Erika Timm on the historical semantics of Yiddish

    Erika Timm's monumental Historische Jiddische Semantik: The language of bible translation as a factor in the progressive divergence between Yiddish and German vocabulary  (Max Niemeyer, Tűbingen, 2005) deals with the vocabulary of Yiddish Tanakh translations written between about 1400 and 1750. The bulk of the book contains detailed histories of many Yiddish words that appear in these translations. There are also special studies of words used to translate the names of gems, musical instruments, plants and animals mentioned in Tanakh. There are also valuable discussions of morphology and word formation.

   The author began the work many years ago by compiling a vocabulary from an edition of  Mirkeves haMishne. Eventually working with a team of scholars and employing computers the list was extended to include words from many other texts. The massive compilation of detailed  word histories makes this book an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the history of Yiddish or simply interested in reading pre-19th century Yiddish literature. It is also endless fascinating for the browser.

     The book begins with some essays that provide a fresh prospective on the field. Dr. Timm considers Yiddish to be one language, old and new, east and west, written and spoken. This perspective is refreshing because it is actually quite unusual. A surprising number of scholars think of the eastern and western dialects of Yiddish as having independent origins. Many do not use written sources in their reconstruction of the history of the language because, for a variety of reasons, they overestimate the difference between written and spoken forms the language. The neglect of written forms is expecially serious when it comes to medieval writings which some scholars dismiss as being not Yiddish at all but German in Hebrew characters. Erika Timm will have none of this. In particular, she rebuts the common opinion that the language of Bible translation special dialect far from ordinary spoken Yiddish.

    The year 1349, plays an especially important part in the author's thinking. In that year, Jewish communities from northern Spain to northern Germany were the victims of numerous state-sponsored massacres. Erika Timm believes that these pogroms had extensive effects on the history of Yiddish.

    For one thing, by about 1400, Jewish education in Germany was reformed so that Tanakh was taught through Yiddish translations. Previously, the language of translation in Yiddish speaking communities had been Loez (Judeo-French). One consequence of the persecutions of 1349, the author believes was to throw the community back on its own resources and this included developing teaching aides in the communities' own mother language. The old Loez translations did not, however, disappear without trace. Dr. Timm demonstrates that they influenced the newer Yiddish translations.

    The new isolation of the community also affected the nature of the German component of written Yiddish. Up to the 1300's, Dr. Timm, along with Manfred Gernot Heide, find that the few scraps of Yiddish texts that survive tend to have German components that mirror the specific regional varieties of German used in the places they were composed. By 1400, the German component in Yiddish sources from all different places tends to rather uniform. Yiddish writers, regardless of where they live, use a standard mixture of forms borrowed from a number of regional varieties of German.

    A related development is that until the 1300's changes in German are reflected in changes in the German component of Yiddish. After 1400, this is no longer case. Yiddish follows its own course of internal development changing some features that remain the same in German while preserving other features that are lost in German. German and the German component of Yiddish exhibit increasing divergence over time.

    A word about the origins of the German words used in Yiddish Tanakh translations is apropos. Max Weinreich wished to refute the very common idea that Yiddish is descended from Middle High German. In doing this, he was correct but he overstated his case in one way. He noted that the Middle High German as we know it from the texts that have come down to us is a literary language used in learned circles. This, Max Weinreich maintained made it different from the kind of German that was borrowed into Yiddish. Yiddish speakers he thought had little contact with learned non-Jewish circles. They obtained their Yiddish words from peasants, workers and merchants of little education.

    A glance at the Tanakh translations shows that this cannot be true. The original Tanakh is the product of a highly sophisticated urban civilization. To translate it requires specialized vocabulary having to do with such things as nature, government administration, architecture, religious rites, and other civilized arts and sciences. In order to translate Tanakh, Yiddish speakers had to draw on the highly developed vocabulary of medieval literary German.

    The fact that before the 1300's Yiddish borrowed from regional varieties of German may be partly responsible for the appearance of different German dialect forms in the modern Yiddish dialects. A special study of this is the Ph. D. dissertation of Ulrike Kiefer at Columbia University which is slated to be published in book form.

    If we accept as a fact, the related observation that most of the divergence between German and the German component of Yiddish dates from after 1349, this has special consequences for the way the history of Yiddish is reconstructed. If the view is taken, that the German component of Yiddish is the essential core of the language then it would have to be conceded that Yiddish did not have an existence independent of German before 1349.

