Eastern Europe adopted a new rite (Nusach Sefard) based on the innovations (borrowed from Sephardic Jews) introduced in the sixteenth century by Isaac Luria. 1 2
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Appendix C
historiography. According to this approach, Jewish communities that existed during the last centuries in Central and Eastern Europe are mainly due to the migrations of German Jews. It is also asserted that migrants from the Rhineland were responsible for the creation of Jewish medieval settlements in other German provinces. As a result, within the framework of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS, the general direction of migrations in non-Mediterranean Europe has been from west to east. Scholars who adhere to this approach usually acknowledge that a number of Slavic-speaking Jewish communities existed in Slavic territories before the arrival of Ashkenazic migrants from western Germany.3 However, generally they consider the demographic contribution of these pre-Ashkenazic communities insignificant in comparison to that due to Ashkenazic newcomers. The second approach corresponds to the historical aspects of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS of the inception of Yiddish discussed in section ... It asserts that medieval Jewish communities in the Danube area were not an offspring of the Rhenish ones but an independent Jewish center created by migrations whose route did not pass through the Rhineland. Certain authors (for example, Katz b:) include in the Danubian area the communities from Franconia considering that they were mainly due to migrants from the south (Bavaria and Austria) and not from the west (the Rhineland). The immediate vicinity of the Czech lands allowed for the integration of local Jewish communities into the Ashkenazic cultural and linguistic sphere quite early. Proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS consider that the role of Rhenish Jews in the settlement of Eastern Europe was minimal and their influence was mainly cultural. The medieval communities from the Rhineland represent a branch on the genealogical tree of European Jewry that was at some time submerged by the numerically larger southern German Jewish population. It can be seen that if we follow either of the two approaches discussed above, the “historical” definition of the term ASHKENAZIC JEWS becomes to a great extent correlated with other definitions. Indeed, according to both scenarios, the bulk of the ancestors of modern Ashkenazic Jews lived in medieval ASHKENAZ. However, each scenario emphasizes a predominant role of one part of this area: the western one for the first approach and the southeastern one for the second approach. The third approach is totally different. It breaks the genetic link between modern Ashkenazic Jews from Slavic countries and those Jews who lived in medieval Germany. Wexler (, ) is the main proponent of this approach among Yiddish linguists. He claims that most Eastern European Jews descend from “autochthonous” converts to Judaism: Slavic Sorbians and Turkic Khazars. Theories by several non-linguists point in a similar direction. For example, Poliak (), Koestler (), Sand (), and certain other authors all emphasize the role of Khazars, while van Straten () asserts the conversion of masses of East Slavs. Despite the fact that all these studies dramatically lack positive information to corroborate their ideas about mass conversions, some of their critical remarks concerning the paradigm dominant in Jewish historiography are worth paying attention. For example, van Straten convincingly shows that no factual data is available to corroborate an assertion about the existence of mass migrations from Germany to Eastern Europe during the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. Yet, numerous “mainstream” works on Jewish history (and especially textbooks) stipulate such migrations, at least, after the First Crusade (), the massacres of the time of the Black Death (), and the expulsions from German provinces of the fifteenth century.4 In this chapter, the approach by these authors will be called “revolutionary” because it is radically opposed to the whole set of traditional points of view on this topic.
3
For example, this point is explicit in writings by Weinreich (WG), one of the founders of this school. This is true, for example, for Dubnow (:, –, ). See also van Straten :–, – for quotes from other authors. Generally speaking, in the list of authors in question, van Straten is clearly the least biased: he tries to be factual and neutral on the topics discussed. Sand also includes some interesting quotes of simplifications made by certain authors who adhere to the dominant paradigm. However, his exposal of the main aspects of Jewish history (including the origins of Ashkenazic Jews) is entirely skewed by his explicit political agenda dealing with contemporary Israel. From all the sources available for the analysis of Jewish history, he selectively mentions only cases of conversions. 4
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Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry
As discussed in this book, modern Ashkenazic Jews descend from a merger of three principal groups of Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in non-Mediterranean Europe, namely: • those from the Rhineland (ASHKENAZIC Jews according to the “historical” definition); • those from the Czech lands (WEST CANAANITES); • those from the territory of modern Ukraine and Belarus (EAST CANAANITES). In Jewish historiography, the fact of the existence of these groups is consensual: medieval documents leave no doubt here. However, opinions of various authors differ dramatically concerning the following major aspects: • the exact origins of each of these groups (including the possibility of some of them being formed by migrants belonging to another group); • the possibility of the existence of additional, independent sources (for example, in the Danubian Germanspeaking provinces and Franconia); • the relative part played by each of them in the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry. Table C. summarizes various approaches. Arguments proposed by various authors are discussed in this Appendix. As can be seen from the Table C., the approach suggested in this book is different from those known in the previous literature. Yet, the difference with respect to the scenario described by the RHINE HYPOTHESIS is not fundamental. It merely provides additional details making the general picture more nuanced and thus may be considered as complementing the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. On the other hand, this approach is totally incompatible with ideas of the “revolutionary” authors.
TABLE C. Proportions of various groups in the composition of Ashkenazic Jews Approaches
Contribution to modern Ashkenazic Jewry [their origin] German-speaking territories
Western Slavic territories
Eastern Slavic territories
Dubnow , Bałaban b
major
unrecognized
minor [East Slavic Jews]
Weinryb
major
unrecognized
non-existent
RHINE HYPOTHESIS
major [Rhenish Jews]
minor [Czech Jews]
minor [East Slavic Jews]
DANUBE HYPOTHESIS
major [mainly Jews from the Danube area + minor number from the Rhineland]
unrecognized
unrecognized
Wexler
minor
major [Sorbian converts]
major [Khazar converts]
Poliak, Koestler, and Sand
minor
unrecognized
major [Khazar converts]
van Straten
minor
unrecognized
major [East Slavic converts]
major or medium [Czech Jews]
minor or medium [East Slavic Jews]
Approach suggested major [mainly Rhenish Jews, plus, perhaps, in this book a minor number from Bavaria and Austria]
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Appendix C
NETHERLANDS
ive
r
G RA N
Kalisz
er Riv ine D Rh AN EL IN RH
Erfurt
SI LE SI A
SA CE
iver
AL
Kraków
BOHEMIA CZECH REPUBLIC MORAVIA
Regensburg BAVARIA LOW Augsburg Dan AUSTRIA ube SWABIA München Riv Vienna er Eisenstadt AUSTRIA Wiener STYRIA Neustadt
BELARUS Brest Lublin Vladimir IA HYN Lutsk VOL
UKRAINE
Prague
au R
SWITZERLAND
LITTLE POLAND
Lwów
Mold
FRANCONIA Worms Speyer Nürnberg Rothenburg
iver
Grodno
Breslau
THURINGIA
Frankfurt Main River LUXEMLUXEMMainz am Main Würzburg BOURO Trier BOURG eR
iv e r
SAXONY Halle
GERMANY
BELGIUM
Danzig
IA
River Vis Warta tula MAZOVIA Poznan Riv er Warsaw GREAT POLAND POLAND
BRANDENBURG
Berlin BRAUNSCHWEIG Magdeburg
Cologne
FRANCE
P O ME
MECKLENBURG
N RA
rR
eR
de
Elb
sell
Vilna EAST PRUSSIA
Hamburg
Mo
LITHUANIA
ea
cS
lti Ba
a Se
O
rth
No
SWEDEN
D LI TH O DU UA F CH Y NI A
DENMARK
RUTHENIA
SLOVAK REPUBLIC
ROMANIA
HUNGARY
CARINTHIA
MAP C. Main Provinces and Towns DENMARK
SWEDEN LITHUANIA
ea
cS
rth
No
lti Ba
a
Se
r Rive elle
Od
ANN
Prague
ZA
ube
E
S
Dan
KH
River
Y NE B Regensburg
Kraków
CZECH REPUBLIC
u Molda
R FA T
Brest
Rive
r
MAP C. Medieval Jewish Region Names
Lwów
UKRAINE SLOVAK REPUBLIC
Vienna
AUSTRIA SWITZERLAND
ANAAN T C N
Warsaw
NA
Z
FRANCE
Main River
iver
POLAND
C
A
r
E TH R
ive eR
Frankfurt am Main
BELARUS Vistu
la R
N
B
O
in Rh
Mos
iver
R Warta
A
L LUXEMBOURG
A S H K GERMANY Cologne E N EY H ES
W EBerlin ST
AS
r
NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
er
ive
E
eR
Ri
ve
r
Grodno Elb
HUNGARY
ROMANIA
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Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry C .
RHENISH JEWS
C.. Romance migrants According to numerous cultural aspects, some of which were discussed in section ., Rhenish Jews and those from northern France (ZARFAT) were closely related. In textbooks on Jewish history, it is for the most part admitted that Jews appeared in the former area after migrations from the latter. However, no documentary evidence is available to corroborate this general concept. For the whole of the Middle Ages, known cases of French Jews in Germany correspond to a few individuals.5 Schwarzfuchs () wrote a strong plea in favor of the theory that reverses the direction of these migrations. According to him, Jews from northern France were descendants of those who came to that area from the Rhineland. He points out that for Western Europe, during the tenth and the eleventh centuries, the Jewish scene is dominated by Narbonne in the South and Speyer/ Worms/Mainz in the North, while Jewish scholarship is known about in northern France only from the end of the eleventh century (Rashi). Schwarzfuchs also states that regular dealings between Jews from northern France and their coreligionists from the southern part of the country were not established even by the twelfth century. From these two arguments, he concludes that Jews could not have come to ZARFAT from the South and, therefore, they necessarily must have come from the East, that is, from the Rhineland. To illustrate this idea, he reminds us that the maternal ancestors of Rashi likely were of Rhenish origin. As a consequence of this scenario, Italy remains the only plausible source for the Jewish communities of the Rhineland. To corroborate this possibility, Schwarzfuchs mentions the fact that in the rabbinical literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we find a few direct references to contacts between scholars from Italy and those from ZARFAT and/or the Rhineland, as well as the legend about the Kalonymides. These arguments do not appear to be convincing. Examples of individual (and not mass) migrations or contacts can hardly serve to draw such a global conclusion. In no case can the fact that at some period of time certain Rhenish communities were culturally “dominant” with respect to those from neighboring northern France be considered sufficient to determine the direction of migrations between these provinces. Jewish history knows of numerous cases where particular new communities would acquire significant cultural and demographic importance. In the list shown in Table C., the only strong argument could be the absence of contacts between southern France and ZARFAT. However, this is precisely wrong. Several factors imply the existence of a route from southern France to ZARFAT. One of them corresponds to the corpus of given names discussed in section .. that spread from southern to northern France and from there to the Rhineland. Another comes from the analysis by Banitt (:–) of the specifically Jewish repertoire in medieval ZARFAT. Among many thousands of glosses found in works by medieval Jews from that area, less than one hundred reveal items unknown in available Old French sources and about one half of them can be assigned to the Old Provencal language spoken by Jews in southern France. These words had their roots in the tradition of biblical translations and other religious literature created by Jewish scholars from Narbonne, the center of Jewish cultural life in medieval Provence. From the analysis of several extra-linguistic factors as well as the pronunciation of Hebrew provided in section ., it is clear that the influence was going from ZARFAT to ASHKENAZ and not vice versa. However, some of these shared features resulted from the borrowing between already established communities and are therefore adstratal rather than substratal. In this context, crucial arguments are provided by the analysis of toponyms and given names, as well as the study of words from the general lexicon (some of which belong to the basic vocabulary while others are closely related to the religious sphere).6 They strongly corroborate the paradigm dominant in Jewish historiography about the predominant role of Jews from ZARFAT in the settlement of the Rhine valley. The weakness of arguments suggested by Schwarzfuchs does not necessarily mean that his main idea cannot reflect some historical reality. For example, no information available to us precludes the possibility of the following scenario: (i) first Jewish settlers in the Rhineland came from the territory of modern Italy; (ii) some of their descendants migrated to northern France and formed the first Jewish communities there; (iii) migrants from
5 6
See, for example, Salfeld :–. See sections . and ., as well as their synthesis in section ...
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Appendix C Xanten
Rhine
Cologne Bonn
Frankfurt
Main
Würzburg
Mainz Neckar
Nürnberg
Heilbronn
Rh
Metz
in e
M os
ell
e
Worms Speyer
Bamberg Regnit z
Trier
MAP C. Western Ashkenazic Communities southern France joined the communities of northern France; (iv) during the eighth and ninth centuries some Jews from northern France came to the Rhineland bringing with them Gallo-Romance linguistic elements; (v) during the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, Jews from northern France exerted important influence on those from the Rhineland because of their migrations there and the prestige of their rabbinical authorities. For this scheme to be valid, the first step to be posited would be rather to Roman times than to the period after the conquest of northern Italy by Charlemagne in . Evidently, this scenario is purely hypothetical. In principle, one may construct other scenarios that are also compatible with the available information. For example, if in this scenario we withdraw the first two steps and in the third step replace the word “joined” by “created,” we obtain yet another theoretical construction. This scenario is simpler because it includes a smaller number of independent hypotheses. For this reason, it appears to be more plausible. Alternatively, one can also imagine a “mixed” scenario in which Rhenish Jews living in that area without interruption since Roman times (in Cologne, the Jewish community is first mentioned in )7 were later joined by migrants from northern France. However, in this context, linguistic analysis exposed in section .. precludes the possibility of the Romance substratal elements in the speech of medieval Rhenish Jews (and later in Western Yiddish) being of local, Rhenish origin and retained there from Roman times. It does not provide any particular corroboration for a putative Italian origin either. Yet, it shows that a large portion of Romance substratal elements have been necessarily brought by migrants from ZARFAT during the eighth to the eleventh centuries. The initial part of this period corresponds to the creation of the Charlemagne Empire. Note that it is precisely during the reign of this Frankish emperor that references to Jews reappear in documents dealing with the Rhineland after more than four centuries of total silence.8 Charlemagne strengthened links between the territories of modern France and Germany established during the reign of his father Pippin the Short, the founder of the Carolingian dynasty.9
See Aronius :. As shown by Schütte () based on his archeological findings, the existence of a Jewish community, with a synagogue and a ritual bath, seems to be uninterrupted until the beginning of the Second Millennium when regular references to local Jews reappear in available sources. See also the synthesis of these findings in van Straten :–. 8 See Aronius :–. 9 The Rhineland and northern France have been within the same Frankish Merovingian kingdom since the conquests by Clovis at the end of the fifth century. However, the kingdom in question was not really unified and descendants of Clovis were rulers in different parts of it. The most important subdivisions of this period have been 7
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Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry
C.. Franconia and eastern Swabia For the proponents of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS, medieval Jewish communities in Franconian cities (Nürnberg, Würzburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Bamberg, etc.) as well as in eastern Swabian cities (such as Augsburg) represent an offspring of Rhenish Jewry. Various data available to us corroborate this idea. The analysis of the pronunciation of Hebrew exposed in Chapter shows that in the Middle Ages the communities in question belonged—along with those from the Rhineland—to the area of BNEY HES. Dates of the earliest references to Jews in various places of western Germany represent an important argument to corroborate this idea. Indeed, for a number of places in the Rhine–Moselle valley references of this kind are significantly older than for those from Franconia and eastern Swabia.10 The most detailed coverage of this topic may be obtained thanks to onomastic analysis. It reveals clear similarities between the names used in the Rhineland and Franconia in the Middle Ages. For Cologne, a community situated at the northern point of the Rhineland, and for Nürnberg, in southern Franconia, the statistical distribution of names is almost identical. The distribution of names appearing on the lists of martyrs of the Black Death () in Worms (Rhineland) and Nürnberg are similar as well.11 In principle, these statistical similarities could be due to random factors. However, it is highly unlikely that the presence of numerous identical names in the two regions would be fortuitous. Aleit/Aleid, Bela, Dolze, G(e)nanna, Guda/ Guta, Gutheil, Jutta, Kela, and Rich(en)za appear among the female non-biblical appellations that were most common in Cologne between and . From this list, only Kela was almost absent from Franconia. Bela, Dolze, Guta, and Jutta also enter the group of ten most popular appellations in Franconia in , where Adelheit, Gnenlin (related to Aleit and Gnanna, respectively), Gutheil, and Rich(en)za were also not rare. Mina/ Minne, Brune and Vroude (Freude), widespread in Franconia in , were not very popular in the Rhineland. However, it is unlikely that even these names first entered the corpus of Jewish names in southeastern Germany—their Rhenish references are earlier. Numerous other female names, less popular, can be found in sources from both regions, the references in the Rhineland generally being older than those in Franconia. In southeastern Germany certain forms with purely Rhenish phonetic peculiarities existed.12 Comparison of male non-Semitic names also reveals numerous similarities between these two regions. These names rarely appear in Jewish sources where generally only the SHEMOT HA-QODESH are present. For the Rhineland, a representative list of names may be extracted from Christian documents only for Cologne during the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries and Frankfurt in the fourteenth century. Among the typical names from these cities are Ans(h)elm, Kal(e)man/Calman, Gottschalk, Liberman/Lipman, Man(ne), Seligman, and Vivus/Vivis/Vives. Two names from that list, Liberman and Seligman, were also common in Franconia in , where they regularly appear even in Hebrew sources. Several Gottschalk, numerous forms derived from Vivus (as Veyvus, Veifis, and Veyfelein), as well as several derivations from Anshelm (as Anschel and Ansel) are cited in sources from the fourteenth century for Nürnberg. References to Kalman/Calman and Man(ne) in Franconia are almost lacking in the thirteenth century, but they appear regularly during the following hundred years.
Austrasia (part of the Rhine–Moselle valley, with Metz, Cologne, and Aachen) and Neustria (part of northern France, with Reims and Paris). 10 The map shown at the end of GJ (second edition) provides a good illustration of this. Before the eleventh century, Jewish communities are mainly concentrated along the Rhine River, from Xanten in the north to Speyer and Heilbronn (on the Neckar, a tributary of the Rhine) in the south. Old communities are also known in one town in Franconia (Bamberg) and one in Bavaria (Regensburg). Between and , in western German-speaking territories communities mainly expanded to the Upper Rhineland (Alsace, Switzerland) and along the Main river and its tributary the Tauber (Hessen, Franconia). Only a few new communities are attested during the same period in eastern Swabia (Augsburg), Bavaria (Munich, Passau), and Austria (Vienna, Wiener Neustadt). The map presented at the end of GJ shows the development of communities between and . One can observe that during that period numerous new communities have been created in the Rhine valley and along the Main and Neckar. The settlement spread to Flanders and the Netherlands. Nine new communities appeared in Austria. (See additional details in section C...) 11 Beider :–, . 12 All data cited in this and the following paragraphs were taken from Beider :–.
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Appendix C
The data discussed here correspond to the period before the Black Death (). Since communities from the Rhineland and Franconia were particularly damaged by the massacres, one may question whether during the following decades the same area was not populated by migrants from the Danubian area. Yet, the consideration of a representative list of given names used in Nürnberg between the Black Death and (when all Jews were expelled from the city) shows that such a scenario is implausible. No change in the corpus occurs: names are typically Rhenish and similar to those borne in the same area before .13 For Augsburg, the first representative list of names is that of taxpayers from the second half of the fourteenth century (immediately following the Black Death) and the first third of the fifteenth century.14 Numerous names appearing in that source are typical of Rhenish Jews: male Annshalm (Anshelm), Falk, Enslin, Feyflin/Fiflin, Gotlieb, Kaufman, Koppelman, Lemmlin, Lieberman, Lieppman, Pendit, Salman, Sanwel, Säcklin, Selikman, Süzzkint; female Adel, Bel, Fraudlin/Frödlin, Geluck, Guotlin, Rihtz, Schon, and Toltz.15 A number of other names found in Augsburg were also known in the Rhineland though their earliest references appearing in available sources come from Franconia: male Ber, Eberlin, Eysaac, Gumpre(c)ht, Mosse, Vischlin, and Volf; female Hytzlin, Jütta, Lieb, and Sprintz.16 The borrowing of Gentile names by German Jews was very selective. Among examples are Ans(h)elm and Gottschalk. Creation of new names—such as Liberman or Seligman—was rather unusual. As a result, it would be implausible that German names should appear in various regions of western Germany independently—it was probably due to the migration of people. It is known that the communities of these two regions were in close kinship resulting from numerous migrations. The Rhenish occurrences almost always being older than those from southeastern Germany, it is reasonable to postulate that these migrations were from the Rhineland to Franconia and eastern Swabia and not vice versa. C.
WEST CANAANITES
The earliest references to Jews in the Czech lands date from the early tenth century.17 During the next centuries local communities became populous and the fame of their religious scholars extended beyond the region. In the twelfth century, we have direct testimony by Ephraim ben Isaac of Regensburg (died ) who wrote that “in the land of CANAAN there are sages of sages.” At that period the term CANAAN, though formally applicable in Jewish literature to various Slavic countries, was primarily used for Czech territories (neighboring the Regensburg area).18 Isaac ben Jacob ha-Lavan, an important religious scholar and liturgical poet, flourished in Prague in the late s. Among the most important representatives of Czech Jews of the next century were Abraham ben Azriel, the author of Arugat ha-bosem ‘Bed of spices,’ Isaac ben Moses, a rabbi in Vienna and the author of Or zarua ‘Light Sown,’ as well as Moses ben Ḥ asdai Taku ()תאקו. The works by the two first scholars include a number of Slavic glosses. Students and scholars from that region were certainly present in religious schools of the most important Jewish centers of the Rhineland and northern France. A tombstone inscription in the cemetery of Speyer for a man called *Milota ( ;מילוטא), the unique reference to a Jew with a Slavic
13 This can be observed in both Jewish (necrology –) and Christian (all seventy-five men who were family heads in ) sources given in Stern :–, –. 14 This list (found in the archives of that town) was received from Yacov Guggenheim (personal communication) and used in Beider . 15 Their StY equivalents are (respectively): Anshl, Falk, Henzl, Fayvush, Gotlib, Koyfman, Kopl, Leml, Liberman, Lipman, Bendit, Zalmen, Zanvl, Zekl, Zelik(man), Ziskind (male); Eydl, Beyle, Freyde, Glike, Gute, Raytse, Sheyne, and Toltse (female). In this list, almost all names belong to the German component and are discussed in section ... The only exceptions are Bendit, Fayvush, Beyle, and Toltse, all of Romance origin (see section ..). 16 Their StY equivalents are (respectively): Ber, Eberl, Ayzik, Gimpl, Moyshe, Fishl, and Volf (male); Hitsele, Yute, Libe, and Shprintse (female). These names are discussed in section ... The only exception is Mosse, a form of biblical Moses typical of medieval BNEY HES (see sections .. and ..). 17 See Bondy-Dvorský :. 18 This was conclusively shown in Jakobson and Halle . Benjamin of Tudela, a famous Jewish traveller of the twelfth century, is the first author who notes that Czech Jews refer to their country as Canaan (( )כנעןJakobson and Halle :).
