Yiddish Linguistics

The paper is constructed as a reply to Alexander Beider's paper in the maiden issue of "Journal of Jewish Languages" and also to Brill's editors' policies both in permitting personal invective against Max Weinreich, Solomon Birnbaum and other towering giants of Yiddish linguistics. The crux of this paper's argument is that the comparative method trumps on all counts the Wexlerian construction of multiple hypothesized languages and interrrelationships based on some curious stray lexical items. Paper is in Yiddish, abstract in English.

Bibliografijische Information Der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografijie ; detaillierte bibliografijische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

This chapter discusses a contested case where language planners committed to revival applied Heinz Kloss’s Ausbau theory of weaker languages ‘too similar’ to stronger languages needing to be ‘made further’ by means of normative planning. Katz argues that the purist strain of revivalism that emerged pitted its followers against the aging native-speaker writers and speakers of the language. This was followed in short order by an unexpected dramatic demographic increase in traditionally religious communities, whose language use (and more generally, traditionalist beliefs) the revivalists do not approve of, leading to further layers of alienation. The author asserts that the case of Yiddish can serve as a warning that well-intentioned revivalism coupled with Ausbauist purism can be counterproductive. The chapter, rooted in the classic descriptivist stance, provides a glimpse into the complex interfaces of revivalism, corpus planning, and non-linguistic alienation. A 1000-year prehistory of the debate is provided for context.

The main purpose of this paper consists in shedding light to the controversial topic dealing with the origins of unique Romance elements that belong to oldest strata of Yiddish. Arguments demonstrate that an important portion of medieval Rhenish Jews were German-speaking by the end of the 11th century. The existence of tight linguistic links between medieval Ashkenazic communities and those from northern France is without doubt. The information provided by the onomastic analysis and the study of words from the general lexicon implies that certain ancestors of Rhen-ish Jews came to the Rhineland bringing with them ready-made toponyms formed in the territory where Old French was spoken. The consideration of peculiarities of Western Yiddish Romanisms allows establishing approximate time frames of the development of the Romance substratum present in the language spoken by medieval Jews of western Germany. It was during the 8th-9th centuries that the Romance substratum of Western Yiddish became independent from the phonological development of the Gallo-Romance ancestor of French. Despite the substratal character of certain Gallo-Romance lexical elements present in the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews since the last centuries of the First Millennium C.E., this language had no structural influence on Yiddish.

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 cen turies 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. 1 This article could not be written without Erika Timm. Firstly, her works represent a basis for numerous elements of the analysis presented here. Secondly, during the preparation of this text, she shared with me copies of numerous quite helpful sources and answered to many questions of mine.

The article discusses several definitions of the notion of Yiddish that exist in linguistic studies. The Germanistic approach emphasizes differences between various German and Yiddish dialects. The Judeo-Centric approach, developed during the second half of the 20th century as an alternative method to that used by the Germanistic school, puts the uninterrupted chain of languages spoken by Jews in the center of its linguistic analysis. For the representatives of this school, Yiddish is a fusion language from its inception, the process they generally posit to the period when the first Jewish communities appeared in German-speaking territories. As suggested in this article, for the adequate understanding of the development of Yiddish, several notions used by the two approaches should be combined. Only the Germanistic approach provides appropriate frames for analyzing the genesis of Yiddish according to the Language Tree model. Its (re)application shows the inadequacy of certain basic positions of the Judeo-Centric Approach. Yet, several notions introduced by the proponents of the latter method still represent a major contribution 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 Germanistic approach. The article also suggests a classification of languages spoken by Jews useful for the analysis of their historical development.

Das XXV. Symposium für Jiddische Studien in Deutschland findet vom 5. bis 7. September 2022 in Düsseldorf statt. Wir würden uns selbstverständlich sehr darüber freuen, dieses besondere Ereignis in Präsenz mit Ihnen zu erleben. Wir sind uns jedoch der sich ständig verändernden Lage aufgrund der Corona-Pandemie bewusst und werden (zeitnah) eine Entscheidung treffen, die unser aller Wohl berücksichtigt.
Dieses jiddistische Forum wird jährlich im Wechsel von den Jiddistik-Lehrstühlen der
Universitäten Trier und Düsseldorf veranstaltet.
Wir laden Sie herzlich dazu ein Vortragsangebote, in Form einer kurzen Zusammenfassung, an die Symposiumsleitung einzusenden. Vorschläge für Sitzungen mit 2–4 Vorträgen müssen zusammen mit Abstracts für die einzelnen Vorträge eingereicht werden.
Die Vorträge können auf Jiddisch oder Deutsch gehalten werden.
Es steht Ihnen eine Redezeit von 20 Minuten zur Verfügung.
Zusammenfassungen können bis zum 1. Mai 2022 eingesendet werden ([email protected]).

