Khazars
by Paul Wexler
“What Yiddish teachs us about the role of
the Khazars in the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis”
Students of Khazar history have long been
interested in the fate of the Khazars after the collapse of
their empire in the 10th century. This is a difficult topic to
research since the ethnonym in its native habitats fell into
disuse in the 11th century, after losing its raison d’ętre
as a political label. While it has been widely assumed that the
non-Judaized populations merged with coterritorial and
contiguous groups according to linguistic, ethnic and/or
religious bonds, there remains considerable disagreement over
whether the Judaized Khazars merged with non-Khazar Jews
(adopting the latter’s epithet) or were assimilated to
non-Jewish populations, or both. Scholars seem willing to accept
the merger of Khazar Jews with other Jews in the Caucasus and
possibly even Central Asia and the Fertile Crescent, but there
is widespread disagreement over the possibility that Khazar Jews
(i) may have augmented the Jewish communities in the East Slavic
lands (the very existence of the latter has most recently been
challenged by Pereswetoff-Morath 2002) or (ii) actually
constituted the major component of the Ashkenazic
Yiddish-speaking communities of Poland and the East Slavic lands
after the 13-14th centuries. Not unexpectedly, this topic is
highly charged, since a primary Khazar origin for the Ashkenazic
Jews would invalidate the Zionist thesis that the contemporary
Jews are largely of Palestinian Semitic origin and are more
deserving of Palestine than the indigenous Palestinian Arab
population.
Most scholars are justifiably sceptical about
the hypothesis that the Khazars became a major component in the
ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazic Jews when the latter emigrated
from Germany to Poland (13th century), Belarus’ and Ukraine
(15th century), since all supporters of the Ashkenazic-Khazar
hypothesis (see e.g. Gumplowicz 1903, Koestler 1976 and
Sobolev 1998, the latter with a
rich literature) have failed to buttress their claims with
convincing arguments. Arab support for the claim that the bulk
of the contemporary Jews are of Khazar origin (see ‘Amāra 1967,
Šākīr 1981, 1984) also does not endear the hypothesis to many
readers. To be sure, the historically enormous Jewish
populations in Poland and the East Slavic lands do not require a
large Khazar input; theoretically the founding population could
have been modest and of West European origin.
Future historians can still hope to shed
light on the topic if they can determine if, where and when
Khazar and non-Khazar Jews merged into a single community and
what the significance of the use of the label “Ashkenazic” for
some Caucasian Jewries is. For example, Nestor’s Russian
Primary Chronicle distinguishes “Khazar” and “non-Khazar”
Jews in Kiev by name but in the Vladimir-Suzdal’ Principality
for the year 1175 only “Jews” are mentioned (see Paszkiewicz
1983, 93; Pinkus 1988, 4); in the Lezgian language of southeast
Daghestan and northern Azerbajdzhan, Caucasian Jews are called
“Ashkenazic” (Czortkower 1933, 148, fn 1).
However, in my view, the best evidence for
the hypothesis that the Ashkenazic Jews are largely of (Slavic-
and Turkic-)Khazar descent is linguistic and comes from the
Yiddish language.
I believe that Yiddish is a mixed West-East
Slavic language (and not a German dialect as is commonly
believed—see below and my 2002). Of the two native Slavic
substrata of Yiddish—Sorbian and pre-Ukrainian/pre-Belarusian
(or in historical terms, “Kiev-Polessian”)—it is the latter
imprint that unambiguously points to the existence of
Slavic-speaking Jewries in parts of the former Khazar kingdom
who eventually became speakers of Yiddish. Hence, one major
venue for the birth of the Ashkenazic people would have to be in
the contemporary Belarusian and Ukrainian lands, where an
indigenous Slavic-speaking Jewry (as best established by the
facts of Yiddish) could only be derived from the Turko-Iranian-speaking
Khazars. Furthermore, Yiddish lexicon and grammar reveal links
with Turkic and Iranian languages that have not been widely
appreciated.
Linguistic arguments other than Yiddish have
been presented in the past to determine the fate of the Khazar
Jews after the 10th century but these are inconclusive. For
example, a number of scholars over the last century or so have
claimed to have found Khazar loans in coterritorial and
contiguous languages (see Wexler 2002), but these terms, at
best, can only reveal the historical areal of Khazar linguistic
contacts, but not necessarily the fate of the Khazar Jews after
the late 10th century, since the loans could predate the
collapse of the Khazar Empire.
It is generally assumed that Khazar Jews,
speaking Turkic, Iranian and other languages, could have become
fluent in (pre-)Eastern Slavic as early as the 9th-10th
centuries from contacts with the Slavs. Curiously, the earliest
mention of the Slavic term for ‘German’ (or perhaps in these
earliest attestations, in the meaning of ‘foreigner’), nmc
/nemec/ (~ Uk німець),ą appears
in a late 10th-century letter written in Hebrew by the Khazar
king Josef to Ħasdaj ibn Šaprūţ, the representative of the
Caliph of Córdoba (see Golb and Pritsak 1982, 75-121). This fact
is important for two reasons: (i) It suggests that Hebrew ’aškenaz,
the prevailing term for ‘German(s), German lands, Germany’
in Medieval Hebrew, was not yet in general circulation at that
time (Biblical Hebrew ’aškenaz denoted an Iranian
people). Note that Medieval Hebrew ’aškenaz, while now
denoting Germany and German Jews, originally denoted also
Khazars, Scythians and Sarmatians (see Krojs 1932, 1935,
387-389; Modelski 1910, 40, 78, 85, 92; Poznanski 1911, 76;
Wexler 1987, 3, fn 9, 160, fn 49, 2002, chapter 4.7). (ii) It
reveals contact with Slavic speakers, though can tell little
about the status or origin of Slavic in the Khazar empire, since
the few attested Khazar Slavicisms, including the above term,
are found in a number of languages, see e.g. pre-migration
Hungarian, Byzantine Greek and Arabic, and thus might reflect
either a common corpus or knowledge of Slavic (which at this
time was acquiring the status of an international lingua
franca) well beyond the Khazar community. The Catalan Jewish
traveler to Central Europe in the late 10th century, Ibrāhīm ibn
Ja‘qūb, included the Khazars in his list of speakers of Slavic
(see Peisker 1905, 113, fn 2, 133).