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Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry
name in medieval Rhineland, most likely corresponds to one of them.19 Thanks to this presence, one finds Slavic glosses in the writings of Gershom Me’or ha-golah ‘Light of the Exile’ (born in Metz in , he was a rabbi in Mainz during the first half of the eleventh century), works by Rashi (–) and Joseph Kara (קרא, circa –circa ), both from Troyes, France, as well as Elieser ben Nathan from Mainz (twelfth century).20 The Old Czech origin of the majority of known medieval Slavic glosses is beyond doubt.21 They are due to WEST CANAANITES, that is, Slavic-speaking Jews from the Czech territories. The situation of Jewish communities in other Central European lands with a Slavic population is totally different. For the late twelfth century, we have a testimony of Eliezer ben Isaac of Prague who wrote that in Poland (as well as in Russia and Hungary), because of the poverty of the local Jews there was at that time a dearth of bookmen.22 The first references to Jews in Silesia date from the start of the thirteenth century, but it was only during the end of that century and especially during the first half of the next century that Jewish communities are mentioned in the main localities of the province: Münsterberg (), Breslau/Wrocław (), and Liegnitz (). In Görlitz (Upper Lusatia), Jews have been known about from .23 We have, however, no information about any important Jewish cultural development particular to these areas. The earliest references to Jewish communities in Poland date from the first half of the eleventh century when a regularly functioning religious court was present in Kraków.24 Since the end of the next century the community in the same city, the most populous location in Lesser Poland and the then capital of all of Poland, was established perhaps as a continuation of that mentioned years earlier.25 The cemetery in Kalisz (Greater Poland) is cited in . Documents from the fourteenth century dealing with Jewish centers in Poland correspond (in addition to Kraków and Kalisz) to Poznań (Greater Poland). These places are situated not far from the western borders of the country in the immediate proximity of Bohemia-Moravia and Silesia. In several localities of East Germany such as Magdeburg, Merseburg, and Halle—all situated on the Elbe or its tributaries (mainly Saale)—Jewish communities are mentioned before the early thirteenth century. Nothing is known, however, about the size of their population and their culture. The historical information mentioned in the two previous paragraphs dealt with Jews only. Certain elements of general history are also important in our context. In the medieval period, only two Slavic states gained importance in the region in question: Bohemia and Poland. The former was ruled by the Přemyslids. One of the most prominent representatives of this dynasty was Ottokar II who reigned in Bohemia-Moravia – and was also the duke of Austria, Styria, and Carinthia. He was the founder of several dozen towns in all of these areas. His son and successor to the Bohemian throne (–), Wenceslaus II, became suzerain of some Upper Silesian duchies. He was also the Duke of Kraków (–) and the King of Poland (–). Wenceslaus III, the son of Wenceslaus II, was the King of Bohemia and Poland (–) and Hungary (–). The first king from the next important dynasty, Luxemburg, John the Blind (Czech Jan Lucemburský)—who reigned in –—annexed during the s and s a number of Silesian duchies. His son, Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Count of Luxemburg in – also was Holy Roman Emperor (–) and Margrave of Brandenburg (–). It was also during his reign () that all of Silesia became a 19 Constructed from the Czech adjective milý ‘dear, kind’ and the substantive suffix -ota, this appellation was commonly used by Christians in medieval Bohemia and Moravia. It appears in sources as Milot(h)a or Mylot(h)a. Another exceptional Jewish form is Tuschchin, a female name mentioned in Frankfurt-am-Main (). Only its root is Slavic: it represents a hypocorism of Tuschana, a variant of Czech Dušana, constructed using Central German suffix -chen. The source indicates that the father of this person came from Augsburg, a Swabian town situated near the border of Bavaria. 20 Only the latter author speaks explicitly about the language of Bohemia ()בהם. Generally, scholars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries use the expression ‘language of Canaan’ ()לשון כנען. 21 See their discussion in Kupfer and Lewicki , Jakoson and Halle , and Šedinová . On the possibility of the East Slavic origin of some of these glosses (mainly those known from Hebrew sources of Western Europe) see Kulik . 22 See Jakobson and Halle :. 23 These dates are taken from Brann (:XV–XXXI) whose book covers Silesia in its nineteenth-century boundaries, that is, including not only medieval Silesia but also the Görlitz area. 24 A Christian document from also speaks about the Polish Princess Judith who ransomed Christian slaves from Jewish traders (Aronius :). See also the discussion concerning the town of Przemęt in section ... 25 See details in Ta-Shma :–.
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Appendix C BR AN DE Elb NB e U
Magdeburg
SAXONY Halle
Spandau
Od
er
Merseburg
TH
UR
IN
Prague
IA
GREATER POLAND Kalisz
SI
Erfurt
G
Poznan
RG
Braunschweig
UPPER LUSATIA
LE
SIA
Breslau
Kraków
BOHEMIA
Vienna
LOW AUSTRIA
STYRIA
AR Y
nu b e
HU NG
IA R
VA BA
LESSER POLAND
MORAVIA
Regensburg
Da
ula Vist
CARINTHIA
MAP C. Central Europe possession of the Bohemian crown: it remained Bohemian until . The son of Charles, Sigismund, King of Bohemia in –, Holy Roman Emperor in –, was also King of Hungary in –. As already mentioned, for centuries Upper Lusatia was also under Bohemian rule. These facts of political history show the particular importance of the Bohemian kingdom for a large area of Central Europe. This dominance provided a situation that was favorable for the migrations of Czech Jews into the provinces in question. Nothing is known about the origins of medieval WEST CANAANITES. A few pieces of information about their language and given names do not allow us to distinguish any substratal element that would point to area(s) from which their ancestors came to the Czech lands. From the geographic point of view, one may think about Byzantium (via the Balkans), northern Italy, and/or western Germany. However, it would be purely speculative establishing a link to any of these regions: no information is available to corroborate it. We just know about Jewish merchants going from the Rhineland to Eastern Europe through Regensburg and Prague in the eleventh century.26 However, nothing indicates that this contributed to the development of Jewish communities in towns situated on this trade route. Moreover, the possibility of the community in Prague being an offspring of Rhenish Jewry is precisely the least plausible because of the differences in the pronunciation of Hebrew, given names, and religious rites that existed between these Jews and their coreligionists from western Germany.27 On the other hand, close links existed between WEST CANAANITES and Jewish settlers in the German-speaking regions of the Danube area (Regensburg and Austria). Relations between Jews from the Czech lands and those from Regensburg were not simply cultural. We also know about migrations of a few famous individuals from one to the other. Petaḥ iah of Regensburg, the author of a book about his extensive travels in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Caucasus at the end of the twelfth century, was the brother of Prague’s rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Lavan, mentioned at the beginning of this section. During the same century, Isaac ben Mordecai of Prague was the head of the rabbinical court of Regensburg. The most important Bohemian rabbis of the thirteenth century, Abraham ben Azriel and Isaac ben Moses, both had links to Regensburg.28 Avigdor Kara (died in ) 26 28
See, for example, Kupfer and Lewicki :. See Ulicˇ ná :–.
27
See sections . and ...
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lived in Regensburg before becoming the rabbi of Prague. Also note the use of the Slavic name for the Danube by Jews in medieval Regensburg.29 Among the few names from Regensburg known to us for the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, several names, mainly of Czech origin, can be found that are unknown in the Rhineland and Franconia.30 The opposition of the Rhenish (BNEY HES) and the Danubian (BNEY KHES) groups of Jews was partly maintained even during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that is, after Czech Jews had abandoned their Slavic language in favor of the German-based vernacular and become an integral part of Ashkenazic BNEY KHES. Two alternative global scenarios for the question of the genesis of the BNEY KHES communities seem to be possible. Firstly, theoretically speaking one can conceive a situation with two originally independent cultural centers, one covering German-speaking Austrian provinces and Regensburg, and another including Slavic WEST CANAAN, that is, primarily Bohemia and Moravia, that would (during the centuries that followed their inception) influence each other so that eventually their religious customs and pronunciation of Hebrew became similar. Secondly, one could also imagine a situation in which all of them had common roots. In this scenario, those who settled in the southeastern German-speaking provinces shifted to German, while those who started to live in the areas with a Slavic majority adopted the vernacular language of their Gentile neighbors. Unfortunately, no real evidence allows us to make a choice between these two competing theories. The absence of any source dealing with the initial period of Jewish history in these regions—the community of Regensburg is identified by , that is, during the same century when Jews are mentioned in Bohemia for the first time, while the earliest Austrian references correspond to the twelfth century—represents the main obstacle to an appropriate analysis. Yet, as discussed in section .., the Slavic name for the Danube used by Jews in medieval Regensburg may imply the Czech origin of the local community. On the other hand, Slavic names found in Bavaria or AustriaStyria-Carinthia in documents from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries could, in principle, belong to recent migrants from the Czech lands rather than represent traces of the Slavic substratum in these areas. Note that the Slavic names in question were exceptional, while a large majority of the appellations borne by Jews there (at least, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for which sources available to us for Austrian provinces are representative) were either Germanic or Semitic. The genesis of Jewish communities in eastern Germany, Silesia, and western Poland, is less obscure: it is directly related to WEST CANAANITES. For Brandenburg, the most eloquent argument comes from an analysis of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century tombstone inscriptions from the cemetery of Spandau. Among the twentytwo female names quoted, nine (covering ten persons) are biblical, spelled according to their standard Hebrew orthography (including the unusual Noemi), while the remaining thirteen names (covering sixteen persons) have Slavic (often unquestionably Czech) roots and/or suffixes. Not one is Germanic. The sample of male names, despite its small size, includes a set of unusual appellations such as Dan, Naphtali, Paltiel, Sason, and Shabat. This information leaves little doubt: the community in question was due to migrations of Czech-speaking Jews to that area. Since, firstly, there is no reason to consider Spandau to be an exceptional community in that area, and, secondly, a few available sources making references to Jews in other places of that province mention a number of Slavic names,31 we may safely postulate that the role of migrants from the Czech lands, directly from Bohemia-Moravia or indirectly via other eastern German provinces, was important during the initial Jewish settlement in Brandenburg. This province is located immediately east of the old Elbe-Saale communities such as Magdeburg, Merseburg, and Halle where earliest references to Jews date—as mentioned already—from the period before the early thirteenth century. Because the formulae found on the tombstone inscriptions from Spandau are similar to those from Magdeburg (Brocke :), it is reasonable to conjecture that the first Jewish settlers in these two areas are related to each other. Consequently, the Elbe-Saale communities would also primarily be of Czech origin. From the geographic point of view, this hypothesis appears quite natural: Prague is the only community at least as old as those of Magdeburg and Merseburg and situated not very far
29 See section ... See also Ta-Shma :– on the existence of intimate religious and cultural ties between Jewish scholarship in Regensburg, Magdeburg, and Poland during the thirteenth century. This information indirectly also implies a close link between Regensburg and Bohemia because, as shown below in this section, Jewish communities of eastern Germany and western Poland were clearly related genetically to those from the Czech lands. 30 Beider :–. 31 All onomastic references mentioned in this section appear in section ...
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Appendix C
from these towns. Access to them from Prague was possible by water—Vltava/Moldau is a tributary of the Elbe, with Prague upstream. We also know that Eliezer ben Jacob of Prague was a rabbi in medieval Halle (GJ ). A few Slavic appellations and one unusual Hebrew name from Magdeburg and Merseburg, occurring in a tiny sample known to us from documents from the fourteenth century, corroborate this very idea. Additional support for the same hypothesis is provided by the consideration of the names used during the fourteenth century in Braunschweig, immediately west of Magdeburg. Some of these are distinctively Slavic, with immediate parallels with the corpus of Czech Jewish names. In Braunschweig, these appellations are, nevertheless, exceptions: a majority of names used by local Jews were of Germanic or Hebrew biblical origin, typical of Jewish communities from western Germany. The most likely source for the Slavic names in question could be Jewish migrations from the Elbe-Saale area. There are also documents that speak explicitly about the origin of some Jews of Braunschweig from towns in Saxony and Brandenburg.32 Moreover, both areas also shared such German names as Jordan and Hase.33 The history of Jewish settlement in Thuringia is different from that of other parts of eastern Germany. For Erfurt, its capital, the earliest lists of names available to us—several dozens martyrs from Erfurt () and the neighboring town of Weissensee (), tombstone inscriptions from Erfurt (second half of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century)—all demonstrate definite kinship between local Jews and those from the Rhineland. A rich collection of documents dealing with the Jews of Erfurt (–, Süssmann ) includes names of about six hundred individuals. Most of these appellations are standard for Jews from the Rhineland and Franconia.34 A considerable number of female names (more than ten percent) are Slavic. Some could have come directly from Bohemia or Moravia. Others were probably due to migrations from Brandenburg, the Magdeburg area and Poland. It is likely that these Slavic names were brought to Thuringia by migrations in the fourteenth century; otherwise, it would be difficult to explain the absence of the appellations of that type in sources prior to the mid-fourteenth century. Actually, in the collection in question the provenance of bearers of a number of unusual names from other regions in Central Europe is indicated explicitly.35 In Silesia and neighboring cities of western Poland, the corpuses of Jewish names known to us from sources of the fourteenth century, that is, the first period when local communities became important, are particularly close to each other.36 This statement concerns all three layers of appellations: Slavic, Semitic, and Germanic. It is unlikely that these similarities are mainly due to migrations from Poland to Silesia or vice versa. Silesian sources often indicate the origin of named individuals, while among several hundred persons quoted during the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries the Polish provenance is made explicit for only two.37 On the other hand, there is no documentary evidence of the massive migrations from Silesia to Poland. Sources tell of a few individuals like Abraham who came from Bytom to Kraków in the fourteenth century. Most likely, the onomastic similarity of communities in both these regions is due to both of them having identical roots, being due to Jewish settlers from neighboring Bohemia, Moravia, and East German provinces (primarily, Brandenburg and Saxony). Since, as discussed above, East German communities were in turn mainly due to Czech Jewish migrants, the ultimate role of Bohemia-Moravia seems to be of particular importance. Certain Slavic names used by Polish and/or Silesian Jews are known among Czech Jews and/or Czech Christians and unknown for Polish Christians. For a number of Silesian families their Czech origin is beyond question.38 Summarizing this information, one can suggest that during the Middle Ages, communities of a large area of Central Europe belonged to the same Jewish culture. This area was dominated by Czech-speaking Jews (WEST CANAANITES) and encompassed Bohemia, Moravia, Brandenburg, and, most likely, also Saxony, Silesia, and western Poland. In many aspects, this culture was close to that of Jews in German-speaking Regensburg and Austria. A common genesis of the communities of both these areas is plausible though by no means certain.
33 34 See Ebeling . See section ... See details in Beider :–. 36 37 See section ... See details in Beider :. See Brann . 38 As an illustration, one may consider names used in the family of Jacob, one of the richest members of the community of Breslau, the largest in Silesia, in the mid-fourteenth century. His mother was called Radachena, his wife Desslawa, and his brother Abrusch, all three names being of Czech origin. 32 35
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Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry C.
EAST CANAANITES
The earliest indirect references to Jewish communities in Russian principalities (EAST CANAAN) correspond to tenth-century Kiev.39 A description of the life of Theodosius, one of the founders of the Pechersk monastery of Kiev (second half of the eleventh century), speaks about his secret night theological debates with Jews. During the next century, Russian chronicles regularly mention the local community and the “Jewish Gate” of that city. From the Jewish sources of the same century, we know about rabbi Moses of Kiev and rabbi Isaac of Chernigov, both in Western Europe.40 In –, the Mongol invasion destroyed numerous towns in the area. The westernmost principality of Galicia-Volhynia (created by Prince Roman Mstislavich at the end of the twelfth century) was significantly less damaged than other Russian principalities and, despite being a vassal of the Golden Horde, continued from the mid-s to be one of the most powerful states in east-central Europe, especially under the reigns of Daniel and Lev (Roman’s son and grandson, respectively). It declined during the fourteenth century and between and it was divided between the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Poland incorporated southern and western parts covering the principalities of Lvov (Polish Lwów, Ukrainian Львiв), Peremyshl’ (Polish Przemyśl, Ukrainian Перемишль), and Galich (Polish Halicz, Ukrainian Галич). In Poland, these territories constituted a new province that is generally designated in the historiography as Red Ruthenia (or Red Russia). The earliest documented evidence of Jews in that area corresponds to Lwów (s). During the first half of the next century, Jews are also mentioned in Drohobycz (), Podhajce (), Krosno (), Halicz (), Bełz (), Hrubieszów (), Przemyśl (), Gródek (), Wojsławice (), Sambor (), and Żydaczów ().41 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania acquired northern and eastern parts of the former Galicia-Volhynia. Toward the late fourteenth century, the Duchy already encompassed a large area corresponding to modern Lithuania, Belarus, a part of Ukraine, the Smolensk area (now in Russia), and Podlasie (now in Poland). Most of its population was composed of Orthodox East Slavs. Russian was the official language of the Duchy.42 The first references to Jews of the Duchy date from – when the ruler of the country, Vytautas (Vitovt), promulgated laws on Jewish privileges for the towns of Brest, Grodno, and Troki (REA :–). The document dealing with Grodno mentions a local Jewish cemetery and synagogue demonstrating that at that time there were not only individual Jews living in Lithuania but also entire Jewish communities. Documents from the first third of the fifteenth century mention Jewish communities in three towns in Volhynia: Lutsk (), Vladimir (), and Ostrog ().43 At the end of the same century, Jews are again mentioned in Kiev. Table C. presents the set of available references to Jews in Vladimir. For the earliest reference (), we cannot be sure that we are dealing precisely with the main town of Volhynia and not the center of another important principality in eastern Russia. However, the presence during the same period of Jews in Kiev and Chernigov, centers of principalities in the same general area as Volhynia, and the absence of any reference to Jews in another Vladimir (remote from all other urban centers where a Jewish presence is attested) make the idea of the Volhynian origin of Rabbi Benjamin particularly attractive. Consequently, data in Table C. show a Jewish presence in Volhynia uninterrupted since the twelfth century, that is, from before the Mongol invasion. This example of Vladimir shows that Jewish communities that existed
39 From that period dates the Hebrew letter that might be related to the community of Kiev analyzed in section ... A Russian chronicle mentions the presence in Kiev in of a delegation of Jews from Khazaria (RN ). 40 On the Jewish documents in question see section ... For the Russian chronicles on Kiev from the eleventh and twelfth centuries see RN –. From approximately the same period dates a document found in the Cairo Geniza that makes a reference to a Jew from “Russia” in Salonika who spoke neither the holy language (Hebrew), nor Greek, nor Arabic because in his native country Jews speak the language of CANAAN (that is, Slavic) only (Mann .:). 41 Horn :–. For certain towns in this list, the western provenance of the first Jewish settlers is quite plausible. For example, this is the case for Krosno, a town situated in the westernmost part of the Peremyshl’ principality, not very far from Kraków. 42 Though at that time this language was indeed called “Russian” in documents, according to several factors including the vocabulary used, to conform to modern linguistic terminology it is more appropriate to speak about the common ancestor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian languages. 43 Schiper :.
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Appendix C TABLE C. References to Jews in Vladimir (Volhynia) Reference to
Period
Source
Merchant Benjamin in Cologne
Jewish (Aronius :)
Rabbis Isaac and Manoaḥ ben Jacob
end of the th century Jewish (Ta-Shma :)
Local Jews
Russian (RN )
Local circumcision ceremony
th century
Jewish (Kulik :)
Local Jews
Russian (RN )
Local Jew Isac
Latin (Schiper :)
Local Jew Майко, a collector of duties Local Jews
th–th
Russian (RN ) Numerous
in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were composed, at least partly, of the descendants of Jews who had lived in the territories of modern Ukraine during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.44 In historiography, there is no consensus on the origins of communities known during the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. Often, it is assumed that they had eastern and/or southern roots. Theories include the Khazar Kingdom, Crimea, Caucasus, Byzantium, Persia, and Babylonia as possible sources. A provenance of Jews from any of the last three areas is purely theoretical: no documents corroborate this for a single Jew in Eastern Europe. The earliest trace of a Jewish presence in the Crimean Peninsula appears in the Greek-language
44 A number of historians (for example, Weinryb :) dismiss this possibility without providing valid arguments. Certain other authors describe the history as if they were writing a novel or a script for a movie. They add numerous details that are not found in the historical documents dealing with the period in question. For example, Schiper (a:) states that after the Mongol invasion Jews from the territories of modern Ukraine and Poland migrated to Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, and Hungary. Later, a number of the migrants returned to Poland. Mark () is the champion of the “literary” approach. The following quotes illustrate his “historical” method: during the ninth and tenth centuries after the mass migrations of Khazars, Jewish communities appeared in the Chernigov, Pereyaslavl,’ and Kiev principalities (p. ); a significant number of Jews served as military guards for various Russian princes (p. ); during the eleventh century, there were two Jewish communities in Kiev: one from Khazaria and another from Western Europe (p. ); in the twelfth century, Jewish Khazars created communities in Homel (now in Belarus), while numerous Babylonian Jews settled in Russia (p. ); the princes of Kiev and Chernigov encouraged the settlement of Jews during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and Jews played an important role in the economic life of the region, some of them specializing in credit operations (p. ); Khazar Jews would convert inhabitants of Russian principalities to Judaism (p. ); Jews took an active part in the Russian fight against the Mongols (p. ); after the Mongol invasion, most of the Jews left for the West and others were converted to Christianity and Islam (p. ); Jews settled in the Lublin area as far back as the eleventh century (p. ); during the twelfth century all Poland was open for Jews except for Mazovia (p. ). Baron also includes a number of stories of the same kind in his description of the earliest Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. For example, when describing the assassination of the Russian prince Andrey Bogolyubsky (called Bogoljubov in his text), he asserts that if two prominent court Jews, Ephrem Moisevich and Anbal Yassin, took a leading part in the conspiracy, other Jews seem to have remained loyal to the reigning monarch (Baron :). The original chronicles of (RN ) just mention Ofrem Moizich ‘Ephraim the son of Moses’ (without indicating that he was a Jew, while at that period some Russian Christians would sometimes bear biblical names) and Ambal/Anbal nicknamed Yassin ‘Ossetian’ (implying his origin in the Caucasus) and addressed as ‘Jew’ by another courtier (RN –). Nothing is said about “other Jews.” Mieses (:) quotes from Josef Meisl who writes that “numerous Jews served in the guard of Andrey Bogolyubsky.”
