Prof. Vulf Plotkin, D.Sc.

On the role of genetic, areal and ethnocultural factors
in the formation and evolution of Yiddish

1. Is Yiddish a "mixed" language?

There was a time when Yiddish was not even mentioned as a distinct language in books on Germanic linguistics, which accounts for the characterization of Yiddish as a stepchild of traditional Germanistics [cf. Lötzsch 1990, p. 17]. Apart from other factors that have nothing to do with linguistics, this oversight of Yiddish, widespread both among Germanists and native speakers of the language, stemmed from the notion of Yiddish as a mere variety of German, substandard at that - hence the widely used disparaging designation of this language as "the jargon".

Such disregard of Yiddish is a thing of the past now, as special chapters on Yiddish are included into Germanistic compendia [Hutterer 1990; Berkov 1996], and two German universities - in Düsseldorf and Trier - have established chairs of Yiddish at their philological faculties. However, a tendency is evident in recent studies of Yiddish which impedes unbiased investigation of the process of its formation as a distinct language and of its place among the Germanic languages. While the inclusion of Yiddish into the list of Germanic languages is no longer questioned, it is nevertheless regarded as too peculiar among them and thus somewhat peripheral. That trend is manifested in attempts to present Yiddish as a "mixed" or ”fused” language, whose main characteristic is a blending of elements coming from three disparate sources - Germanic, Slavic and Semitic.

Whereas the abandoned practice of not recognizing Yiddish as a distinct language was based on the exaggeration of its genetic proximity to German, labelling Yiddish as a "mixed" language overestimates the weight of the non-Germanic components introduced into its system due to the impact of areal and ethnolinguistic factors. The areal factor was the bilingualism of practically the entire East European Jewry throughout its history. Since the second language, widely used in communication with the ambient population, was Slavic - Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian, later Russian, numerous Slavic borrowings were absorbed into the vocabulary of Yiddish, noticeably affecting its grammar and pronunciation as well. The ethnolinguistic factor accounts for the large number of borrowings from Hebrew, which was more or less familiar to all Jews as the language of religious worship.

Characterization of Yiddish as a "mixed" language is implicitly predicated on the linguistic fallacy of regarding the vocabulary as the pivotal component of a language system. From that naive viewpoint Yiddish, whose vocabulary contains elements of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic origin, could indeed be called "mixed", but the same term should then be applied to many, perhaps even most languages of the world, including at least one other Germanic language, namely English, in the vocabulary of which Romance borrowings are twice as numerous as the Germanic lexical inheritance. However, the numerical prevalence of borrowings in the English vocabulary is offset by the much higher frequency of the native words in texts, which is most essential for the comparative assessment of the role of certain components in the language system.

Moreover, what matters most is not just the difference in the usage frequencies of borrowed and native vocabulary components. The vocabulary is only one of the three subsystems functioning within the language system, and the other two, namely the grammar and the phonology, far outweigh its significance in the system as a whole. Unlike the vocabulary, which is highly susceptible to ethnocultural influence and submits to deliberate control, including the introduction of borrowed words, neither grammar nor phonology are subject to such extrasystemic interference. It is highly indicative in this respect that French, despite its huge impact on the English vocabulary, failed to affect the grammar and phonology of English, which remained practically impenetrable to French forms and phonemes.

The problem of the place Yiddish occupies among the Germanic languages should therefore be studied in all its aspects, with due account of the relationship between its three genetically distinct components not only in its vocabulary, but in its grammar and phonology as well.

2. When and where was Yiddish born?

There is no need here to go deep into the history of Yiddish, but some of its aspects have a direct bearing on the problem under consideration. First and foremost among them is the question of the time and place of the emergence of Yiddish as a distinct language. Tradition sets its origins in Germany at the start of the 2nd millennium AD. According to a different opinion Yiddish was born several centuries later, and its birthplace lay outside Germany [Lötzsch 1990, p. 7].