A bibliography of works about the life and career of Max Weinreich, a leading figure in YIVO (The Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna, later New York) and pioneer in the fields of Yiddish Studies and Jewish interlinguistics. Apart from his magnum opus, The History of the Yiddish Language, Weinreich is best known for popularizing the quip, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

This chapter is from the revised and expanded second edition of Solomon Birnbaum's Yiddish. A Survey and Grammar (2015). It addresses the origins and history of Birnbaum's classic work (1979) as well as notes ways in which Birnbaum's "Orthodox", southern-oriented approach to Yiddish differs from that of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO).

El ídish es una lengua cuya codificación, al compararse con otras lenguas europeas, se registró solo en forma tardía.
En el contexto europeo, los hombres judíos eran tradicionalmente alfabetizados en hebreo, mientras que el ídish era relegado como una variedad desprestigiada, propia de mujeres y de hombres no alfabetizados. Esto producía una falta de interés en la codificación del ídish hasta la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, cuando se populariza la literatura ídish moderna y aparecen los primeros diccionarios.
Ante la inexistencia de una norma ortográfica unificada, los docentes de escuelas judías argentinas carecían de un referente claro, lo que provocaba que cada uno de ellos (que en muchos casos contaban solo con una formación rudimentaria) enseñara ídish desde modelos propios, cuyos referentes podían ser variados (obra literaria, manual escolar traído de Europa, prensa ídish local, etc.). A esto se agrega el hecho de que en las escuelas de Buenos Aires de orientación comunista se desvalorizaba cualquier tipo de enseñanza normativa del ídish: con la perspectiva de que el único objetivo era formar militantes, se priorizaba la capacidad del docente para concientizar y no como pedagogo, lo que habilita pensar que en escuelas de otra orientación ideológica sí se favorecía el estudio de la lengua.
Sin embargo, a partir de la década del treinta, y principalmente hasta los años cincuenta, la situación cambió: los sindicatos locales de docentes ídish comenzaron a demarcar sus diferencias con mayor claridad, se creó en Berlín el Yidisher Visnshaflekher Institut (Instituto Científico Ídish)  y en ciertas esferas y regiones de la Unión Soviética el ídish fue oficializado.
En esta oportunidad nos abocaremos a relevar los modos en que los responsables argentinos de la enseñanza del ídish buscaron generar medios para enseñar una lengua cuya ortografía, fonología, léxico y, en algunos casos, sintaxis, coincidía solo parcialmente con las variedades manejadas por ellos, enfrentándose, además, a su poca capacitación y las dificultades para acceder a discusiones académicas.

Jonatan Meir, "The Discovery and Publication of Joseph Perl’s Yiddish Writings"

The attitude of Tarnopol satirist Joseph Perl (1773–1839) towards the Yiddish language has been discussed by a number of scholars. In particular, researchers have examined his views with regard to his most well-known satire, Sefer Megaleh temirin, which was printed in Hebrew in Vienna, 1819, with a partial Yiddish translation of the work appearing in Vilna, 1938. However, there remains much to be said concerning the creative process which guided Perl’s writing in Yiddish, as well as the later discovery and publication of his Yiddish works, both of which are chapters in the wider story of the development of Yiddish literature in the first half of the nineteenth century and the increasing scholarly interest in it at the outset of the twentieth century. This article briefly describes these multifaceted matters and then offers suggestions for the future study of Perl’s writing in particular, and maskilic Yiddish literature in general.