    Nevertheless, the identification of Yiddish, with its German component has to be rejected because of many phonological, morphological, lexical, and phraseological features that are found in all Yiddish dialects or widely distributed among dialects spoken from the west to the east. Some of these forms and features are from Semitic, Romance or Slavic languages. Others are Germanic but may come from a Germanic language other than German. Such Germanic features include the position of the verb in second syntactica position in the Yiddish  sentence and the tendency to stress words, regardless of origin, on the first syllable. The fact that this common Yiddish heritage is spread among all the dialects indicates that it is of great age, certainly dating back before 1349.

    These two sets of facts; the tendency of Yiddish to avoid diverging from German before about 1349 with the much older existence of common Yiddish forms and features, often Germanic, can be reconciled if we reconstruct early Yiddish as being having been a Germanic language that was not originally derived from German but which subsequently borrowed heavily from it. This is consistent with the derivation of the earliest Yiddish from an East Germanic system akin to or identical with Gothic.

    As has been the case with  her earlier work on the spelling system and pronunciation of older Yiddish, Graphische un phonemische Struktur des Westjiddischen unter besonderer Berűcksichtung des Zeit um 1600 (Max Niemeyer, Tűbingen, 1987), Historische jiddische Semantik will shape the field of Yiddish studies for many years to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The four great vowel systems of Yiddish

    Readers who have encountered other treatments of the Yiddish vowels and their historical pattern of spatial variation will notice some unusual features in this essay. In particular, i have chosen a rather unconventional way of referring to the Yiddish vowels. The more familiar approaches to this are based on the observation that there are regular correspondences between Yiddish vowels and German vowels and also between Yiddish vowels in different dialects. The correspondences, in question, hold between vowels that occur in the stressed syllables of words. These make it possible, in many cases to predict, from what vowel is found in a German word, the vowel that will be found in a Yiddish word or to predict from the vowel in a word in a particular Yiddish dialect what vowel the same word would have in another dialect. Thus the from the fact that the German word 'Nadel' has a long a as its stressed vowel is possible to predict that the vowel in Standard Yiddish would be o as in 'nodl' or from the fact the vowel in the northeastern dialect of Yiddish pronunciation of 'gut' is an u that the same vowel will be i as in 'git' in the Polish and Galician dialect.

    The first scholars to note these regular correspondences thought they could be explained by assuming that vowels whose pronunciation varied regularly shared a common ancestor from which they diverged. The earlier scholars were especially struck by the regular correspondences between German, especially Middle High German, vowels and Yiddish vowels. They regarded the Middle High German vowels as ancestral to the Yiddish vowels so they used the values of vowels in Middle High German to designate their, supposed, descendants. Thus the vowel in 'nodel' was thought of as a descendant of Middle High German long a.

    A later set of scholars, most notably, Max Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum were more struck by the regular correspondences among the vowels of the Yiddish dialects. They also assumed that such a correspondence was the result of a descent from a common vowel but they identified this set of ancestral vowels not with the vowels of Middle High German but with later set of vowels that emerged from a mixture of medieval German dialects at a time in history when Yiddish had already branched off from German but before Yiddish had diverged into different dialects.

    This difference can be illustrated by way the earlier and later scholars would have treated the vowel in Yiddish 'gut'. The first group would have assumed that Yiddish 'gut' was descended from Middle High German 'gut'. Since Middle High German 'gut' had a long u: the vowel in Yiddish 'gut' would be classed with descendants of Middle High German u:. The later scholar would observe that based on the variations of the vowel 'gut' in various Yiddish dialects it was possible to trace it back to a particular vowel in early Yiddish. This vowel most like had an u quality but unlike the Middle High German vowel it most likely was not long since no modern Yiddish dialect has a long vowel in this word. To designate these ancestral vowels Max Weinreich invented a numbered system of proto-vowels. Within it the vowel of 'gut' would be designated 51 with the 5 indicating that the vowel originally had an u quality and the 1 indicating that it was originally short.

    I have broken with this approach because my observations of vowel variation in the data of the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry and other sources has led me to have a different idea about the mechanism by which the variation among vowels in the Yiddish dialects and, ultimately, the variation between Yidddish and German vowels emerged. The two groups of  scholars mentioned above started from the idea that a set of vowels that are in regular correspondence diverged from a common ancestral vowel. The mechanism by which this occurred was believed to be a gradual process of change in pronunciation called 'sound shift'.

