Volume 2014, Issue 226 - Jewish Language Contact

Kristian Sandfeld explicitly excluded Judezmo from consideration in the second footnote to his classic (1930 [1926]) work Linguistique balkanique , which laid the groundwork for Balkan linguistics as a discipline offering an empirical basis for Trubetzkoy's theory of the Sprachbund. To this day, Judezmo still receives relatively little attention from Balkanists. Nevertheless, the language offers some particularly important insights into the Balkan Sprachbund. As an Ibero-Romance language sufficiently different from contemporary forms of Spanish to be considered separate and distinct, it represents a second sub-branch of Romance found within the Balkans. Judezmo has importance for Balkan linguistics owing to its relatively late arrival in the Balkans, when compared to the other convergent languages, and to the relative social isolation of Judezmo-speaking Jewish communities in the region. Importantly, there are features on which Balkan Judezmo converges with other Balkan languages, but others on which it does not. There are also Judezmo dialects outside the Balkans, and so, in conjunction with comparisons to other Ibero-Romance languages and dialects, Judezmo provides a control for distinguishing convergence from coincidence. In this article, we develop these observations and draw conclusions about the nature of language contact in the Balkans involving Judezmo-speaking Sephardim, as well as that involving the other languages, by contrast.

The article discusses the problem of the linguistic status of the varieties of Old French used within the Jewish communities of medieval northern France. On the basis of evidence drawn from graphemics, phonology, inflectional morphology and the lexicon, several distinct linguistic registers, corresponding to the various discursive traditions reflected in the Jewish vernacular texts, are identified. These registers are characterized essentially by a number of lexical features, including phenomena pertaining to inherited Romance vocabulary, loan words, morphological calques and phono-semantic matching. While the existence of an autonomous Judeo-French language or dialect is not corroborated, the Jewish vernacular sources are interpreted as the expression of a distinctly Jewish linguistic repertoire shaped by the cultural dynamics of Jewish life in the French Middle Ages.

Acquiring knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and comprehension of the language are major aims of the Israeli education system. Yet for most students, it fails on both counts. This article proposes that these failures are closely connected: both are rooted in an erroneous linkage between Biblical Hebrew and the language spoken in modern Israel. Modern Hebrew – or more appropriately: “Israeli” – is a hybrid of Hebrew, Yiddish and other languages. Its grammar is distinct from that of Hebrew, and it has been the mother tongue of most Israeli-born Jews for about a hundred years. There is a fundamental difference between the acquisition and usage of mother tongues and those of any other language. Since Biblical Hebrew is a foreign language for modern Israelis, it ought to be taught as such. Israeli should be acknowledged as a legitimate, distinct tongue.

Here we have translated the German text of a (1905) lecture of Nathan Birnbaum's that has been almost completely overlooked by researchers of modern Jewish movements generally, and particularly in the study of the Czernowitz Conference. This lecture was itself given at Czernowitz and ends with a call for “linguistic and literary conferences” on behalf of Yiddish and the elevation of the public status of the language. The lecture was given in German not only because the intellectual Jewish society Zephirah conducted its business in German, as was still (and long remained) the custom among the majority of the Czernowitz intelligentsia, but also both because Birnbaum himself had at that time never spoken Yiddish before an audience and because some of the individuals who had invited him to Czernowitz had been pupils of his in the previous decade when they were studying in Vienna, and so his relationship with them had already been established in German. Birnbaum guides his audience through all the Jewish problems of the time (Zionism, emigration, assimilation, cultural autonomy, the revival of Hebrew), until he comes, finally, to the problem and promise of Yiddish. Ten years later he would be in his Orthodox phase, which is faintly perceptible in this lecture, where both his earlier break with Zionism (1898/1899) and the autonomist, Diaspora-nationalist phase in which he found himself in the first decade of the 20th century are clearly evident. Although the entire lecture is quite clearly a Diaspora-nationalist manifesto, it is also especially important for the study of the Czernowitz Conference, because the lecture concludes with a number of the points that three years later Birnbaum would develop into the agenda of the conference there. This lecture clearly shows us the extent to which Birnbaum was the chief instigator of and driving force behind the conference. On Birnbaum as a language planner (and also as a national planner, always full of plans to strengthen, rebuild and deepen the Jewish people culturally) see Fishman (1987a).

The article deals with the question of the unity of the German component of Yiddish. Before the 16th century, the languages used in works compiled by various Jewish authors from western German-speaking provinces show close similarities to dialects spoken by local Christians and do not represent texts written in a single specifically Jewish language. Texts dating from the 16th to 17th centuries demonstrate the existence of two separate Jewish idioms: western and eastern. The former covers western Germany and northern Italy and is mainly based on East Franconian and Swabian. The latter characterizes works written in Bohemia and Poland. It is closely related to Bohemian colonial dialect of German. It is inappropriate to consider all varieties of modern Yiddish to be dialects of one single language. Indeed, the analysis shows that in many aspects, Southwestern Yiddish inherits features of East Franconian, while Eastern Yiddish is primary based on Bohemian. Its consonantal system was later adapted to the Silesian dialect spoken by German Christian urban population in Polish towns. These two Yiddish idioms inherit numerous features from the two languages, western and eastern, respectively, that existed during the 16th to 17th centuries. As a result, as a whole, Yiddish is not descending from any hypothetical Proto-Yiddish.