Since most linguists and non-linguists alike
regard Yiddish as an outgrowth of High German from around the
10th century, I need first to motivate (albeit briefly) why I
believe that Yiddish is in fact a mixed West-East Slavic
language. Contrary to the popular view that Yiddish arose when
(Judeo-?)French- and Italian-speaking Jews settled in the
Rhineland and Bavaria in the 9th-10th centuries and eventually
adopted/adapted local German dialects (see Vajnrajx 1973), I
believe that Yiddish arose when Jews speaking Sorbian (a West
Slavic language spoken in the mixed Germano-Slavic lands) first
“relexified” their language to High German (and to a lesser
extent, Hebrew and “Hebrew-like”, or Hebroid) “phonetic strings”
approximately between the 9th-12th centuries (see details
below). This means that Yiddish began as a West Slavic language
with the unusual feature of possessing a predominantly German
lexicon. Yiddish speakers who created an original literature in
Hebrew, in the total absence of native speakers of Hebrew, had
to use their native Slavic grammar with superimposed Classical
Hebrew vocabulary to produce written “Hebrew”; this made the
unspoken Hebrew (and most recently, the spoken Hebrew that came
into being in the late 19th century) of the Yiddish-speaking
Jews a bizarre Slavic language of the same magnitude as Yiddish
itself (see Wexler 1990). By the 15th century at the very
latest, East Slavic Jews in the Kiev-Polessian lands, comprising
an unknown number of descendants of the Judaized Khazars,
relexified their native Kiev-Polessian speech to the Yiddish
that Ashkenazic immigrants brought to their area. Yiddish
itself, readjusting to contemporary High German pronunciation
norms, became now a lexifier source language for Kiev-Polessian.
Since Khazar Jews are known to have migrated westward both
before and after the collapse of the Khazar Empire in the late
10th century, it is conceivable that their descendants, if they
were also speakers of Kiev-Polessian, and if they had contact
with Yiddish speakers, could have already relexified to Yiddish
prior to the Ashkenazic migration to Kiev-Polessie (the
distribution of a Khazar tribal name in Central and Eastern
Europe suggests where the Judaized Khazars might have settled:
see Lewicki 1988 and discussion below). Important archaeological
materials that lend support to the thesis that Khazar (and
possibly Avar) Jews migrated westward into Europe are the stone
fragments with Jewish motifs and some Hebrew writing from the
6th-8th century found in Čelarevo (Vojvodina, Serbia) and Khazar
rings with Hebrew letters found in nearby Baranya district in
southwestern Hungary (see Bunardžić 1978-79, 1980, 1985, Kiss
1970).
The strong likelihood that speakers of Kiev-Polessian
relexified their language to Yiddish vocabulary by the 15th-16th
centuries presupposes the existence of a significant Eastern
Slavic-speaking Jewry. The latter, in turn, could only have its
roots, for the most part, in the Judaized Turko-Iranian Khazar
population that became Slavic-speaking after the collapse of the
Khazar Empire in the late 10th century (and probably also
before, limitedly). Hence, Yiddish offers the most reliable
indication of the fate of the “lost” Khazar Jewry and compelling
evidence for the claim that the contemporary Ashkenazic Jews are
not in the main descendants of Palestinian Jews.
In some areas Yiddish I (relexified Upper
Sorbian) and Yiddish II (relexified Kiev-Polessian) could have
coexisted, while in others they could have assumed a
complementary geography (e.g. Yiddish I might have prevailed in
Poland and parts of the Ukraine while Yiddish II reigned supreme
in the Belarusian and most Ukrainian areas), and, finally, in
some areas, the two Slavic Yiddishes, drawn together by a
similar relexified German lexicon and similar Slavic grammars,
could have fused. The origins of contemporary Yiddish dialects
should be sought in the mutual relationships between Yiddish I
and II rather than in coterritorial German dialects.
Now what is meant by relexification?
Relexification means that a borrowing language adopts “empty
phonetic strings” from a foreign language, while providing those
strings with its own native syntactic and semantic functions.
Hence, relexification is the mirror image of “calquing”, i.e.
the formation of loan translations of non-native patterns of
discourse using exclusively native morphemes (e.g. R
выглядеть ‘appear’, with its prefix ‘out’
and the verb ‘see’ copies the component structure of German
aussehen in the same meaning). In the case of Yiddish,
Slavic-speaking Jews replaced their native lexicon with
Germanisms, provided there were adequate overlaps between the
German phonetic strings and the corresponding Slavic words.
Where German lexicon underwent phonological or derivational
processes (e.g. morphophonemic alternations) that violated
Slavic norms, the Germanisms were usually blocked for use in
Yiddish. These lexical gaps had to be filled by retaining some
of the original Slavic lexicon or by using Hebrew vocabulary;
where the latter was lacking, Yiddish speakers had to invent
Hebroidisms (on the theoretical principles of relexification and
a rich bibliography, see Horvath and Wexler 1997).
In addition to the fact that Yiddish can only
make limited use of German resources, Yiddish often (under
Slavic pressure) requires that accepted Germanisms be ascribed
very idiosyncratic functions. Most native speakers and
non-native observers have assumed that Yiddish was either a
“deformation” or a “creative Jewish outgrowth” of High German,
with attrition of Germanisms and acquisition of Slavicisms
resulting from prolonged contact with the Slavic languages. Yet,
the only major component of Yiddish that does not display
significant innovative formal and/or semantic features is the
Slavic component; this suggests that Yiddish was a Slavic
language which uniquely exploited its two non-Slavic lexical
components: Hebrew/Hebroid and German(oid).
Many studies of Yiddish morphosyntax and
phonology have demonstrated the similarities between Yiddish and
Slavic grammars (I exclude from this generalization most Old
Yiddish texts, which are genetically Germanic and unrelated to
contemporary Eastern Yiddish dialects; on “German” and “Slavic
Yiddish”, see Wexler 1995). We have essentially two
methodological options for establishing the claim of double
relexification in Yiddish: (a) broaden the study of comparative
Yiddish-German-Slavic grammar, and/or (b) show how it is
possible to predict most of the Yiddish lexical corpus–in all of
its componential variety. In Wexler 2002 I chose the second
path, because corpus predictablity is a major diagnostic text
for the relexification hypothesis (and invalidates the
hypothesis of largescale Slavic influence on an allegedly
Germanic Yiddish), and because the results are more striking and
quicker to obtain than by a painstaking comparison of Yiddish,
German and Slavic grammars.
The early German corpus of Yiddish can be
predicted with considerable accuracy by comparing the lexicons
and derivational machineries of German, Upper Sorbian and Kiev-Polessian.
It is highly significant that we are able to anticipate which
Germanisms are likely to be acquired through relexification and
which are likely to be blocked from incorporation in Yiddish,
and, hence replaced by non-German components. Blocked Gemanisms
are replaced by original retained Slavicisms and Hebraisms; we
cannot predict which Slavic and Hebrew components will be used
in Yiddish, and but we can predict where in the lexicon Slavic
and Hebrew (and especially Hebroid) components are apt to
appear. The ability to make such predictions with an extremely
high degree of accuracy is the most important diagnostic test
for relexification. For example, related G Ahne
‘ancestor’ and Enkel ‘grandchild’ cannot both be expected
in Yiddish since Slavic languages require different roots; not
surprisingly, Yiddish has ejnikl ‘grandchild’ but ▲oves
for ‘ancestors’.
The high volume of blocked Germanisms in
Yiddish, predictable only by the relexification hypothesis,
explains why Yiddish has such an unusually large corpus of
Hebraisms and Hebroidisms, far in excess of the Hebrew corpus of
other Jewish languages. When the reduced extant Semitic Hebrew
texts failed to supply replacements for blocked Germanisms,
Yiddish speakers had to invent new Hebrew forms, as well as new
meanings for old words. Germanisms used in Yiddish exclusively
in violation of Slavic norms are few in number, and most of the
examples can be identified as relatively recent
post-relexification loans (after the 1600s and usually in
consciously Germanized speech).