In discussing this problem it is useful to look at the broader ethnolinguistic picture of language usage in Jewish communities all over the world. On the one hand, the language of the ambient population is typically used not only for interethnic communication, but serves as the everyday language within the Jewish community and family. On the other hand, the use of Hebrew is not restricted to its religious function - it is also a source of words denoting diverse objects, actions and states not necessarily linked to religious observance. The widespread recourse to the Hebrew script when writing in the everyday language is also a significant factor. The adoption of Hebrew borrowings into the everyday language and the use of Hebrew characters to write in it led to the emergence within the language of the country of a peculiar ethnocultural dialect spoken by the Jewish community. Such Jewish dialects have functioned for many centuries in Farsi, Arabic, Spanish, Turkish, Amharic, Marathi, Georgian, Tati; later they developed in Russian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and other languages. The Jewish dialect of American English is well documented [cf. Rosten 1970]. It should be stressed, however, that neither an influx of borrowed words into a dialect nor the use of a different script can affect the basic structure of the language to which the dialect belongs strongly enough to set the ethnocultural dialect apart and to turn it into a new, distinct language.

Such an ethnocultural dialect of German was used by the Jewish communities in mediaeval Germany since the 10th century. Its speakers called it ivre-taitsch, which literally means "Jewish German", adequately characterizing it as the Jewish dialect of German. Traditional studies of Yiddish treat ivre-taitsch as the earliest stage in the history of the language and as its Western dialect in the subsequent stages [Hutterer 1990]. A less categorical approach describes the pre-14th century period as the prehistory of Yiddish [Berkov 1996]. But the question whether ivre-taitsch was a dialect of German or a distinct language in its own right requires an unequivocal answer. Ivre-taitsch undoubtedly shared all the features of the Jewish ethnocultural dialects all over the Diaspora. As the age-long segregation of Jews in Germany gradually came to an end, ivre-taitsch lost ground to the High German standard and disappeared in the 18th century.

A precondition for the emergence of a new language by separation from the parent language is territorial dissociation, because coexistence of two closely related languages on the same territory is practically impossible for a prolonged time. On the one hand, this was the way in which Old English split from continental Old Saxon, Afrikaans from Dutch, and all the five Scandinavian languages were born to supersede their Norse parent. On the other hand, Low German, which had all the makings of a language, was not separated territorially from High German and therefore failed to develop as a distinct Germanic language, whereas its westernmost dialects in the Netherlands attained that status as Dutch. It is therefore plausible that Yiddish could become a distinct language only outside German-speaking regions.

The conditions for such linguistic separation appeared in the 13th and 14th centuries with the massive Jewish migration eastward, to Poland and Lithuania, which eventually merged into a single kingdom. As was the case elsewhere, the Jews started to use the local Slavic languages - Polish, Ukrainian and Belarussian, but unlike the situation in other Diaspora communities these languages were not adopted in everyday community and family life and were confined to communication with the ambient population. The reason for this deviation from the common practice in the Diaspora can be found in the peculiarity of Jewish settlements in Poland. Unlike Jews in Western Europe, who lived in towns side by side with the ambient nation, albeit in separate quarters, Jews in the Polish realm were allowed to settle in separate townships of their own, officially designated as miasteczko (diminutive of miasto 'town') and adequately translated into Yiddish as shtetl (diminutive of shtot 'town', comp. German Stadt). Life in ethnically homogeneous Jewish settlements evidently restricted contacts with the ambient population and thereby enabled the language brought over from Germany to continue functioning in the community and in the family. The first generations of migrants still spoke ivre-taitsch, which, however, gradually lost touch with German and started its independent evolution.

Remarkably, a parallel development took place elsewhere under similar conditions and with a similar result: the Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century and migrated to the Balkans spoke judeo-español - the Jewish dialect of Spanish, which developed with time into a new, distinct Romance language known as Ladino or Judezmo.

3. Does literary Yiddish adequately reflect the structure of the language?

The traditionally adopted norms of Yiddish hinder objective study of the relationship between the three genetically different components of this language. Because of the low standing of Yiddish among its speakers for practically its entire history it was seldom used in the higher sociocultural functions, where it could not compete with two much more prestigious languages - in secular circles German was preferred to the presumably substandard "jargon", while the religious Jews favoured Hebrew as the loshn-koidesh ('holy language'), leaving Yiddish as the mameloshn ('mother tongue') to the womenfolk, who, unlike men, were not expected to know Hebrew. As a result, the vocabulary of everyday Yiddish lacked many terms for exalted abstract notions. When fiction and periodicals began to be published in Yiddish in the 19th century, this lexical deficiency was filled by numerous borrowings from both German and Hebrew. At the same time the grammatical norms of Yiddish were adversely affected by the tendency to "emend" those forms and constructions which had deviated in the course of evolution from their German prototypes and were therefore regarded as "corrupted". The purge of products of the transformation of erstwhile German forms into distinct forms of Yiddish distorted the historic evolution of the new language.

