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East Germanic Is Not Extinct - Yiddish As A Gothic Descended Language
Mainstream linguistics have incorrectly considered the East Germanic branch of the Germanic language family to be extinct. This however is not entirely true. Yiddish (The Jewish-Germanic language of Ashkenazi Jews) is a descendant of Gothic, although heavily influenced by German during the medieval period, after Crimean-Gothic-Jews moved westwards.
In her monumental work Historische Jiddische Semantik The language of bible translation as a factor in the progressive divergence between Yiddish and German vocabulary: (Max Niemeyer, Tűbingen, 2005) linguist Dr. Erika Timm become one of the first mainstream linguists to prove the relationship between Gothic and Yiddish as she demonstated that Yiddish has previously been incorrectly categorised as a High German dialect when;
"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 Charles Nydorf explains:
The earliest Germanic elements in Yiddish came, not from High German, but from Gothic or a closely related member of the East Germanic branches. Yiddish in its earliest stage which was probably before the seventh century of the Common Era, must have been very close to Gothic in its form. This very early Yiddish was spoken in southeastern Europe.
All Germanic languages that survive from this early period have undergone great structural transformations and Yiddish would not be expected to be an exception. So little of the original Gothic structure can be expected to be found in modern Yiddish. In its subsequent history, probably from the ninth century on, Yiddish has been heavily influenced by High German. Non-Germanic languages have also played a role in the formation of Yiddish.
These influences have also helped to efface the original Gothic character of Yiddish but substantial traces of Gothic remain.These are largely to be found in the Yiddish sound system. The Yiddish vowel system, particular in East Yiddish, is characterized by mergers that are typically Gothic: the vowels in the modern classes of words typified by 'shney' and 'heym' and 'zeyen' are one example of such a merger. Yiddish also has carried over a number of Gothic phonological process: r-umlaut, kh-umlaut and glide insertion. The Yiddish vowel system is much smaller than the High German one and many phonological processes found in High German are lacking in Yiddish.
Traces of Gothic morphology are also present in Yiddish but are probably less prominent. Perhaps the most striking is the "n" infix in words like 'leyenen.' and the formation of plurals with 's'. Lexical traces of Gothic are harder to identify: Yiddish has borrowed very heavily from High German and the Gothic vocabulary is not very well knowm. One of the clearest lexical examples may be the word 'oyganes.'
Some non-verbal cultural features have probably been inherited by modern Yiddish-speaking communities from the early Gothic world. Notable among these are animal style features of ornamentation in wood, stone and metal work as well as motifs that reproduce runic patterns.
The later history of Yiddish is largely one of High German influence on the original Gothic foundation. The nature of this influence is of great interest for general linguistics. Its specific mechanism of this influence was the development of a network of small Jewish communities between Ukraine and Germany. These communities traded, intermarried and exchanged linguistic materials in a characteriistc pattern where men typically moved when they got married. The result was the development of a diasystem: a series of dialects that are related to each other by sound substitutions made from a common inventory of sounds.
The Role of Crimean Gothic in the Formation of the Eastern Yiddish Dialects
As readers of this blog know, my research has led me to some unusual conclusions about the history of Yiddish. Yiddish is most commonly believed to have originated in Germany about 1000 years ago and to have been carried from there to eastern Europe where the majority of its speakers lived. Two things that have that generally been considered relevant to the history of Yiddish are Crimea and the Gothic language. Crimea is a peninsula of Eurasia which is not known to have had a Yiddish-speaking population before the 19th century when Jews began to settle there from other parts of the Russian Empire. Gothic is a Germanic language spoken by a people who migrated from northern Europe to the shores of the Black Sea around 250 CE. It gradually stopped being spoken on the European mainland after about 600 but continued to be used in Crimea at least through the 1500's.
In previous posts I have stated my general conclusions that there was once a Gothic speaking Jewish community in Crimea which played a role in the history of Yiddish. Recently, I have been able to come up with a more detailed historical narrative. In future posts I plan to supply the reasoning behind this reconstruction but here I just want to present it in broad outlines.
Around the 850's there was an active trade route between Austria and east Germany in the west and the Black Sea coast. Crimean Jews played a role in this trade. The Jews involved in this trade spoke a form of Gothic. By making inferences from later Yiddish it is possible to reconstruct some aspects of this language. It incorporated words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic. Often these were incorporated into Gothic by attaching Gothic elements to the Hebrew roots.
