to google/should be "who is a Slavic speaker?"

Tue Nov 20 12:17:20 UTC 2007

I replied to Prof. Taube privately before. The best testimony about relexification is describing the process of learning a revived language, with knowing "the other". I am a native speaker of Russian and at one point (mid-seventies) learned Hebrew to function in it intellectually, not only in the streets. When, However, I came to the US and started learning how to use English actively, as well as Biblical Hebrew for exegetic purposes, did I discover what learning a truly foreign language actually entailed. Only in retrospect did I understand that what I had learned in Israel, near perfectly, was Russian relexified: it was a piece of cake and everything "made sense" in the terms of my native Russian. 
Another interesting point is that this modern Hebrew, Russian relexified, is surviving: people speak and read in it, and even write wonderful, controversial literature, such as Agnon's, where a Biblical quote sounds like a Church-Slavonicism in Leskov's Russian--always recognizable as deceptively similar  vocabulary but a different, marked structure. In fact, by clashing his re-lexified Russian (and partially German, and not always through Yiddishisms) with Bibleisms, Agnon creates a Hebrew literary style as unique as that of Leskov's in Russian. So there are ways in poetics to urge relexifications to take root, and thereby make the revived language survive, by making this new structure clash with the traditional. As usual, cross-breeding helps to make the species survive, and purists lose. But everyone knows this who has worked with poetics and not merely with languages as sociolects. Paradoxically, the more a poet bends the language, the better it is tempered. Look at Shak
espeare.
o.m. 

----- Original Message -----
From: colkitto <colkitto at ROGERS.COM>
Date: Monday, November 19, 2007 10:40 pm
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] to google/should be "who is a Slavic speaker?"

> I will take the liberty of quoting from my review of Dixon The Rise 
> and Fall 
> of Languages (1999)
> 
> "...... disentangling all the different strata in so-called hybrid 
> languages 
> is admittedly difficult, but not impossible, if proper use is made 
> of all 
> available items of evidence. Eggers (1998) provides examples of how 
> close 
> analysis of linguistic material can often disentangle quite fine 
> strands, in 
> this case various Judeo-Romance, Bavarian, Slavic, and Hebrew 
> components in 
> Yiddish."
> 
> .........
> 
> [A] much-discussed phenomenon in historical linguistics is 
> relexification, 
> which involves situations where a language preserves its original 
> grammatical structure during a period of close language contact 
> while 
> borrowing most of its lexicon from another language. Some of the 
> examples 
> cited by Thomason & Kaufman (1988), and discussed by Dixon, appear 
> to this 
> involve this process (see above). Welsh may also provide a relevant 
> example. 
> Currently in South Wales a form of relexification appears to be 
> actually 
> under way. Many children in Glamorgan and the Rhondda whose first 
> language 
> is English are being educated through the medium of Welsh. However, 
> there 
> have been no actual Welsh-speaking communities in those areas since 
> about 
> 1850. The Welsh that such children actually use, however, may be 
> described 
> as English structure with a Welsh lexicon: partially parallel to 
> the 
> Yiddish/Hebrew situation described by Wexler. This type of Welsh is 
> called 
> bratiaith (jargon), and is regarded with scorn by many speakers 
> from North 
> Wales, who often claim that it is incomprehensible. However, if the 
> decline 
> of Welsh in rural communities coupled with the increase in numbers 
> of 
> speakers of bratiaith continues, one day the latter might be the 
> only type 
> of Welsh left.
> 
> So-called revived languages may also constitute partial examples of 
> relexification. Further on (Chapter 8, p.111n.), Dixon cites Hebrew 
> as a 
> canonical example of a revived language. He points out that Modern 
> Hebrew 
> has borrowed syntactic constructions from the Indo-European 
> languages spoken 
> by Jews before they switched to Hebrew.fn. Similar criticism has 
> been voiced 
> of revived Cornish, which is mostly based on the language of 
> medieval 
> miracle plays. As Dixon points out, the examples of Hebrew (as well 
> as 
> Cornish) show that even if language revivalists are successful in 
> persuading 
> a critical mass of speakers to (re)learn and (re)use dead or 
> moribund 
> languages, the revived languages often undergo massive structural 
> borrowings 
> from the native or functional languages of the speakers who are 
> making the 
> switch. This is all the more reason to heed Dixon’s concluding call 
> (135-138) for recording languages currently on the brink of 
> extinction.
> fn. In a recent series of works Wexler has proposed that Yiddish, 
> and by 
> extension Modern Hebrew, are actually Slavic languages which have 
> undergone 
> massive relexification (see Wexler 1993, and the literature cited 
> therein). 
> His proposal has remained controversial, see, e.g., the mainly 
> negative 
> reviews cited in Wexler 1993:305). "
> 
> Eggers, Eckhard. 1998. Sprachwandel und Sprachmischung im 
> Jiddischen. 
> Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.
> 
> Thomason Sarah G. & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact: 
> Creolization 
> and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
> 
> Wexler, Paul. 1993. The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic people in 
> search of 
> a Jewish identity. Columbus: Slavica."
> 
> So the question is: are processes such as massive structural 
> borrowing and 
> relexification enough to move a language from one family into 
> another? 
> Wexler clearly thinks that they are. He may well have a point.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----
> Use your web browser to search the archives, control your 
> subscription  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS 
> Web Interface at:
>                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----
> 

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