Sefer shivḥei ha-Besht is considered the central collection of hagiographic tales regarding Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760). It was first printed in Hebrew in Kopys in the latter part of 1814 and includes hundreds of stories which circulated orally and were heard by the author. The work was soon translated into Yiddish, with significant changes, and three such translations have survived, each one very different to the others. The first translation, published in Ostróg in 1815, was believed lost. This paper offers a brief description of the recently discovered edition, discussing its uniqueness in the context of the work's printing history and on the background of Jewish publishing in Eastern Europe.
המהדורות האבודות של ספר שבחי הבעש"ט ביידיש, 1817-1815
(כולל דיון ראשוני במהדורת אוסטרהא תקע"ה - שנמצאה לאחרונה - לאחר שנחשבה לאבודה)

The paper describes main linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish language. It is focused on the aspects related to historical linguistics: phases of its historical development, earliest attestations, historical dialectology, settlement history of Yiddish speakers, relation of Eastern Yiddish and Western Yiddish to various German dialects, incorporation of Hebrew and Aramaic elements, substratal elements of Old French and Old Czech origins, results of contacts with other languages. The paper also addresses the state of research in this domain.

This article examines debates in Poland since the 1860s concerning Jews' naming practices and attempts to resolve the practical and social problems they engendered. Polemics within the Jewish press in Poland, particularly in Warsaw's Yiddish dailies, reveal competing conceptions of what constitutes an authentic and socially appropriate Jewish name. They also reflect changing perceptions of Yiddish, which had left its stamp on the inventory of names used by Ashkenazic Jews, and its growing place in urban life.

Although exceptional for the sheer diversity and longevity of his cultural and political activity, Noah Prylucki illustrates a broader phenomenon common among the secularized nationalist leadership of early twentieth century Eastern European Jewry. He provides an example of an acculturated intellectual who under the influence of the general European movements of Romanticism and populism “discovered” Yiddish as the “authentic” creative expression of an idealized Jewish folk dwelling on the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Claiming to be a non-native speaker of the language, he worked to refashion the folk’s own language (folkshprakh) into an instrument for the attainment of both political and cultural goals on its behalf. Paradoxically, he endeavored to create a kulturshprakh, a version of the language whose growth and cultivation was to be removed from the hands of the Jewish folk which had created it and ultimately entrusted to linguists necessarily at a social remove from it.

Based on corpus data from the Polish and Russian National Corpus and the Corpus of Modern Yiddish, this paper explores two competing subject resultative constructions - namely the construction based on the past participle and the construction based on the adverbial participle - in the three object languages. Classification trees reveal that for Russian, transitivity is decisive for the choice of syntactic encoding, whereas Polish and Yiddish display a tendency towards encoding subject resultativity with the help of an ergative structure. Furthermore, language contact between Polish and Yiddish seems to have perpetuated the co-existence of the two competing constructions in Yiddish.

This paper investigates the impact of Nikolay Ia. Marr’s obscurantist “Japhetic theory” (or “Japhetidology”, later renamed the “New Theory of Language”), which was elevated to a leading authority in Soviet scholarship in 1929, on Soviet Yiddish linguistics. In particular, the politics of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture in the 1930 controversy around the so-called “Iazykfront” group is analyzed.

In: Slavic Almanach, vol. 7/No. 10 (2001), pp. 165-190.

פארוואס טאָן מיר רופן יוחנן "די באַפּטיסט"? ווייַל ער באַפּטייזד מענטשן אין וואַסער פֿאַר "תשובה". פארוואס טאָן איך רופן יאָשקע "דער באַפּטיסט"? ווייַל ווי געזונט ווי אָוווערקאַמינג זינד און שפּאָרן אונדז פון דעם לאַנד פון טויט, ער געקומען צו שמאַדן אונדז פֿאַר די "תשובה פון זינד". גלייך נאָך ער רויז פון די טויט, ער באַפּטייזד זיין תלמידים מיט אַ גייסט, ניט מיט וואַסער (יוחנן 20: 22). וואָס איז ווען יאָשקע אנגעהויבן זיין מיסיע פון "גייסט באַפּטיזינג" און נאָך היינט. די ערליאַסט שליחים פארשטאנען עס און געגאנגען צו באַקענען מענטשן איבער דער ערד צו יאָשקע און הילף אין זייער "גייסט באַפּטיזאַם".

A survey of the languages spoken by Jews in Christian Europe of the Middle Ages arranged according to language regions: Greek (Yevanic), Romance and Ibero-Arabic (La'az, Yahudic), Germanic (Yiddish), Slavic (Kenaanic), Georgian, Turkic. Final remarks on the fate of the Jewish languages of Medieval Europe. Suggested readings.