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Moscow
Vitebsk
Troki Grodno
MAZOVIA Warsaw
POLAND
MUSCOVY
Minsk
GRAND DUCHY OF LITHUANIA
Brest Chernigov
Lublin
RE
Lutsk
Kiev
IA YN
Vladimir Kraków
VO LH
Lwów
D
RU T
HE NIA
PODOLIA
MAP C.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania (around )
inscription from the end of the First century CE (RN –). Given names in the inscription (Artemisia, Drusus, and Heracles) show that we are dealing with Hellenized Jews.45 However, the earliest reference to a Jewish migrant from Crimea to the territory of modern Ukraine corresponds to the fifteenth century only.46 Until the end of the tenth century, Khazaria, whose western border was in the immediate vicinity of Kiev, clearly represents the most plausible source: Jewish communities situated outside of that kingdom that are known to us from written sources were significantly more remote from Kiev. According to the information appearing in the correspondence from the mid-tenth century between Ḥ asdai ibn Shaprut, a counselor of the Caliph of Cordoba, and Joseph, the king of Khazaria, the Khazar ruler *Bulan ( )בולאןembraced Judaism in the eighth or the ninth century. His descendant Obadiah performed a number of reforms aimed at enforcing the role of Judaism in the country. Numerous regularly quoted references to Khazars appear in Russian chronicles. For example, we know that polyane, severyane, and vyatichi (Slavic tribes from the area) would pay a tribute to the Khazars during the ninth century; in certain documents, the princes of Kiev bear the Khazar royal title khagan. 45 The Jewish presence in Crimea is also attested in funeral inscriptions from the second to the thirteenth centuries (RN –). Despite the fact that Chwolson () considers them genuine, the authenticity of this data (all taken from the collection by Abraham Firkovich (–), a Karaite author) is rather doubtful, at least for the period before the sixth century. Note that—contrary to all other Jewish inscriptions of that time—almost all of them have precise dates and are written in Hebrew characters. 46 Caleph from Kaffa in Lwów (Schiper :). A theoretical possibility of the existence of connections between the area in question and Crimea can be illustrated by an analogy to Armenians and Karaites. Note that important Armenian communities existed in the Middle Ages in the territory of modern Ukraine and southeastern Poland (Lwów /L’viv, Kamieniec Podolski/Kamyanets-Podilsky, Lublin) created by merchants who came there not from Armenia but from Kaffa. We have also known about the existence of the Karaite communities in Volhynia and Red Ruthenia (future Galicia) at least since the sixteenth century. These communities, which were during the period in question in close contact with other, Rabbanite, Jews (see the end of this section) could also have originated from Crimea where the large majority of their coreligionists lived. On parallels between, on the one hand, the (Rabbanite) Jews and, on the other hand, Armenians and Karaites see Shapira :. See also details concerning the Jewish community of Kaffa in the sixteenth century in Shapira :–.
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Appendix C
Generally speaking, any mention of Khazars does not necessarily have a link with Jewish history. If contacts between Russian principalities and the Khazar Kingdom before the eleventh century are well known from Russian chronicles, no direct data is available to us to corroborate the idea of the presence of Jews from Khazaria in the territories of modern Ukraine.47 The only document that directly speaks not just of Khazars but Jews from Khazaria dates from (RN ). It is a story (which may, in theory, be literary rather than real) about the religious debate that preceded the conversion from paganism to Christianity of prince Vladimir of Kiev. Almost two centuries passed between the conversion of Bulan and the destruction during the s of the Khazar Kingdom by Sviatoslav (the father of Vladimir). During the period in question, this powerful state in which the rulers were Jewish was clearly attractive to Jews from other countries. Moreover, the presence of Jews is quite likely in the territories of modern Daghestan, the historical center of the Khazar Kingdom. Their role could have been of some importance in his conversion to Judaism.48 The probability of the presence in Khazaria of Jews who were genetically independent of the Khazar converts to Judaism is particularly high since the archaeological data show that the conversion to Judaism could not have been massive: traces of Jewish ritual in that territory are small.49 Moreover, several Arab authors from the tenth century write that Jews, though politically dominant, represent a minority in the country in comparison to Muslims, Christians, and pagans (RN –). Al-Mas’udi, an Arab historian and geographer from the same period, speaks of migrations to Khazaria of Jews from Muslim countries and Byzantium. He emphasizes the important role of the Byzantine migrants who left their countries because of the persecutions of religious minorities there (RN ).50 For these reasons, it is logical to consider (though without certainty) that Jewish families in Khazaria during the tenth century were of heterogeneous origin.51 Weinryb () provides a detailed analysis of ideas of his predecessors about various possible origins of Jews in Eastern Europe and concludes (pp. –) that “most of the theories succumb to searching criticism” adding that “in the absence of factual information, authors developed a kind of speculative game without a shred of evidence,” and “most of the theories and hypotheses may reflect the climate of opinion of the authors and their times.” The majority of his critical arguments sound cogent and therefore these general assertions valid.52 To corroborate the possibility of the western origin of these communities (or, at least, of one section of their members) historical information is also meager. It merely allows us to see that during the first centuries of the Second Millennium contacts existed between Jews from the area in question and their coreligionists in Western Europe.53 47 Several authors (Gumplowicz :–, Schiper :, a:) write about the etymological link between Khazars and several toponyms in Red Ruthenia and Lesser Poland (places Kozari, Kozara, and Kozarzow; Kawiori and Kawyary said to be related to Kabars, one of Khazar tribes). Yet, a hypothesis proposing Slavic etymons for these toponyms (compare Ukrainian козарь ‘shepherd’) sounds significantly simpler than the alleged Khazar connection. (On this topic, see also Altbauer :–.) 48 See Artamonov :. 49 See Novosel’tsev :, Petruxin and Flerov , Stampfer :–. 50 Stampfer (:–) provides a detailed critical analysis of Hebrew and Arabic sources speaking about Jews in Khazaria showing that no document mentioning the conversion of the Khazar elite to Judaism is really reliable. This point is of little relevance for our topic: the presence of Jews in Khazaria, converted or not, is beyond doubt. 51 On links between Byzantine Jews and those from Khazaria and medieval Russian principalities see Kulik :–. 52 However, it is strange to read at the end of his interesting paper (p. ) lines that express his own opinion concerning the “true beginnings of East-European Jewry.” Weinryb claims that: (a) any remnants of earliest Jewish settlements “were wiped out by the Mongol invasion”; (b) “Polish Jewry does not antecede the th century except perhaps in the form of some sporadic individuals”; (c) “we have evidence that they [Jews in Eastern Europe] were neither descendants of Khazars nor of any eastern Jewish group.” For all these statements, Weinryb actually provides no evidence at all. See also Bałaban b:–. 53 Several passages relevant to this topic appear in the collection of medieval rabbinical references to Eastern Europe compiled by Kupfer and Lewicki (). Kalonymos ben Shabbetai (eleventh century, Worms) makes references to () Jewish merchants going from Mainz to Poland via Regensburg and Prague and () trade links that existed between Regensburg and Russia via Hungary (pp. , , –). Isaac ben Asher (turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Speyer) returns from Russia (p. ). Russia is also mentioned in works by several West European scholars: Eliezer ben Nathan (twelfth century, Mainz) (pp. –) and Joel ben Isaac (twelfth century) (p. ). See also mentions in section .. of a few Jews from Eastern Europe present in Western Europe during the twelfth century.
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Analysis of given names sheds no further light on that subject; however, it may illustrate some arguments. If (i) most of the Jews resident in Lithuania in the late fourteenth century were descendants of those who had lived in the Kiev region and/or in Volhynia during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, and (ii) among the latter, the proportion of the individuals of one specific origin (Khazar/Turkic, Byzantine/Greek, Persian, or Babylonian/ Arabic) were significant, then one would normally expect to see traces in the corpus of names of Lithuanian Jews. Unfortunately, no names are known that existed during the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century. The meager information on the corpus of names in the late fifteenth century and those, much more representative, for the following centuries, does not mention any name of Turkic or Persian origin. The unusual given names of the signatories of the Hebrew-language “Kievan letter” (tenth century) were no longer used. Any connection of such names of Greek origin as Kalonymos, Todros, and Alexander with migrations of Jews from Byzantium or Crimea would be artificial, since all three names were known in medieval Western Europe.54 Representative data on the corpus of names borne in Crimea are lacking. The only list in our possession comes from a letter written in Latin in Kaffa (at that time, a Genoese colony) in the mid-fifteenth century. It presents a significant number of names unknown in Lithuania.55 Certain names from that list are Turkic. That factor is no surprise since the Crimean Jews lived among the numerous Tatars who spoke a Turkic language. It shows that, at least during the fifteenth century, the Jewish communities of Crimea and Lithuania were separate. Migrations of Crimean Jews to Lithuania or Red Ruthenia could not have been massive, and they were limited to a few isolated individuals. These negative results may be due to two independent reasons. Firstly, those who lived in the Russian principalities in the Middle Ages could be of heterogeneous origins; no group of immigrants represented most of the population of these communities. The only language that allowed them to communicate in everyday life was the local East Slavic language. Secondly, these Jews could simply be too few in number to keep their original language. The abandonment of the original language in favor of that spoken by the majority of the population of the country was inevitable. In both cases, a Slavic tongue was becoming the vernacular language of the community; consequently, specific names created from Turkic, Arabic, Greek, and Persian vocabularies tended to disappear, leaving in their place Hebrew and Slavic names. In these pre-Ashkenazic communities, the tradition of assigning the names used by ancestors to newborn children may not have been strong enough or absent. Exactly the same explanation stands for the corpus of WEST CANAANITES that, according to the documents available to us, consisted only of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Old Czech names. Some individuals coming from the West joined these communities during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries or even earlier. There is no historical evidence of a massive arrival, so it is reasonable to believe that these migrants were isolated families or individuals. In the early period, because they were not numerous, the Slavicspeaking communities absorbed them, and their Hebrew or Germanic names underwent Slavonizing.56 The linguistic influences of the East Slavic Christian population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania would be very strong since, until the mid-sixteenth century (excluding the short period of the expulsion between and ), the situation of Jews in this country was particularly favorable and Lithuanian Jews clearly were not isolated from their Gentile Slavic neighbors.57 Moreover, as discussed in section .., a number of names that originated in the communities of WEST CANAANITES have been brought to Eastern Europe. Some of them could have appeared before the fourteenth century, that is, during the period when Czech Jews were still Slavicspeaking. Others could have been brought from the Czech lands when local Jews shifted to a German-based language and were incorporated into the sphere of Ashkenazic culture. Taking into account these arguments, it See section ... Maymon was the only Yiddish name of Arabic origin used in Eastern Europe one to two centuries earlier. This name could not have come from a country using the Arabic language. It is much more plausible that it became part of the Ashkenazic corpus through literary works as the name of the father of the famous Sephardic philosopher, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides). 55 Adolcarem, Anurpotam or Anurcoham, Cocos, Coia, Janibei, Melisca, Passa, Rabani, and Sagedi (Xoker :). Two Jewish communities existed at that time in Kaffa; one of them was Karaite. The author of the publication never precisely stated which of them the document concerned. 56 See the examples in the Езофович (Brest) and Кон˛кович (Grodno) families in Beider :–. 57 In addition to rich tax collectors and landowners, sources also mention Jews who were members of the court of justice in the town of Grodno and would take part in trials involving Christians (REA :, , , ; RN ), wore sabers in the Grodno area in (RN ), and those who had Christian servants (RN , ). 54
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Appendix C
would be a serious error to consider that the terms “Slavic‐speaking Jews” and “non‐Ashkenazic Jews” designate similar layers. The first affords a purely linguistic identification. It encompasses persons of various origins, including certain Ashkenazic families.58 In this connection, it is appropriate to consider several Slavic names among the Lithuanian Karaites. Examples are Зубец and Батко, leaders of the Karaite communities of Troki (at the end of the fifteenth century) and Lutsk (in the mid-sixteenth century), respectively.59 Among historians, a consensus exists as to the origin of the Lithuanian Karaites. It is related to the military campaign of Vytautas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, in Crimea toward the end of the fourteenth century, from where he led Karaites to Troki, his ducal town. One century was sufficient for Karaites to start to use new Slavic names. Certain other Slavic names were not specific to that sect of Judaism but were also used by Slavic Christians: Богдан, Волчко, and Яхно appear in the census results of Lutsk of . All were also used by the non-Karaite (Rabbanite) Jews.60 The first, Богдан, was common among Christians and, consequently, in principle, both Jewish groups could have borrowed it independently. This cannot be the case for the two other names, both rare as East Slavic Christian names. Their use by Rabbanites and Karaites cannot be accidental. Both groups used the form Агрон ‘Aron,’ Мордухай ‘Mordecai,’ and would also bear several non-biblical Hebrew appellations, including Нисан ‘Nissan,’ and Симха ‘Simḥ a,’ which were uncommon in other areas, especially the former one. These facts could be explained by the absence of any clear-cut separation between the two groups. During the fifteenth century, the Karaites lived in the following towns of Lithuania and Poland: Troki, Lutsk, Lwów, and probably Kiev. Rabbanites were resident at least in the last three places; thus, the Rabbanites and the Karaites were not separated geographically. In the documents of that time, there are no signs of conflict between them; therefore, they should have been in permanent contact.61 As the possibility of the western origin of Karaites is ruled out, we can safely assume that the Rabbanites in question were also already living in the area before the arrival there of Jewish migrants from the West. As discussed in sections .. and .., EAST CANAANITES contributed to the development of Jewish communities in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Red Ruthenia, and the Lublin area of Lesser Poland.62
C.
ASHKENAZIC JEWS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
During the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, all Jewish communities in Central Europe gradually became totally integrated in the Ashkenazic cultural sphere. Gradual abandonment of the Slavic vernacular language in favor of a German-based idiom, the ancestor of CzY and EY, was principally related to two factors. The first is related to the existence of numerous German Christian colonists in Bohemia and Moravia. German-speaking families had lived in the western part of the country, that is, in Eger (Cheb, in Czech) and its surroundings, since very ancient times. In other regions, they settled in large groups between the mid-twelfth century and the early fourteenth century. Their proportion was especially significant in cities and towns, where most Czech Jews dwelled. The second factor is related to the arrival of Jewish immigrants from southeastern Germany and
58
Jewish sources mention several Ashkenazic Jews from Lithuania who appeared in Crimea either after the expulsion of or as prisoners of Tatars after the latter took Kiev in the s. Their number was large enough and their cultural influence so significant that Ashkenazic elements were introduced in Crimean Jewish rites. Among these persons were Moses ben Jacob “the Exile,” a rabbi from Kiev, and a Talmudic scholar Kalman Ashkenazi (Evrejskaja enciklopedija :, :, :–). 59 REA :, , ; :. 60 See section ... Data of this census are given in REA :. 61 To the Christian population both were simply Jews. Generally, Christian sources of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries do not distinguish between them, with only three exceptions: documents from Troki () and Lutsk (), as well as the Lutsk census () (REA :–, , :). On close contacts between Rabbanites and Karaites see also Shapira :, . Bałaban (:–) mentions an archival document () that demonstrates the presence of a Karaite tombstone in a cemetery used by Rabbanites. 62 They could also partly contribute to communities in other parts of Poland and Silesia. Note that three Jews “de Russia (Russya, Rwssia)” (as is stipulated in the original Latin document) appear among Jewish residents of Breslau, the capital city of Silesia in (Brann :XVII, XIX, XXVI). One of them, Effraym (Ephraim), was among the five most influential members of the community.
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Austria. These settlers were not necessarily more numerous than the indigenous Jews. Due to their cultural importance and the fact that they were speaking German dialects similar to those used by local German Christian colonists, their linguistic influence could be disproportional to their population size.63 For Prague, German elements may already be observed in the earliest document () that contains names of local Jews. Nothing implies their Rhenish origin: they are more likely due to the presence of migrants from the Danubian area.64 In other documents from the same century, numerous Germanic and several Romance names appear as used by Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. They include a group of names whose base forms appeared in the Rhineland. However, in that period, names of this kind do not cover the majority of persons mentioned. Until the mid-sixteenth century, in the Czech provinces there are no occurrences of many names popular in the medieval Rhineland.65 This factor indicates that Rhenish immigrants were still rare in the Czech lands. Emigration of Ashkenazic Jews to Bohemia continued during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Prague’s census of reveals the presence of numerous names also known in the Rhineland and Franconia and absent from the Czech sources of the preceding centuries.66 Again, nothing suggests the existence of direct migrations from the Rhineland. Much more likely, the routing between the two countries mainly involved some intermediary stage(s) through Franconia and/or Bavaria. Note that since at least the second half of the fifteenth century, Jewish names in the community of Regensburg were already similar to those in the Rhineland (implying that numerous migrations had taken place from the Rhineland to this city, directly and/or via Franconia).67 Also note that often names of Rhenish origin found in the Czech lands are characterized by linguistic features unknown in the German dialects of the Rhineland and shared by Bohemian and Bavarian.68 In other words, we are not dealing with names that would come from the Rhineland as ready-made forms. In Brandenburg, a dramatic change in the corpus of names used occurred during the fifteenth century. In sources from the second part of that century and during the following century, one finds numerous names typical of western Germany.69 This fact demonstrates the arrival of Ashkenazic Jews from western Germany, either directly or by way of Bohemia-Moravia. Slavic forms were becoming rare. The few exceptional occurrences such as Isaatzek in Berlin in could, in principle, have belonged to recent immigrants from Poland rather than indicating traces of the old Slavic substratum of the Brandenburg communities. Numerous references exist regarding the arrival of Jews, most likely already Yiddish-speaking, from the Czech lands to Poland. In the early fifteenth century, the rabbi Yom Tov Lipman, who originated from Mühlhausen (Thuringia), came to Kraków from Prague. During the second half of the same century, the following persons came to Kraków: (i) Ephraim Fischel, whose descendants played a significant role in the life of the Kraków community; (ii) Abraham Bohemus, appointed in by the king to the position of tax collector for all of Greater Poland and Mazovia; (iii) Jacob Polak, the Prague rabbi who originated in Germany and later became the glory of the Polish rabbinate.70 Certainly, here we are only dealing with a few famous 63 As discussed in section .., German colonists in the Czech lands mainly came from Bavaria-Austria, Eastern Franconia, and eastern Germany. 64 It mentions four men: Baruch, Ysac (Isaac), Wogel, and Auivgdor (Avigdor), the son-in-law of Muslin (Emler :). Note that among these five names, one, Wogel, has a German root (the name Vogel and various hypocorisms of it are known in the fourteenth century in Alsace, Austria, and Hungary), and another, Muslin, includes the German hypocoristic suffix -lin. Its root’s /u/ shows a form of Moses typical of BNEY KHES (see section ..). 65 Details concerning Ashkenazic names in the Czech lands appear in Beider :. 66 Some of the names could have belonged to relatively recent immigrants, others could have existed in Bohemia for several centuries, and their absence from older documents would be due to the non-exhaustive character of the latter. 67 The first representative list of names from Regensburg dates from –. There we find a significant number of names typical of the Rhineland including numerous full or hypocoristic forms derived from Rhenish names (Beider :–). 68 Among the examples are: the diphthongization of MHG î and the shift /b/ > /p/ in the initial position. The hypocoristic suffix -lin (lein), shared by numerous High German dialects and commonly used in Jewish names known in the fourteenth century, gradually disappears. Since the fifteenth century, Jewish hypocorisms have been constructed using the element -(e)l specific to Bohemian and Bavarian. 69 See details in Beider :. 70 In , official Polish sources tell about several other immigrants from Bohemia: Ioseph who came from the town of Chomutov with his sons Michaele and Isaac, their spouses and children, as well as merchants Iacob and Lazar (REA :, ).
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individuals. However, for the early sixteenth century, we have direct information—the only one of this kind for the whole history of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe—about the existence of a massive migration. At that time, there was a large controversy between two local communities: (i) the “Polish” one, consisting of people who were considered to be local Jews; and (ii) the “Czech” one, composed of persons who had recently come from Bohemia-Moravia. Moreover, some members of the “Polish” community had been living in the country for only one or two generations, and their ancestors had come from the Czech lands as well.71 When, in , the King promulgated the law that prohibited foreign Jews from living in Poland, the only exception was Bohemian Jews. In , a cantor in Kraków has a nickname ברוינשוויג, clearly derived from the name of the German province of Braunschweig (Brunswick).72 For the latter third of the sixteenth century, we find the latest documented references to migrants from the Czech lands in Poland.73 The Ashkenazic Jews who came to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries were of heterogeneous origins. No information implies the existence of massive migrations: we are dealing with a constant flow of individual families. The exact origin is known only for a small number of persons. For some, the origins are clearly indicated in the sources. During the first half of the fifteenth century Symhay (Simḥ a), the son of Jossman (Yiddish form derived from Joseph), moved from Kraków to Lutsk (Bałaban a.:). The merchants Симон Докторович and Израиль Езофович came to Vilna from Kraków in the mid-sixteenth century. The route of Феликс / Щасный in the s was the same, while at least two community leaders of Vilna, in about , originated from Frankfurt. Бейман appeared in the late seventeenth century in Mogilev from Saxony. He served King Wladyslaw II.74 Some sobriquets also give indications as to the origins of their bearers. For example, one of the two community leaders of Lutsk () was Израиль Краковянин, his nickname meaning ‘one from Kraków.’ One shopkeeper in Grodno () was called Хаим Познанский (‘of Poznań’). A document from Kremenets, Volhynia, mentions Абрам Калугира. His last name corresponds to the family Calahora, of Sephardic origin, which came to Eastern Europe from Italy. Абрам Вайсвасар is cited in Tykocin in . His last name comes from the town of Weisswasser, Bohemia. Two bearers of the sobriquet Чех ‘Czech’ appear in the documents of Brest () and Volhynia (). For several famous rabbinical families in Eastern Europe, the genealogical trees are known and point to Western or Central Europe. Epstein, Katzenellenbogen, Oppenheim, and Rothenburg come from Hessen; Emden from northern Germany; Bachrach, Landau, and Spira/Schapiro from the Rhineland; Auerbach, Ettinger and Ettingen, Fränkel, Günzburg, Heilprin (Halperin), Heller, Margolies, Wallerstein, and Weil from southern Germany (Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg); Lunz from Alsace; Eilenburg from Saxony; Rappoport from northern Italy; Cheifetz, Eiger, Horowitz, Lipschitz, and Jaffe/Joffe from Bohemia; and Braude, Morawczyk, Schor, and Teumim from Moravia. The earliest references to the Minz family are from Swabia and Franconia. The earliest identifiable bearers of the names Treves and Luria lived in France during the fourteenth century. The given geographic localization indicates only the distant origin, while for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (where most of these families that settled during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries had branches), the immediate sources could be different. For example, the Katzenellenbogens (and one of their most famous representatives, Saul Wahl) came not directly from Germany but by way of northern Italy, while numerous persons named Heilprin, Heller, and Margolies in Prague could contribute to the spread of these names in Eastern Europe. Moreover, generally, members of these families came to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after living for one or several generations in Poland. The information in the two previous paragraphs deals with representatives of the Jewish elite only. For the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe, it is in the early seventeenth century that we can observe a large 71 For example, Jacob Polak was considered to be “Polish” (Bałaban a.:–). The exact origin is not known for Ossar (Asher Leml), the brother-in-law of Jacob Polak, appointed as the rabbi of the “Polish” Jews (Bałaban a.:). However, the /o/-pronunciation of the initial sound of his first name, as well as his second name, Leml (with its suffix shared by CzY and EY), clearly point to the Yiddish-speaking communities from the west of Poland. After his death, the Polish king assigned Moysi Fischel to that position. This person was the great-grandson of the aforementioned Ephraim Fischel (of Czech origin) and the nephew of both Jacob Polak and Ossar. 72 See Dubnov :. 73 The nickname of Jacob Morawczyk, the rich tax collector in Lublin and merchant in Kazimierz, reveals his Moravian roots. The famous rabbinical Horowitz dynasty from Prague settled in Kraków during the same period. 74 The information appearing in this paragraph is taken from Beider :.