    But sound shift is not the only way that vowels can change. Sometimes they change by a process called sound substitution where one sound in a word is replaced by another. People typically do this when they wish to communicate with speakers of another language or dialect which is historically related to their own and whose sounds, while they may differ from the sounds in their own language, tend to differ in predictable ways. Thus Swedish and Danish are historically related; an ei sound in Swedish tends to correspond to an ai sound in Danish. A Swede who wished to communicate with a Dane but who has not really mastered Danish will approximate Danish by substituting ai for ei in Swedish words.

    Sets of closely related languages or dialects with regular sound correspondences in which people communicate to speakers of other languages or dialects in the set by sound substitution are called diasystems. Uriel Weinreich observed that the Yiddish dialects constitute a diasystem. Speakers of one Yiddish dialect can be observed trying to communicate with speakers of another dialect by substituting sounds from the other dialect in words of their own dialect. This is particularly noticeable in cases where the sound correspondances between two dialects are not perfectly regular and the sound substitutions result in mistakes. For example, a speaker of the dialect of Yiddish spoken historically in Poland  will observe tha when he says 'git' a speaker of the northeastern dialect says 'gut'. This and many other examples may cause our speaker to generalize that any time his own dialect has i sound the northeastern dialect will have an u sound. But this generalization will occassionally break down. For example, our speaker from Poland speaker  the word 'litvak' for a speaker of the northeastern dialect. In trying to speak the northeastern dialect he may substitute an u yielding 'lutvak'. But, in fact, the form used by the northeastern dialect is actually 'litvak'. The use of the incorrect form shows that the speaker from Poland is practicing sound subsitution.

    I think that at an early stage in the history of Yiddish, sound substitution played a role in the formation of the Yiddish dialects. This process began at a time when Yiddish had a sound system that was based on a Germanic language which was NOT German. The language, call it X, from which Yiddish derived its sound system was, however, closely related to German and it was possible for speakers with the X sound system to communicate with German speakers by sound substitution. In other words, German and languages with the X souind system formed a diasystem.

    At this stage Yiddish speakers normally used the X sound system when communicating among themselves while using substitute sounds when communicating with German speakers. There were actually several, perhaps three or four different systems of substitution that were used by speakers with the X system to approximate German pronunciations. Each of these sound substitution systems was popular in a different area of Yiddish-speaking territory.

    At a later time, the language X ceased to be spoken. At the same time, interactions between Yiddish and German speakers were quite important. Yiddsh speakers stopped using the original sounds of the X system and began using the substitued sounds all the time. Because different areas had different substitution sytems, the speakers in these areas ended up with different pronunciation systems of Yiddish which evolved into the modern Yiddish dialects.

    If it is assumed, as it is here, that all Yiddish dialects are descended from a common ancestor, it would be expected that the similarities and differences between the dialects looked at in conjunction with the relative positions of the dialects in space should provide evidence as to how the dialects developed and came to occupy their geographical territories. The best way to do this is to look at the maps of the Language and culture atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry which represent the pattern of spatial variation in Yiddish as it was in 1939.

    Of particular interest are the set of maps presented in Volume I of the Atlas which show variation in the Yiddish sound system. The Yiddish dialects show roughly four vowel systems. These systems are called within the Atlas project Alsatian, West Transcarpathian, Central and Southern and Northeastern. The names are not alwats descriptive and can in fact be somewhat misleading. Alternatives will be suggested below.

    Geographically the vowel systems can be characterized as ranging from the southwest to the northeast of 1939 Yiddish-speaking territory. The most southwestern dialect is that spoken by informants from Alsace-Lorraine. Based on historical data it is typical of the Yiddish once spoken also in southern Germany west of the Elbe and as far north as Hesse as well as in adjacent corner of Switzerland. Since it is spoken near the Rhine we will call it Raynish. 

    To the northeast of this Alsatian dialect is one spoken in western Slovakia, western Hungary and Burgenland. Within the Atlas it is characterized as West Trancarpathian. The traditional Yiddish term for this territory is the Oyberland and we will call this vowel system Oyberlandish.

    Further to the northeast are two variants of Yiddish , one spoken in most of Poland as well as in Galicia and the other in adjacent parts of the weatern Ukraine. The former dialect is called Central Yiddish within the Atlas and the latter Southeastern Yiddish. Popularly, speakers of both dialects are called Galitsyaners and we will group these two similar dialects and speak of  the Galitsyanish system.