The impact of Hebrew affected not only the vocabulary, which was inflated by numerous borrowings that were not in actual everyday use and were familiar only to men with a high level of religious education. The main victim was (and remains to this day) the spelling, on which a principle is imposed unknown to any Western language, namely, that while Yiddish writing is generally phonetic, the spelling of Hebrew words is sacrosanct and cannot deviate from the way they were written in the source language. If adopted elsewhere, it would require, for instance, that in the languages of Roman Catholic nations - French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and others - words should preserve their ancient Latin spelling. The principle in fact makes it impossible to write in Yiddish without thorough linguistic competence in another language, as it presumes the writer to be able to distinguish words of his/her native language by their provenance and to be proficient in Hebrew spelling. Metaphorically speaking, the Hebrew component of the Yiddish vocabulary is treated like an alien enclave exempt from the laws of the realm and ruled by its own prescriptions imported from abroad. The reason behind this extraordinary treatment of borrowings is purely ideological and has nothing to do with linguistics.

The overblown concern of traditional Yiddish standards for the inviolability of lexical, grammatical and orthographical elements of German and Hebrew origin leads to an inadequate reflection of the language system of Yiddish, belittling its independence and uniqueness. The traditional standards will therefore be disregarded here, and the author's lifelong experience of conversing in his mameloshn will provide the material for investigation.

4. The phonology

The structure of the phonological subsystem of Yiddish was shaped by the interaction between the Germanic and Slavic phonological characteristics. On the one hand, the monophthong vowels lost the phonemic opposition of protensity (long vs. checked), which is typical of Germanic languages, but absent in most Slavic languages, including those with which Yiddish was in close contact. On the other hand, Yiddish retained three typically Germanic narrowing diphthongs /ai/, /ei/, /oi/, for which there are no Slavic parallels. Slavic influence was undoubtedly instrumental in the appearance of the palatalized consonants /t'/, /d'/, /n'/, /s'/, /z'/, /l'/ and in the increased inventory of sibilants and affricates. The shift of word stress in Slavic and Hebrew borrowings towards the beginning of the word is obviously due to the Germanic pattern (cf. lOpete from Polish łopAta 'spade', khAsene from Hebrew khathunA 'wedding').

Not being a spoken language, Hebrew could not affect the pronunciation of Yiddish in any way. On the contrary, in borrowings from it not only the place of the stress was shifted, but the phonemic composition often changed as well, as in the latter example. It is noteworthy in that respect that the conservatism manifested in the demand to keep the spelling of Hebrew words intact was not extended to their sound shape, which resulted in divergent European and Oriental versions for reading sacred texts.

5. The grammar

Since the grammatical subsystem is the core of the entire system of a language, an adequate presentation of the relative impact of Germanic, Slavic and Hebrew elements on the formation and evolution of Yiddish must above all take into account their role in shaping the grammar of this language. The Germanic and Hebrew contributions in that respect are easy to estimate - elements of the former have indisputably provided the foundation for the grammatical subsystem of Yiddish, whereas the minor influence of Hebrew was confined to the retention of the forms of Masc. Pl. in the borrowed nouns with the inflection -im and the typically Semitic inner inflection (khOidesh 'month' - Pl. khadOshim). This borrowed pattern even attained a modicum of productivity, extending to some nouns of non-Hebrew origin (dOkter 'physician' - Pl. doktEirim) as well as to a few indivisible words originating from Hebrew phrases (klEzmer 'Jewish folk musician' from Hebrew klEi zEmer 'musical instruments' - Pl. klezmOrim). However, this is obviously a marginal phenomenon in the grammar of Yiddish with no effect on its foundations.

While assessing the Germanic foundations of the grammar subsystem of Yiddish, care should be taken not to identify Germanic with German. The latter is of course the direct source of most Germanic elements in Yiddish grammar. However, as Yiddish began to evolve into an independent language no longer in everyday contact with German, its grammar developed some features not inherited from the latter. Some are analogous to certain grammatical innovations in other Germanic languages - for instance, the Yiddish indefinite article a(n) diverged widely from its German ancestor ein and practically coincided with its English counterpart, whereas the definite article remained close to its German ancestor. Other innovations have no analogues in Germanic languages - thus, nouns in the North-East (Litvakish) dialect of Yiddish distinguish only two genders, unlike the other Yiddish dialects as well as German, where there are three genders. True, the inventory of noun genders was reduced from three to two in other Germanic languages as well - in Dutch and in most Scandinavian languages, where the Masculine and the Feminine merged in the Common gender, or Utrum, opposed to the Neutrum. But in North-East Yiddish it was the Neuter that disappeared with its nouns distributed between the Masculine and the Feminine - a change with no analogies in either Germanic or Slavic languages.