Relative clauses introduced by vos (e.g., der bokher vos ikh ze ‘the boy that I see’) are the most typical relative clause pattern in Eastern Yiddish. The construction has characteristic traits: although vos derives from the interrogative pronoun WHAT , which is restricted to non-humans, relative vos has no restrictions with respect to the semantics of the relativized nouns. In addition, depending on the syntactic function of the relativized noun, resumptive pronouns can or must also be present (e.g., der bokher vos ikh ze im lit. ‘the boy what I see him’). The present article is concerned with the origin of this construction. To this end, it is compared to German, Semitic and Slavic constructions that display similar or identical characteristics. The comparison encompasses older stages as well as modern non-standard varieties of the relevant languages. It turns out that vos relative clauses owe their origin to Slavic, rather than Semitic or German. This finding is discussed with respect to the contact situation of Eastern Yiddish in more general terms. It may be that in the realm of syntax, the role of Semitic has been overrated, whereas the role of Slavic has been underestimated in many previous accounts.

This article discusses a gender-based aspect of contemporary language contact among Israeli Yiddish-speaking Haredi Jews. The speakers are all bilingual, and their command of Israeli Hebrew undermines the traditional linguistic disparity between men's and women's access to sacred Jewish texts. These texts are studied solely by men, with the result that, throughout the generations, men's command of “the holy tongue” (Hebrew and Aramaic) was much higher than that of the women. Today, in contrast, the familiarity of Israeli Haredi women with Israeli Hebrew facilitates their understanding of such materials. This is a new phenomenon, giving women access to sacred texts which had formerly been available only to men. Consequently, in quoting from sacred texts, when they speak in public (for example, in giving sermons to other women in their community), Israeli Haredi women employ various strategies in order to camouflage their true linguistic competence, so as not to display knowledge of the holy tongue on a level higher than that perceived as socially legitimate for women. Linguistic and discourse-based analyses of these strategies – in marked contrast to those of their American Yiddish-speaking counterparts – illustrate a facet of the continuing Haredi efforts to preserve a traditional way of life in a changing world.

This article investigates the current status of Yiddish as a home language and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Yiddish nouns and noun plurals spoken in Sanz Hasidism. In the Hasidic community, Yiddish and Modern Hebrew have been competing as native tongues in an inconsistent bilingual sociolinguistic situation for over 60 years. The aim of this study is two-fold: first, a sociolinguistic issue concerning the amount and character of Yiddish usage across generations; second, to explore psycholinguistic issue regarding the nominal lexicon ( kind ‘child’) and its plural marking ( kinder ‘children’). Participants were first asked about the language prevalent in their parental home and in their current home. Then we administered a confrontational naming task to 48 Israeli Hasidic (IH) men and women who were asked to name 95 singular nouns from pictures and provide their plural forms. Results showed that over generations there is a tendency towards using only Yiddish as a home language accompanied by substantial variation and change both in the nominal lexicon and in the plural system. Both facets indicated that participants who grew up in Yiddish-only homes and still maintain this linguistic exclusiveness produce fewer Modern Hebrew-related lemmas.

The article is concerned with bare participle forms instead of full-fledged past tense (the auxiliary hobn/zajn  + past participle) produced by two young male speakers of Lithuanian Yiddish. In Yiddish, the past tense is more or less isomorphic to the German Perfekt and covers the functions of both perfect and imperfect. The speakers acquired Yiddish and Lithuanian simultaneously in their childhood. Remarkably, in Lithuanian, present perfect auxiliary is optional. The phenomenon of omission can be explained within at least two paradigms: incomplete L1 acquisition (especially in heritage language speakers) and contact linguistics (contact-induced language change). In this article I argue that there are possible multiple explanations because it is unclear how to draw a strict line between incomplete acquisition and contact-induced language change. Comparison with Levine's study on incomplete acquisition of Yiddish demonstrates that the present informants are fluent, strongly identify with Yiddish and produce no non-target past participles. At the same time, the speech of the informants exhibits Lithuanian impact in phonetics and non-core morphosyntax. While limited input does play a role, it is unclear whether and where the border between incomplete acquisition and contact-induced structural change can be drawn.

The article addresses the socio-linguistics and the socio-cultural process of the way in which the Yiddish pragmatic and idiomatic substrate has become increasingly visible in Modern Israeli Hebrew speech and literature. It does so by comparing two translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye der milchiker : that of Y. D. Berkovich (1959), and the new translation by D. Miron The complete Tevye the dairyman (2009). Miron aims to bridge the language and culture gap between the Modern Hebrew reader and the current, highly-literary authorized translation by Berkovich. My main thesis is that Miron's success in bringing the text closer to the Hebrew reader is the result of the fact that Modern Hebrew, especially colloquial Hebrew, is soaked with Yiddish utterances and echoes some traits of Yiddish folk discourse. The article thus sheds light on the complex twofold pragmatic and idiomatic aspects of the contact between the two languages.