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homogenization, “Yiddishizing,” of the corpus of Jewish names found in sources from the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. This is characterized by several factors. Firstly, typically Ashkenazic forms of biblical names dominate. Secondly, for certain biblical names, a number of their variants diminish considerably. For example, for Isaac there are numerous occurrences of Ицко (Yiddish Itske) but Ицхак, Ицханко, Сак, and Сачко, disappear. The same is true for Jacob, for which Янкель (Yiddish Yankl) becomes the standard form, while Яцко and Якуш were no longer used. Thirdly, names with Germanic roots and/or suffixes are common. Finally, many appellations cited during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries disappear.75 The frequencies of the use of certain others—Агрон, Игуда, Нисан, Пе[й]сах, and Шахно—diminish considerably. Only the last three (in the forms Nisn, Peysekh, and Shakhne) survived in the corpus of Yiddish names used during the second half of the nineteenth century. This onomastic homogenization is a direct consequence of the linguistic homogenization. There is no doubt that from the seventeenth century EY was already the first spoken language for a large majority of Jews living in the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.76 As amply discussed in this book, numerous characteristics of this language imply its origin in the Czech lands. EY has a small but well identifiable Old Czech lexical substratum, while its system-level features are mainly based on the colonial Bohemian dialect of German spoken in urban centers of Bohemia and Moravia. Migrants from these lands were responsible for the diffusion of this idiom in Poland and from there to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A large number of other EY particularities had already appeared in the Polish territories, under the influence of the colonial Silesian dialect of German spoken in the Middle Ages in numerous Polish towns and also as a result of internal innovations. Almost all of them were eventually brought to the Ukraine and a large number of them (mainly those dating from the period before the mid-sixteenth century) appeared in Lithuania and Belorussia as well.
C.
COMPOSITION OF MODERN ASHKENAZIC JEWRY
C.. Approaches As discussed in the previous section, modern Ashkenazic Jewry results from the merger of communities formed by (at least) three groups of medieval Jews living in non-Mediterranean Europe: Rhenish Jews, Czech Jews (WEST CANAANITES), and those who lived in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus (EAST CANAANITES). No information in our possession allows us to state that any of these three groups was formed by migrants belonging to another group. This section addresses the relative part each of them played in the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry. Since the ancestors of a large majority of modern Ashkenazic Jews lived before in the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the discussion by various authors is concentrated not on Ashkenazic Jewry as a whole but almost exclusively on its East European branch. Here, opinions vary between two extremes. At one end of this continuum appears a simplified version of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS according to which modern Ashkenazic Jews descended from those who had lived in the medieval Rhineland. For these authors, the contribution of Jews who lived in Slavic countries, before their involvement in the sphere of Ashkenazic culture, to the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry can be disregarded with respect to the role of migrants from western Germany. Weinryb (:) adheres to this position. Weinreich certainly never spoke in these terms. Moreover, he is actually the scholar who first explicitly stressed the existence of the three independent Jewish cultural centers in the non-Mediterranean medieval Europe and even suggested the terms WEST CANAAN and EAST CANAAN to distinguish western and eastern Jewish communities in Slavic countries. However, his general emphasis on the particular importance of the Rhineland for the history of Ashkenazic Jewry combined with the great influence exerted by this scholar on the domain of Jewish studies contributed to the appearance of
75 Among them are: Аврамец, Боско, Доманя, Енька, Еско, Волчко, Ганко, Голаш, Говаш, Иль˛к, Каспер, Кон˛к, Кривон, Левей, Лиханка, Меворах, Мошей, Пчолка, Рабей, Рыжко, Самоделка, Шмонко, and Стехна (all mentioned in section ..). 76 See section ...
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simplifications of this kind in vulgarizations of Jewish history. Very close to the same extreme is situated the opinion of certain proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS. Those scholars who initiated it (Faber and King ) search for sources for both Yiddish and Ashkenazic Jewry almost exclusively in the German-speaking provinces of the Danube area. In other words, if in their position concerning the composition of Ashkenazic Jews we were to replace the word “Danube” with “Rhine,” we would obtain the opinion shared by the proponents of the simplified version of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. Katz also asserts a non-Yiddish character of the language spoken in the medieval Rhineland. However, he explicitly states that the ancestors of modern Ashkenazic Jews lived in both the Rhine–Moselle and the Danube areas (Katz b:). The aforementioned proponents of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS ignore Slavic-speaking Jews. An opposite extreme position consists in denying altogether the contribution of emigrants from the Germanspeaking territories to the formation of Ashkenazic communities in Eastern Europe or, at least, considering it to be insignificant in comparison to other sources. “Revolutionary” authors adhering to this position often wrote their works to contradict the simplified version of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. In their zeal to oppose the view in question, regularly found in vulgarizations appearing in textbooks, they go well beyond the simple assertion of local, Eastern European sources for Ashkenazic Jews. All of these authors state about the sources in question that they result from massive conversions to Judaism. Arguments from several independent domains appear in the literature concerning this topic. Since the ambition of the present book is primarily linguistic, factors related to the study of the Yiddish language and traditional given names used by Ashkenazic Jews will be elaborated in more detail than those from other domains. For extra-linguistic approaches, only a sketchy coverage is presented here. A much more elaborate exposal, covering not only main methodological aspects but also technical details, is beyond the scope of this book and should be addressed by specialists in the corresponding fields, namely historians, demographers, and geneticists.
C.. Arguments revealing cultural and administrative western influences Some authors advance arguments that put forward the existence of important cultural influences in the East coming from the West. The direct link between Rhenish religious traditions and those of modern Eastern European Jewry represents one of them. It does not necessarily imply the mass migration of people. Influential rabbis coming from Western Europe could progressively incorporate various non-Mediterranean communities into the sphere of Rhenish Judaism.77 In Polish-Lithuanian territories, the western origin of the major part of the rabbinical elite is beyond question.78 The similarity of the communal structure in Eastern Europe with respect to the one that originally appeared in the West79 belongs to the same category of arguments. The organization of Jewish communities in this area was due to western rabbis who were also responsible for the general development of the spiritual life there. Obviously, rabbis do not represent a small closed caste whose representatives would move from place to place individually. They were accompanied by members of their families. Their migrations would make displacement to the same areas attractive to their relatives and compatriots. However, from these cultural changes we cannot deduce that proportions of western migrants were significantly higher than those of “autochthonous” Jews. Bałaban (b:, ) emphasizes the following geography and relative chronology of Jewish privileges issued by various Christian rulers: Vienna – Prague – Kalisz – Sandomierz – Lwów – Brest . Since the text of every new law from the set in question is clearly based on laws from the same set promulgated earlier, we are dealing with a gradual diffusion of the general legislation concerning Jews from
77 For similar arguments see van Straten :–. The same explanation is also valid for the diffusion of the Rhenish rite in the Danubian area at the end of the Middle Ages. For example, we know for sure that several intellectual leaders of the Danubian communities originated in the Rhine valley or Franconia. Judah ben Samuel (–), the author of Sefer Hasidim and the leader of an influential movement of Jewish mysticism in Germany, was born in Speyer and came to Regensburg at the end of the twelfth century. 78 See, for example, section C. and the list compiled by Weinryb (:–). 79 This argument is advanced in Bałaban b:–.
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West to East. Bałaban considers that it reveals migrations of Jews in the same direction. The validity of this assertion is rather doubtful. The intervals between the laws of Vienna, Prague, and Kalisz (plus Hungary in ), or between those of Sandomierz, Lwów, and Brest, are too small to relate the propagation of these laws to migrations. We can be sure that Christian authorities would copy each other. One may also conjecture that local Jewish leaders have been proactive in bringing the attention of the corresponding monarchs to the existence of laws of this kind in neighboring countries. Yet, again none of this sheds any light on the question of the proportions of western migrants in Poland and Lithuania. On the other hand, the privilege issued in for the community of Grodno (REA :) speaks about certain occupations specific to local Jews that are not characteristic of their coreligionists in Western and Central Europe: ownership of fields to plow and hayfields. This factor makes the western origin of local Jews implausible.80
C.. Historical arguments Historical arguments are more significant in this context. Some of the direct factors have been already addressed in section C.. We have no evidence for the existence of migrations from West to East that would be en masse but for one case, namely the existence in Kraków during the first half of the sixteenth century of a community composed of Czech Jewish immigrants. Nevertheless, we know for sure about migrations of individuals (most likely accompanied by members of their families) that continued until the Cossack wars of the mid-seventeenth century. On the other hand, migrations from East to West (especially from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to northern German territories), individual or by groups, are well known only for the following period. Certainly, this information is not helpful for evaluating the proportions of western migrants in Eastern Europe (or eastern migrants in Western Europe after the middle of the seventeenth century). However, these scanty pieces of factual information are significantly more palpable than the historical corroboration of the “revolutionary” theories of Ashkenazic history. We know about the conversion of the representatives of the Khazar elite in the First Millennium CE. Yet, we know nothing about any link between the Khazar converts and the Slavic-speaking communities that existed in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus during the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Moreover, we do not even know the sizes of the corresponding communities. As for the putative mass conversions to Judaism of Sorbians or East Slavic people, they are the fruit of the theoretical imagination of Wexler and van Straten, respectively. Not a single piece of historical information alludes to these events. The settlement history may serve as an indirect historical argument. For the tenth century, for all of German and West Slavic territories, references to Jews exist only for six towns: two in the Rhineland (Mainz and Worms), one in Bavaria (Regensburg), and three on the Elbe and its tributaries (Prague, Magdeburg, and Merseburg). During the second half of the eleventh century, Jews are also mentioned in six or seven other towns: five in the Rhine–Moselle valley (Cologne, Trier, Xanten, Speyer, and Bonn), one in the Elbe area (Halle), and, possibly, one in Franconia (Bamberg). It was in Mainz and Worms, that the Jewish population became particularly large. The above geography is well correlated with the main trends of German political, economical, and cultural life. Note that the places in question were the most important localities of the corresponding areas: centers of archbishoprics (Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Magdeburg), episcopal towns (Worms, Speyer, Bamberg, Merseburg), and major trade centers (Regensburg, Prague).81 Moreover, the existence of Jewish centers on the Elbe (Saxony) in the tenth century and the substantial growth during the eleventh century only of the Rhenish Jewish communities fit well with the fact that in – German kings belonged to the Ottonian (Saxon) dynasty, while during the period of – Germany was already ruled by monarchs from the Salian (Frankish) dynasty, with Mainz, Speyer, and Worms being their principal centers of activity.82 Massacres at the
80 Jewish owners of land are regularly mentioned in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the fifteenth century (see, for example, REA :, , ). 81 The text of this paragraph is based on the synthesis of data presented in GJ and GJ made by Toch (), with detailed maps for every fifty years and comments on them. 82 This correlation (noted in Toch :) makes plausible the idea that the growth of the Rhenish Jewish population during this period could be (at least partly) related to immigration.
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time of the First Crusade () strongly affected Rhenish communities. During the next century, the destroyed communities were gradually re-established and sixteen new places of Jewish residence are mentioned in the sources. Almost all of them are situated in the Middle Rhine area covering Bonn, Mainz, and Frankfurt. Globally speaking, the western orientation of Jewish settlement of the area became accentuated. During the first half of the thirteenth century, sixty-two new communities are mentioned. They are mainly concentrated along the Rhine, Moselle, and Maas, as well as in Hessen. During the second half of the same century, new communities already cover all of western Germany (the concentration is the biggest between Frankfurt and Erfurt), a dozen of them appear in eastern Germany (Thuringia and Saxony), and isolated outposts are known in Austria. More than new places of residence are known from the first half of the fourteenth century. Some of them could appear because of the natural growth of the Jewish population, others are directly related to persecutions and expulsions that had been regular since and ended up with the catastrophe of the Black Death ().83 The map at the end of GJ unambiguously shows that before the middle of the fourteenth century, the density of Jewish communities in western German-speaking territories populated by BNEY HES (Rhineland, Franconia, Swabia, Hessen) was significantly higher than in Central Europe populated by BNEY KHES (central Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, eastern Germany, Silesia). This factor implies that at least for the period in question the number of BNEY HES was significantly larger than that of BNEY KHES.84 For all of Poland, references to Jews up to the mid-fourteenth century are concentrated along its western borders and clearly imply the western origins of local communities. According to the criterion of geographic proximity, WEST CANAANITES (from the Czech lands and/or eastern Germany) are more likely to be responsible for this immigration than their coreligionists from western and southern Germany.85 For the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus, we know only of Kiev, Chernigov, and Vladimir (Volhynia). As discussed in section C., in Kiev, we know of no reference to Jews for about three hundred years: from the end of the twelfth century to the end of the fifteenth century. The unique medieval reference to Chernigov dates from the twelfth century. Yet, the Jewish presence in Vladimir has been uninterrupted there at least from the end of the twelfth century. Certainly, such geographic distribution of documents may be due to the paucity of sources available for the area in question and especially the territories devastated by the Mongols (including Kiev and areas neighboring it). As a result, based on this we cannot take for granted that in localities outside of Volhynia all Jewish communities necessarily disappeared after the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century. However, this distribution is perfectly correlated with several other factors. Vladimir was one of the most important towns of a powerful Galicia-Volhynia principality that was less damaged than other East Slavic states of the area. Moreover, it was precisely in the territories that belonged to this principality that we find all the Jewish communities known at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Red Ruthenia. Consequently, the uninterrupted set of references to Jews in Vladimir (contrasting to Kiev and other places situated in eastern principalities) is unlikely to be fortuitous. Note that this principality was the westernmost in comparison to other East Slavic states. In several respects its rulers were connected with western countries in which Jews would be living during the period in question.86 As a result, we cannot rule out that,
83 Actually, it is also because of these numerous persecutions (see their list in Toch :–) that we learn about the existence of certain Jewish communities. During the previous, peaceful years the communities in question could already have been in existence for a long time but not mentioned in the available sources. This possibility is particularly plausible for the period before because of the lack of tax registers (Toch :). 84 To counter this argument e silentio, Faber (:–), one of the creators of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS, explains the small number of references to Jews in that area by the climate of religious tolerance in the area of the Danube, in the territories populated by Germans who professed the Arian version of Christianity. According to her, only the significant size of the Jewish population in that area and subsequent migrations from it (and not from the Rhineland) to Slavic countries can explain the large size of the Jewish population observed in modern Eastern Europe. This purely theoretical scenario ad hoc is untenable because of its anachronism. Note that Arianism was eradicated in southern Europe during the seventh century, that is, centuries before the period for which we can really start our discussion of Ashkenazic history. 85 See section ... 86 Daniel (circa –) was crowned in by a papal messenger as the First King of Ruthenia. Four of his children were married to representatives of the high nobility of western countries: Lev to the daughter of the King of
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after all, at least one element of the members of the Jewish communities that existed in the Galicia-Volhynia principality during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were already migrants from the West. The massacres of the time of the Black Death () destroyed numerous communities in the Rhineland and other western German-speaking territories. Only fifty-eight communities enjoyed an uninterrupted existence and all of them are situated in Central Europe (city of Regensburg, Austria, Czech lands, Saxony, and Silesia).87 This factor is regularly repeated by the opponents of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS who stress that since that period German Jewry had not been large enough to provide masses of immigrants to Slavic countries during the following centuries. Moreover, we have no historical documents that would indicate the existence of such migrations immediately after the Black Death despite their regular mention in vulgarized descriptions of Ashkenazic history. In western German provinces, several hundred communities were re-established during the following hundred years including all those that were important before the Black Death. The greatest concentration of these communities corresponds for the second half of the fourteenth century to the area between Speyer and Frankfurt, that is, far from the areas spared by the massacres, but exactly in the region where most populous Jewish communities existed before. For this reason, we can be sure to be mainly dealing with survivors and their descendants. During the first half of the following century numerous additional places of Jewish residence appeared along the Rhine River and its tributaries (including multiple towns of East Franconia), southern Swabia (on the Danube), and Braunschweig. Between and , Jews are found in more than two hundred new places, mainly in Alsace, Baden (along the Neckar), the Mainz area, and East Franconia. By the end of the fifteenth century, we know about one thousand localities with Jews. This number (bigger than the number current before the Black Death) should not be taken as an indicator of a large Jewish population. Indeed, less than five percent of these localities had twenty Jewish families or more, while in more than one half of all places one or two families were resident and no more than ten families lived in about thirty percent of places. The three largest communities—Vienna (circa persons in ), Regensburg ( in ), and Prague ( in )—were all situated in Central Europe and not in the Rhine valley. During the entire fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century, Ashkenazic Jews were banned from numerous towns and whole provinces of Western and Central Europe. Among the examples are: Cologne (), Augsburg (), Magdeburg (), Nürnberg and Ulm (), Regensburg (), Vienna (), main towns of Moravia (mid-fifteenth century), numerous towns in Silesia during the second half of the fifteenth century (including Breslau, Brieg, Glogau, and Görlitz), provinces of Upper Bavaria (), Lower Bavaria (), Mecklenburg (), Styria and Carinthia (), Württemberg (), and Brandenburg (). In Mainz, Speyer, and several other cities between the end of the fourteenth century and the mid-sixteenth century Jews were expelled several times for shorter or longer periods. In , a general expulsion was promulgated for Prague that, however, was canceled soon after. As a result of the enactment of this anti-Jewish legislation, no Jews lived in the whole of Bavaria between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century and in the Duchy of Württemberg from to the end of the eighteenth century. In Silesia at the end of the sixteenth century, Jews were already expelled from all towns except for Glogau, Zülz, and Hotzenplotz. In western Germany and Alsace, regular expulsions from towns transformed dramatically the life of local Jews. Often, Jews expelled from a town would settle in nearby villages. As a result, they populated a large set of villages of Alsace, the Rhine Palatinate, Baden, eastern Swabia, Hessen, and East Franconia.88 During the same period, in Poland and Lithuania the situation for Jews was significantly more favorable from the political and economic points of view. It is precisely during the fifteenth century that we can observe a rapid growth in the number of communities in this area: references to Jews are known in about fifty new places. Numerous historians make a causal link between the deterioration of the situation in the West and the inception of new communities in the East. A priori, this opinion appears quite logical: it shows both a motivation for the
Hungary, Roman to a Duchess of Austria, Pereyaslava to a Prince of Mazovia, and Sofia to a Count of Schwarzburg (Thuringia). 87 All details concerning the settlement history appearing in this paragraph are taken from Toch :– (with a synthesis of data from GJ). 88 See Toch :. The information about expulsions appearing in this paragraph was taken from GJ and Encyclopaedia Judaica. For southern German territories during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see also a synthetic table in Ziwes :–.
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emigration from various German-speaking provinces (including the urban centers in the Czech lands) and a phenomenon in the Polish-Lithuanian territories that looks like a direct consequence of these conjectured migrations. Moreover, as stressed earlier, we know for sure about cases of individual migrations in this direction. However, this argument does not appear as strong as it seems to be. If we look into the exact geography of the communities first mentioned in the fifteenth century,89 we may observe that about one half of them correspond to the territories of Red Ruthenia, Volhynia, and Podolia, that is, the areas where a presence of EAST CANAANITES and/or their descendants is more than plausible. In certain cases, we cannot be sure we are really dealing with new communities. The general paucity of written sources surviving from the area in question may, at least, in theory, be responsible for the silence of historical documents regarding the Jewish presence in these towns during the preceding centuries.90 The geography of communities known in fifteenth-century Poland (western and southern Poland and Red Ruthenia) is well correlated with another factor: the geography of the settlement of German colonists in Poland.91 This correlation is unlikely to be fortuitous. The economic development of the urban centers in question and the presence there of Christian colonists (and even their dominance in a number of towns) speaking an idiom close to that used by Jews in Central and Western Europe were attractive for western Jewish migrants both economically and linguistically.92 Globally speaking, a consideration of historical factors does not provide any decisive argument in favor of any competing theory concerning the proportions of western migrants in the formation of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. However, these facts doubtlessly look more favorable for the opinions of those scholars who emphasize the western contribution than those who consider the “autochthonous” Jews as being numerically more important.