    Still further to the northeast is the dialect spoken in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarussia as well as adjacent sections of Poland and Ukraine. The speakers are popularly called Litvakes and the system can be called Litvish.

    These systems are distinguished by different patterns of splits and mergers among their stressed vowels. Many other features; lexical, morphological, grammatical and cultural are distributed in patterns that closely match the distribution of the vowel systems.

    It is interesting to review some of the features of each of these four vowel system. For Raynish, data can be found in Richard Zuckerman's article "Alsace: an outpost of Western Yiddish" printed in The field of Yiddish III edited by Marvin I. Herzog, Wita Ravid and Uriel Weinreich (Mouton, the Hague, 1969). The most striking features of this system have to do with classes of words that have a stressed vowel which is spelled with a kamets alef in Standard Yiddish and with an o the YIVO transcription system.

    One such class of words includes words such as 'grobn', 'gor', 'tog', etc. In Raynish, these words have a long vowel a:. This results in a merger with two other classes of words that also have a:. These are a class of the words spelled with tsvey-yudn in Standard Yiddish and 'ey' in YIVO transcription including 'zeyf', 'heym' and 'veykh'. as well as a class of the words spelled with vov-yud and transcribed as 'oy' including 'roykh', 'oyg' and 'loyfn'.
    Another class of words spelled with kamets alef in Standard Yiddish and 'o' in YIVO transcription includes 'nodl', 'shlofn', 'blozn', etc. These words have ou in the Raynish system, As result they are merged with another class of words written with vov-yud and transcribed as 'oy' including 'voynen', 'groys', 'royt', etc

    Moving northeastward, Oyberlandish is like Raynish in that the vowels in the class of words spelled with tsvey-yudn in Standard Yiddish and with ey in YIVO transcription exemplified by 'zeyf', 'heym', and 'veykh' have a: as does the class words that includes 'roykh', 'oyg' and 'loyfn.'

    Oyberlandish, however, differs in that the class that includes 'grobn', 'gor' and 'tog' has the vowel o: as do many of the vowels in the class that includes 'nodl', 'shlofn' and 'blozn'. Further to the northeast we will find this pattern of merger strengthened with virtually all of the words in both classes having the same vowel.
     Moving still further east we find Galitsyanish which merges the stressed vowel in the class of words that include 'roykh', 'oyg' and 'loyfn' with the vowel in the class of words including 'voynen', 'groys' and 'royt'. In Galitsyanish all these words have oi. Another merger brings the vowel in the class of words that includes 'zeyf', 'heym', and 'veykh' with a class of words that are also spelled with pasekh tsvey yudn and with ey; 'shney', 'tseyn', 'breyt', etc. In the variant of Galitsyanish spoken in Poland and Galicia all these words have ai. In the Ukrainian variant they all have ei.

    Galitsyanish also has a important pair of mergers affecting the vowels spelled with vov and yud in Standard Yiddish and 'u' and 'i' respectively in YIVO transcription. The vov vowels can actually be divided into two classes which are pronounced differently in the dialects spoken southwest of Galitsyanish. One class includes words like 'un', 'nus' and 'zumer' while the other has words like 'du', 'shul' and 'shtub'. The vowels in words of the first class are short and  those in the second class are long in Raynish and Oyberlandish. The yud words are also divided into two classes: 'ikh, iz, kind' etc. with a short vowel in Raynish and Oyberlandish and 'dinen', 'brider', 'tif', etc. with a long vowel. In Galitsyanish the short classes of the yud and vov vowels are merged into one vowel and the long classes into another. The nature of the difference between these vowels differs in the two divisions of Galitsyanish. In Poland and Galicia, the long vowels merged into a long i; while the short vowels merged into a short version of the same vowel. In Ukraine the long vowels merge in an i of indeterminate length while the short one merge into a more central vowel I.

    In addition to processes that affect the whole Galitsyanish territory there are two features that characterize subparts of the Ukrainian sector. One process, in southern Ukraine, effects the vowels spelled with pasakh alef in Standard Yiddish and 'a' in the YIVO transcription: 'mame', 'hant'. 'zalts',etc. and a class of the vowels spelled with kamets alef in Standard Yiddish and 'o' in YIVO transcription: 'ofn', 'lokh', 'tokhter', etc. These merge in an o vowel. The other, in northeastern Ukraine, effects a class of the words spelled with 'ayin' in Standard Yiddish and 'e' in YIVO transcription: 'mel', 'lebn', 'shver', etc these merge with the  class of short vowels spelled with yud (see above) and are pronounced with the centralized I vowel.
    In one way, the Polish and Galician variant of Galitsyanish groups with Raynish and Oyberlandish. All these dialects group vowels into long and short classes. The Ukrainian variant does not have this distinction.

