[gothic-l] Re: Jiddish

[Marja Erwin marja-e@riseup.net [gothic-l]]

Do the earliest Yiddish texts look East Germanic or West Germanic? Do they have the sound shifts, masculine o-declension endings, etc. associated with East Germanic or West Germanic?

Where East Germanic would include Biblical Gothic and the little known of Crimean Gothic, while West Germanic would include Old English, Dutch, and German.

I don’t know Yiddish, but I gather it is supposed to be West Germanic, and practically German, just a different dialect than literary German.

I suppose we could explain that by West Germanic influence on an East Germanic language, but if so, the earliest texts should have the most East Germanic features, in addition to Turkic and of course Slavic borrowings.
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