C.. Arguments from demography The arguments considered in the two previous sections are purely qualitative. However, for a discussion about the proportions of various Jewish groups in the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry, they are of little use. Numerical information of various kinds may be more relevant. One set of data of this kind comes from demography. Several authors who wrote about the history of Jews in Eastern Europe suggested their estimations of the Jewish population figures in the area. Table C. presents a sample for two particular moments: at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and on the eve of the Ukrainian Cossack wars (). It covers the territories of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Among the authors cited in Table C., Dubnow was certainly the author who put the least store on his estimation. His mention of these “approximate computations” appears in a footnote without any comment about the method for the information was obtained and it is marginal for his general, qualitative exposal of the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Schiper provides some details about the way he obtained his population figures. Even a superficial look at them suffices to see that the numbers proposed by this historian are unreliable.93 Weinryb tries to ameliorate the estimations made by Schiper by withdrawing some of the 89
See, for example, the list compiled by Schiper (:–) who asserts that it testifies to western migrations. Note that Schiper includes Vladimir (Volhynia) in the list in question without recognizing the Jewish presence there during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. 91 See Appendix B. 92 Jewish migrants could have come at the same time as German Christians (as suggested in Bałaban b:) or after them. 93 To obtain numbers for , he starts with information about annual taxes paid by Jews “at the end of the Middle Ages:” four and two złoty paid by stone and wooden houses, respectively. Schiper considers an average of thirty persons per stone house and fifteen per wooden house. Thus, he obtains a total estimation of , Jews in the three most populous communities: Kraków, Poznań, and Lwów. For that period, Jewish presence is known in fifty-eight other communities from Poland and Ukraine. For a few of them, the tax amount is available: it gives an average of twelve (wooden) houses per community. Schiper extrapolates this average to all the fifty-eight communities to obtain the total of , in them yielding a total of about , Jews in Polish and Ukrainian towns. Considering that the number of rural Jews has been five times smaller than in towns and that the number of Jews in Lithuania represented a third of that of Poland and Ukraine he obtains his ,. It is clear that several important elements in this calculation are to a great extent arbitrary: numbers of persons per house, percentages of rural and Lithuanian Jews, as well as the 90
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TABLE C. Estimations of the number of Jews in Eastern Europe Source
Population circa Population circa
Dubnow :
,
,
Schiper a:–
,
,
,–,
,
,–,
,–,,
Weinryb :, , – van Straten :
arbitrary elements in the calculations made by his predecessor. However, even if according to certain parameters his methodology looks (at least, on the surface) superior to that applied by Schiper, his overall results do not look reliable.94 These skeptical considerations are not given here to denigrate the quality of the analysis of the scholars in question. We are simply dealing here with the huge objective difficulties necessarily faced by any approach. In natural sciences, the universally accepted method consists of considering reliable only situations when the suggested (average) value is significantly more important than the standard deviation from it (which measures the degree of variability of the figure one wants to estimate). Unfortunately, in the situation under analysis, the raw data available for a historian are so scarce, incomplete, and indirect that any proposed figure for this early period sounds worthless.
extrapolation for fifty-eight communities based on a small sample of them. To obtain numbers for , he starts with an estimation based on taxes of . Their amount is available for Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Red Ruthenia, Volhynia, and Podolia. Based on this amount, Schiper estimates (without giving any precision about the exact way he proceeds) that the number of Jews in these five provinces was about ,. He guesses that the number of Jews in Podlasie and eastern Ukraine was about , and ,, respectively, while their number in Pomerania can be disregarded. To estimate the Jewish population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, he applies his usual factor of / in comparison to that in Poland-Ukraine. This way he arrives at the total of , in . Saying he takes into account “natural growth,” he comes up with , in , , in , and , in . From the Schiper’s postulate about doubling of the population in thirty-three years, we can deduce that he was conjecturing an annual growth of more than . percent for the period between and , while the population figure he suggests for actually implies that the annual growth increased to about three percent between and . 94 For calculating the number of urban Jews in Poland and Ukraine circa , Weinryb (:–) uses the same general approach as Schiper. He just adjusts the average number of persons per stone and wooden house from to –. and from to –., respectively. These amended factors are calculated by him on the basis of numbers of houses and persons available for a few Polish towns (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). This way he comes up with the estimation of , to , urban Jews in Poland and Ukraine. To obtain from this his total estimation of , to ,, he just states that the number of rural Jews in the same area was “very small,” while the number of Jews in Lithuania was just “small,” an approach hardly acceptable for obtaining numerical values. Moreover, the mere possibility of extrapolating to all of Poland multipliers obtained for a very small sample known about one century later is highly questionable. The estimation for is obtained using an approach different from that applied by Schiper. Weinryb accepts the estimation made in Ettinger (based on tax polls and listings of Jewish houses) about , Jews in Ukraine. He also observes that according to the Polish census of , about thirty-one percent of Jews of the country lived in Ukraine. Considering that the same percentage was also valid in , he obtains his estimation of about , Jews in all of Poland and Ukraine around . Adding the (unknown) number of Lithuanian Jews, he comes up with , Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Several important aspects of this method are highly questionable. One concerns his guessing about the number of Lithuanian Jews. The application of proportions of to sounds inappropriate. The year was followed by the massacres of Jews of Ukraine by Cossacks. Jewish communal life was re-established only decades after these events; see, for example, in Lukin the description of the situation in Podolia during the period in question (with statistical details). Moreover, the estimation by Ettinger deserves itself a critical analysis. Stampfer (:) shows, however, that figures suggested by Weinryb have at least an advantage of being compatible with realistic annual growth rates.
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The approach suggested by van Straten (:–) is totally different from those used by his predecessors. His starting point is the total number in of Jews of East European origin, that is, those who continued to live in the territories that before the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as those who emigrated during the nineteenth century from the area in question. His estimate of more than seven million sounds reasonable.95 Considering that during the nineteenth century the annual growth rate was . percent, he obtains the estimation of ,, Jews in . He then continues with backward calculations for previous centuries by applying for Jews two rates: one identical to the one known from McEvedy and Jones () for the total (Jewish and non-Jewish) population (biggest estimation of the number of Jews) and another slightly bigger than that (smallest estimation). This way he obtains the figures appearing in Table C.. Actually, all the rates he applies are clearly unreliable.96 Moreover, even if they were accurate, estimations obtained using such a backward approach may be used only for a period for which we can postulate that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acquired a number of immigrants that can be disregarded with respect to natural growth, say, after the mid-seventeenth century. If reliable demographical data were available for and , one could make a very rough estimation of the number of immigrants comparing the actual number of Jews in to the number expected if one starts with a population figure of and applies to it realistic annual growth rates. Since these data cannot be found, methods of demography operating with numbers in a way that can appear to a layman to have mathematical precision are not really helpful for shedding any light on the main question addressed in this section: the proportions of western immigrants in the constitution of Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Scarce available information concerning censuses and taxes provides only a very rough idea about the number of Jews living in the area in question. For a period during which migrations could take place, such data are certainly more objective than the method of backward calculation using (unknown) annual growth rates. For example, we know the results of the censuses made for all important communities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (except for Troki and Ostrog) in the middle of the sixteenth century. There were a large number of Jewish houses only in the following places: eighty-five in Brest (), sixty in Grodno (), forty-eight in Kremenets (), thirty-one in Lutsk (; this figure does not include the Karaites), and thirty in Vladimir Volynskij () (Beršadskij :). A detailed analysis of Russian available sources shows that members
95 It is based on the data from the census of performed in the Russian Empire to which van Straten adds the Jewish population of Austro-Hungarian Galicia and the Prussian provinces that were formerly Polish, as well as the number of emigrants from the area. The number obtained is also well correlated with the figure resulting from another, independent, estimation (Stampfer :). 96 The annual rate of . percent was obtained in van Straten and Snel : being based on demographic data by one German author from the end of the nineteenth century who calculated it for the period between and for the Duchy of Posen taking into account the censuses for these years, number of emigrants for the period and a theoretical estimation of the number of children these emigrants would provide in if they were staying in Posen. The possibility of making an extrapolation from the information (partly non-factual) for this specific period and this Prussian (former Polish) province to the whole Eastern Europe and to the whole nineteenth century is extremely controversial. Note that, for example, using the data of the Polish census of (Korobkov :–), we can see that the Jewish population of the province that later became Posen represented at that moment only about two percent of the total number of Jews of Poland. In the mid-nineteenth century Jews from Posen were significantly less traditional than their coreligionists in other parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a result, the demographic tendencies of Posen could be irrelevant for other areas. The annual growth rate was not stable during the nineteenth century. During its last thirty years it could be significantly higher than during the previous period (see Stampfer :). The calculations from previous periods are inappropriate because nothing suggests that the rates for Jews, with their striking social differences in comparison to the Gentile population, should be very similar to those of the total population. Moreover, when we know that striking methodological difficulties are faced by any person who wants to estimate the population growth of Jews even during the nineteenth century, we can logically question the accuracy of data appearing in McEvedy and Jones for the whole area for centuries that are more distant. To estimate the general validity of the approach, one could compare the estimation it provides with census data. The only available information corresponds to the year with about , Jews counted. Raphael Mahler allowed for the noncounted infants and undercounted communities and suggested that the actual number of Jews was about ,. Stampfer () shows that this estimation does not contradict other demographic parameters. Yet, the method by van Straten (:) yields a totally different estimation: from ,, to ,,.
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of these communities were often related and therefore the number of independent families was not large. Moreover, for some of these families we know for sure about their western origin.97
C.. Arguments from genetics Genetics is another domain that operates with numbers and therefore a priori could provide information particularly helpful for our understanding of the proportions of various groups in the composition of East European Jewry. Unfortunately, genetic studies of Ashkenazic Jews, numerous since the s, often provide contradictory information. Related methodological issues are huge: no access to the genetic pool of populations who lived centuries before us, the possibility of the genetic variation related to natural selection, etc. To these objective problems one should add striking subjective elements: for certain authors, the way they proceed in their investigation and their interpretation of obtained results are clearly skewed by their political and/or religious feelings. Every new publication in which their authors give a numerical estimation is immediately followed by numerous articles in the non-academic press written by journalists who in a highly vulgarized manner present them to the general public. Several factors contribute to this situation including the high prestige of genetic studies in our day (many people feel fascinated when they hear such terms as “chromosomes” and “gene pools,” “Y-DNA” and “mitochondrial DNA,” “haplotypes” and “haplogroups”) and the impossibility for laymen, even those with a high level of general culture, to verify the validity of the results presented.98 As a result, it is customary to see articles that explain to readers that, for example, (i) a majority of people considered to be of Jewish priestly descent indeed have the same paternal ancestor, (ii) for about forty percent of modern Ashkenazic Jews their matrilineal ancestry can be traced to just four women who lived about , years ago and, most likely, had Middle Eastern roots, (iii) more than eighty percent of Ashkenazic lineages have European sources, (iv) the genetic distance between modern Ashkenazic Jews and non-Jewish Italians is rather small, while the distance between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is tiny or huge, depending on the author and the time and the place of the publication.99 Taking this background information into account, we may conclude that genetics (at least at its current stage) cannot be really helpful in shedding light on the main issue addressed in this section. Moreover, the questions to which genetic research tries to obtain answers and our issue dealing with the proportions of the three groups that compose modern Ashkenazic Jewry are only partly correlated. For example, consider one extreme theoretical scenario: all the three groups in question (Rhenish Jews, WEST and EAST CANAANITES) are genetically indistinguishable. In this case, no proportion of any of them could be found using the methods of genetics. Proponents of the RHINE HYPOTHESIS could assert that this homogeneity is related to the migrations en masse of Rhenish Jews to Slavic countries. Yet, authors who place emphasis on EAST CANAANITES can claim that the leveling in question was achieved because of the mass migrations of Eastern Jews to the West after the mid-seventeenth century. A third category of authors could consider that the similarity is related to the foundation of all nonMediterranean European Jewish communities by Jews whose ancestors all lived in the Middle East during Antiquity. Evidently, the closer the answers provided by genetics are to the other extreme (striking genetic
97 By chance, a large collection of archival data dealing with the community of Grodno, one of the most important of the country, is available precisely for the period around the census (RN, REA ). Its analysis makes it possible to distinguish among the owners of sixty houses counted in that town in (REA :–): () five sons of Игуда Богданович: Абрам, Израель, Огрон, Мошко, and Песах, as well as at least two of his grandsons, Тобиаш Абрамович and Мордухай Богданович; () at least two members of another rich family, Хорошенький, namely Хацко Лазарович and his son Мисан. At that time, Jewish houses generally were small in size, and the name of only one owner appearing on census data could not mask numerous individuals living in his house (Beršadskij :). 98 Such a kind of checking is possible, at least in theory, for domains discussed above in this chapter, namely, historiography and demography when the raw (archival) data are explicitly presented and the arguments used in interpreting them can be followed (or thought to be able to be followed). 99 See sarcastic remarks in Sand :– that are partly founded. On the other hand, the overall criticism by the same author of genetic results that are not correlated with his own ideas and his general pathos about the necessity to limit genetic studies to medical purposes instead of the search for genetic links between various populations (labeled by him as “racist”) are typically obscurantist from the scientific point of view.
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differences between various groups of Ashkenazic Jews and their closeness to independent Gentile groups), the more relevant they can be for the question of proportions in the composition of Ashkenazic Jewry. Moreover, the genetic studies that yielded the most spectacular (though still controversial) results concern patrilineal (Kohen or Levite) or matrilineal heritage only. In other words, they ignore one parent of two, three grandparents of four, seven grand-grandparents of eight, etc. Evidently, their conclusions have little relevance for the question of the general proportions of the contribution of various groups. The above skeptical assessment affects in a different manner the “revolutionary” and the more conservative theories concerning the origins of East European Jews. Indeed, despite the controversial character of conclusions made by various geneticists, no serious study shows any particular closeness between Jews and Turkic100 or East Slavic101 groups of population. The main controversy concerns the degrees of closeness of Ashkenazic Jews to Middle Eastern and European Mediterranean Gentiles. From that point of view, theories about the Khazar or East Slavic converts being the ancestors of the majority of Jews of Eastern Europe are untenable.
C.. Arguments based on given names Given names are of particular importance for the history of Jewish settlement. Migrants coming to new locations invariably have proper names; therefore, it is reasonable to speak about migrations of names associated with these persons. A comparative analysis of names used in different communities can yield information of paramount importance about patterns of migrations and genetic relationships existing between communities. Indeed, if one can find a large set of names that clearly came from region R to region R, we can be sure that we are dealing with an important migratory pattern.102 According to this aspect, information about names is significantly more important than knowledge about the vernacular language spoken by Jews in various regions. To take just one example: in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries Jews from the Rhineland and northern 100 The paper by Elhaik () that received a relatively large echo in non-scientific media can be used as an illustration of the general phenomenon described in this section. That author pretends to prove that modern Ashkenazic Jews are much more closely related to Khazar converts to Judaism than to Jews who lived in the Land of Israel during biblical times (Hebrews). Certainly, for a non-specialist it is impossible to follow his analysis. However, one does not have to be a professional geneticist to see striking methodological problems in his approach. Indeed, instead of Khazars (a Turkic people that lived along the Volga and in North Caucasus and disappeared from the historical scene at the beginning of the Second Millennium CE) he took Armenians and Georgians, two peoples from South Caucasus having with Khazars neither cultural-linguistic nor geographic links, while he took for granted that the genome of modern Palestinian Arabs is similar to that of biblical Hebrews. It is highly symptomatic that the brief exposal of Ashkenazic history presented in the paper by Elhaik (and seen by him as corroborating his ideas) is mainly based on the information appearing in works of other “revolutionary” authors: Poliak (), Koestler (), Sand (), and van Straten (, from whom he quotes incorrectly), with a “special guest” invited to sanctify the results from the linguistic point of view: Wexler (). 101 One of the studies focused on patrilineal heritage, Behar et al. , deals with Levites. The authors state that their results show a major difference between, on the one hand, Ashkenazic Levites, and, on the other hand, other Jews (people of Kohen or Israelite origins), both Ashkenazic and Sephardic. Moreover, the unusual characteristics of Ashkenazic Levites—namely a high frequency of the haplogroup Ra—is also observed for several Slavic people such as Sorbs and Belarusians. From these results, the authors make a conjecture about the importance of one or a few European converts from Slavic countries for the genetic makeup of modern Ashkenazic Levites. Just because conversions in Eastern Europe are historically known only in the Khazar Kingdom, the authors point to Khazars as the most attractive source. Note that the proportion of Levites in Ashkenazic communities is very low: about four percent according to sources used by the authors. Moreover, several methodological aspects of the study in question make these results highly controversial (see also van Straten :–). The studied sample size of Ashkenazic Levites is particularly small: sixty persons from nine to ten European countries. Small samples of four non-Jewish population groups were concerned by the analysis: Germans (eighty-eight persons), Norwegians (eight-three), Sorbs (), and Belarusians (). As a result, the actual results just show that Ashkenazic Levites concerned by the sampling are closer to the two Slavic groups than to the two Germanic groups. Nothing indicates any specific Slavic (or Khazar) connection: other Slavic or non-Slavic European populations were simply not affected by the analysis in question. 102 This assertion represents a particular case of the application of OCCAM’S RAZOR. Indeed, one hypothesis about the migratory pattern is logically preferable to a multitude of independent hypotheses that separately explain the displacement of every individual name in the set under consideration.
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France would be speaking totally different languages, yet both shared a number of given names and close genetic links between these two groups are beyond doubt. Using names to identify migratory patterns needs some methodological comment. The presence of the same name in two different regions may be either independent or related. The first possibility is more likely for certain names taken from the Bible. It is valid for names borne by major biblical figures such as Abraham, Isaac, Samuel, Sara, and Esther and names with pleasant or attractive meanings such as Baruch ‘blessed’ and Menahem ‘one who comforts.’ For other groups of names, this phenomenon is unlikely. From the end of the Middle Ages, the corpus of given names used in various non-Mediterranean European Jewish communities underwent only a few changes, especially for men. On the one hand, the importance Jewish tradition accorded to names made it almost impossible for new loans to penetrate the corpus between the mid-fourteenth century and the nineteenth century. Consequently, if the same Gentile name is being used by Jews in two distant areas, it is difficult to imagine the possibility of independent borrowing, even if the names were popular among Christians. On the other hand, very few names have been created during the same period. During the first centuries of the Second Millennium CE borrowings were also particularly selective and creations rather limited. As a result, except for the two categories enumerated at the beginning of this paragraph, the presence of the same name in two different areas, during the same or distinct time periods, is generally related to migrations of their bearers and/or members of their families.103 For this reason, for an analysis focused on migrations, it is appropriate to speak about these names as diagnostic. The link can be either direct or indirect, and in these cases we can speak about inherited and fashionable names, respectively. All conclusions about migrations based on the consideration of given names should be done bearing in mind this dichotomy. The direct influence of migrations corresponds to situations when a name for a newborn child is chosen in honor of some close relative. Since the Middle Ages, this method was customarily in Germany, Italy, and Spain where numerous names were inherited from previous generations. The tradition to call children after deceased relatives was also standard in the Slavic countries during the last centuries. Yet, formally speaking, we have no information about its validity for medieval WEST or EAST CANAANITES. The indirect influence is valid in cases when a name is chosen with no relationship to names used within the same family. No factual data corroborate the existence of this method. Yet, one can hardly imagine its absence since frequencies of the name use vary considerably depending on community and, especially, period. It is likely that a significant portion of names were assigned by choosing names borne by members of other families of the same community. In cases of this kind, it is appropriate to speak about fashion effects that correspond to the imitation by one individual or by a group of certain aspects of the behavior of other persons.104 Several major factors favor the choice of a name in this situation. Among them are: . its presence in the Bible and the importance of its biblical bearer; . its attractive meaning (this is valid for both biblical and non-biblical names); . the fact that it is borne by a honored person (or his/her close relatives) external to the family. For Ashkenazic Jews, the last reason was neither suggested nor approved by rabbinical authorities. Yet, this naming pattern could have existed on an unconscious level. The choice of a name is affected by the positive associations it induces for parents, although they may be unaware of the name’s origin. Among the most important features that can render a name “positive” is the use of the appellation by a person toward whom the parents had a high regard, especially a famous rabbi. For female names, for the assignment of this kind one should conjecture that people would choose for their girls names borne by daughters or wives in families with a higher social rank (that of a rabbi, a rich man, etc.). If a correlation exists between usages of a name in two regions, then it could be due to the migrations either between them or from a third area to both regions. In either case, it is necessary to identify the area where the name was used for the first time. Several criteria may be helpful to accomplish this task. The first factor is purely
See the detailed analysis of borrowings, creations, and migrations of names in Beider :–, –. The prolificacy of many families could be an important stimulus for such a procedure. Indeed, several first-born boys and girls could cover all names of the deceased grandparents or great-grandparents. As a result, for other children, the parents would have to choose new names external to their family. 103 104
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linguistic. In certain cases the phonetic (phonemes resulting from phonetic shifts confined to certain particular areas), morphological (specific suffixes), or lexical characteristics of an appellation can be sufficient to determine its geographical source. The second criterion is chronological. The area where the name occurs the earliest is likely to be its place of origin. This criterion is less precise than the first since there are too few medieval documents. The lapse of time between the initial presence of an appellation in a region and its first mention in available sources can be very important. If, during that period, the name was brought to a new region, there is a chance that its first documented occurrence in this new area could be older than that in the area from which it originated. The third criterion comes from population statistics. If, for the same time period, in one country a name is more frequently used than in another, then it is more likely to be older in the country of more frequent use. Finally, it is necessary to keep in mind that the discovery of diagnostic names reveals only a small portion of migrants. In the Middle Ages and in modern times, names of several important biblical figures were among the most common in all European communities.105 These names hide the origins of their bearers. For example, Abraham, Isaac, Sara, or Rachel mentioned in documents from Germany could belong to indigenous Jews as well as to newcomers from France, Italy, Bohemia, or the Levant. Among post-biblical Hebrew names Meir is particularly popular in various modern Ashkenazic communities. During the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, its Yiddish phonetic forms Meyer and Mayer appear among ten to fifteen most frequently used in Frankfurt, Prague, and numerous communities of Eastern Europe.106 It is already common in the lists of victims in the Rhineland () and Franconia (). In the Middle Ages, this name was actually common not only in western Germany but in all of Western Europe, that is also in northern and southern and Spain.107 However, it was rare in medieval eastern Mediterranean communities.108 This observation makes plausible its diffusion in Slavic countries to be due to western migrants. Numerous Germanic and a number of Romance and Greek names used by medieval Rhenish Jews are also later known in other German-speaking provinces, as well as in Slavic countries.109 For some of them, their semantics could be, at least, partly responsible for their propagation as fashionable names. Among StY examples are: Liberman ‘beloved man,’ Ziskind ‘sweet child,’ numerous female names including Sheyne ‘beautiful,’ Feyge ‘little bird,’ Golde ‘golden,’ Eydl ‘noble,’ Freyde ‘joy,’ Blume ‘flower,’ and Reyzl ‘little rose.’ However, for numerous other names their semantics could not be helpful for their diffusion,110 which, therefore, has to be explained either as a direct consequence of migrations or via the assignment of imitating naming traditions of the western elite. As already explained, the second source is purely theoretical, while the first one is natural and corresponds to established traditions. Moreover, members of the elite families, as all other Jews, would mainly bear biblical names or those having an attractive meaning in Yiddish. A combined logical probability of a non-traditional scenario to be applied precisely in cases of non-popular categories of names is low. This theoretical possibility becomes particularly implausible if we add the “revolutionary” hypothesis asserting that in Eastern Europe the number of western migrants was small in comparison to that of “autochthonous” Jews. This hypothesis reduces dramatically the size of the corpus available for imitation by local Jews. Globally speaking, we can be confident about a large portion of these names being truly inherited. The scenario of fashionable names may be a valid explanation in some particular cases only and certainly not on a large scale. The consideration of the series of male “animal” names (Leyb ‘lion,’ Hirsh ‘deer,’ Ber ‘bear,’ and Volf ‘wolf ’) also corroborates the same general idea. Since at least the seventeenth century their phonetic variants have For a detailed analysis and statistical tables see Beider :–, –. All statements concerning the most common Ashkenazic names that appear in this section are based on tables presented in Beider :– and sources used to compile them. 107 See Gross : (France), Baer and Régné (Spain). 108 According to the index to Mann (compiled using materials from Cairo Geniza), more than forty names were more popular than Meir. Only a few references to Meir are known for medieval Byzantium (Starr ). 109 See sections .., .., and .. 110 StY examples, all with Rhenish ancestors, are: male Anshl, Falk, Getsl, Helman, Henzl, Herts, Kalmen, Karpl, Kopl, Koyfman, Lipman, Note, Zalmen, Zanvl, Zekl, Zelikman, Zusman, Bendit, Bunem, Fayvush, and Shneyer; female Brayne, Frumet, Gele, Ginendl, Mine, Beyle, Bune, Rike, Toltse, Tsertle, and Yentl. To this list, one should add names whose earliest references are known in Franconia, such as: Ayzik, Eberl, Gimpl, and Ziml (male), Ele, Hendl, Tile, Yute, and Zelde (female). 105 106
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appeared among the most common male names in all communities following the Ashkenazic rite. There is no doubt that this is due to their semantics. However, only for the first of them is the attractiveness of the meaning of the corresponding word in Yiddish easy to explain. Numerous cultures have positive associations with lions and, moreover, in the Bible, Jacob’s son Judah is compared to a lion. Yet, a similar explanation does not fit the three other names. Certainly, biblical Jacob compares the other sons, Benjamin and Naphtali, to a wolf and a hind, respectively, while Issachar—though compared by Jacob to a donkey—gradually became associated in the Ashkenazic tradition with a bear.111 Yet, contrary to Judah, these three biblical names were uncommon in medieval Ashkenazic communities and the importance of the corresponding biblical personages is certainly smaller than that of Judah. The fact that all four “animal” names (all initially created in Rhenish communities) became as widespread in Eastern Europe as they were in Western and Central Europe is also a cogent argument for the importance of western migrations. The consideration of given names also shows the importance of WEST CANAANITES in the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry. On the one hand, we know about a series of (mainly female) names of Old Czech origin widespread in Central and Eastern Europe.112 On the other hand, we learn that Hebrew names, biblical and post-biblical, appearing in Eastern Europe are closely related to the naming traditions of the medieval BNEY KHES who lived in Central Europe and were, at least partly, inherited from WEST CANAANITES. A large number of these names were used by medieval BNEY HES from the Rhineland and Franconia too. However, names common in the Rhineland and exceptional among BNEY KHES are also uncommon in modern Eastern Europe. Those frequently used by BNEY KHES but rare among their coreligionists from the Rhine and Main areas are also common in Eastern Europe.113 For example, Ḥ ayyim (StY Khayem) was common among BNEY KHES but rare among BNEY HES. Its female equivalent Ḥ aya (StY Khaye) was simply unknown in medieval western Germany: earliest references (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) come from Austria and Bohemia. In good correlation with these facts, we find them among the ten most frequently used names in Prague (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries) and various Eastern Ashkenazic communities (nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century),114 but significantly less common in Frankfurt (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). The portion of Germanic names specific to BNEY KHES is tiny.115 However, certain names popular in western Germany never became common among BNEY KHES. As a result, in modern times the same names are rare in Slavic countries. Among examples are StY Anshl and Yute/Ite whose equivalents were among the ten most common names in Frankfurt even during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Typical Rhenish form Herts ‘deer’ remained common only in western Germany, while in Central and Eastern Europe it was rarely used and forms identical to local Yiddish words for deer were mainly used: Hirsh and Hersh. Evidently, these Germanic examples have nothing to do with the heritage of WEST CANAANITES. They are given here just as an additional illustration of the general idea about the importance of the communities of BNEY KHES (formed in Central Europe after the merger of WEST CANAANITES with Ashkenazic migrants from German-speaking provinces) for the Jewish settlement of Eastern Europe. Nothing similar can be said about the legacy of EAST CANAANITES. Only a few names specific to them survive in the corpus of modern Eastern European Jews and all of them are unusual in comparison to names of Old Czech origin.116 In the Middle Ages, the creation of populous stable Jewish communities was typically accompanied by the growth of the corpus of given names borne by local Jews, with new names being either created or borrowed. This phenomenon is apparent, at least for western Germany, the Czech lands, France, Italy, and the Middle East. It was particularly acute for female names (for which their semantics is of particular importance): they have been less conservative and more affected by fashion trends than male names. In the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus, as can be seen from sources of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the corpus of names was not large and a few biblical names were quite common. This relatively small range of innovations in Slavic-speaking Jewish communities, together with the fact that traces of these specific names are almost absent from the modern corpus indirectly imply small-sized communities. Looking into the lists of names most frequently used during the nineteenth century in the Russian Empire and Galicia, we can observe only a few idiosyncrasies with respect to those used during the two previous centuries in Prague. For example, forms of 111 112 114 115
See the corresponding blessings in Genesis :, , , and , respectively. 113 See section ... See section .. Yiddish Khaye often appears even among the five most common names. 116 See section ... See section ...