After about 900, this trade route declined. The Gothic speaking Jewish community now split into two groups which had, for a long time, relatively little communication.
One group continued to live in the Austrian and East German area. They were surrounded by speakers of German, a language that was fairly closely related to Gothic and they gradually shifted from speaking Gothic to speaking a language that was largely German but with an underlying structure that was retained from Gothic. This was an early form of Yiddish. The modern Yiddish dialect which resembles it most closely is the one that Uriel Weinreich named West Transcarpathian Yiddish.
Back in Crimea, the Jewish Gothic spoken there eventually took a new approach to Hebrew loans. Gothic morphemes were no longer attached to Hebrew roots. Hebrew nouns were given Hebrew plural endings and the roots of Hebrew verbs were used along with separate Gothic auxiliary verbs.
Around 1300, trade between the German lands and Crimea revived. Jews from the eastern parts of Germany and Austria re-established communication and some migrated to Crimea. They brought their language, the ancestral form of West Transcarpathian Yiddish along with a new approach to Jewish culture that had evolved in central Europe. Some Gothic speaking Crimean Jews adopted these cultural features and also learned Yiddish from these immigrants.
In this new environment Yiddish was no longer surrounded by German speakers but by speakers of Gothic. A new dialect, Crimean Yiddish developed under this renewed Gothic influence.
By the mid 1300's, major trade routes from Crimea led north into the developing Duchy of Lithuania and Polish Kingdom. Yiddish speaking Crimean Jews moved north along these routes, settling along them and bringing their Crimean Yiddish. In the Duchy of Lithuania it developed into the Northeastern Yiddish dialect.
In the Polish Kingdom the development was more complicated. There settlers from Crimea encountered Jewish settlers from eastern Germany and Austria who spoke the ancestral form of West Transcarpathian Yiddish.. Contact between this dialect and Crimean Yiddish led to the development of the Central and Southeastern Yiddish dialects.
In summary the eastern dialects of Yiddish formed as the result of three language contact events. The first involving a form of Jewish Crimean and German occurred along the the trade routes between the German speaking lands and the Black Sea around 850. This produced a dialect ancestral to modern West Transcarpathian Yiddish. Subsequently, the central European and Crimean branches of this trading community were separated The second event was renewed contact between speakers of this Yiddish dialect and speakers of Jewish Crimean Gothic which occurred around 1300. It produced the ancestor of modern Northeastern Yiddish. The third event occurred in the 1300's in the lands that became the Kingdom of Poland. There the contact was between the Crimean Yiddish ancestral to Northeastern Yiddish and the dialect ancestral to West Transcarpathian Yiddish. The products of this was the ancestor of the modern Central and Southeastern Yiddish dialects.
Posted by Charles Nydorf at 1:27 PM 2 comments:
Friday, May 24, 2013
A sketch of the history of the Yiddish dialects
I want to give a quick overview of how I see the Yiddish dialects emerging from a Gothic system. Early Yiddish developed out of Gothic in parts of Ukraine. Until about 1200, Early Yiddish remained in eastern Europe. The spread of Yiddish into Central Europe began in the 1200's reaching Austria first. There speakers of Bavarian German learned Yiddish. The Yiddish they learned was essentially a Gothic system but in the course of acquiring it they incorporated many Bavarian features. For example, the vowels in the words inherited from Gothic were redistributed to approximate the Bavarian vowel distribution. The resulting Bavarianized Yiddish constituted the ancestral form of modern West Transcarpathian Yiddish.
This Bavarianized Yiddish spread into Germany where it was learned by speakers of Central German dialects who modified it by incorporating material from Central German. The German Jews of the Rhineland also incorporated their unique and very old Hebrew vocabulary. This was the origin of the family of West Yiddish dialects that came to be spoken in Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, Luxemburg, Holland and Switzerland.
In all these dialects the incorporated German material was modified owing to its integration into the basically Gothic system of Early Yiddish. The nature of these transformations is a rich source of information about the structure of Early Yiddish. This particularly valuable as we have no texts in Early Yiddish.
A migration of West Yiddish speakers into eastern Europe began in about 1400. There these West Yiddish speakers came into contact with resident speakers of Early Yiddish. The newcomers acquired the Early Yiddish system while adding West Yiddish elements. The new forms of Yiddish that developed out of this process were the ancestral East Yiddish dialects.
