New Directions

I last posted on this blog in October, 2009. Since then a number of irresistable new opportunities have appeared which have competed for my time. For one thing, thanks to the initiative of Bob Scott at the Digital Humanities Center of the Columbia University Libraries there is a real possibility that a critical component of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry data base will be published online. I have been part of the effort to accomplish this.
A new research opportunity has also appeared with the development of inexpensive and widely available genomic testing since 2008. The potential for using genomic information as a source for Ashkenazic history has long been recognized but pioneers have had, until recently, to base their research on the limited data provided first by classical markers and later by mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome haplogroups. Extensive newly available autosomal data is now being added to provide a much richer and firmer basis for historical inferences.
My research on the history of Yiddish has also taken on some new directions thanks to hints provided by teachers, Marvin Herzog and Mordtkhe Schaechter.
Herzog called attention to the fact that when groups migrate they tend to lose cultural and linguistic traits. This observation which goes back his mentor Uriel Weinreich is now becoming more widely appreciated as can be seen from a recent article by Quentin D. Atkinson in 'Science' which uses lose of phonetic features to trace the spread of human languages back to Africa.
Uriel discussed the loss of features in small settlements in his article on 'Western Traits of Transcarpathian Yiddish.' The specific example he gave was the development of Northeastern YIddish but in other parts of the same article he describes a much wider pattern of progressive trait loss. He describes a number o features unique to Transcarpathian Yiddish. A smaller set of these can be found in Central Yiddish. A still smaller set are shared by Central and Southeastern Yiddish but not found in the remaining the East Yiddish dialect, Northeastern Yiddish.
The global pattern is then one of maximum richness of traits in Transcarpathian Yiddish with a gradual falling off of traits towards the northeastern part of East Yiddish territory. Uriel does not specifically say as much but this pattern implies that the settlement of East Yiddish territory spread out from the broader Transcarpathian area (this area would include Austria and the Czech lands which are to the west of the Carpathians) to the northeast. We can infer from this that the common root of Transcarpathian and East Yiddish originated in the Transcarpathian area. This is consistent with other evidence that the ancestor of these dialects coalesced in Austria around the the 11th century.
The spread of East and Transcarpathian Yiddish from a focal area in early medieval Austria is also implied by a line of research that was suggested by the work of another of my teachers, Mordtkhe Schaechter. Schaechter identified a specific kind of linguistic borrowing in which a language borrows standards of correctness rather than specific items from another language. The borrowed standard is used to select preferred variants within the internal repertoire of the borrowing language.
As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, early Yiddish was an East Germanic language derived from Gothic. Modern Yiddish is, in comparison, much more similar to German. Yiddish has come to resemble German partly through the mechanism of ordinary linguistic borrowing but the mechanism described by Schaechter has actually played a greater role. Specifically, early Yiddish borrowed standards from a form of literary German. This form was the Middle High German used in Austria.
As to the question of how the original Gothic-derived Yiddish got to Austria, I currently favor the hypothesis that from at least 500 CE on, Gothic was spoken by the Jews of northwestern Balkan Jewry. Medieval Austria was settled by Jews from the Rhineland and East Franconia as well as other areas but I think that early Yiddish was brought there by settlers from the area of the Save River valley.

The development of Germanic short 'o'

Proto-Germanic is commonly reconstructed as lacking a short 'o' phoneme. The subsequent development of short 'o' can be looked at by tracing developments in Gothic, German and Yiddish.
Biblical Gothic, attested from the 5th century, is close to the Proto-Germanic state. There is no 'o' phoneme in the native Germanic word stock although 'o' is found in loanwords.
Within the Germanic component, 'o' occurs as an allophone of short 'u' before the consonants 'r', 'kh' and 'khw'. This is part of a more general short vowel lowering rule that also lowers short 'i' to short 'e'.
German by comparison has a short 'o' phoneme which mostly developed from PG short 'u' and which is found in many contexts. Notable are occurences of 'o' derived from 'u' before nasal vowels, e. g. fromm, Sommer, Sonne, kommen, besonderer, gesponnen, geschwommen, genommen. (examples from Bin-Nun). This shift began in Old High German and continued through Middle High German and Early New High German.
The short vowel lowering rule survives in the German dialects but it is quite restricted geographically.
Yiddish occupies an intermediate position between Gothic and German. The short vowel lowering rule survives except in the Northeastern dialect (Litvish) which has lost the distinction between short and long vowels.
Words like vortsl, dorsht, shtorem, vorem, gorgl, vokher, etc. are universal in Yiddish and show that this rule operated at the earliest period in the history of the language.
On the other hand, there is well-established short 'o' phoneme in found in many word from the Germanic component such as groshn, holts, honik, shlos. gebot. etc. But 'u' before nasals was rarely lowered so that the listed German words above are represented in by Yiddish words that, historically, have short 'u' e. g. zumer, zun, kumen, etc.
I say 'historically' because in almost all the Yiddish dialects, the short 'u' has been transformed into another vowel. The excpeion is Alsation Yiddish. Alsation Yiddish is also exceptional in that while it has zumer, zun, kumen, etc. these are in free variation with forms that have 'o'
The picture that one gets is of an early Yiddish that had the short vowel lowering rule and lacked an 'o' phoneme but subsequently acquired it through contact with German, Hebrew and other languages that have it.
A particularly interesting set of words are fun, duner, and ful. The German cognates of these words have had 'o' since Old High Germanic times. It is possible that Yiddish preserves Old High German forms that are not attested in the literature. Alternately these forms may go back to an earlier Gemanic language such as Gothic or an earlier stage of the West Germanic language that developed into Old High German. Either way we are looking at a date for the origin of Yiddish that is earlier than 800 C E.