    Furthest to the northeast is the Litvish system which is very distinct. It merges all three classes of vowels spelled with kamets alef in one mid-tense O vowel, both classes of  vowels spelled with ayin in one mid-tense e vowel, both classes vowels spelled with yud in one mid-tense i vowel and both classes of vowels spelled with a mid-tense u vowel.

    Litvish shares with Galitsyanish the merger of the two class of words spelled with tsvey-yudn as well as the merger of two classes of the words with vov-yud: the class that includes 'voynen', 'groys', 'royt', etc. and the one that includes 'roykh', 'oyg' and 'loyfn'. In addition, the vowel in the two latter classes is realized as ei. This results in a merger of all four classes. The merger is not found in the northwestern corner of Litvish territory where the vowel in the latter two classes is a front rounded diphthong umlaut-o umlaut-u.

    A striking series of mergers in Litvish effects all vowels that are distinguished by length in Raynish, Oyberlandish and western Galitsyanish. All the word classes with vowels spelled with kamets alef and transcribed as 'o' are merged together. Similar mergers affect all the word classes  with ayin, transcribed as 'e'. all those with yud, transcribed as 'i' and all those with vov, transcribed a 'u;.

    Higher level groupings are often used. Galitsyanish and Litvish are commonly grouped as East Yiddish. Raynish and Oyberlandish are traditionally grouped as West Yiddish but this grouping has been justifiably challenged because in comparison to Raynish, which is very distinct, all three of the other systems can be grouped together. (see the essay on Manastar-Ramer).

Manaster Ramer on the polygenesis of Western Yiddish and the mono

                                         Manaster Ramer on the polygenesis of Western Yiddish and the monogenesis of Yiddish

    An article, "The Polygenesis of Western Yiddish--and the Monogenesis of Yiddish" is to be found in Indo-European, Nostratic and beyond: festschrift for Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin edited by Iren Hegedus, Peter A. Michalove and Alexis Manaster Ramer (Washington DC, The Institute for the Study of Man, 1997). The article written by Manaster Ramer with the help of Meyer Wolf discusses two important and rather neglected aspects of the history of Yiddish. One is the fact that the customary primary division of Yiddish into an East and a West Yiddish dialects has no real justification. The other is that all the dialects of Yiddish are descended from a common ancestor.

    The first topic, the fact that the dialects that have been traditionally lumped together as West Yiddish have less in common with each other than some of them have with the East Yiddish dialects is not new. In his essay, "Western traits in Transcarpathian YIddish" published in For Max Weinreich (The Hague, Mouton, 1964) Uriel Weinreich already pointed out that chronologically deepest gulf in the Yiddish landscape ran through West Yiddish territory separating the Yiddish of Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland on the one hand, from the West Transcarpathian dialects of western Slovakia, Burgenland and western Hungary. Uriel Weinreich's observation inspired me to reconstruct the history of vowel splits and mergers in the West Yiddish dialects. The results reinforced the evidence for a very old divergence between the Alsactian and Swiss dialects on the one hand and the rest of Yiddish on the other. Manaster Ramer musters a number of fresh arguments based on lexical features and on the historical development of the Yiddish vowels.

    The second topic is, rather surprisingly quite neglected. The use of a single term, Yiddish, for all Yiddish dialects is now virtually universal. This was not always the case as the West Yiddish dialects were often referrred to as "Judeo-German". The current use of one term for all Yiddish dialects, however, does not imply that that all these dialects are seen as springing from a common ancestor. A good many authors, explicitly postulate separate origins for East and West Yiddish. Others do so implicitly by maintaining that the two branches of Yiddish are descended from different German dialects or different mixtures of German dialects.

    Manaster Ramer addresses this problem by mustering a large set of lexical items, phonological and morphological developments and phrases that are unique to Yiddish and are Pan-Yiddish in that they are either found in all the Yiddish dialects from West to East or in a representative sample of western and eastern locations. These he presents as evidence for a common early stage of Yiddish. His examples are drawn from the linguistic literature but many more could be adduced from the records of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Yiddish as well as from the examination of samples of written Yiddish.

