tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post8856010275454077892..comments2024-03-23T01:31:13.502+01:00Comments on Jabal al-Lughat: Why Yiddish is not Slavic, and language families are not familiesLameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-43622405827872607312017-09-30T02:53:28.483+02:002017-09-30T02:53:28.483+02:00Oh, Rome. Should have been obvious. :-) Belated th...Oh, Rome. Should have been obvious. :-) Belated thanks for the link to the gnxp post.David Marjanovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-3615401605457044122015-07-07T15:10:40.811+02:002015-07-07T15:10:40.811+02:00What a fun article and what a fun blog! Thank you,...What a fun article and what a fun blog! Thank you, jabal climber, from a Yiddish learner in Warsaw. The explanation of what happens when you learn a different language -- versus when your community learns a different language -- and the description of different ways of classifying a language and language family-- helped me get a grasp on this debate. I am going to do a quick search in your blog for articles on Judao-Aramaic.. if you haven't written about it, how I'd love to read! I wish there was as much research in that as to Yiddish. Well now that I am making inquiries. Do you have any thoughts or theories on the debate about the Jesus language, Aramaic and Hebrew? It's nice to read discussions by authors with less ax to grind than others...<br /><br />With respect to Italians (caveat: I am not an expert), I think that the theory behind Jewish genetic closeness to Italians is that after the Roman exile Jews travelled to major centers of the Roman world, which is current day Italy / Mediterranean basin. And if I recall correctly there is a split along the lines of the Babylonian and the Roman exiles among Jewish genetics, with genetic groupings of similarity to on the one hand Mediteranean/Italian and on the other hand (For non Ashkenazis) Mesopotamian. The genetic differences would I imagine mark the geographic regions that the peoples could sorta migrate and travel; and the big split in empires was Greco-roman and its inheritors vs mesopotamian/babylonian. I dont think Ashkenazi Jews would be alone in the genetic similarity to Italians though- maybe any group that historically spent a lot of time hanging out in the Greco-roman world and its offshoots, ie I would imagine actually that a lot of Tunisians would have similar-to-Italian genetics mixed in.... Aha, here is an article with some info that I hope I am recalling and recounting correctly- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/06/genetics-the-jewish-question/#.VZvOvu2qqko).Alizahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17391487486692786398noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-23611189275077421392014-06-29T22:30:18.910+02:002014-06-29T22:30:18.910+02:00In fact, there is a rather large non-Jewish geneti...<i>In fact, there is a rather large non-Jewish genetic component among Ashkenazis, but it seems to be linked more to Italians than to Slavs.</i><br /><br />Italians? That's a surprise.David Marjanovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-88568374895573439082014-06-29T15:56:40.838+02:002014-06-29T15:56:40.838+02:00Vocabulary, in the sense of the mass of words in a...Vocabulary, in the sense of the mass of words in a language, allows linguists to establish not only the phonological system but also the morphological system. Words are usually classifiable into nouns, verbs and other categories, but that membership is often expressed by some modifications such as nominal case endings, verbal stem modifications and/or endings indicating such things as tense, aspect, person, etc (more or less, according to the language). A language may borrow a lot of vocabulary from another without borrowing the associated morphology, instead modifying the borrowed words according to its own morphological system. English has borrowed heavily from French and Latin without borrowing the morphology associated with the words in the original languages: although educated English maintains some Latin noun plurals, borrowed verbs (or verbalized items) are modified with English verbal affixes, not French or Latin ones. Conversely, English verbs borrowed into French are fitted as stems into the much more complex French verbal morphology (eg the recently adopted verb "tacler" "to tackle", first adopted in the context of sports, which can have all the conjugation forms of verbs ending in -er in the infinitive). Supposing that Yiddish is actually a relexified Slavic language, why is its morphology not Slavic but Germanic?marie-lucienoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-35843312248383043912014-06-24T09:08:19.452+02:002014-06-24T09:08:19.452+02:00That's simple: he postulates that most Ashkena...That's simple: he postulates that most Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Slavic converts to Judaism, who supposedly converted as a way to evade persecution and enslavement by Christians for being pagan while preserving their identity. (Not the most effective long-term strategy on either count, then.) In fact, there is a rather large non-Jewish genetic component among Ashkenazis, but it seems to be linked more to Italians than to Slavs.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-3757347558430139442014-06-23T23:54:38.697+02:002014-06-23T23:54:38.697+02:00Lameen,