Relexification takes place exclusively when a
speech community is seeking a new identity. Why, for example,
might Sorbian-speaking Jews have relexified their language to
High German vocabulary? A plausible answer is that numbers of
pagan Sorbs identified themselves as Jews when they became
household slaves of local Jewish owners or in order to avoid
being sold into slavery by the Germans and Scandinavians. This
is tantamount to saying that it was mainly Sorbian converts to
Judaism who had the motivation to relexify, rather than the Jews
themselves (see the evidence for conversion in Wexler 1991,
1993). This means that many so-called “Jewish” languages are
better called “languages of converts to Judaism”. I assume that
the Khazar ruling class that converted to Judaism in order to
preserve neutrality vis-ŕ-vis the Byzantine Christians and the
Arab Muslims in the Baghdad Caliphate also found relexification
(this time to Yiddish and again to High German) attractive as a
means of accentuating their newly acquired Jewish religious
profile.
Most linguists and historians have assumed
that the Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants arriving from the
Germano-Slavic lands vastly outnumbered the indigenous
Slavic-speaking Jews that they encountered in the Eastern Slavic
lands (see most recently Geller 1994, 26). This assumption is
based on the paucity of Yiddish-speaking observors who mentioned
encountering monolingual Slavic-speaking Jewries before the 17th
century (for details, see Wexler 1987). It is also likely that
Yiddish speakers enjoyed a higher cultural and material level
than the indigenous Slavic Jews, thus making Yiddish an
attractive language for the latter. Yet, the revelation of
Kiev-Polessian traits in the grammar of Old Yiddish (such as the
dual number; see below) suggests that Slavic speaking Jewries
were widespread at the time of the Ashkenazic eastward
migrations. In order to affect such changes in the grammar of
(Sorbian) Yiddish I, one would have to assume the numerical
preponderance of the Slavic-speaking Jews over the
Yiddish-speaking immigrants. I wonder if the Slavic-speaking
descendants of the Khazars, who presumably shared a common
culture with their non-Jewish neighbors, may have regarded
Yiddish (and Ashkenazic culture in general?), in periods that
prized a heightened ethno-religious identity, as a tool for
accentuating the growing differences between themselves and the
coterritorial Slavs who were gradually undergoing
Christianization. The closeness of Western and Eastern Slavic
languages at the time would also have facilitated the second
relexification process.
The conjectured paucity of Yiddish speakers
(regionally or overall) would have presented Kiev-Polessian Jews
with the difficulty of acquiring Yiddish from native speakers,
thus reinforcing the Kiev-Polessian “impact” on Yiddish. The
presence of a prosperous German middle class in many urban
centers of Eastern Europe (see Martel 1938, 195-196) could also
have contributed to the attractiveness of Yiddish, which looked
like a form of German. Polish sources from the 13th-14th
centuries regarded the local Jews as speakers of German, i.e. as
a religiously defined subgroup of the German colonists (Zientara
1974, 25-26). The identification of Yiddish speakers with the
prestigious German language also could have swayed the Kiev-Polessian
Jews to adopt Yiddish. A benefit of these Polish sources is that
they provide a terminus post quem for the first
relexification phase: the 13th century. The latter date is also
confirmed by the fact that Sorbian Jews began to migrate to
Poland at that time, and they are not described by
contemporaries as being Slavic speakers. Given the practicality
of German as a language of international trade, the burgeoning
urban middle class and the legal system (see the application of
the Magdeburg Law to Slavic cities), we must also reckon with
the possibility that Yiddish could have spread from the German
lands in the absence of significant numbers of native speakers.
There is no way to know in what precise areas
Slavic-speaking Jews resided before the Mongolian/Tatar invasion
in the early 13th century. But this invasion presumably
propelled large numbers of Jews and other Slavs northward into
the Belarusian lands (which had escaped the Mongols relatively
unscathed) and westward into what was to become the Eastern
Polish lands (in which a majority Ukrainian and Belarusian
population resided); thus, the Tatar invasion must be seen as a
sine qua non for the crystallization of Ashkenazic Jewry
in the Kiev-Polessian lands and the second relexification phase.
After the Tatar onslaught subsided, the Polish rulers invited
Germans and Sorbian Jews inter alia to settle in the
depopulated Eastern Slavic lands that they took over (see Martel
1938, 197). The Polish colonization of the Eastern Slavic lands,
by encouraging the eastward migration of Sorbian
Yiddish-speaking Jews (as well as the simultaneous westward
migration of Slavic Jews?), would have also been a prerequisite
for the second relexification phase. While Jews and Germans are
frequently found side by side in some of the Polish lands, this
is rarely the case in Belarus’ and Ukraine. Moreover, Polish
Yiddish differs from that of the Eastern Slavic lands. These
facts hint at a non-western origin for most of the Ashkenazic
Jews. The use of a German lexicon by Jews should not deceive us
into thinking that the speakers of Yiddish must also have come
from the West (just as the use of English by Afro-Americans,
either in European or African Creole form, does not mean the
speakers descend from the British Isles!).
In addition, Khazar Jews joined Hungarian
tribes in their migration into Central Europe before the 9th
century. Lewicki 1988 has shown that place names based on Khazar
tribal names (e.g. Kabar) appear in Hungary, northern
Yugoslavia (Vojvodina), Poland, Austria, Slovakia, western
Rumania, as well as in Ukraine and Southern Russia. Hence, the
second relexification could actually have been initiated in
Western or Central Europe, if contact was made there between
Sorbian Jews speaking relexified Sorbian (= Yiddish I) and
Khazar Jews speaking Eastern Slavic ([Judeo-]Kiev-Polessian).
This raises the possibility that the time lag between the two
relexifications might have been quite modest.
Yiddish appears to have valuable information
on the western borders of the Kabar tribe. Consider the set of
related German roots (of Middle High German origin): (a)
begraben ‘bury’, graben ‘to dig’, Graben
‘ditch, trench’, Grab ‘grave’, Middle High G grabćre
‘gravedigger’/ (b) G Begräbnis ‘burial’,
Totengräber ‘gravedigger’, Gräber ‘digger’/ (c)
Grube ‘cavity, pit, mine’/ (d) Gruft
‘sepulchre, tomb, vault’/ (e) grübeln ‘ponder,
muse, brood over’. Of this set Yiddish has acquired only the
following morphemes: (a) bagrobn ‘bury’, grobn
‘to dig’, grobn ‘ditch’, (b) (ba)greber
‘gravedigger’/ (c) grub ‘pit; mine’. Yiddish lacks
the German root for ‘grave’, using instead ▲kejver
‘grave; tomb’, ▲kvure ‘burial’, ▲kvores-man ~ ▲kvoresnik
‘gravedigger’, ▲brengn cu kvore ‘bury
(Jewish)’, while inventing karke ▲‘(Jewish) burial
ground’ (< He qarqa‘ ‘land’). (b) G Totengräber
‘gravedigger’, though attested in Middle High German, is not
ordinarily used in Yiddish, perhaps because of the ambiguity of
G Gräber ‘graves’ ~ ‘gravedigger(s)’; Germanisms with
multiple meanings that lack a Slavic parallel are often blocked
in Yiddish. Slavic languages express ‘gravedigger’ by an
agentive noun (rather than a compound noun), see e.g. Uk
грабар, гробар,
могильник (the
failure of synonymous Middle High G grabćre, without
Umlaut, to license relexification suggests the latter was
unknown to Yiddish speakers).