These examples show that the evolution of the Yiddish grammar subsystem was a process largely independent of external influences and determined mainly by intrasystemic factors. The process could sometimes run parallel to similar processes in other, not necessarily kindred languages, but it could also be peculiar to Yiddish alone. Caution is therefore in order before an innovation in Yiddish grammar is ascribed to external influence. Above all, it is requisite when Slavic influence is postulated in the evolution of the Yiddish grammar subsystem. Unlike German on the one hand, whose huge contribution played a decisive role in its shape, and Hebrew on the other, the impact of which was negligible, Slavic influence in this aspect was significant, but not to be overestimated. It is therefore important to investigate the Slavic impact on the Yiddish grammar in more detail.

The intensity of the Slavic impact was different in particular parts of the grammar subsystem. It was generally strong in the morphology of verbs, while practically absent from the morphology of nouns. But in the former not all the verbal categories were affected equally - there are no traces of Slavic influence in the categories of Person and Number, which are directly linked to the sphere of the noun, as well as in the category of Mood. As for the category of Tense, which is reduced in Yiddish to only three forms (Present, Past and Future) and thus has the same structure as in Slavic languages, it should be noted that this is a structure found in numerous languages of diverse origin, including another Germanic language, namely Afrikaans.

Three spheres in Yiddish grammar deserve closer consideration with regard to the Slavic influence in them, namely the categories of Verb Aspect and Voice as well as prefixation in verbs.

5a. Aspect

Since the category of Verb Aspect is well developed in Slavic languages, it is customary to ascribe the establishment of analytical aspect constructions in Yiddish to seemingly obvious Slavic influence. However, a closer look casts a serious doubt on this ascription.

Two such constructions are in frequent use: in one, which presents the action as momentary, the verb is used in its substantivized transform accompanied by the indefinite article and the auxiliary verb ton 'to do' or gebn 'to give' (a klap ton 'to knock once', a kuk gebn 'to look once'); the other, made of the Infinitive with the auxiliary flegn, presents the action as habitual in the past (mir flegn shpiln 'we used to play', er flegt leienen 'he used to read'). But nothing remotely resembling these constructions exists in the three Slavic languages with which Yiddish was in close contact since its emergence as a distinct language, and Slavic influence is thus effectively ruled out as a factor in the development of these constructions in Yiddish grammar. Direct analogues to them are found, however, in the English constructions give a knock, have a look, used to play, which provides grounds for regarding the analytical aspect constructions in both Germanic languages as products of parallel evolutionary processes caused by internal factors and unrelated to any external influence.

5b. Voice

The establishment of the Reflexive Voice in Yiddish grammar, which is not a category of German verbs, is regarded as a most vivid manifestations of Slavic influence. The categorial verb form was built from the German combination of the verb with the reflexive pronoun in the corresponding person and number, which has not solidified into an analytical verb form in German. In Yiddish it turned into such a form, as the pronoun lost its person and number distinctions and became a unified reflexive auxiliary, which initially had the same shape as the 3rd person reflexive pronoun sich. This analytical form is fully analogous to the analytical reflexive forms in Polish, where the reflexive pronoun się is used in the same auxiliary function. As the similarity between the reflexive verb forms in Yiddish and Polish goes beyond their structure, extending to their lexical scope, semantic content and usage, the strong Slavic impact on the Reflexive Voice in Yiddish is not in doubt.