Este articulo analiza la mixtura de ídish, castídish, español estándar de Buenos Aires y lunfardo presentes en tres canciones del cantautor comediante Max Perlman (1909-1985). Su repertorio ha alcanzado la popularidad en el marco del teatro ídish argentino durante la primera mitad del siglo 20.

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 cen turies 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.

An exploration of the phonetically precise, multi-dialectal spelling system developed by linguist Solomon Birnbaum as part of his Orthodox Jewish religious ideology and his battle against secular influences on the Yiddish language (in Yiddish).

Although far from completion, this new online (and free) edition of the Vilnius-based English-Yiddish dictionary project (at: www.yiddishculturaldictionary.org)  comprises c. 300,000 words of Yiddish text and c. 13,000 entries. It aims to cover religious and secular Yiddish equally, provides dialect variants, and comprises the Yiddish forms of writers' names from both spheres. It takes a variationist and descriptive stance, thereby complementing other works more rooted in purism and normativism. It is dedicated to a vibrant, living Yiddish (hence all discussion on usage etc are in Yiddish; hence it is frequently updated to reflect contemporary issues). Corrections, comments and suggestions (including English or Yiddish terms readers propose for inclusion) are welcome at: [email protected]

The role, ramifications and legacy of the much-discussed Czarnowitz Language Conference of 1908 in the further development of modern secular Yiddish language and culture is surveyed and then "challenged" by a series of little-known "Religious Chernowitzes" where traditionalist Jewish factions proclaimed their own version of the sanctity and continuity of Yiddish.

The June 2020 update of "A Yiddish Cultural Dictionary for the 21st Centry: An English-Yiddish Dictionary" (at www.yiddishculturaldictionary.org), though a very long way from completion, now comprises c. 300,000 words of text and c. 13,000 entries. The project's goals include representation of (a) genuine Yiddish usageף (b) elaboration of Yiddish culture, and East European Jewish civilization, including ancient and modern, religious and secular (with  entries for core Yiddish writers); (c) conscious adoption of a descriptive and variationist stance, to complement the normativist and purist perspective of other works; (d) Yiddish as a vibrant living language (hence a descriptive apparatus that is  entirely in Yiddish, hence a determination to include contemporary terms and trends).
Colleagues are invited to contribute words, phrases, nuances and corrections (both typographic and substantive) at: [email protected].

This pamphlet serves as an introduction to the vibrant world of Jewish linguistics, bringing attention to the interconnection between language and its sociological implications with a focus on the history of two major Jewish languages: Yiddish and Ladino.

A new online English-Yiddish dictionary in the spirit of variationism and descriptivism (rather than purism and normativism), with equal emphasis on the classical and newer strata of the language, and on the religious and secular. Interactive with option for reader input on entries for inclusion as well as corrections (online free, no login).

Joint International Conference of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Paris Yiddish Center – Medem Library in cooperation with the Polish Association for Yiddish Studies and the Michal Friedman Foundation that will take place in Warsaw, 15-16 November 2015.

This article shows what we can learn from Vienna Jewish cabaret, so called Jar-gontheater 'jargon theater' and the language situation of Vienna Jews at the end of the 19th century. By analyzing one of the most popular plays of this genre, we can see how structures from Yiddish dialect fused with Viennese German and what may have caused the 'Vienna Jewish speech,' a Judeo-German city variety in the First Austrian Republic (1920s and 1930s).

Unlike other Yiddish dialects that were diminished to the point of virtual obsolescence in the decades following World War II, Hasidic Yiddish remains the dominant language for several hundred thousand Hasidic Jews across the globe. And yet, a survey of the research on Yiddish linguistics published during the second half of the 20th century does not reflect this reality. In this article, I review how the ideological underpinnings of Yiddish linguistics created and perpetuated a disciplinary preoccupation with a hypothetical standard at the expense of theoretically informative empirical studies of an evolving Yiddish dialect. Specifically, I show how linguistic chauvinism, a series of calamitous events, and historical anti-religiosity complicated by new resentments, led to the erasure of Hasidic dialects from Yiddish scholarship. Finally, I highlight significant contributions that recent empirical studies of Hasidic Yiddish are making to the field of linguistics.