German (d-e) are blocked in Yiddish
since Upper Sorbian and Eastern Slavic lack a set of related
roots that cover such a broad semantic terrain. See So (a)
pohrjebać ‘bury’, hrjebać ‘to dig; scratch in the
earth’, přirow, přěrow, hrebja ‘ditch,
trench’, mohila, rownišćo ‘mound’, row
‘grave’/ (b) pohrjeb, chowanje ‘burial’,
tótka, rowar, rowryjer ‘gravedigger’/ (c)
jama, row ‘cavity, pit’/ (d) rownišćo,
row ‘sepulchre, tomb, vault’/ (e) sej hłowu
łamać ‘ponder’ (lit. ‘break one’s head’). See also Uk
гребати ‘bury; be disgusted by;
neglect; scorn’, гребти ‘to
row; bury’.
It is surprising that any forms of (a)
surface in Yiddish at all, in view of the formal similarities of
the cognate Slavic forms (though they are not similar
semantically). However, the existence of Yiddish Hebraisms for
‘bury’ and the existence of Y ■rov (< So row
‘ditch’) or ■riv (< Uk рів)
suggest that even G (a) Graben ‘ditch, trench’
may have also been initially blocked in Yiddish. The association
of (historically unrelated) G Graben and So row
could have taken place while Common Slavic *g was
either still a stop in Upper Sorbian or after it had become a
fricative between the 12th and late 14th c (see Schaarschmidt
1998, 95-97 and Old So hrow!); h before a
consonant tends not to be pronounced at all in contemporary
Upper Sorbian.
Y ▲kejver ‘grave, tomb’ could have
become popular due to its similarity to a partly Judaized Khazar
tribal name, the Kabars, who participated with the Magyars in
the settlement of Hungary. Old Polish Latin documents reveal the
terms Kawyary (near Sandomierz 1387) and Kawyory
(near Kraków, late 14th century) as names for Jewish cemeteries
(for further Polish and Belarusian toponyms, see Wexler 1987,
212, fn 86). The most westerly attestation of the term appears
to be in the second component of G Judenkiewer
(Magdeburg, early 16th century), interpreted as Judenkiew
with the German plural suffix -er (see Wexler 1987, 213
and fn 99). Magdeburg has one of the oldest Jewish communities
in Slavic Germany, dating from the second half of the 10th
century. I assume that the Polish Latin terms come from the name
Kabar, and that when knowledge of the Judeo-Turkic
ethnonym was lost among the Jews, the term could have easily
been reinterpreted as He qever. For ‘cemetery’, Yiddish
has a variety of Hebraisms and Aramaisms, e.g. ▲besojlem,
▲bes-almen, ▲bejsakvores ‘Jewish cemetery’ ~ ■molkes,
etc. ‘non-Jewish cemetery’ < Slavic. German terms for ‘cemetery’
are not usually attested in Yiddish, see e.g. Friedhof,
Kirchhof (> So kěrchow).
All models which regard Yiddish as a form of
German assume that Yiddish became progressively Slavicized
through time. But the “Slavicization” hypothesis has two
difficulties: (i) One has to prove that Yiddish speakers had an
intimate knowledge of Slavic; mere contact with (Judeo-)Slavic
speakers would not have been sufficient to account for the
extensive “Slavicization” of Yiddish. It is imperative to
collect evidence for widespread Yiddish-Slavic bilingualism from
all historical places and periods. (ii) It is significant that
there is little variation among Eastern European Yiddish
dialects regarding the extent and even the very details of the
Slavic impact (only a small recent corpus is of local origin:
see Ljubarski 1927; Swoboda 1979-1980, 1990). How could Yiddish
speakers, living across such a broad territorial expanse, agree
on these details if the source of the Slavic influence in
Yiddish is ascribed to bilingual interference in situ?
If Yiddish is a Slavic language rather than a
Germanic language with a heavy Slavic imprint, then the
characterization of the German component of Yiddish as native
and the Slavic component as non-native is erroneous. The
assumption that Yiddish is a Slavic language that underwent
intensive Germanization of its lexicon rather than a Slavicized
German dialect offers a smoother analysis of many hitherto
vexing problems in Yiddish linguistics. Also it seems
counterintuitive to claim that a language could be so radically
influenced by interference from another language, as a Germanic
Yiddish would have to be. Languages which have been in close
contact with Slavic for as long, or almost as long, as Yiddish
do not reveal the extreme “Slavicization” that allegedly
characterizes Yiddish. Significantly, the Slavic and German
components of Yiddish are largely in complementary distribution,
with Slavic found almost exclusively in the grammar, phonology
and phonotactics and German influence confined mainly to the
lexicon. Impressionistically, about three quarters of the
lexicon of contemporary Eastern European Yiddish are of German
origin; the remainder consists roughly of Hebrew-Aramaic (c.
15%) and Slavic components (c. 10%) and a handful of unique Old
Romance components that are unattested in German. One would be
tempted to argue that the relatively impoverished German
component of Yiddish, measured both by the quantity of its
German roots in comparison with the putative German lexifier
dialects, and the near absence of Yiddish synonyms of German
origin, could easily be ascribed to attrition after many
centuries in contact with Slavic languages. This is not
convincing since (i) Yiddish never lost contact with German in
Eastern Europe, and (ii) we can largely predict the original
German lexical corpus of Yiddish and identify post-relexificational
Germanisms (i.e. after the 16th century). Indeed, all relexified
languages appear to have a smaller superstratal lexicon than the
lexifier dialect itself; compare Haitian Creole with French.
Finally, if Slavic were the cause of the attrition of the German
component of Yiddish, we should expect a far larger Slavic, but
certainly not a Hebrew, component.
The linguistic evidence for my two-tiered
relexification hypothesis in the genesis and history of Yiddish
can be summarized under five headings (here in brief; for
further details, see my 2002):
(a) German morphophonemic alternations
(derivational patterns) that do not enjoy Upper Sorbian and/or
Kiev-Polessian parallels are blocked in Yiddish. German roots
which match roots with similar form and meaning in Upper Sorbian
and/or Kiev-Polessian (the words in question are mainly
cognates) were usually blocked in Yiddish, since they were
apparently perceived as Slavic elements. It is difficult to
determine how much similarity in form and meaning is required to
cause blockage of a Germanism. The following German words are
available to Yiddish apparently since their Upper Sorbian
(pseudo-)cognates are formally and/or semantically sufficiently
different and the genetic relationship apparently was not
immediately clear to naďve bilinguals, e.g. G heilen ‘to
cure’ > Y hejln, G Heilung ‘cure’ > Y hejlung,
a cognate of So cyły ‘all’ (curiously, G heil
‘whole, uninjured’ is not regularly used in Yiddish).