That said, attention should also be drawn to certain aspects of the Reflexive Voice in Yiddish which are not so easily ascribed to Slavic influence. Of peculiar interest is a feature of the reflexive form which has not been recognized by Yiddish standards because it has deviated from its German origin. In the accepted standard the reflexive auxiliary zikh retains its identity with the German reflexive pronoun sich, although the latter does not function as an auxiliary in an analytical verb form. In Yiddish, however, a clear distinction has developed between the sound shapes of the 3rd person reflexive pronoun zikh and the reflexive auxiliary, which, unlike the former, is never stressed, is pronounced zakh, and its initial consonant is regularly assimilated to the preceding consonant (compare: Er golt zikh di bord 'He shaves his beard' - Er goltsakh 'He shaves'). The reflexive auxiliary in the analytical form was thus transformed into a suffix of the syntheticized verb form. Such syntheticization is observed in some Slavic languages as well, which would allow this development in Yiddish to be ascribed to Slavic influence. This, however, is problematic, because it is absent from Polish, that is, from the Slavic language whose impact on the formation of Yiddish was the earliest and the strongest.

Syntheticization as the final stage in the evolution of analytical forms, widespread in Slavic and Romance languages, is not typical of the Germanic group. Nevertheless, Yiddish is not its only member where this stage has been reached. A similar development took place in the Scandinavian subgroup, where it affected the same grammatical category of Reflexive Voice. An analytical reflexive construction was formed in Old Norse with the reflexive pronouns, which were later unified in sik, akin to German sich, and then transformed into the suffix -sk of the syntheticized reflexive, now -st or -s (Icelandic kallast, Danish kaldes 'be called'). The formation and evolution of the Reflexive Voice in Yiddish should thus be regarded as a process determined by both the Slavic impact and internal forces active in other Germanic languages as well.

5c. Prefixation in verbs

The impact of Slavic is particularly strong in the sphere of verb prefixation. It is a sphere well developed in both Germanic and Slavic languages, which, however, differ sharply in their prefixation patterns. As the grammar system of Yiddish has remained basically Germanic, the structure of prefixed verbs follows the Germanic pattern, but the semantic modification given to the meaning of the verb by the prefix is mostly of the Slavic type. As a result many Yiddish prefixed verbs are in fact exact loan-translations of their Slavic counterparts, and regular semantic equivalence is established between Germanic and Slavic prefixes.

For instance, the prefix unter- 'under-', which denotes position below or downward movement, became equivalent to the Slavic prefix pod-, which besides the same meaning has other meanings as well, and the prefixed Yiddish verb untervaksn is an exact translation of the Polish verb podrastać 'to grow up' with a meaning directly opposite to that of the basic meaning of the Germanic prefix. The prefix fanander-, morphemically indivisible unlike its German ancestor voneinander- 'from one another', is equivalent to the Slavic prefix roz- with the meaning of divergent movement besides other meanings, so that fananderjogn di ferd, like its Polish correspondence rozganiać konie, means not only 'to disperse, scatter the horses', but also 'to spur the horses on', where the original meaning of the prefix is lost.

6. Conclusion

The relationship between the roles of genetic, areal and ethnocultural factors in the formation and evolution of Yiddish, which determined the course and the outcome of the interaction between elements of Germanic, Slavic and Hebrew origin in its language system, can thus be summed up as follows: the Germanic elements remain determinant in all the three subsystems - grammatical, phonological and lexical; the Slavic contribution is considerable in all the three subsystems without, however, becoming predominant in any of them; the Hebrew elements make up a considerable part of the lexical subsystem, but are practically absent from the other two. Taking into account the hierarchical relationship between the three subsystems in the language system, in which the strictly organized grammar and phonology are structurally pivotal, while the much looser vocabulary has a different function, it can be inferred that -

(a) the evolution of Yiddish did not affect the basic Germanic nature of its language system;

(b) the absorption of a considerable amount of Slavic elements enabled them to exert a more or less serious influence on some aspects of the Yiddish grammar and phonology, which was not, however, strong enough to affect the Germanic foundations of the Yiddish language system;

(c) the impact of Hebrew was mainly confined to the vocabulary and did not affect the Yiddish grammar and phonology. The only aspect of Yiddish where the Hebrew influence is dominant is the script, but writing is not a constituent part of a language system.

The notion of Yiddish as a blend of Germanic, Slavic and Hebrew elements must therefore be discarded as totally unfounded [Lötzsch 1990, p. 8].

References

Berkov, V. P. Sovremennye germanskiye yazyki. (The modern Germanic languages). St.Petersburg, 1996.

Hutterer, C. J. Die germanischen Sprachen: ihre Geschichte in Grundzügen. Budapest, 1990.

Lötzsch, R. Jiddisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig, 1990.

Rosten L. The joys of Yiddish. New York, 1970.