New book on (Slavic) history of Yiddish

[Loren A. Billings]

Richard Robin wrote:
>
> Hi, Seelangovtsy!
>
> As a non-specialist with a strong interest in Slavic
> historical linguistics, I would like to see a discussion
> of Wexler's ideas. _Two-tiered Lexification..._ is the
> latest of three major items Wexler has published over
> the last 10 years suggesting that Yiddish is a Slavic
> language relexified by German. (His even more
> controversial claim is that modern Hebrew is Semitically
> relexified Yiddish and therefore by extension an
> underlyingly Slavic language!)
>
> I don't know enough about Sorbian (or West Slavic in
> general) to begin to evaluate the veracity of his claims.
> But they certainly make for fascinating reading.
>
> Is anyone willing to weigh in on Wexler?

Although brought up on the historical phonology of most
Ph.D. programs in Slavic linguistics, I am not primarily
interested in historical matters, especially having to do
with diffusion (= language contact) in earlier periods.
Nor am I familiar with modern Sorbian, Belarusian, and
especially not Yiddish or Semitic languages as a whole.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do share Rich's
fascination with Wexler's ideas. For those who don't know
the person (and I met him only once at a conference), his
parents hail from the Ukraino-Belarusian area (this from
the front matter of his earlier book, Wexler 1974, though
I don't have that book with me at the moment). As of 2000
he had been employed at an Israeli university for quite a
while already. He was certainly very fascinating to talk
with during the aforementioned conference. I gather that
the other book Rich was referring to was Wexler 1993.

I guess what I'd have to say is that Yiddish is clearly
Germanic in its syntactic properties. I can't seem to
find core references, but I recall occasional mention of
of Yiddish in the syntactic literature which puts it
firmly within the Germanic typology. See, for example,
Vikner 1995. The problem is, however, there seems to be
no established way of doing historical syntax. I am a
relative newcomer to that field, having attended one
workshop on the topic recently; the heavyweights in
attendance--Ian Roberts, Anthony Kroch, and David
Lightfoot--seemed to have interesting things to say about
diachronic syntax, but no agreed-upon methodology, such
as the the neogrammarians hammered out in the late 1800s
for historical phonology and morphology.

What I'm getting at is that Wexler's methods are those of
the neogrammarians for the most part (looking at words
and affixes, but not phrasal configurations), with a bit
of sophistication in the area of contact/creolization. As
such, he seems to largely ignore syntactic considerations.
Thus, I don't see how Wexler would be able to account for
the syntactic nature of (modern) Yiddish (for example,
tell-tale germanic verb-second order).

I would very much appreciate it if someone better versed
than I am could correct any missteps I made in the
preceding discussion. I am not that sure of myself in
much of what I've said.

CITED WORKS:

Vikner, Sten (1995) _Verb movement and expletive subjects
     in the Germanic languages_ New York: Oxford
     University Press.

Wexler, Paul (1974) _Purism and language: a study in
     modern Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalism (1840-
     1967)_ Bloomington, Indiana: Research center of the
     Language Sciences, Indiana University.

Wexler, Paul (1993) _The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic
     People in Search of a Jewish Identity_ Columbus,
     Ohio: Slavica.


--
Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
Associate professor of linguistics
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Chi Nan University
Puli, Nantou, Taiwan 545 Republic of China

E-mail: billings at ncnu.edu.tw

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                  http://home.attbi.com/~lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------