Presumably, G Tausend ‘thousand’ is acceptable to Yiddish
as tojznt since cognate So tysac, Uk
тисяча are too distant formally.
German roots are blocked in Yiddish if Upper
Sorbian and/or Kiev-Polessian translation equivalents do not
broadly overlap semantically. Future studies will need to
determine whether the matching of German and Slavic lexicon by
relexifiers (leading to the decision to relexify or block
Germanisms) operated on the minimal domain of individual words
or on the maximal domain of root sets. For example, Upper
Sorbian has a set of derivatives that includes móc
‘power; be able; possess’, pomhać ‘to help’, pomoc
‘help’, móžno ‘possibly’. The likelihood of finding a
German root with derivatives matching most or all of these
meanings is small. The relexifiers would then have to choose
between (i) linking all the Slavic and German forms as a set,
and (ii) matching only parts of the two root sets, in accord
with the principle of semantic similarity. It would appear that
the second option is almost always elected. Thus, So móc
‘power’, móžnosć, móžnota ‘possibility’ are
relexified to Y (cognate) maxt, miglexkejt, but So
móc ‘be able’ > Y kenen, while So pomhać ‘to
help’ and pomoc ‘help’ > Y helfn and hilf.
If the first option had been selected, much more of the German
lexicon would have been blocked, thus necessitating an even
greater number of Hebraisms and substratal Slavicisms; in other
words, relexification would have been in practice impossible.
The problem is that if Hebraisms (replacing blocked Germanisms)
were also acquired to express some of these meanings, it is not
immediately clear if their presence is due to the failure to
match all the forms of So móc with a single German
root, or because of disparallels between parts of the two
paradigms. For example, alongside kenen ‘be
able’ (< German), Yiddish also uses ▲zajn
bekojex, ▲zajn bixojles, (humorous)
▲joxlen; for ‘perhaps, possible’, Yiddish has ▲efšer,
▲tomer alongside miglex < German.
Most likely, these Hebraisms were acquired because of the
awkwardness of the un-Slavic alternation of cognate G kennen
‘know’/können ‘be able’ and the use of different
Slavic roots for part of the paradigm, e.g. So snadź, snano
‘perhaps’.
(b) Yiddish frequently lacks the volume of
German-origin synonyms that can be found in most German
dialects.
(c) Yiddish uses the plural marker ■/▲-(e)n
(< G -[e]n) with German nouns in violation of German
norms and often in imitation of the “pseudo-dual” in Kiev-Polessian.
This suggests that Yiddish once had a dual category. (See my
2002 for the argument that Y ■/▲-[e]n was chosen
because of its similarity with the Common Slavic root infix
-en- which became partly linked with the plural number, see
Uk ім’я
‘name’, genitive імени ~ ім’я,
plural іменa.)
The
distribution of the plural marker (■)-(e)n in Yiddish
differs radically from that of its German counterpart, in that
it generally matches Ukrainian and Belarusian (and less
frequently Russian) nouns which have a separate ending after the
numerals 2-3-4 which consists of the plural ending + the
singular stress position. This ending can be called the “new
pseudo-dual” (since it differs from the Common Slavic dual
endings and involves 3 and 4). The pseudo-dual is restricted to
the nominative-accusative cases; in other cases the numerals
govern the normal plural forms. Only Ukrainian and Belarusian
nouns with mobile stress are potential candidates for the
pseudo-dual; in contrast, Y (■)-(e)n is not restricted to
nouns following a numeral. This would be consonant with the
genuine dual which might have been obtained from Upper Sorbian
in the first relexification phase. Since the Yiddish
distributional facts now correlate well with the
Ukrainian-Belarusian pseudo-dual, it might be more appropriate
to speak of a pseudo-dual in Yiddish as well. Significantly, the
pseudo-dual is not widely used in Ukrainian, Belarusian or
Yiddish with nouns which denote a paired object (e.g. ‘ear’,
‘eye’, ‘scissors’). Furthermore, the pseudo-dual in Ukrainian
and Belarusian (< Kiev-Polessian) can survive since it has
formal marking; Yiddish lacks the ability to shift stress onto
desinences (due to German influence). Since presumably the
Yiddish pseudo-dual was originally not employed widely with
nouns denoting paired objects, it not unexpectedly fell into
disuse and (■)-(e)n became unambiguously a marker of
plural number.
I suggest that the Kiev-Polessian pseudo-dual
became part of Yiddish when Kiev-Polessian was relexified to
Yiddish (and German) lexicon (presumably effacing the Upper
Sorbian dual). Nowadays, (■)-(e)n denotes plural number
exclusively. The rich literature on bilingual interference gives
no examples of a dual category successfully borrowed by a
language previously lacking the category. Hence, a dual number
in Yiddish would be powerful evidence in support of the
relexification hypothesis.
Contemporary Yiddish tends to apply the (■)-(e)n
plural ending on phonological grounds (i.e. depending on the
final consonant of the singular stem). This fact serves to
obfuscate the historical functions of Y (■)-(e)n; still,
a sizeable number of old Germanisms in Yiddish which arguably
took the (■)-(e)n ending when it had a dual function can
still be identified. I presume that originally nouns with (■)-(e)n
in a dual function had another suffix to denote the plural.
The pseudo-dual is far more productive in
contemporary Ukrainian than in Belarusian; the Belarusian
dictionary compiled by Sudnik and Krywko (1999)
has approximately 150 examples, mostly feminine nouns, while
Ukrainian dictionaries cite over 600 nouns with the pseudo-dual,
again, mainly with feminine nouns (see Pohribnyj 1964). Whereas
Belarusian now has only about 15 masculine nouns, Ukrainian has
over 200. Moreover, the distribution of the pseudo-dual in
Ukrainian forms a better match with Y (■)-(e)n than
Belarusian, thus providing precious linguistic support for the
assumption that the bulk of the Kiev-Polessian Jews of mainly
Khazar origin who first became Slavic speakers originally
resided in the southern (i.e. pre-North Ukrainian) part of the
territory. Yiddish data may also raise the possibility that East
Slavic nouns now lacking the pseudo-dual once had it; e.g., Y
trer(n) ‘tear (in the eye)’ could only have its (■)-n
from Br сляза which has a
pseudo-dual, since cognate Uk сльоза
presently has stress shift in the root but no pseudo-dual.
Either Y trer(n) was modeled on Br сляза,
or Uk сльоза once had the
pseudo-dual. Alternatively, the -n plural of synonymous G
Träne (unknown in Yiddish) may be the basis for the
Yiddish plural choice (especially after relexification).