I hadn't thought of that until you me...Lameen,<br /><br />I hadn't thought of that until you mentioned it and now I have to wonder why he even thought there was any point in using Standard German for his comparison.<br /><br />And now that you mention Sorbian, I have to ask the same question about the point of using it. Surely it was a rural language, spoken often by low status migrants into formerly Germanic territory. Jews were predominantly urban dwellers, and cities in central and eastern Europe in the Middle Ages were pretty much uniformly German-speaking. How and why would Jews have learned any Sorbian anyway?Jimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07187836541591828806noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-29673447396047254662014-06-22T00:12:34.052+02:002014-06-22T00:12:34.052+02:00Bulbul: Certainly it does go deeper than I was sug...Bulbul: Certainly it does go deeper than I was suggesting in the case of Modern Hebrew. Even for Yiddish, Wexler makes an interesting argument that the meanings of particle+verb combinations are almost entirely calqued from Slavic, rather than reflecting German semantics. But all his comparisons seem to be with standard German and modern Sorbian, so I don't know how seriously they can be taken. In any event, I would insist that syntactic-semantic patterns like those that Wexler and Zuckermann highlight cannot be reconstructed with anything like the accuracy of vocabulary and morphology, and that it would be perverse to insist that a language's family membership should be conditional on the natural transmission of such patterns. (Wexler, indeed, gleefully points out that his definition would logically make it impossible "to identify genetic relatedness on the basis of linguistic criteria alone", which to me is precisely why it should be rejected.)<br /><br />Jim: I wonder what Wexler's claims would have looked like if he had compared Yiddish with Franconian rather than with Standard German...Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-62717888379524130862014-06-20T00:23:03.749+02:002014-06-20T00:23:03.749+02:00bulbul,
"Hebrew where the syntax is strikingl...bulbul,<br />"Hebrew where the syntax is strikingly Yiddish- and Slavic-like and very unlike Biblical or Rabbinic Hebrew,"<br /><br />Nuu-chah-nulth is suffixing but verb initial, just like the Salishan languages around it and the other Wakashan languages. It is structurally similar enough the whole Sapir thought these langauges formed a family he called Mosan. It turned out to be a Sprachbund. Unfortunately we don't have any record of what proto-Wakashan looked like before this contact started having these effects.<br /><br />John,<br />"It was not until some centuries later that Jews’ German separated sufficiently from the German of non-Jews to be called a separate language, Yiddish..."<br /><br />And not all non-Jewish Germans, by a long shot. Yiddish sounds a lot like Nuernberg Franconian and shares a lot of the same sound changes that distinguish Rhineland dialects form High German - and these similarities track the geographically spread of Jewish communities in the early Middle Ages,Jimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07187836541591828806noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-24497156713552431072014-06-19T18:44:57.970+02:002014-06-19T18:44:57.970+02:00Here's what I posted at Language Hat on the su...Here's what I posted at <a href="http://languagehat.com/journal-of-jewish-languages/#comment-111967" rel="nofollow">Language Hat</a> on the subject:<br /><br />The purpose of the <a href="http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22134638-12340003" rel="nofollow">Beider article</a> is to reconcile the historic disagreements about Yiddish between the “Germanist” Stammbaum model and the “Yiddishist” relexification model of the origin of Yiddish. Beider rightly says that the relexification model, whereby Yiddish starts to exist as soon as Jews begin to speak German, and Yiddish itself is a language of mixed origins, doesn’t meet the standards for historical linguistics theories. <br /><br />Unquestionably Yiddish and Modern High German are the descendants of Middle (or Early Modern) High German. Yiddish is not, as Wexler would have it, a relexification of Judaeo-Sorbian or some other Judaeo-Slavic language, nor of Judaeo-French as Weinreich thought, with German vocabulary. No relexification is so thorough, nor is the morphosyntax of Yiddish anything but a normal descendant of MHG/ENHG morphosyntax.<br /><br />(Beider takes some trouble to show how the use of the name German for both the ancestral language and one, but not both, of the daughter languages tends to confuse people, though we are stuck with it. The simple act of using the name Old East Slavic for the ancestor of modern Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian instead of Old Russian has apparently quieted a host of nationalist ambitions and fears.)