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Appendix C
biblical Lea (StY Leye / PolY Laye) were more popular in Eastern Europe (where they were among the five to ten most common names) than in Central and Western Europe, while Hinde ‘hind,’ common in Frankfurt (sixth position) and Prague (twelfth position), was of medium popularity in Poland. Yet, nothing suggests that the popularity of Leye is due to the legacy of EAST CANAANITES: a hypothesis of the development internal to EYspeaking communities appears more plausible. As discussed in this section, the analysis of traditional given names used in Ashkenazic communities represents one of the most powerful tools allowing us to show that the contribution of the Rhenish communities was not simply cultural, carried through religious books of western origin and a handful of highly influential rabbis from western Germany. These given names corroborate the existence of the route (with a number of intermediary stages) from the medieval Rhineland to Eastern Europe. They also imply the particular demographic importance of communities from Central Europe for the composition of Ashkenazic Jewry of Eastern Europe and a rather small contribution of EAST CANAANITES. Onomastic information allows us also to see that neither WEST CANAANITES nor EAST CANAANITES made in the Middle Ages any major demographic contribution to areas situated to the west of them. The main direction of migration was clearly from west to east. When—after the Cossack wars of the midseventeenth century—the direction became opposite, migrants from Eastern Europe were already members of Yiddish-speaking communities, with only a small WEST CANAANITE substrate. They did not change dramatically the corpus of names used in Ashkenazic communities of Western and Central Europe.
C.. Arguments based on surnames If one takes into account the exact chronology of the adoption of surnames by Ashkenazic Jews, it becomes clear that surnames do not shed any light on Jewish history before the end of the eighteenth century.117 Yet, certain authors anachronistically search for traces of medieval Jewish communities precisely by analyzing Jewish surnames from Eastern Europe. Idelsohn (:) writes about the migrations of Khazars, Persian and Babylonian Jews to Eastern Europe that are corroborated by the existence of “numerous Jewish oriental surnames among Jews of Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland.” To illustrate his point he suggests a list of names such as (among others) Chalfan, Chefez, Gamsu, Gefen, Jaffe/Jofe, Kadisch, Sarchi, Schapiro, Tappuach, and Zemach. Actually, almost all these surnames first appeared only at the beginning of the nineteenth century within the Russian Empire. Actually, only Chefez (Cheifetz), Jaffe, and Schapiro (for which Idelsohn suggests an erroneous Aramaic etymon) are older, but all of them first appeared in Western or Central Europe.118 Their putative “oriental” origin is due only to the fact that almost all of them are based on Hebrew or Aramaic words or names. This etymology shows the “oriental” origin of their etymons and certainly not of the surnames themselves. Weinreich asserts that the high frequency of surnames such as Spiro/Schapiro (from Speyer), Minz (believed to be related to Mainz), Landau, Halper(i)n (from Heilbronn), Katzenellenbogen, Epstein, and Bachrach, all derived from the names of towns located on or near the Rhine and Main rivers, corroborates his own hypothesis about the Rhenish roots of Eastern European Jews (WG :). Süsskind (:) also erroneously states that modern common Jewish family names derived from the names of German towns demonstrate medieval migrations from these places. Güdemann (:) speaks about “numerous” Polish Jewish surnames derived from names of towns in southern German provinces and gives Landau, Minz, Schpire (Speyer), Heilprin (Heilbronn), and Runkel as examples. Actually, as explained, the number of such examples is quite small. Mieses (:–) unravels “traces” of old migrations from southern German-speaking provinces to Poland when considering such Galician surnames as Altenberg, Asch, Bach(er), Bardach, Baumöhl, Haber, Hammer, Hirschfeld, Hirschtal, Klausner, Landau, Lauterbach, Lichtenstein, Nacht, Nagler, Rosenberg, Weissenbach, Wiesenfeld, and Winkler. For any name in this list, he discovers in various Austrian provinces or in Bavaria small localities whose names are, according to Mieses, etymons for the corresponding Jewish surnames. Yet, but for a few exceptions, Galician family names were invented by Austrian officials only after the law of . In a few cases, we are dealing with fortuitous phonetic coincidences.119 In the majority of 118 See section ... See footnote (section ..). Examples: Hebrew acronym Bardach and the toponym Berdach, German common noun Hammer ‘hammer’ and the toponym Hamm. 117 119
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cases, however, both toponyms and (mainly artificial) Jewish surnames are simply derived from the same German words.120 Wexler (:–) suggests the possibility of a link between the surname Kagan [Каган, in Russian] and the title kagan of the rulers of medieval Khazaria. Yet, we do not find any reference to this surname before the end of the eighteenth century, while after the mass assignment of surnames at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was adopted by numerous families. In the Russian Pale of Settlement, it became one of the most common surnames in Lithuania, Belorussia, and northern Ukraine, that is, exactly those parts of the Empire where the form Kogan [Кoган] was rare (Beider :–). The notion that all these families had maintained throughout the centuries an oral tradition—for which no written reference can be found—concerning their descent from the rulers of Khazaria is logically untenable. In provinces where surnames were spelled using Latin characters (northeastern part of the Kingdom of Poland, Courland), that is, in the immediate vicinity of the area containing the widespread use of Kagan in the Russian Pale of Settlement, we find numerous Kahan/Cahan but not a single Kagan/Cagan. Moreover, in various Jewish sources of the nineteenth century, its bearers always spell it כהן, which corresponds to the Hebrew Kohen. All this information leaves no doubt about Kagan being adopted as a surname by people of Kohen origin (that is, the members of the Jewish priestly caste).121 Wexler (:) suggests that the surname Хазáн(ов), also from the Russian Pale of Settlement, is worthy of note. Its root comes from the Hebrew ‘ ַחָּז ןcantor in a synagogue,’ khazn in Yiddish. According to this author, the stress position implies the existence of the Slavic word *khazán that would be due to Khazarian Jews. Actually, here the position of the accent is determined not by the Jewish language to which the etymon belongs but by the prosodic peculiarities of East Slavic languages. Indeed, the same etymon also gave rise to the surnames Хазóн and Хáзин. In variants ending in -an or -on, we have the ultimate stress because these final elements were (falsely) interpreted as Slavic suffixes, both of which always take the accent. Yet the Russified form Хáзин, on the contrary, has initial stress. The same factor explains the stress position in the Ukrainian noun капцáн ‘poorman’ and Jewish surname Кабцáн/Капцáн (compare ַקְּבָצן, kaptsn in Yiddish). This word could not have been borrowed by Ukrainians from Khazars: it appears neither in the Bible nor in the Talmud. It was created by Ashkenazic Jews.122 Also compare the position of the accent in the Russian words цáдик ‘Tzadik,’ Мúшна ‘Mishnah,’ Гемáра ‘Gemara,’ but хасúд ‘Hasid,’ мацá ‘matzah, unleavened bread,’ and Талмýд ‘Talmud.’ Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew equivalents of all these words all have the penultimate accent, while in the Sephardic pronunciation all of them have ultimate stress. This set clearly shows that the position of stress in Hebraisms found in East Slavic languages is determined by the internal prosodic peculiarities of these idioms rather than by the stress position in the Jewish etymons. An anachronistic approach to the domain of Jewish surnames in Eastern Europe together with a vague knowledge of the linguistic past of Ashkenazic Jews also led to an erroneous opinion about the relative chronology of various linguistic strata of surnames. Numerous laymen consider that surnames based on Hebrew are older than those based on German or Yiddish, which in turn are older than those having Slavic etymons. Actually, almost all surnames, independently of the languages of their source words, were adopted by Eastern European Jews during the same period: about two hundred years ago.
C.. Linguistic arguments No author writing about the composition of Jewish communities in Slavic countries can ignore the fact that during the last centuries Yiddish, a language with an obvious High German basis, was the first everyday 120 Examples: Altenberg ‘old mountain,’ Lauterbach ‘pure brook,’ Rosenberg ‘mountain of roses,’ and Wiesenfeld ‘grassy field.’ 121 Its particular form Kagán, with two “a” and the stress on the final syllable, implies that it is not derived from the Hebrew word for Kohen (from which the surname Kógan, with the first syllable stressed, is derived), but from its Aramaic cognate: ַּכֲהָנא, pronounced in Yiddish as kaháne. The existence in northern Belorussia of the surname Barkagan/Barkan (in which the first syllable comes precisely from Aramaic and not Hebrew ‘son,’ and whose bearers according to well-known tradition all descend from a couple of Kohen origin) corroborates this hypothesis. Also note that in Galicia we also find Kahan as a common variant of a more frequently used Kahane. 122 In Modern Hebrew it is a loanword from Yiddish.
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Appendix C
language of all local communities. Often, the approach to this topic is directly related to the general conception an author has about the history of the formation of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. For scholars who adhere to a traditional point of view about the history of the formation of these communities (including linguists following the RHINE or the DANUBE HYPOTHESES), the propagation of Yiddish is totally natural. For them, the Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe is mainly due to western migrants who brought this language from Central and/or Western Europe. For “revolutionary” authors who favor the non-western origin of Jews in Eastern Europe, the status of Yiddish represents a serious issue that they must necessarily address. Generally, these authors advance two main arguments.123 Firstly, some of them write about the great linguistic impact of the German colonists in medieval Polish towns. This argument is invalid. The Silesian dialect spoken by the colonists indeed was an important influence on EY. Moreover, the presence of a large number of German-speaking Christian colonists and their dominant role in the economic life of numerous urban centers of western and southern Poland could be important factors that contributed to the survival of Yiddish during the first centuries of its presence in Poland. However, the basis of EY is not Silesian: this is particularly clear from the consideration of vowels, both stressed (with major structural differences between the two idioms) and unstressed (with the absence of apocope in Silesian and its presence in EY).124 The language of the German colonists could be the reason for neither the initial development of Yiddish in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth nor for the propagation of this language, especially in Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania where the German presence was minimal and where the bulk of the communities of EAST CANAANITES could in theory be located. The second argument is connected with sociolinguistics. A dispersion of a language represents a fact that is partially cultural. If the entire community speaks the same language, it does not mean that all or even a majority of its population is of homogenous origin. In theory, at certain periods, the language of the more cultured minority could become the one spoken by the majority. An explanation of the diffusion of Yiddish as a natural result of western migrations would be sufficient if direct information about the massive character of these migrations was available. Yet, this is not the case and, moreover, we have serious arguments showing that, on the one hand, the Jewish presence in the territories of modern Ukraine might well have been uninterrupted from, at least, the tenth century, and, on the other hand, even during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, certain Jews living in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania would still be using East Slavic languages as their vernacular idioms. In this context, the mere fact of the propagation of Yiddish does not allow us to draw automatic conclusions about the prevalence of western migrants with respect to “autochthonous” Jews. All “revolutionary” authors evoke the possibility of sociolinguistic factors playing a dramatic role in the propagation of EY. Poliak (, chapter ) insists that the Yiddish language spoken in Jewish elementary schools and the houses of rich men would be influencing that of all other members of the community (who, according to his general notion, were of Khazar origin). Koestler (, section C.) also emphasizes that Yiddish is due (in addition to the influence of German settlers in Polish towns) to a very small but more cultured group of Jews from Bohemia and Germany. Sand (:) assigns the propagation of Yiddish (the language that began, according to him, among the descendants of Khazar converts under the impact of German settlers in Poland) to the late migration of erudite German rabbis whose influence was disproportional to the small number of these migrants.125 Van Straten (:–) also considers that a limited number of western rabbis and teachers played a fundamental role in the propagation of Yiddish in Eastern Europe.126 123 A supplementary ad hoc conjecture by Poliak (:) about Yiddish starting in Khazar communities of Crimea because of the influence of Crimean Gothic may be ignored because there is no evidence about any linguistic link between the two idioms in question. Yiddish has a High German basis, while Gothic was an Eastern Germanic language. 124 See the synthesis presented in section ... 125 To this theoretical idea, he also adds a “proof ” about the Khazar substratum of EY: the “Turkic” origin of the verb davenen ‘to pray.’ As discussed in section .., this word is of uncertain, most likely Hebrew origin. The information given by Sand comes from his inaccurate reading of Wexler (:) who, faithful to his nonscientific etymological method of searching (often exotic) parallels, writes about the theoretical possibilities of this word—according to him of ultimate Arabic or Iranian origin—being inherited by speakers of Yiddish from their putative Turkic (Khazar) ancestors. 126 He adds that the use of Yiddish was particularly attractive for local Jewish communities because it would provide them with a feeling of belonging to a group separate in many major respects from their neighbors. This
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If sociolinguistic factors described in the previous paragraph could indeed have any importance for the development of Yiddish in Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as a whole the scenario in question (purely theoretical and speculative since no evidence exists to corroborate it) seems impossible: it goes against common sense. Certainly, in world history, we know about cases where the language of a more cultural minority gradually became the everyday idiom of the majority who copied the linguistic behavior of its elite. For example, this was the case in the territory of modern France where Latin, initially a vehicular language introduced by the Romans, became the first language of the entire population, which abandoned its Celtic (Gaulish) idiom. However, the case of Yiddish is fundamentally different. Latin “won” against Gaulish in a context in which the competition was between these two idioms and two population groups only. An exact analogy would be an imaginary scenario according to which Yiddish-speaking Jewish migrants come to an island inhabited by Slavic-speaking Jews only and the latter gradually shift to Yiddish. Yet, Slavic-speaking Jews (EAST CANAANITES) were not living on an island and were not confined to any kind of ghetto. They constituted a minority among Slavic Gentiles and were by no means isolated from their Gentile neighbors.127 As a result, in the real-life situation, Yiddish competed against the everyday language of EAST CANAANITES in a context of close contacts with a Gentile majority speaking a language structurally identical to that of EAST CANAANITES. Moreover, nothing indicates the existence of migrations among the masses of Jews from the West. It is clear that under such circumstances, the chances of victory for Yiddish were relatively small. It is no surprise that the process of total Yiddishizing lasted in the territories of modern Belarus and Ukraine several centuries: traces of monolingual Slavic-speaking Jews are apparent even during the seventeenth century. To explain the fact that Yiddish was finally victorious in the whole area of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the sociolinguistic factors exposed earlier are totally insufficient.128 In the territories of Crown Poland, the situation for the development of Yiddish was much more propitious than in Lithuania because of the presence of German settlers and the absence (except for Red Ruthenia) of EAST CANAANITES. The dominant role of Yiddish in Lithuania is a cogent argument in favor of the importance of the demographic contribution of western Yiddishspeaking migrants (from Central Europe to Poland and from Poland to Lithuania), with a regular influx over a long period and the relatively small size of the communities of EAST CANAANITES.129 Several additional arguments complement this analysis. The emphasis placed by “revolutionary” authors on the decisive role of the western elite is also untenable from the point of view of common sense because it is unclear how these presumably small layers of western migrants could contain so many rabbis, teachers, and rich
assertion may have some basis: there is little doubt that “secret” aspects of speech played at some stage a certain role in the development of the Hebrew component of various Jewish languages (Bunis :–; see also footnote in section .). However, it can hardly be a major factor in the shift of entire communities to a new vernacular language. 127 See section C. and especially footnote . 128 Aslanov (:–) is one of the supporters of the idea that Yiddish, initially the language of a small minority, was propagated because of its high social status among the Slavic majority. To corroborate this idea, he states that cases of this kind are well known in Jewish history. He gives two examples both related to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in and the propagation of their Spanish-based language to the communities of the Ottoman Empire (formerly Greek-speaking ROMANIOTES) and Northern Morocco (formerly Arabic-speaking). These examples are highly questionable. In the case of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula (in contrast to migrations of Ashkenazic Jews from Central and/or Western Europe eastward), we can be sure that immigrants came en masse. As a result, nothing indicates that they were a minority in comparison to the “autochthonous” Jews in question. We do not even know that Spanish Jews really joined existing Jewish communities rather than formed (at least, some) new communities of their own. Unlike Ashkenazic Jews who mainly received fixed surnames only at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, surnames of numerous Sephardic families in the Ottoman Empire (modern Greece, Turkey, Bosnia, and Bulgaria) date from the Middle Ages. Among them, those revealing the ROMANIOTE origin are a small minority, while those with explicit links to Spain (mainly based on Spanish and Arabic) are particularly common. 129 As discussed in section ., the sabesdiker losn phenomenon in LitY was brought to the northern part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by Jewish migrants from Mazovia. According to historical documents, the medieval Jewish population of Mazovia was rather limited. As a result, the number of migrants from that province to Lithuania could not be large. The sabesdiker losn represents therefore indirect evidence of the small total size of the Jewish population in Lithuania at the end of the Middle Ages. It indicates that local communities of EAST CANAANITES could not be populous either.