There is no way to posit an accurate
chronology for the pseudo-dual in Ukrainian and Belarusian since
stress is rarely marked in texts before the 16th century, but
the existence of the phenomenon in both Ukrainian and Belarusian
dialects suggests a Kiev-Polessian origin, i.e. predating the
14th-century (the date that Shevelov notes as the first
attestation of the plural in Ukrainian after ‘2’: 1963,
234-236). Sorbian could not have developed a pseudo-dual since
the stress became fixed on the initial root syllable between the
12th-14th centuries (Schaarschmidt 1998, 87-88) and the original
dual category survived.
The East Slavic use of stress to distinguish
the plural and pseudo-dual could, in theory, have been
maintained in Yiddish after the second relexification phase. For
example, some Yiddish nouns distinguish singular and plural
stems by stress shift (together with a plural marker), e.g. (■)miníster
(plural ministórn) ‘minister’ < G Miníster or
Uk мінíстер
(with fixed stress, ultimately < Latin), ▲tálmed
(talmídim) ‘student’, ■pól’ak (pol’áken) ‘Pole’. In Y
fúrman (furmánes) ‘driver’, the components are of German
origin but (following So wóznik, Uk водій)
lack the suppletion found in Middle High G vuorman (vuorliute).
However, there are no examples of a non-singular noun in Yiddish
with two stress patterns, say ■ministórn plural vs. *minístorn
dual. The age of moveable stress in Yiddish nouns is
unknown; it is widely believed that the Yiddish pronunciation of
Hebrew loans probably arose in a language other than Yiddish. (I
suspect that the tendency to move stress to plural endings in
Modern Hebrew is either of East Slavic origin or Old Hebrew
supported by parallelism with East Slavic.)
The Yiddish dual must have become
unproductive sometime after the second relexification phase in
the 15th-16th centuries, to judge from the fact that Yiddish
productively uses (■)-(e)n as a plural marker far in
excess of G -(e)n (though modern German influence also
contributed to the productivity of Y [■]-[e]n).
When a Yiddish noun with (■)-(e)n
corresponds to a number of Ukrainian terms, only some allowing
the pseudo-dual, we can reconstruct the likely Slavic input for
relexification. For example, Uk lavka ‘shop’, but not
kramnycja, takes the pseudo-dual. Hence, I assume
that the Yiddish choice of (■)-n in gevelb(n ~ -er)
‘shop, store’ was motivated by Uk лавкa
(vs. G Laden [Läden]). Consider also Uk війнa
(with the pseudo-dual) ‘war’ ~ Y krig(n) vs. G Krieg(e).
While synonymous Uk бій and
боротьба both lack the
pseudo-dual, the corresponding Y kamf ‘struggle, fight,
combat’ pluralizes with (■)-n (vs. G Kampf[Kämpfe]).
I suspect that Yiddish came to innovate in its distribution of
(■)-(e)n in the dual function especially after the second
relexification phase, when the Slavic substratum no longer
operated so pervasively, and/or Jews gradually became
monolingual in Yiddish. This seems borne out by the likelihood
that Y kamf–with -f is a recent acquisition
(vs. older Y kop with -p < G Kopf).
A number of German, Slavic and occasionally
Hebrew nouns in Yiddish take two or three plurals, usually
without semantic implications, see e.g. Y vogn(s ~
vegn ~ vegener) ‘cart’, kni(es ~ -en ~ zero plural)
‘knee’, noz (nez ~ ne[j]zer ~ rare -n)
‘nose’. Multiple pluralization in Yiddish could (i) result from
the merger in the standard language of different dialectal
choices, (ii) reflect differences and changes in
productivity through time and space, (iii) result from a
survival of the original plural and dual endings.
In Y ▲lošn ‘language’, double
prefixation seems to entail a dual meaning; contrast the
expected plural ▲lešojnes vs. lešojnesn ▲‘(Classical)
Hebrew and Aramaic’ (Rejzen 1926, column 409). The “union” of
the latter two languages is possible because they are closely
related Semitic languages with common unspoken literary and
liturgical functions in the Yiddish-speaking communities; as a
result, they are also called by the common Y glottonym ▲lošn
kojdeš (lit. ‘holy language’). Double prefixation with
Germanisms in Yiddish sometimes provides a means of
distinguishing between dual number (with single prefixation) and
plural number (double prefixation). The creation of the
unambiguous plural form Y ojgenes ‘eyes’ (~ G Auge[n])
suggests an attempt to remove the ambiguity of ojgn
‘eyes’, which is conceptually dual or plural; ojgenes
plural would leave ojgn (vs. G Augen plural) free
to mark the dual unambiguously.
Yiddish has some compound nouns of non-German
origin with a dual meaning which are used in the literary
language mainly as a plural and in colloquial Yiddish in the
singular, e.g. Y (■)tate-mame ‘(two) parents’ (lit.
‘father’ + ‘mother’), ■zejde-bobe ‘(two)
grandparents’ (lit. ‘grandfather’ + ‘grandmother’). The first
example matches Polish ociec i mać, attested since the
early 15th century or Uk батько-мати;
the second example matches So dźěd a wowka
‘grandparents’.
(d) The gender assignment of many German and
Hebrew nouns in Yiddish dialects follows the gender of the Kiev-Polessian
rather than of German and Hebrew translation equivalents, see
e.g. Y bet feminine, neuter ‘bed’ ~ Uk ліжкo
neuter (all Slavic neuters > feminine in Yiddish) vs. G Bett
neuter exclusively.
(e) An important piece of evidence for the
hypothesis that Kiev-Polessian contributed some unrelexified
lexicon comes from the geography of Eastern Slavicisms in
Yiddish, many of which appear to come specifically from southern
and western Belarusian and northern and western Ukrainian
dialects–i.e. precisely from the area of the original Kiev-Polessian
dialect up until its disintegration and realignments in c.1400,
see e.g. Y ■bereze, ■ber’oze ‘birch’ ~ ubiquitous
Br бярозa,
while бярэзa
is rare and limited to the southwest area; see also Uk
березa (Dyjalektalahičnyj
atlas belaruskaj movy 1963, map #29); Y ■bloxe ‘flea’
~ Uk блоха ~ блиха
(Atlas ukrajins’koji movy 1984, map
#84). It is impossible to determine whether the number of
unrelexified Kiev-Polessianisms in Yiddish was originally larger
than it is today, or whether in the last six centuries since the
disintegration of Kiev-Polessian, many Kiev-Polessianisms have
been replaced by new Ukrainian and Belarusian localisms.
While there is broad agreement that Polish
and the three Eastern Slavic languages are the major donors,
there is no unanimity over the origins of many individual
Yiddish Slavicisms. The relexification hypothesis offers a means
of separating substratal from adstratal Slavicisms in Yiddish.
More Eastern Slavicisms appear in Polish Yiddish than
Polonisms in Eastern Slavic Yiddish. This fact was noted by
Šulman (1939, 82), who cited a figure of about 10% Polonisms
among the Slavicisms in Eastern Slavic Yiddish, as opposed to
some 50% Eastern Slavicisms in Polish Yiddish, see e.g. PolY ■mučen
‘to torment’, ■p’ate ‘heel’, ■pi(š)čevke ‘trifle’
(< Uk мучити, п’ята,
підшивка ‘lining’ vs. Pol
pięta, męczyć [> Central PolY ■menčen],
podszewka).
