off-topic linguistics question

[Peter Richardson]

A friend who knows much about these matters answers:

>
> I just re-read a comment I received many years ago on the name "Sabad."
> It's a very rare variation of "Shabad" or "Szabad," which are actually
> pretty common.  But I have never come across another "Sabad" anywhere in my
> 19th century research.  It does appear in the Vilna Ghetto lists of WW II,
> but nowhere else.
>
> The man who commented on the name, Dr. David L. Gold, said that it is "the
> sabesdiker-losn" form, whereas "Shabad" is "the non-sabesdiker-losn" form
> of Northeastern Yiddish.  Aside from being hilariously funny, what does
> that mean?  And what is the significance of using one rather than the
> other?  I don't think there could be a geographical significance, since
> virtually all Sabads-Shabads I've ever seen--with the exception of a few
> from Bylo-Russia--came from Vilna, the city or the district.


In brief: North East Yiddish (NEY) is the Yiddish spoken in Vilna/Vilnius
and more broadly in an area loosely equivalent to Lithuania, known as
Lite.
It is the language of "litvaks" - that is, Jews from Lite (rhymes , though
sometimes with a shorter i, and excluding the final vowel - with Rita).
Among the features of NEY (until the mid to late 19th c when it recedes as
a derided regionalism, unlike many other features of the NEY dialect which
were to become the model for Standard Yiddish [SY] in the 1920s and to the
present)  is the confusion of hissing and hushing sounds, the linguistic
problem that gives English the word shibboleth. Thus people who speak
sabesdiker losn are people who cannot pronounce the phrase shabesdiker
loshn (language of the sabbath) as it is pronounced in all other dialect
areas. NEY also sometimes confuses z and zh: my parents had a friend who
called my sister Susan Shuzhn. The unsurpassed description of sabesdiker
losn was published by Uriel Weinreich in _Word_ VIII in 1952 pp 360-77.
Edward Sapir describes the phenomenon  in "Notes on Judaeo-German
Phonology," _Jewish Quarterly Review_ VI (1915-16) 231-266.