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Appendix C
men necessary for the propagation of Yiddish in such a large area. It is logical to consider that, on average, western migrants could well be better educated from the religious point of view than EAST CANAANITES. Yet, there is no reason to consider that only the elite took part in migrations to the East. Obviously, it would also be absurd to conjecture that the Jewish communities in Central and Western Europe encompassed only highly educated persons. In addition, in the case of the putative autochthonous (formerly Slavic) majority in Eastern Europe, one could expect a substantial Eastern Slavic substratum in LitY and UkrY. However, this substratum is not seen.130 Moreover, no evidence exists of the phonology or the grammar of these two eastern subdialects of EY being more affected by Slavic influence than PolY. The consideration by “revolutionary” authors of Yiddish as the prestige idiom contradicts what we learn from the history of Yiddish literature. Hebrew, the language of culture, was the only idiom whose social status among Jews was indeed high.131 Nothing similar can be said of Yiddish. It was a typical vernacular language. In Jewish elementary schools, the Bible was studied in Yiddish translation certainly not because of the putative prestige of Yiddish but simply because it was the language understood by all. In the preface to numerous Yiddish books published in Poland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the authors explicitly say that the text is written in that language (called by them taytsh) so that simple folk and/or women and girls might understand. These books were printed using a special typeface (vaybertaytsh, literally ‘women’s Yiddish’) and not in square Hebrew letters, to distinguish them from the sanctified texts of Hebrew or Aramaic. Until the nineteenth century, the rabbinic tradition considers that Yiddish can only have an auxiliary function and is not used for serious publications.132 Also note that girls would not be studying in Jewish elementary schools and, consequently, they could not acquire any knowledge of it at school. Yet, there is no evidence that women were less fluent in Yiddish than men. Certainly, the Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe known to us dates from the sixteenth century only and corresponds to Poland. Yet, no Yiddish publication from the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, or Lithuania is known even for the seventeenth century. As a result, the available literature does not provide any direct information about the period of the “struggle” between Yiddish and East Slavic languages in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, there is no reason to believe that the general attitude toward Yiddish could change so dramatically in time and/or space: a language with high social status in Lithuania could not be considered an idiom with texts for a female audience in the contemporary Poland and later in Lithuania also.133 The dominant role of Yiddish in Eastern Europe represents a strong argument for the importance of the demographic contribution of western migrants with respect to that of “autochthonous” EAST CANAANITES. The Bohemian basis of EY indicates the preponderant role played by migrants from the Czech lands in the Jewish settlement of the area in question. Yet, it does not allow one to draw any conclusion about the relative proportions of the descendants of Rhenish Jews and those of WEST CANAANITES. Actually, both of them contributed to the formation of Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia. On the one hand, the fact that the Yiddish dialect that originated in the Czech lands has an Old Czech substratum points to the legacy of WEST CANAANITES. On the other hand, the presence in CzY, EGY, and EY of a small set of lexical items from the Romance (mainly French) substratum of WY indicates the legacy of Rhenish Jews who migrated from western Germany to the Czech and eastern German lands and from there came to Eastern Europe. The absence in CzY and EY of linguistic elements originating in western German dialects should not be misinterpreted to imply a small role played by migrants from western German-speaking areas in the formation of the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe. When, during the Middle Ages, those migrating would move to Bohemia and
See section ... As a result, the sociolinguistic factors of prestige can be, at least partly, responsible for major shifts in Hebrew, for example the establishment of norms of its pronunciation. 132 See Fishman :. The same topic is amply discussed in other works on the history of Yiddish. 133 The sentence by Meir Katz, a rabbi in Mogilev in the first half of the seventeenth century about Jews around him speaking mostly “Russian” is regularly quoted by “revolutionary” authors—Koestler (section C.), Poliak (from whom Koestler actually takes this information), and van Straten (:)—to support their thesis about the propagation of Yiddish driven by sociolinguistic factors rather than western migration. However, as discussed at the end of section .., a number of important indirect elements oppose this literal interpretation of the sentence in question. 130 131
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Moravia, they were simply adapting their vernacular High German speech (based on western German dialects) to the norms of the local German dialects.
C.
SYNTHESIS
The considerations presented here in Appendix C allow us to evaluate the relative plausibility of various approaches to the origins of Ashkenazic Jews that exist in the literature. The main distinction that may be posited is between, on the one hand, “revolutionary” theories implying that the bulk of Ashkenazic Jewry of Eastern Europe descend from “autochthonous” converts to Judaism and, on the other hand, more traditional approaches (including both the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES) favoring the role of western migrants. Evidence corroborating the second opinion is overwhelming, as summarized in Table C..
TABLE C. Synthesis of arguments Domain
Factors
Conclusions
Cultural history
. Rhenish rite . Western communal structure
Elite of western origin
Settlement and legal history
. Uninterrupted presence of Jews in Volhynia since the th century . Individual known cases of western migrations . Existence of an important “Czech” Jewish community in the th century in Kraków (at that time the capital of Poland) . Dramatic decline of the legal status of Jews in German-speaking territories during the th–th centuries with a large increase in references to Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe during the th–th centuries (where the legal status was favorable) . Geography of Polish areas with dense Jewish population correlated with that of settlement of German colonists
. No western migrations in masses . The role of EAST CANAANITES should not be underestimated . The correlation between the decline in the West and growth of communities in the East can hardly be fortuitous . Jews often settled in the same areas as German colonists and consequently these Jews are also likely to be western migrants
Demography
According to taxes paid, small communities even in Population growth cannot be the mid-th century in Belorussia and Ukraine explained without migrations
Genetics
Similarity of East European Jews to their coreligionists in other areas and/or to certain Mediterranean people
Onomastics
. Importance of western . Largest portion of given names inherited from migrations in comparison to Rhenish Jews local East Slavic-speaking . An important layer of given names brought from communities. the Czech lands . Minimal East Slavic layer and no Turkic names . Importance of migrations of Rhenish Jews to Central Europe . A set of names of Romance (mainly French) origin
No similarity to Turkic or East Slavic people
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Linguistics
. EY became the vernacular language in the Grand Importance of migrations from the Duchy of Lithuania where local population (and Czech lands in comparison to local first Jewish communities) were Slavic-speaking East Slavic-speaking communities . EY is based on a Bohemian dialect of German and not on that of German colonists in Poland . EY has an Old Czech substratum but no Eastern Slavic or Turkic substrata . EY includes a small number of words of Old French/Gallo-Romance origin that are substratal for WY
For any of the “revolutionary” theories to reflect historical reality, one must develop a large series of bold independent hypotheses such as: • The western migration affected only the cultural and financial elite (rabbis, teachers, rich men, etc.); • Data obtained via genetic studies should be interpreted in a way different from the way suggested by geneticists; • Censuses carried out during the mid-sixteenth century give a false picture of the Jewish population, which was actually much larger than is generally considered by historians; • These putative populous Jewish communities were formed after the mass conversions of Khazars and/or of East Slavic people (while according to available documents, only the ruling elite of Khazars converted to Judaism and archeological information testifies against the possibility of their large-scale conversion; for East Slavs, no case of conversion is known from available documents); • It is merely by chance that historical sources are silent about the presence of large Jewish communities in medieval Eastern Europe; • Western given names became widespread only because western naming traditions were copied by “autochthonous” Jews from Eastern Europe; • A small more cultural minority could impose their language on a large majority in the context of permanent contacts with Gentile neighbors speaking the same language as the majority of local Jews; • It is by chance that the Old Czech substratum of EY survived, while the putative East Slavic substratum was lost. If they were valid (a situation impossible according to OCCAM’S RAZOR), these assertions would be really revolutionary for historiography, archeology, genetics, onomastics, and linguistics. This general conclusion represents itself as a very important argument against the theories in question. It shows that, for the “revolutionary” authors, scholars who worked in the domains in question before them were totally wrong. In other words, these authors consider (mainly implicitly) that their predecessors have been either bad specialists in their respective domains, or, at least, ideologically biased. Yet, in many cases, the real situation is quite the reverse. An ideological bias on the part of Sand, Wexler, and Koestler is self-evident. For the first two authors, their idea about converts being the basis of the Jewish people is not limited to Jews from Eastern Europe. For them, this is just one particular instance of the general task that inspires their studies: showing that all modern Jews (or, at least, the largest branches, Ashkenazic and Sephardic) descend from converts. Moreover, Sand does not hide the fact that his study is a pamphlet aimed against Israeli politics and the notion of the Jewish people as a whole. In his book, Koestler () declares many times his intention to prove with his study the invalidity of the Nazi racial doctrine. Any ideological orientation is less apparent in the book by van Straten (). Yet, when reading it, one can get the impression that its author is a proponent of a kind of conspiracy theory. He accuses almost all major Jewish historians and almost all biologists who worked in the domain of Jewish genetics of issuing incorrect statements.134 Another general feature characteristic of the “revolutionary” authors is their amateurism 134 His denigration of views of various authors (often considered classical by their peers) is so general that he does not hesitate to “refute” some of their basic ideas dealing with topics totally marginal for the main questions addressed
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in the fields they address.135 Superficial opinions are particularly common in onomastics and linguistics.136 Often, when asserting something about Jewish history, they ignore or disclaim the opinions of the most important historians and base their conclusions on the views of authors marginal to the domain. Only a few of various points enumerated in Table C. shed light on the controversy between the RHINE and DANUBE HYPOTHESES. All of them favor the former: Rhenish rite, an important set of Rhenish given names in the corpus of traditional given names used in Eastern Europe, and the Old French/Gallo-Romance origin of Yiddish Romanisms. The onomastic and linguistic factors demonstrate that the influence of the Rhenish Jews on the southern German communities (and later on communities in Slavic countries) was not merely cultural. Apart from the propagation of cultural customs of the Rhineland that, in principle, could be due to the displacement of rabbis, migrations of other kinds of people certainly took place as well. Actually, the paradigm dominating the works of historians does not say that the Rhine–Moselle valley represented the source of Ashkenazic Jews. It is believed that these communities result from the fusion of several sources, one of its strands being of Rhenish origin. As Table C. is oriented to Eastern Europe, factors dealing with Western and Central Europe only are absent from it. They also mainly favor the RHINE HYPOTHESIS. The historical geography of the Jewish communities clearly indicates that Franconia and eastern Swabia were mainly populated by Rhenish migrants and not by those coming from the Danube area. WY used during the last centuries by Jews in western German-speaking provinces has an Eastern Franconian basis and is unrelated to the German dialects of the Danube area. Numerous idiosyncrasies of the Hebrew component of both WY and EY had their roots in the language of western BNEY HES. Only a few general norms are definitely due to BNEY KHES from Austrian, southeastern German, and the Czech territories. Yet, one of the major positions of the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS, namely, the non-Rhenish origin of the medieval Danubian Jewish communities in Austria and the Bavarian city of Regensburg, is well corroborated by various indirect (mainly onomastic) data. These Jews were closely related to medieval WEST CANAANITES and not to their coreligionists from the Rhineland. Due to the paucity of written documents dealing with the early period of the existence of Jewish communities in the German territories, historical and linguistic analysis will never be able to yield the proportions of population contributions of the various sources of Ashkenazic Jews. In this context, any attempt to reduce the problem to a simple set of conclusions, which tends to exist among some Yiddish linguists, should not be accepted. For someone trained in the natural sciences, the theories on the origin of modern Ashkenazic Jews, such as the DANUBE HYPOTHESIS, ruling out the genetic contribution of the Rhenish Jewry, or the ideas by “revolutionary” authors, may, at first sight, seem to be very attractive. Indeed, these reductionist statements are very bold and the way they are formulated allows, in principle, their falsification. In this purist formulation, they can, however, be easily refuted. For example, the genetic participation of some Jews whose ancestors lived in the Rhine–Moselle valley in the formation of Ashkenazic Jewry is undeniable. Evidently, the promoters of these theories will never admit this purist approach. They will never claim the total absence of the Rhenish contribution, suggesting only that this contribution was very small. The meaning of small is rather vague. As a result, even if we dismiss the onomastic and linguistic data illustrating that this contribution was more likely to be large, it is obvious that we are facing a formulation that is more ideological than scientific. Only a broader vision, without any reductionism, really allows our knowledge of history to progress.
in his book. For example, van Straten vehemently attacks Weinreich’s opinion about the Jewish presence in the Rhineland after the fourth century being interrupted for several hundred years (pp. –). Yet, since van Straten asserts that western migrants were relatively few in Eastern Europe, this topic related to the early history of Rhenish Jews is of no importance to his general theory. Numerous passages from Sand may also be interpreted as inspired by conspiracy theory. He regularly accuses the Israeli academic establishment of hiding the truth about conversions. Yet, almost all his information on this topic represents direct quotes from books and articles published in Israel or theses held in Israeli universities. 135 Wexler is an exception. However, his approach to “parallels” violates all general principles elaborated by historical linguistics and it is no surprise that his writings are not endorsed by his peers. 136 For example, any Jew bearing a non-Hebrew (Greek, Latin, etc.) name is automatically counted by Sand () as a proselyte (pp. , , , ). This idea is inadequate: Jews have borrowed names from their Gentile neighbors since Antiquity; see Zunz (passim), Beider (passim), and numerous passages in this book (especially sections .. and ..). The chapter on Yiddish written by van Straten (:–) is full of simplistic vulgarizations that often result from an incorrect understanding by the author of the linguists he quotes.
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Appendix C
Even if the above statements facilitate the choice between several competing theories in historiography, it should be admitted that certain subjective aspects can never be eliminated. For example, the dominating paradigm pays particular attention to the Rhenish source. Several factors contributed to this characteristic: the cultural importance of the Rhine–Moselle communities for the later development of Ashkenazic Jewry; the richest medieval documentation that exists for that area in comparison to other European non-Mediterranean regions; the simplicity of the explanation provided by the one-directional scheme of migrations from West to East. However, these factors do not allow us to draw any conclusion about the paramount demographic importance of the Rhenish contribution. Even if we take into account the onomastic data that illustrate the general validity of the approach emphasizing the Rhenish source, we will never be able to evaluate the extent to which Rhenish Jews contributed to the population. The adherence to the dominating paradigm is therefore partly irrational, more related to personal beliefs than to pure science. For example, it is possible to re-write Ashkenazic history granting the central role not to the Rhineland but to Bohemia-Moravia. Thus, one could, firstly, discuss the medieval communities that arose in the Czech lands and used Old Czech in their vernacular life. Secondly, the contribution of local Jews to the settlement of Central and Eastern Europe could be shown. Thirdly, the narration could turn to the process of the Germanizing of the urban Christian population of Bohemia-Moravia and to the arrival of Jewish migrants from Germany and Austria. Fourthly, one could describe how the fusion of local and external cultural elements contributed to the formation of various features of Yiddish and other cultural characteristics specific to Ashkenazic Jewry. Fifthly, the migrations of Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Czech lands to various parts of non-Mediterranean Europe, and particularly to Poland and Lithuania, could be illustrated. In a history of Ashkenazic Jews written in this way, the medieval communities from the Rhineland, Franconia, Bavaria, Austria, and Eastern Europe would be covered by specific, peripheral chapters. The choice between the Rhenish paradigm of Ashkenazic history and the aforementioned Czech-centered approach is to a great extent conventional. Methodologically speaking, nevertheless, the position of the former is favored: it currently dominates the works of historians and serious counterarguments should be presented in order to replace it with a new paradigm. In this context, it is useful to compare the two approaches according to several independent definitions of the word Ashkenazic that have been formulated at the beginning of this Appendix. According to the demographic criterion that primarily links Ashkenazic Jews to those who lived in Eastern Europe during the last centuries, the Czech-centered approach sounds, at first sight, more appropriate. Indeed, an important number of migrants came to Eastern Europe from Bohemia-Moravia, while the number of those who came there directly from the Rhineland is rather small. However, several additional factors should be evoked. Firstly, it is clear that the Jewish population that lived in the Czech lands after the thirteenth century partly resulted from the migrations of people from southern and central German-speaking provinces such as Franconia, Bavaria, Austria, and Thuringia, of whom some ancestors were from the Rhineland. Of course, it cannot be proven that their proportion was high, but, on the other hand, neither can it be proven that the proportion of those whose ancestors came to Bohemia-Moravia not from Germany but from the Balkans or Northern Italy was more important. Secondly, one could also take into account the fact that, if the migratory flow, direct or indirect, from western Germany to the Czech lands clearly existed, it was almost absent in the opposite direction. As a result, the Rhineland appears to be in a privileged position. Thirdly, it could be argued that if one explicitly introduces Eastern Europe in the definition of what is Ashkenazic Jewry, it would be more appropriate, from the beginning, to focus the narration of Ashkenazic history on Eastern Europe and not on Bohemia-Moravia. In this situation, the sections about Khazars and other Jewish groups of the Kievan Russia would be at the center of narration, while those about Western and Central Europe would become peripheral. The situation with respect to the linguistic criterion is rather ambiguous. On the one hand, EY originated in Bohemia-Moravia. As a result, the Czech-centered approach appears particularly attractive. On the other hand, WY has nothing to do with the Czech lands. It is mainly based on East Franconian. As a whole, WY is unrelated to dialects from the Rhineland. Yet, numerous lexical, semantic, and even some morphological features of WY (and EY also) appeared in the Rhineland. This factor weakens the Czech-centered approach. Other criteria clearly favor the Rhenish paradigm. Historically, the term ASHKENAZ covers, in medieval rabbinic literature, the German-speaking provinces, while Slavic countries are designated as CANAAN. From the religious point of view, the Ashkenazic rite originated in the Rhineland. Finally, the collective consciousness of Jews from Eastern Europe considers their ancestors to come from Germany and certainly not from Khazaria or any Slavic country. Certainly, this psychological
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Origins of Ashkenazic Jewry
criterion is the most subjective of all and may, in principle, be more closely related to national myths than to genuine history. However, in a situation in which no numerical proportions can be identified and consequently the method of exposal of history becomes partially conventional, such a criterion should not be dismissed either. This consideration of various aspects of the problem shows that no decisive arguments can be suggested yet that would prompt us to replace the Rhenish paradigm of Jewish historiography with a new one. We just need to have in mind that the whole picture was much more nuanced even if, based on the available information, no reliable numerical proportions can be suggested. The information presented in Appendix C shows that, even if the contribution of Rhenish Jews to the composition of modern Ashkenazic Jewry was significant, we should not underestimate the importance of communities from the two medieval Jewish centers in Slavic countries: WEST CANAANITES (from Central Europe) who also played a crucial role, and EAST CANAANITES (from the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus) whose role (though less important) should not be neglected either. No information in our possession indicates that any of the three groups studied mainly consisted of descendants of converts to Judaism.
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Glossary ADSTRATAL. Belonging to an ADSTRATUM. ADSTRATUM. In this book, a layer of a language L that is borrowed from another language L well after the inception of L. This term is applicable to languages spoken by non-Jews and those spoken by Jews. (Compare SUBSTRATUM and SUPERSTRATUM; see section .). ASHKENAZ. Medieval Jewish collective name for German-speaking countries. ASHKENAZIC JEWS. In this book, () for the Middle Ages: Jews who lived in German-speaking countries; () for modern times: their descendants, as well as descendants of WEST CANAANITES and EAST CANAANITES. BLACK DEATH. The plague that killed many Europeans in the mid-fourteenth century. In the Jewish context (and consequently in this book), this term refers not to the plague itself but to the massacres of thousands of Jews in by German Christians who accused Jews of being responsible for the propagation of the plague. BNEY HES. (Transcription of modern Standard Yiddish pronunciation.) A medieval term for Jews who pronounced the Hebrew letter heth as the aspirate /h/, as distinguished from BNEY KHES. (See sections .., .., and ...) BNEY KHES. (Transcription of modern Standard Yiddish pronunciation.) A medieval term for Jews who pronounced the Hebrew letter heth as the velar /x/, as distinguished from BNEY HES. (See sections .., .., and ...) CANAAN. Medieval Jewish collective name for Slavic countries. DANUBE HYPOTHESIS. A theory according to which Yiddish originated in the Danube area. (See section ...) EAST CANAAN. The territories where EAST CANAANITES dwelled in the Middle Ages. EAST CANAANITES. In this book, members of East Slavic-speaking Jewish communities who dwelled in the Middle Ages in the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus. (See sections .. and ..) EASTERN YIDDISH. Yiddish dialects specific to Eastern Europe. E-EFFECT (term introduced in this book). A pronunciation of pataḥ , ḥ aṭef-pataḥ , and qameṣ, when adjacent to heth or ayin, as some sort of front mid-vowel [e(:)] or [ε(:)]. (See section ...) GERMAN NEUTRALIZATION OF CONSONANTS. High German dialectal consonantal phenomenon consisting of the creation a series of unvoiced lenes stops as a result of merging of formerly voiced lenes and unvoiced fortes stops. (See section ...) GERMANISTIC APPROACH. In this book, a method of analyzing Yiddish history considering this language as a descendant from (Middle) High German. (See section ...) HASKALAH. Ashkenazic Enlightenment movement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. HYPOCORISM / HYPOCORISTIC FORM. Colloquial or intimate form derived from the base (full) form of a given name. Some hypocoristic forms carry a slight expressive nuance of a person’s attitude toward an individual (familiarity, friendship, etc.), although generally they are expressively neutral. JEWISH-ORIENTED APPROACH. In this book, a method of analyzing Yiddish history implying that the vernacular idiom of Jews in German-speaking countries was structurally different from the idiom of their Christian neighbors from the earliest times of the uninterrupted Jewish presence in these territories. (See sections ..–...) LANGUAGE TREE (German Stammbaum) MODEL. A model of language change, classical in historical linguistics, which describes the development of languages by an analogy with the concept of a family tree, with mother languages and daughter languages. (See section ...) LOEZ (term introduced by M. Weinreich). A hypothetical group of Jewish vernacular languages based on various Romance languages. (See sections .. and ..) LOSHN-KOYDESH (literally ‘language of the holy’ in Yiddish). The Hebrew and Aramaic languages. MERGED HEBREW (term introduced by M. Weinreich). The Hebrew component incorporated into the vernacular language of the Jewish community (as opposed to WHOLE HEBREW). (See section ..)
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Glossary
ORIENTAL JEWS. Jews who, during the Middle Ages, lived in the Middle East, Byzantium, and Persia and their descendants. PALESTINIAN POINTING SYSTEM. A system of diacritics devised in Jerusalem during the second half of the First Millennium CE to vocalize Hebrew texts, originally the biblical one. (See section ...) PROTO-VOWEL. The original vowel of an ancient language (in this book, Yiddish) reconstructed by a comparative analysis of the vocalic systems of more recent dialects of that language that are considered to be derived from the original source (proto-vowel) system. (See sections ., .., and ..) PROTO-YIDDISH. A hypothetical Ashkenazic language from which all Yiddish dialects descend according to the LANGUAGE TREE model. Similar terms can be applied to describe the mother language of a group covering some of the Yiddish dialects. For example, PROTO-EASTERN YIDDISH represents the mother language for all Eastern Yiddish dialects. (See section ...) RHINE HYPOTHESIS. A theory according to which Yiddish originated in the Rhine area. (See section ...) SEPHARDIC JEWS. Jews who in the Middle Ages settled in the Iberian Peninsula and their descendants. SHEM HA-QODESH (singular; plural SHEMOT HA-QODESH.) Hebrew for “sacred name.” The name by which a Jewish man is called in religious matters. (See section ...) STANDARD YIDDISH. In this book, a normative literary Yiddish formalized during the twentieth century in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Its stressed vocalism is mainly based on the specific pronunciation in the territories of modern Lithuania and Belarus. SUBSTRATAL. Belonging to a SUBSTRATUM. SUBSTRATUM. In this book, a layer of a language L that is inherited from a language L previously used by the same population group (or, at least, a part of it) before its shift from L to L. This term may be applicable to languages spoken by non-Jews (for whom, at some moment in time, the social status of L was higher than that of L) or by Jews. (Compare ADSTRATUM and SUPERSTRATUM; see sections .., .., and .). SUPERSTRATAL. Belonging to a SUPERSTRATUM. SUPERSTRATUM. In this book, a layer of a language L that is borrowed from a language L previously used by conquerors before they shift from L to L. This term is not applicable to specifically Jewish languages. (Compare ADSTRATUM and SUBSTRATUM; see sections .. and ..) TIBERIAN POINTING SYSTEM. A system of diacritics devised in Tiberias during the second half of the First Millennium CE to vocalize Hebrew texts, originally the biblical one. Today it is the only system used for that purpose. (See section ...) WEST CANAAN. The territory where WEST CANAANITES dwelled. WEST CANAANITES. In this book, members of medieval Old Czech-speaking Jewish communities. (See section .. and ..) WESTERN YIDDISH. Yiddish dialects specific to western Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Alsace. WHOLE HEBREW (term introduced by M. Weinreich). The Hebrew language used in religious contexts (as opposed to MERGED HEBREW). (See section ..) ZARFAT. Medieval Jewish name for northern France. ZARFATIC. Related to ZARFAT.