The relatively small number of Polonisms in
Ukrainian-Belarusian Yiddish is remarkable for three reasons: (i)
At the end of the 19th century the Jews constituted the dominant
ethnic group in both small and large towns in the Vicebsk and
Mahilëw gubernijas alongside Poles. (ii) According to the
traditional theory, Jews allegedly migrated from Germany across
Poland into Belarus’ and Ukraine. (iii) The meager impact of
Polonisms on Eastern Slavic Yiddish stands in sharp contrast to
the direction of diffusion of Slavicisms between Polish and the
Eastern Slavic languages. The Polish impact on Belarusian and
Ukrainian is much greater than the impact of the latter on
Polish dialects, i.e. we see the opposite of the intra-Yiddish
situation. No less than 14% of the Ukrainian vocabulary has been
shown to be of Polish origin (Shevelov 1975, 452-453, fn 12).
The intensive Polonization of Belarusian and
Ukrainian means that some of the Polish impact on Eastern Slavic
Yiddish may have come into the latter through the secondary
intermediary of Belarusian and Ukrainian. This further reduces
the direct impact of Polish (or Polish Yiddish) on Eastern
Slavic Yiddish, since a certain amount of the Polonisms, from
the point of view of the Yiddish target dialects, are
essentially Ukrainianisms and Belarusianisms. For example, Y ■jatke
‘meat market’, though ultimately of Polish origin, could have
been acquired directly from Pol jatka or from Uk
яткa (where
the Polonism first appeared in the 16th century). Another
problem in identifying Polish influences in Yiddish is that
Eastern Slavicisms can assume a Polish-looking form in Yiddish,
e.g. Y ■blote ‘mud, filth, dirt’ could be < Uk
болото ‘swamp, marsh; mud, dirt’ with the
loss of the initial unstressed syllable, and not necessarily
from Pol błóto.
Two other possible indications of
unrelexified Judeo-Slavic corpus are when Yiddish Slavicisms
either differ from coterritorial Slavic formally or are rare
Slavicisms/Slavoidisms; both types of lexicon are critical for
reconstructing the outlines of a Judaized Eastern Slavic. One
example is Y ■pral’nik ‘laundry beetle’. Br
пральнік, Uk
пральник are found only at
scattered points in south central Belarus’ (on the
Ukrainian border), at some points in northwest Ukraine next to
the Belarusian frontier and in the areas between Rivne and Luc’k
and between Rivne and Novhorod-Volyns’kyj (see Wexler 1987, 95,
186-188; forms such as Br [a]пранік,
Br, Uk прач, etc. are the
preferred terms). See also Pol dialectal praln’ik
‘laundry beetle’ in the Sejn district, perhaps < Belarusian. The
scattered nature of the few surviving locales with Br
пральнік and Uk пральник
suggests a once popular form in Kiev-Polessian.
Finally, there are concepts which are
expressed in Yiddish by Slavic elements often without German or
Hebrew synonyms; these terms appear to be substratal elements
that withstood relexification in the first and second
relexification phases, probably in order to denote
culture-specific terms. These Slavicisms fall into a number of
unrelated semantic domains, see e.g. Jewish religion and culture
(this is a very significant fact, see e.g. Y ■trejbern
‘porge the meat of ritually forbidden parts’ ~ Uk
теребити ‘to peel, shell; eat greedily;
clear a field’), flora and fauna. Many of the Eastern Slavic or
Upper Sorbian terms in Yiddish denoting flora and fauna are also
widely used in early Slavic toponyms, e.g. Slavic bagno
‘swamp’ is much rarer in Slavic placenames than
Slavic blato, etc. (and aside from Ukrainian and
Belarusian, limited to West Slavic languages); the latter is
used in Yiddish but not the former. The retention of some Slavic
tree terms, see e.g. Y ■dub ‘oak’, ■bereze ‘birch’
(and variants), may reflect the revered status of these trees in
pre-Christian Slavic society (see Gimbutas 1967, 744-745). The
blockage of relexification to Germanisms is also likely in the
semantic domain of topography. Many Slavic roots which are still
abundantly attested in German place names of Sorbian and
Polabian origin are preserved in Yiddish (where they are
presumably of Sorbian origin), e.g. Y ■ričke ‘stream,
creek’ < So rěčka, Uk річка.
Sorbian fruit terms are often kept in
Yiddish. For example, today Yiddish lacks G Beere
‘berry’, using uniquely ■jagde of Slavic origin; see also
Y ■malene ‘raspberry’ < So malena, Uk
малинa vs. G
Himbeere (~ Maline < Slavic). Also some Slavic food
terms appear to have been retained in Yiddish, see e.g.
■blince ‘pancake’. The Southeastern German
dialects have borrowed the term as well. Yiddish may have
succeeded in retaining the Upper Sorbianism perhaps because the
German baked goods were prepared in a different way. Kieser
(1972, 164) notes that Plinsen was mainly made out of buckwheat
flour and milk. Владимирская (1982,
75) discusses the different meanings of R блин(ц)ы
in dialects of the Balakleev region of
the Xarkiv oblast’.
When Yiddish has concepts that have a
parallel in Slavic languages but not in German, I would expect
to find such concepts denoted in Yiddish by unrelexified
Slavisms or newer Hebraisms/Hebroidisms. An example is Y ▲mexutn
‘father-in-law’. If Yiddish speakers fail to use the Slavic
equivalent (e.g. Uk сват), this
could reflect a change in its original meaning, either among
Yiddish and/or Slavic speakers, thus necessitating the use of a
new word in Yiddish. A new disparallelism, either during or
after the second relexification phase, could have necessitated
the use of a distinctive Hebroidism, like Y ▲mexutn
(see Wexler 1993, 174, 1997). Interestingly, in some East
Slavic languages, the term denoting ‘matchmaker’ (either male or
female) is also expressed by the same root, see e.g. R
сват, свахa.
But in Yiddish, ‘matchmaker’ is expressed solely by Hebroid ▲šatxn.
This is reminiscent of the Ukrainian dialectal practice of
distinguishing сват,
свахa
‘parent-in-law’ from старостa
‘matchmaker’ (< старий
‘old’). The use of a special term ‘parent-in-law’ is typical of
Slavic, Turkic, Mongolian but not German.
While Eastern Yiddish dialects reveal Kiev-Polessian
grammatical features that could not have entered the former via
bilingual interference, there are almost no Altaic grammatical
or phonological features in Yiddish (with the possible exception
of the periphrastic construction for Hebrew verbal elements
shown below). This suggests that the descendants of the Khazar
Jews acquired Yiddish when they were already predominantly
Slavic-speaking. The geography of these lexical terms and the
grammatical construction within Yiddish (within Germany as far
west as the original limes sorabicus dividing the Holy
Roman Empire from mixed Germano-Slavic areas in the 9th century)
and their presence in other languages support the claim of a
Khazar migration to Western Europe (i.e. western German lands)
before the collapse of the Khazar Empire at the hands of Kievan
Rus’ in the late 10th century. An open question is how long the
Kiev-Polessian Jews retained fluency in a Turkic language.