    Manaster Ramer's conclusion written at the end of the 20th century is that "In spite of all the work that has been done, we still have more gaps than filled-in areas in our knowledge of Proto-Yiddish and early history of the dialects descended from it. The results reported here, coming roughly a century after the birth of comparative Yiddish linguistics, are only scratching the surface of what promises to be a major research topic in the next century. As in every area of comparative linguistics, whether on the large scale asi in the case of such hypotheses as Nostratic, Altaic, Na-Dene, tec., or on the smaller scale as in the case before us, more work is called for."

Daniel Leibel on Ashkenazic Stress

As a member of the Germanic family of languages, Yiddish would be expected to exhibit a fundamentally Germanic sound structure. The most salient characteristic of German phonology may be the strong tendency to place the accent of a word on the root syllable which is often the first syllable of the word. A related Germanic characteristic is the tendency for vowel length distinctions to be expressed on the stressed syllable.

The sound structure of a language is the way in which the speakers of the language analyze speech sounds. An indirect way to observe this is through the way the speakers interpret words from other languages. This can be seen in the way loanwords are modified when they are assimilated into the language.

These principles underlie Daniel Leibel's study "On Ashkenazic Stress" whic appeared in 1965 in the Second Collection of "Field of Yiddish" edited by Uriel Weinreich (Mouton, the Hague). Leibel begins by noting that, in Yiddish, it is rare to stress Hebrew words on the final syllable although final syllable stress in the usual pattern in Classical Hebrew. He goes on by saying that a majority of authors have claimed that the general pattern in Yiddish is to stress Hebrew words on the next to last syllable, the penultimate.

Given the generalization that Hebrew words in Yiddish are stressed on the penultimate, various theories have been put forward to explain why this should be so; that it represents an influence of Polish on Yiddish, that it is an inheritance from a pre-Yiddish form of Hebrew that was already stressed on the penultimate or that it represents a conequence of the supposed loss of distinctive length in Yiddish.

All of these theories, Leibel shows, are defective. Their most serious problem is that Hebrew words in Yiddish are not essentially stressed on the penultimate. They are stressed on the first syllable. This is not immediately clear for the largest number of words which have two syllables since the first syllable in these words is also the penultimate syllable. But the situation can be clarified by looking at words of three syllables. In these words stress also occurs on on the first syllable except in cases where the first syllable has a short vowel and a following syllable has a long vowel. In the latter case the stress is does fall on the penultimate.

Leibel explains these facts by noting that German places the stress on the root syllable of a word which is generally the first syllable. When German borrows words it treats the first syllable of the loanword as a root and stresses it. The exception is when a borrowed word has a long vowel in a later syllable. German does not have long vowels in unstressed syllables. In some cases German deals with this by shortening the long vowel but in other cases it preserves the long vowel and moves the stress to that syllable.

Leibel assumes that Yiddish is a close relative of German and behaves in the same way. In the case of Hebrew loanwords it generally treats the first syllable as if it were a root and stresses. Where a Hebrew word has a long vowel in a later syllable that sylable, which may be the penult, gets the stress.

Leibel's analysis stands out from that of other linguists in several ways. One is that he saw the Hebrew words that were borrowed into Yiddish as coming into Yiddish with distinctive long and short vowels. Most of the linguists who had looked at the Hebrew material in Yiddish, notably, Solomon Birnbaun, Jechiel Bin-Nun, and Max Weinreich had accepted the opinion of specialists in Hebrew linguistics that the Hebrew which was the source of Yiddish borrowings did not have distinctive vowel length. Later, however, Dovid Katz was to support Leibel in this. Another difference, is that other linguists have generally seen the pattern of vowel length in the Hebrew words and the stress pattern as having related causes. Birnbaum, Bin-Nun, and Weinreich attributed all these features to the influence of the Germanic system while Dovid Katz saw them all as being inherited from an earlier form of Hebrew. Leibel, as we have seen, attributed distinctive vowel length to the Hebrew source and the change in stress to Germanic influence.

In Leibel's time, the descent of Yiddish from German was virtually unquestioned. This is no longer true as Paul Wexler has presented the theory that Yiddish is a relexified Slavic language. Leibel's argument is strong support for the originally Germanic character of Yiddish. However. the tendencies toward initial stress and toward expressing length distinctions on a stressed syllable are not just features of German but are shared by all the Germanic languages. Leibel's argument can also be used to support the descent of Yiddish from another Germanic language.