Yiddish gayes Gothic gauja

The Yiddish word 'gayes' was used in western Germany and Poland to mean 'people of the countryside, particularly non-Jewish'. It is commonly spelled as if it were of Semitic origin 'gimel-yod-vov-sof' but it is not a Semitic world. Meyer Wolf and Alexis Manaster Ramer have suggested that it is of ancient Germanic origin.
The word frequently appears in the form 's'gayes' where the 's' is a contraction of the neutral definite article 'dos' the word can also be masculine or feminine.
Related forms in Gothic and Old High German refer to a district or region but the closest form is Gothic 'gauja' (masculine) defined in Lehmann's Gothic dictionary as 'people of a land'.

Yiddish oyganes Old High German ougun Gothic augona

In Yiddish 'oy'ganes' means large protruding eyes as if in surprise. A form 'oy'genes' with stress on the first syllable exists and also a form 'oyga'nim'.
The Old High German word for 'eye' is 'ou'ga' in the nominative singular and 'ou'gun' or 'ougun' in the nominative plural. The Biblical Gothic (4th century) word is 'au'go' in the nominative singular and 'au'go:na' in the nominative plural. In Crimean Gothic from the 1500's the plural is 'oeghene.'
The Yiddish form resembles the Gothic form in having three syllables. However, the 'a' in the second syllable resembles the Old High German form. Both the Gothic and Old High German forms may have influenced Yiddish.

Yiddish klezmer Gothic klismo Hebrew kley-zemer

Yiddish 'klezmer' 'musician' is commonly derived from Hebrew 'kley-zemer'. Biblical Gothic has a word 'klismo' of unknown etymology meaning 'cymbal' used in the phrase 'klismo klismjandei' 'cymbal tinkling',
The two words are actually phonetically quite close in that Gothic lacked a short 'e'. Gothic 'i' would have been the closest approximation to this sound. Semantically, however the two words are pretty far apart. However, the literal meaning of 'kley-zemer' is 'musical instrument.' This word could have existed in Wulfila's time and been the basis both of Gothic 'klismo' and Yiddish 'klezmer.'

Yiddish 'skotsl' Gothic 'skohsl'

The Yiddish expression 'skotsl kumt' is uttered on the occassion of someone's unexpected arrival. Its etymology is unknown. The Biblical Gothic word for 'demon' is 'skohsl'. It is phonetically easy to go from 'skohsl' to 'skotsl'. The Gothic 'h' here designates a preconsonantal 'kh' sound. Such a sound was often lost in the history of Yiddish, compare 'shukh' with derived 'shuster.' The 'sl' cluster can, sometimes become a 'tsl' cluster as in 'pitsl' derived from 'bisl.'
Semantically, the Yiddish and Gothic words are also a good match in that the Yiddish expression can be compared to English 'speak of the Devil and he appears' also said of an unexpected arrival. It can be concluded that Yiddish 'skotsl' is likely descended from Gothic 'skohsl'.

Yiddish /r/

Yiddish /r/
In their Etymologische Studien zum Jiddischen (Helmut Buske, Hamburg, 2006) Erika Timm and Gustav Adolf Beckmann discuss the theory of Paul Wexler that Yiddish is a relexified Slavic language. By this, Wexler means that Yiddish started out life as a member of the Slavic family and borrowed so many words from German that it has taken on a Germanic appearance. Timm and Beckmann reject this theory and they begin their concluding remarks by asking how it is that Yiddish has a very un-Slavic (and they add, un-Turkic) uvular [R]?

That the predominant form of the Yiddish /r/ is uvular can be seen from Map 8 in the first volume of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) (Tũbingen, Max Niemeyer, New York, the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 1992). Yiddish has two kinds of /r/ which are distinguished by the position of tongue contact. In the apical [r] the tongue contact is further forward in the mouth while in uvular [R] it is further back. The bulk of Yiddish speaking territory has [R] with [r] found only at the edges on the northwest, the northeast, the southwest and, a bit, in the southeast.The pattern with [R] firmly established in the middle while on the edges of the territory Yiddish agrees with co-territorial languages in having [r] stongly implies that [R] is the oldest form in Yiddish and that [r] is a new form borrowed from its neighbors.

But if [R] is the original Yiddish /r/, we have to ask where it comes from? Slavic languages can be ruled out as overwhelmingly preferring [r]. The possibility that it comes from Hebrew must be considered but there is no evidence that ancient Hebrew had an [R] and Yiddish pronunciations of Hebrew sounds often differ from the ancient Middle Eastern ones.

The obvious candidate is the Germanic languages and, at first this looks, quite obvious. Modern Germanic languages have both kinds of /r/. In Standard German the [R] is currently preferred as it is in Standard Danish and Dutch. In other Germanic languages, [r] is the standard but [R] occurs as a dialect pronunciation. In fact, Robert D. King and Stephanie Beach derive the Yiddish [R] from German in their article, "On the origins of Germanic uvular [R]: the Yiddishe evidence" in the American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures September 1998 pp. 279-290.

However, if one goes back to the handbooks from the late 19th and early 20th century one gets a different impression. The original Proto-Germanic /r/ is reconstructed as [r]. The original Old High German and Middle High German quality is also given as [r]. An apical [r] is also reconstructed for Gothic.

The evidence that [r] was once univeral in Germanic is, however, not strong. A more recent discussion in the book Proto-Germanic /r/ (Alfred Kummich, Gőppingen, 1974) by Richard M. Runge cites a considerable body of evidence and later studies that indicate that Proto-Germanic /r/ was [R] and that this value was found in at least some Old High German as well as in Gothic.

If Yiddish [R] is Germanic, than this feature takes its place along with the Yiddish tendency to stress initial syllables and to put the verb in second position as a testimony to the deep rootedness of Yiddish within the Germanic family of languages.