Several years ago I raised the possibility of a Turkic
substratum that might have manifested itself in the stereotyped
Ukrainian speech of Jews in Ukrainian plays (so-called
“intermediaries”) of the 17th-18th centuries. The chief feature
of the Jewish Ukrainian speech was sibilant confusion, which
could be ascribed to a Turkic language, though other
explanations for the stereotyped speech come to mind (see
details in Wexler 1987, 192ff and 1994).
Yiddish has three types of evidence for
specific links with Turko-Iranian-speaking (Jewish?)
communities:
(a) Yiddish ordinarily uses a periphrastic
conjugation to integrate Hebrew verbal material.
Most Hebrew verbal material reaches Yiddish
in the form of the masculine singular participle, which becomes
indeclinable in Yiddish and must be conjugated periphrastically
by means of one of two German auxiliary verbs. Occasionally,
Eastern Yiddish conjugates Hebrew finite verbal material in a
standard, non-periphrastic conjugation; dual integration of a
single Hebrew stem is rare, see e.g. batkenen ▲‘inspect
(slaughtered animals for impurities)’ ~ periphrastic ▲bojdek
zajn ‘examine, scrutinize, inspect’ < Hebrew bādqū
‘they inspected’ and bōdeq ‘he inspects, inspecting’ + G
sein ‘be’, respectively. The periphrastic conjugation is
intended almost exclusively for Hebraisms in Slavic Yiddish; it
is exceedingly rare in Western (German) Yiddish and is totally
unknown in German Rotwelsch (slang), where the non-periphrastic
conjugation prevails. The periphrastic conjugation for Hebraisms
is available to other Jewish languages, such as, e.g. Karaite
(also used for Arabisms), 17th-century Judeo-Eastern Slavic and
Balkan Judeo-Spanish. Significantly, the periphrastic
conjugation is also extremely productive in Iranian, Turkic
languages and Dungan (the Chinese spoken by Muslims) for the
integration of Arabic verbal material. The geography of the
periphrastic conjugation prompts me to suggest that the Yiddish
construction might have its roots in a Judeo-Turkic language,
such as Khazar. In that case, the periphrastic conjugation most
likely would have reached Yiddish only in the second
relexification phase. I also suspect that the actual
distribution of the periphrastic conjugation in Yiddish reflects
the use of parallel periphrastic and/or compound constructions
in the Kiev-Polessian substratum, and hence can block German
translation equivalents (see details in my 2002).
The fact that German may also use prefixed
verbs or verbal complements does not seem to affect the
distribution of the Yiddish periphrastic conjugation. For
example, Y ▲bojdek zajn ‘examine, scrutinize, inspect’ is
matched by German terms which were blocked in Yiddish for one
reason or another, see e.g. G be(auf)sichtigen, beobachten,
beschauen, (er)forschen, (nach)prüfen, untersuchen, etc. The
non-periphrastic Y batkenen expresses a ▲‘religious
inspection’ (vs. Old Hebrew ‘inspect’), for which there is no
immediate German counterpart. The Ukrainian translation
equivalents are always prefixed verbs or verbs which tend to
have an adverbial complement, see e.g. Uk допитувати,
наглядати, оглядати,
перевіряти, (старанно)
досліджувaти,
вислухувати. In Yiddish, the
notion ‘to slander, calumniate’ requires a prefixed Germanism, a
simplex with a complement or a periphrastically
integrated Hebraism, such as Y baredn < redn
‘to talk’ (< G bereden, also ‘talk over, discuss,
persuade’, meanings unattested in Yiddish), ▲redn rexiles
ojf (lit. ‘speak gossip about’), ▲mojce-šemra zajn ojf
(lit. ‘take out a bad name on’), ▲redn rišes (lit.
‘speak evil’; the second term also means ‘anti-Semite’), ▲maxn
a bilbl (lit. ‘make confusion, libel’), ▲malšn zajn ojf
(< lit. ‘inform against’). The corresponding Ukrainian terms
also tend to be periphrastic, see e.g. Uk зводити
наклеп, порочити репутацію
‘to slander, calumniate’ (lit. ‘bring slander, insult a
reputation’, respectively) ~ non-periphrastic but prefixed
доносити, обвинувачувати,
засуджувати ‘denounce’.
(b) Yiddish has occasional Hebraisms with an
atypical Ashkenazic phonetic form. Y ▲ta’arebret ‘bier’ <
Old He ţāhārāh should be either tohoro in
Ashkenazic “whole” Hebrew (i.e. monolingual Hebrew texts
read by Yiddish speakers) or “merged” (i.e. colloquial) Y
to’ore. The qamac and pataħ diacritics in Old
Hebrew > Yiddish as /o ~ u/ in open and /a/ in closed syllables.
Other exceptions are found in Slavic Hebraisms, see Br
кагал ‘Jewish community
(organization)’ (vs. Y kōl, kūl). The deviant reading of
the Hebrew diacritics could theoretically be a relic of the
reading norms of Khazar Jews inherited by Ashkenazic Jews.
Similarly, unexpected forms of Hebraisms in Western Yiddish
(created to the west of the Elbe river) could be vestiges of
Judeo-French or Judeo-Italian reading norms (see Jacobs et al.
1994, 396-397; Wexler 1988, 96-116).
(c) Yiddish has a few Iranian words which are
also attested in Eastern Slavic, but not always in the same form
and meaning. This suggests that Yiddish could have acquired the
terms through its own contacts with the relevant source
languages and not indirectly through coterritorial Slavic
intermediaries. Two variants of a single Iranianism are (i) Br,
UkY šabaš ‘tip given to a musician at a wedding by guests
who participate in the dancing’ and (ii) pan-Y šibeš
‘trifle; small coin’ (the latter is spelled as if it were a
Hebrew term but has not acquired the meaning of He šibūš
‘complication’, which could theoretically also become *šibeš
in Yiddish). The first variant, usually in a truncated form
(but often with a meaning closer to that of the second variant),
is found in non-Jewish languages extending from Russian to Dutch
slang (see Wexler 1987, 64-69, 218 and 1993, 108-110). The
meaning of the first variant, restricted to Yiddish, is
identical to that of the etymon of both variants—Persian
šābāš.
In 1993 I regarded the Ashkenazic Jews as a
“Slavo-Turkic people in search of a Jewish identity”; that may
have been an appropriate description for the first
relexification phase. For the second relexification phase, first
proposed in 2000, it is more accurate to speak of a
“Turko-Slavic people”. Hopefully, geneticists will soon have
something to say about the changing mix of Slavic and Turkic
ethnicities in the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazic Jews; for the
time being, though, Yiddish linguistics is the sole proof of a
Khazar component in the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazic people.
Footnotes
ąThe following symbols of component origin
are used with examples: ▲ = Hebrew origin, ▲ =
Hebroidism; ■ = Slavic origin, ■ = Slavoidism.
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