This process had interesting parallels to the earlier development of West Yiddish. In that case a vowel distribution approximating that of a German dialect replaced the Gothic vowel distribution of Early Yiddish. In this case, the Gothic vowel distribution was replaced by one from West Yiddish.
Just as the transformations undergone by German elements integrated into West Yiddish testify to the structure of Early Yiddish, the incorporation of West Yiddish elements into East Yiddish gives
additional testimony about Early Yiddish structure. In both cases the transformations reflect structural processes that Early Yiddish inherited from Gothic.Read more: http://gothicyiddish.blogspot.com.au/As is argued in other essays, on this blog, the Germanic component of Yiddish goes back to an East Germanic, probably Gothic, root. This raises the question of how Gothic material came to be found in a language, Yiddish, which is first attested in medieval Germany.
One school of historians (e. g. Simon Schwarzfuchs "L'opposition Tsarfat-Provence" in "Hommage a Georges Vajda" edited by Gerard Nahon and Charles Touati, Louvain, Peeter, 1980 and Israel M. Ta-Shma "Creativity and Diversity" Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 2006 ) maintains that Ashkenazic Jews migrated to Germany largely from northern Italy between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Historical records of Jews in northern Italy are sparse for the eighth and ninth centuries when northern Italy was under the domination of the Lombard but Jewish communities are mentioned in Lucca and Pavia. Jews were well-treated under Lombard rule.
This Lombard Jewish community can perhaps be derived from a significant Jewish community that lived in Ravenna in the sixth century (see Thomas Hodgkin "Theodoric the Goth" New York, G. P. Putnam, 1891 and Bernard S. Bachrach "Early medieval Jewish policy in western Europe", Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1977) This community lived under the Ostrogothic conquerors of Italy and enjoyed very close relations with them.
It is not known from whence the Jewish community of sixth century Ravenna came from but their closeness to the Ostrogothic elite suggests that they migrated with the Ostrogoths from their previous settlement around the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea. It is not known if the Danubian homeland of the Ostrogoths had a significant Jewish population but another Gothic settlement further east on the Black Sea, the Crimean Bosporus, had an old Jewish community which came under Gothic rule in about 362. (see Gibson, E. Leigh "The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions of the Bosporus Kingdom" Tubingen, Germany, Mohr Siebeck, 1999 for Jews on the Crimean Bosporus and Alexander Alexanderovich Vasiliev "The Goths in Crimea" Cambridge, Mass., Medieval Academy of America, 1936) for Goths in Crimea).
The Crimean Gothic community was separated from the Ostrogothic community from the late fourth century until the mid-fifth century by the Huns who dominated the intermediate area along the Black Sea. But the Huns lost control of this region after the death of Attila in 454 and Goths and Jews from Crimea were free to join the increasingly powerful and prosperous Danubian Ostrogoths on their march to the west.
To flesh out this hypothetical reconstruction; the Ashkenazim began as Jews of the Crimean Bosporus who allied themselves with the Goths who got control of the Bosporus in about 262 CE. These Gothicized Jews joined the Ostrogoths of the lower Danube on their migration to Italy under the leadership of Theodoric the Great in 493. They settled in northern Italy, particularly in Ravenna and remained in northern Italy after the Lombards, a West Germanic people, conquered Italy in 568.
Jewish life in northern Italy is sparsely documented but by about 800 Jews are reported at least as traders to the north of the Alps in Regensburg under the rule of Charlemagne. After the death of Charlemagne in 841, the German lands did not thrive. An economic revival began under the Saxon Empire between 919 and 1024 associated with the rise of eastern German cities like Erfurt, Merseburg, Halle and Magdeburg, all of which are thought to have had significant Jewish populations. This period was followed by that of the Salian Empire from 1024-1125 when Jews, some of whom moved from northern France, settled in Speyer, Worms and Mainz (SHUM).
The first written products of Ashkenaz come from the central Rhineland communities of SHUM in the eleventh century. From these earliest surviving writings, scholars like Abraham Grossman and Israel M. Ta-Shma have been able to build up a picture of medieval Ashkenazic culture. From this one gets the sense of a proud culture with a sense of great antiquity. It is a culture that adheres strongly to local customs which are seen as variants of a tradition directly passed from ancient Israel. Naturally, this culture puts a very high value on Hebrew literacy.
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Originally Posted by Шишани
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