<br /><br />However, by a mere reinterpretation of terms, the “Yiddishist” view can be made to say something very interesting, not about the genetic descent of the Yiddish language, but about the language shifts of Ashkenazi Jews. [...] Rather than saying that Yiddish descends from Judaeo-French, we can say that in Jews who spoke Jews’ French began to speak Jews’ German, an ethnolect of Old High German, retaining from the substrate language a number of words of French, Aramaic, and Hebrew origin. It was not until some centuries later that Jews’ German separated sufficiently from the German of non-Jews to be called a separate language, Yiddish, which then divided into Western and Eastern Yiddish. Almost all speakers of Western Yiddish then shifted languages again, to a new version of Jews’ German, based on NHG this time. So the line from Jews’ French to Jews’ German (I) to Western Yiddish to Jews’ German (II), although in no way a genetic line of descent, does represent a reality, namely a sequence of substrates each of which leaves a layer of vocabulary in the languages which follow it.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-29058776105396001222014-06-19T11:26:43.873+02:002014-06-19T11:26:43.873+02:00All true, but it's not just about funny accent...All true, but it's not just about funny accent or weird expressions. Wexler (and Zuckermann) argue that in Modern Hebrew, it goes deeper than that. For example Zuckermann argues that the inchoative meaning of nif'al and hitpa'el was expanded under the influence of Yiddish prefixed inchoative verbs, that Modern Hebrew is a habere language like Yiddish was and Wexler has give a number of examples of sentences in Modern Hebrew where the syntax is strikingly Yiddish- and Slavic-like and very unlike Biblical or Rabbinic Hebrew, hence relexification. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are right, it's just that the process is bit more complicated. Especially with Modern Hebrew, considering its origins.<br />FYI, if I recall correctly, the Slavic language Yiddish was allegedly built upon was Sorbian and in fact, Wexler often refers to Yiddish (at least in its early stages) as Judeo-Sorbian.bulbulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14505565281151328789noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-27485327315912423212014-06-19T02:21:31.261+02:002014-06-19T02:21:31.261+02:00The origins of Yiddish [...] phonology I can't...<i>The origins of Yiddish [...] phonology I can't comment on</i><br /><br />I think it's the lowest common denominator of German and Slavic. For instance, there are 5 vowel phonemes – the Slavic languages of the region have about 6, German dialects have maybe 10 to maybe 20.David Marjanovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-20306308725098012072014-06-18T21:19:18.775+02:002014-06-18T21:19:18.775+02:00Yes, what I (like Wexler) mean by "phonology&...Yes, what I (like Wexler) mean by "phonology" here is the synchronic phonological system of a language – its phoneme inventory, its allophones, its phonotactics, etc. The concept of a phonological system is of course very useful in reconstruction, but the term "comparative phonology" is misleading here. From its structure, you would think it meant applying the comparative method to phonologies. But what it actually means is finding a phonology to account for data produced by applying the comparative method to vocabulary. A complete phoneme inventory for every Romance language would tell us absolutely nothing about Vulgar Latin phonology on its own, for example, whereas a phonetically transcribed set of Romance 200-word lists would be enough to reconstruct most of both Vulgar Latin's phonology and each individual Romance language's phonology.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-9264005556018057502014-06-18T19:06:32.609+02:002014-06-18T19:06:32.609+02:00Thank you for an interesting post. I was wonderin...Thank you for an interesting post. I was wondering if you might be able to provide a bit of clarification. One aspect of your discussion that I don't understand is your statement that <br /><br />"Historical linguists normally prioritize the vocabulary and the morphology over the syntax and phonology ... Vocabulary and morphology are eminently reconstructible, using the comparative method. Phonology, on the other hand, can only be reconstructed from vocabulary ..."<br /><br />As I understand it, phonology is one of the main areas where the comparative method is applied, grounded in the neogrammarian hypothesis (regularity of sound change). Maybe I'm not clear on your meaning of "prioritize" in this context, but is it not the case that comparative phonology has been one of the most lucrative ventures in historical and comparative linguistics? One case, for example, would be Saussure's laryngeal theory with regard to Proto-Indo-European. <br /><br />I'm also unclear on how you are differentiating between comparison of vocabulary and comparison of phonology. Examining the vocabulary is how one comes to reconstruct proto-phoneme inventories, as well as proto-Lexical items; it seems like you can't compare one without comparing the other. I don't think it's inaccurate to say that language families are often established based on comparison of phonological systems. Although these comparisons are restricted to subsets of lexical items, you are still comparing phonemes.<br /><br />Perhaps I've misunderstood, and you intend "phonology" to reference synchronic phonological rules and phoneme inventories, without consideration of regular sound change or reconstruction in this context.Kevin Hugheshttp://opencuny.org/linggradchronicles/noreply@blogger.com