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Main sources for Yiddish words, toponyms, and given names In this book, for several Yiddish dialects their words are quoted without giving the exact source from which they are taken: • StY: Niborski and Vaisbrot , Niborski , Harkavy , and Weinreich • UkrY: Lifshits • CzY: Schnitzler (for the German component; that source is actually principally based itself on a prayer book Jüdischdeutsches Gebetbuch für alle Feiertage des Jahres published in Prague in ) and Tirsch (mainly for the Hebrew component) • EGY: Friedrich • DuY: Beem , • WphY: Weinberg • SwY: Guggenheim-Grünberg . All the above sources except for Schnitzler either represent dictionaries in alphabetical order or they are indexed. For other Yiddish dialects, sources are multiple and for that reason they are always indicated explicitly. Among them are: • • • •
PolY: Birnbaum , BN AlsY: Zivy , Weiss , Weill , Zuckerman , Catane , Pfrimmer , Picard FrY: Beranek , Stern , Copeland and Süsskind WY of the th century: PhilogLottus (see Appendix A).
Numerous sources from the above lists that deal with Yiddish dialects from Western and Central Europe use Germanized spellings when they quote Yiddish words. In this book, these words were mainly transcribed following the transliteration rules established for StY by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York), with the following additional signs: • a macron over a vowel indicates that it is long • y designates the sound [y] that corresponds to German ü. For example, ō corresponds to the sound [o:], while yˉ to [y:]. Yiddish toponyms used during the th century were mainly taken from Stankiewicz () and WG. In ambiguous cases and for places for which no information was found in the two sources in question, the lists of Yiddish toponyms compiled by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (http:// www.yivo.org/uploads/files/topo.htm) were consulted. All references to Ashkenazic given names mentioned in this book are taken from Beider , a book that is indexed. The only exceptions are statistical data concerning the frequency of use of various names in Eastern Europe during the th century and the start of the th century. They are all taken from searchable databases of several Web sites dealing with Jewish genealogy: JEWISHGEN (http:// www.jewishgen.org), JEWISH RECORDS INDEXING-POLAND (http://www.jri-poland.org), and ALL LITHUANIA (http://www.litvaksig.org). References to Jewish given names in medieval France and England are mainly taken from Seror . That book presents a comprehensive indexed list of names. However, it cannot be directly used to judge their frequency except for a few tables present in the introduction (pp. XI–XIII). Indeed, the author gives only one reference for any spelling variant. As a result, a common form cannot be distinguished from a hapax. Moreover, Seror excludes all names that are spelled in Jewish sources exactly as in the Bible that is, the category that covers the most common male names.
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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References WORKS CITED
ACP: HALPERIN, ISRAEL (ed.), . Acta Congressus Generalis Judaeorum regni Poloniae, – [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. ALTBAUER, MOSHE. . The five Biblical Scrolls in a Sixteenth-century Jewish translation into Belorussian: Vilnius codex . Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. ALTBAUER, MOSZE (Moshe). . Wzajemne wpływy polsko-żydowskie w dziedzinie językowej. Kraków: Nakładem Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności. ALTHAUS, HANS PETER. . Die Cambridger Löwenfabel von . Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter. ALVAREZ-PEREYRE, FRANK. . L’hébreu et les langues juives en leur miroir. Bulletin du Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem, , pp. –. ANDERS, HEINRICH. . Das Posener Deutsch im Mittelalter, I. Phonetik. Vilnius: Towarzystwo przyjaciół nauk w Wilnie. ANDREE, RICHARD. . Zur Volkskunde der Juden. Bielefeld-Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing. APTROOT, MARION. . Northwestern Yiddish: the State of Research. History of Yiddish Studies // Papers from the Third Annual Oxford Winter Symposium in Yiddish Language and Literature, – December (ed. by Dov-Ber Kerler). Philadelphia: Harwood Academic, pp. –. APTROOT, MARION. . “In galkhes they do not say so, but the taytsh is as it stands here.” Notes on the Amsterdam Yiddish Bible translations by Blitz and Witzenhausen. Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. , /, pp. –. ARTAMONOV [АРТАМОНОВ], MIXAIL ILLARIONOVIČ. . Istorija xazar. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyj Ermitaž. ASLANOV, CYRIL. . Le provençal des juifs et l'hébreu en Provence: le dictionnaire “Šaršot ha-Kesef ” de Joseph Caspi. Paris-Louvain: Peeters. ASLANOV [АСЛАНОВ], CYRIL. . Izmenenie jazykovoj identičnosti evreev Vostočnoj Evropy: k voprosu o formirovanii vostočnogo idiša. Istorija evrejskogo naroda v Rossii. Vol. : Ot drevnosti do rannego novogo vremeni (ed. by Alexander Kulik). Jerusalem: Gesharim – Moscow: Mosty Kul’tury, pp. –. ASLANOV, CYRIL. . Judeo-Greek or Greek spoken by Jews? Jews in Byzantium: dialectics of minority and majority cultures (ed. by Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam). Leiden: Brill, pp. –. ASLANOV, CYRIL. a. The Romance component in Yiddish: a reassessment. Journal of Jewish Languages, . Leiden: Brill, pp. –. ASLANOV, CYRIL. b. Kna‘anim vs. Ashkenazim: from Difference to Convergence. Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Prague on October –, (ed. by Ondřej Bláha, Robert Dittmann, and Lenka Uličná). Prague: Academia, pp. –. AVÉ-LALLEMANT, FRIEDRICH CHRISTIAN BENEDICT. . Das deutsche Gaunerthum in seiner social-politischen, literarischen und linguistischen Ausbildung zu seinem heutige Bestande. Vol.. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus. BA: BERANEK, FRANZ. . Westjiddischer Sprachatlas. Marburg: N.G. Elwert. (In this book, quotes give the map number.) BACHER, W. . Der hebräische Vokalname Melopum. Zeitschriften der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, vol. , pp. –. BAER, FRITZ. . Die Juden im christlichen Spanien. vols. Berlin: Schoken. BAŁABAN, MAJER. . Żydzi Lwowscy na przełomie XVI i XVII w. Lwów: H. Altenberg. BAŁABAN [БАЛАБАН], MAJER. –. Pravovoj stroj evreev v Pol’še. Evrejskaja starina, vol. (), pp. –, –, –, vol. (), pp. –. Bałaban, Majer (ed.). , . Die Krakauer Judengemeinde-Ordnung von und ihre Nachträge. Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft, (), pp. –, (), pp. –.
Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Alexander Beider © Alexander Beider . Published by Oxford University Press.
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Main sources for Yiddish words, toponyms, and given names
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Main sources for Yiddish words, toponyms, and given names
BENOR, SARAH BUNIN. . Ethnolinguistic Repertoire: Shifting the Analytic Focus in Language and Ethnicity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, /, pp. –. BERANEK, FRANZ J. . Yiddish in Tshekhoslovakay. YIVO-bleter, vol. , pp. –. BERANEK, FRANZ J. . Jiddische Ortsnamen. Zeitschrift für Phonetik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, , pp. –. BERANEK, FRANZ J. . Die fränkische Landschaft des Jiddischen. Jahrbuch für Fränkische Landesforschung, // Festschrift Ernst Schwarz, , pp. –. BERŠADSKIJ [БЕРШАДСКИЙ], SERGEJ ALEKSANDROVIČ. . Litovskie evrei. St. Petersburg. BEYER, ERNEST. . La Palatalisation vocalique spontanée de l’alsacien et du badois. Sa position dans l’évolution dialectale du germanique continental. vols. Strasbourg: Société savante d’Alsace et des régions de l’Est. BIBLIOPHILUS. . Jüdischer Sprach-Meister oder Hebräisch-Teutsches Wörterbuch. Frankfurt-Leipzig. BIRNBAUM, SALOMO. . Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache für den Selbstunterricht. ViennaLeipzig: A. Hartleben. BIRNBAUM, SALOMO. . Das Hebraïsche und Aramaïsche Element in der Jiddischen Sprache. Kirchhain: Zahn & Baendel. BIRNBAUM, SALOMO. . Di geshikhte fun di alte u‐klangen in yidish. YIVO‐bleter, vol. , , pp. –. Vilna: Żydowski Instytut Naukowy. BIRNBAUM, SOLOMON (Salomo). . Old Yiddish or Middle High German? The Journal of Jewish Studies, XII, pp. –. BIRNBAUM, SOLOMON (Salomo). . The Hebrew scripts. vols. Leiden: E.J. Brill. BIRNBAUM, SOLOMON (Salomo). . Yiddish. A Survey and a Grammar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. BIRNBAUM, SALOMO A. . Zur Geschichte der u-Laute im Jiddischen. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, // Sonderheft Jiddisch. Beiträge zur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, pp. –. (Revised edition of Birnbaum translated by the author into German.) BIRYLA [БИРЫЛА], MIKALAJ VASILEVIČ. . Belaruskaja antrapanimija. Wlasnyja imëny, imëny-mjanuški, imëny pa bac’ku, prozviščy. Minsk. BLÁHA, ONDŘEJ, ROBERT DITTMANN, KAREL KOMÁREK, DANIEL POLAKOVIČ, and LENKA ULIČNÁ. a. On the Problem of Judeo-Czech and the Canaanite Glosses of th to th Centuries in Hebrew Manuscripts. The Knaanites: Jews in the medieval Slavic world // Jews and Slavs, (ed. by Wolf Moskovich, Mikhail Chlenov, and Abram Torpusman). Jerusalem: Gesharim-Moscow: Mosty Kul’tury, pp. –. BLÁHA, ONDŘEJ, ROBERT DITTMANN, KAREL KOMÁREK, DANIEL POLAKOVIČ, and LENKA ULIČNÁ. b. Roman Jakobson’s Unpublished Study on the Language of Canaanite Gloss. The Knaanites: Jews in the medieval Slavic world // Jews and Slavs, (ed. by Wolf Moskovich, Mikhail Chlenov, and Abram Torpusman). Jerusalem: Gesharim-Moscow: Mosty Kul’tury, pp. –. BLANC, HAIM. . Communal Dialects in Baghdad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. BLAU, JOSHUA. . A grammar of biblical Hebrew. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. BLAU, JOSHUA. . On Polyphony in Biblical Hebrew // Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, /. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. BLONDHEIM, DAVID SIMON. . Les parlers judéo-romans et la Vetus Latina. Paris: E. Champion. BLOSEN, HANS. . Teilweise unorthodoxe Überlegungen zu einigen Problemen des Jiddischen. Sandbjerg . Dem Andenken von Heinrich Bach gewidmet (ed. by Friedhelm Debus and Ernst Dittmer). Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, pp. –. BN: BIN-NUN, JECHIEL. . Jiddisch und die deutschen Mundarten: unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des ostgalizischen Jiddisch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. (This book was written before World War II. Its first part represents a reprint of the PhD thesis at the University of Heidelberg published under the author’s original name Fischer in .) BOHWB: JELINEK, FRANZ. . Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch zu den deutschen Sprachdenkmälern Böhmens und der mährischen Städte Brünn, Iglau und Olmütz. XIII. bis XVI. Jahrhundert. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. BOLLAG, MICHY and KARL WEIBEL. . Endinger Jiddisch, eine vergangene Sprache. Baden: Buchdruckerei. BONDY, BOHUMIL and FRANTIŠEK DVORSKÝ. . K historii židů v Čechách, na Moravě a v Šlezsku ( až ). vols. Prague.
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Main sources for Yiddish words, toponyms, and given names
BOROXOV [БОРОХОВ], BER. . Jazyk razgovorno-evrejskij ili žargon. Evrejskaya Entsiklopedija, vol. , pp. –. BOURCIEZ, EDOUARD. . Précis historique de phonétique française. Paris: Klincksieck. BRANN, MARCUS. –. Geschichte der Juden in Schlesien. Breslau: W. Jacobsohn. BRANN, MARCUS. . Eine Sammlung Fürther Grabschriften. Gedenkbuch zur Erinnerung an David Kaufmann. Breslau: S. Schottlaender, pp. –. BRETHOLZ, BERTOLD. . Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Mähren vom XI.bis zum XV. Jahrhundert (–) // Schriften der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der cechoslovakischen Republik, . Prague: Taussig & Taussig. BROCKE, MICHAEL. . Die mittelalterlichen jüdischen Grabmale in Spandau –. Ausgrabungen in Berlin. Forschungen und Funde zur Ur‐ und Frühgeschichte, , pp. –. Berlin. BRØNNO, EINAR. . Studien über hebräischen Morphologie und Vocalismus. Leipzig: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. BRÜNNEL, GABRIELE, MARIA FUCHS, and WALTER RÖLL (eds). . Die >HiobZenerene< // Jidische Schtudies. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprache und Literatur der aschkenasischen Juden, . Hamburg: Helmut Buske. NEUBERG, SIMON (ed.). . Das Schwedesch lid // Jidische Schtudies. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprache und Literatur der aschkenasischen Juden, . Hamburg: Helmut Buske. NEUBERG, SIMON. . Noch einmal die Bney-Hes: (be)hesemen. Jiddistik-Mitteilungen, . Trier: Universität Trier, pp. –. NEUBERG, SIMON. . Die Sprache des Meliz-jošer. Leket: Jiddistik heute / Yiddish Studies Today (ed. by Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg). Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, pp. –. NEUMANN, HANS. . Sprache und Reim in den judendeutschen Gedichten des Cambridger Codex T-S . K.. Indogermanica. Festschrift für Wolfgang Krause zum . Geburtstage am . September . Heidelberg: Carl Winter, pp. –. NIBORSKI, YITSKHOK. . Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh shtamike verter in yidish. Paris: Bibliothèque Medem. NIBORSKI, YITSKHOK and BERNARD VAISBROT. . Dictionnaire yiddish-français. Paris: Bibliothèque Medem. NOVOSEL’TSEV [Новосельцев], АNATOLIJ PETROVIČ. . Xazarskoe gosudarstvo i ego rol’ v istorii Vostočnoj Evropy i Kavkaza. Мoscow: Nauka. ObSWB: MÜLLER-FRAUREUTH, KARL. –. Wörterbuch der obersächsischen und erzgebirgischen Mundarten. vols. Dresden: W. Baensch. OESTERLEY, HERMANN. . Historisch-geographisches Wörterbuch des deutschen Mittelalter. Gotha: Justus Perthes. ÖHMANN, EMIL. . Der s-Plural im Deutschen. Helsinki: Druckerei der Finnischen Literaturgeselschaft. OREL [ОРЕЛ], VLADIMIR. . O slavjanskix imenax v evrejsko-xazarskom pis'me iz Kieva. Palaeoslavica, , pp. –. PERLES, JOSEPH. . Beiträge zur Geschichte der Hebräischen und Aramäischen Studien. München: Theodor Ackermann.
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PERLES, JOSEPH. . Die Berner Handschrift des kleinen Aruch. Jubelschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz. Breslau: S. Schottlaender, pp. –. PETRUXIN [ПЕТРУХИН], VLADIMIR, and VALERIJ FLEROV [ФЛЕРОВ]. . Iudaizm v Xazarii po dannym arxeologii. Istorija evrejskogo naroda v Rossii. Vol. : Ot drevnosti do rannego novogo vremeni (ed. by Alexander Kulik). Jerusalem: Gesharim–Moscow: Mosty Kul’tury, pp. –. PFRIMMER, ALBERT. . Un ilôt judéo-alsacien dans le Haut-Rhin. Mélanges de linguistique et de philologie Fernand Mossé in memoriam. Paris: Didier, pp. –. PFWB: KRÄMER, JULIUS. –. Pfälzisches Wörterbuch. vols. Wiesbaden-Stuttgart: F. Steiner. PHILOGLOTTUS. . Kurtze unde gründliche Anweisung zur Teutsch-Jüdischen Sprache. Freiberg: Christoph Matthäi. PICARD, SALOMON. . Lexique des mots d’origine hébraïque ou araméenne du judéo-alsacien (jéddischdaitsch) parlé au début du siècle à Grussenheim (Haut-Rhin). Manuscript: http://judaisme.sdv.fr//dialecte/ articles/picard. PMG: PAUL, HERMANN. . Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik. th edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. POLIAK, ABRAHAM N. . Kazaria: Toldot mamlakha yehudit be’eirope. Tel-Aviv: Mossad Bialik-Massada. POPE, MILDRED KATHARINE. . From Latin to modern French with especial consideration of Anglo-norman phonology and morphology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. PRILUTSKI, NOAH. . Tsum yidishen vokalizm: etyuden / Yidishe dialektologishe forshungen, . Warszawa: Nayer ferlag. PRITSAK, OMELJAN. . The pre-Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in relation to the Khazars, the Rus’ and the Lithuanians. Ukrainian-Jewish relations in historical perspective (ed. by Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster). Edmonton: Canadian institute of Ukrainian studies, pp. –. RAYFIELD, JOAN R. . The Languages of a Bilingual Community.The Hague: Mouton. REA: Russko‐evrejskij arxiv. (vol. and ed. by SERGEJ ALEKSANDROVIČ BERŠADSKIJ), (vol. ). St. Petersburg: Obščestvo rasprostranenija prosveščenija meždu evrejami v Rossii. RÉE, ANTON. . Die Sprachverhältnisse der heutigen Juden im Interesse der Gegenwart und mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Volkserziehung. Hamburg: Hermann Gobert. RÉGNÉ, JEAN. . History of the Jews in Aragon. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press. REICHERT, HERMANN. . Die Breslauer Personennamen des . und .Jahrhunderts. Breslau: M. & H. Marcus. REVELL, EDWARD J. . Studies in the Palestinian Vocalization of Hebrew. Essays on the ancient Semitic world. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. –. RHWB: MÜLLER, JOSEPH. –. Rheinisches Wörterbuch. vols. Berlin–Bonn: Klopp. RIEDEL, SIGRID (ed.). . Moses Henochs Altschul-Jeruschalmi >BrantspigelHiob< in Handschriftenabdruck und Transkription. Teil : Einleitung und Register, Teil : Edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. RÖLL, WALTER. . A yidish in lataynisher shrift fun arum r”s / . A touch of grace: Studies in Ashkenazi culture, women’s history, and the languages of the Jews presented to Chava Turniansky (ed. by Israel Bartal, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Claudia Rosenzweig, Vicky Shifniss, and Erika Timm). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, pp. – (Hebrew numbering). ROTH, NORMAN. . Jewish reactions to the 'Arabiyya and the renaissance of Hebrew in Spain. Journal of Semitic Studies, , pp. –.
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RUBASHOV, ZALMEN. . Yidishe gvies-eydes in di shayles-u-tshuves fun onhoyb XV bizn sof XVII y’h. Historishe Shriftn, vol. . Warszawa: Kultur-lige, pp. –. RUTGERS, LEONARD VICTOR. . The Jews in late ancient Rome: evidence of cultural interaction in the Roman diaspora. Leiden: E.J. Brill. RYZHIK, MICHAEL. . Italy, Pronunciation traditions. Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (ed. by Geoffrey Khan). vols. Leiden–Boston: Brill, , pp. –. SÁENZ-BADILLOS, ANGEL. . A History of the Hebrew language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SAINÉAN, LAZARE. . Essai sur le judéo-allemand et spécialement sur le dialecte parlé en Valachie. Mémoires de la Société de linguistique de Paris, , pp. –, –. (Translated and amended version of the Romanian original, see the next item.) S.A˘ INEANU, LAZA˘ R. . Studiu dialectologic asupra graiuliu evreo-german. Bucharest: E. Wiegand. SALFELD, SIEGMUND. . Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches // Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, . Berlin: L. Simion. SAND, ILSE Z. . A Linguistic Comparison of Five Versions of the Mayse-Bukh (th–th Centuries. The Field of Yiddish. Second collection (ed. by Uriel Weinreich). The Hague: Mouton, pp. –. SAND, SHLOMO. . Comment le peuple juif fut inventé. Paris: Fayard. (Translated from Hebrew. English version: The Invention of the Jewish People. New York: Verso, .) SANTORINI, BEATRICE. . The generalization of the verb-second constraint in the history of Yiddish. PhD thesis. University of Pennsylvania. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. SANTORINI, BEATRICE. . Variation and change in Yiddish subordinate clause word order. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, , pp. –. SAPIR, EDWARD. . Notes on Judeo-German Phonology. Jewish Quarterly Review, . Philadelphia: The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, pp. –. SAPIR, EDWARD. . Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. SATZ, YITZHAK (ed.). . She’elot u-teshuvot Maharil ha-hadashot. Jerusalem: Machon Yerushalayim. SAUERBECK, KARL OTTO. . Grammatik des Frühneuhochdeutschen. Beiträge zur Laut- und Formenlehre. .Band: Vokalismus der Nebensilben. .Teil. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. SCHEIBER, ALEXANDER. . Jewish inscriptions in Hungary from the rd Century to . Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó – Leiden: E.J. Brill. _ SCHIPER, IGNACY. . Studya nad stosunkami gospodarczymi Żydów w Polsce podczas Sredniowiecza. Lwów: Nakład Funduszu konkursowego im. Wawelberga. SCHIPER, IGNACY. . Der onheyb fun loshn ashkenaz in der baleybtung fun onomatishe kveln. Yidishe filologie, –, pp. –; –, pp. –. SCHIPER, IGNACY. . Kultur‐geshikhte fun di yidn in poyln beysn mitlalter. Warszawa: Brzoza. SCHIPER, IGNACY. a. Rozwój ludności żydowskiej na ziemiach dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Żydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej (ed. by Ignacy Schiper, Arieh Tartakower, and Aleksander Hafftka). Warszawa: Żydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, pp. –. SCHIPER, IGNACY. b. Język potoczny żydów polskich i ich ludowa literatura w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Żydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej (ed. by Ignacy Schiper, Arieh Tartakower, and Aleksander Hafftka). Warszawa: Żydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, pp. –. SCHLESWB: MITZKA, WALTHER. –. Schlesisches Wörterbuch. vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. SCHNITZLER, LEOPOLD. . Prager Judendeutsch. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung des älteren Prager Judendeutsch in lautlicher und insbesondere in lexikalischer Beziehung. Gräfelfing bei München: E. Gans. (This book represents an unpublished PhD thesis, .) SCHUMACHER, JUTTA (ed.). . Sefer Mišle ̇ Šu‘olim (>Buch der Fuchsfabeln