[gothic-l] Re: Gothic, Yiddish and High German

[llama_nom]

Hi Tom,

I don't know anything about genetics, but according to this site,
the the question of the Khazar contribution to Jewish DNA is still
an open question.  See the bottom of the page.  There are plenty of
other sites arguing the case one way or the other, but a lot of them
seem to be ideologically motivated.

http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html

If your aquaintance can suggest any specific ways in which Yiddish
is more like Gothic, I'd be very interested to hear of them.  The
idea is new to me.  I'm not aware of any books or papers about
Gothic which make this claim.  On the face of it, Yiddish, from what
little I know, seems to be exactly how it's usually described: a
dialect of German, written in Hebrew letters, with a lot of Hebrew
words too.  The basic vocabulary looks very much like German, and a
cursory look at some vocabulary lists just now hasn't turned up any
points yet where Yiddish agrees with Gothic in constrast to German,
as far as I can see.  If there was a connection, it would have to be
very ancient and obscured by most of the sound changes that we think
of as characteristic of modern German, not just the High German
consonant shift, but i-umlaut and rhoticism of /z/ > /r/ -- none of
which exist in Biblical Gothic or Crimean Gothic.  In which case,
this hypothetical link may well have to predate the Khazar empire.

Llama Nom




--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, macmaster at r... wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am curious if anyone knows anything about the Yiddish language
and its
> possible ties to Gothic.
> While the conventional model of the origins of Yiddish has it being
> brought to eastern and central Europe from the Rhineland roughly
at the
> time of the Crusades and makes it a medieval Rhenish dialect, an
> acquaintance of mine asserts that the Yiddish language has more in
common
> (in grammar, morphology, vocabulary, etc) with the East Germanic
languages
> of the early middle ages than with the German of the Rhine.
> Not reading Hebrew and knowing less than "ein bissel Yiddishe", I
can't
> judge his hypothesis.  Maybe someone knows more and can speak on
this?
>
> thanks,
> Tom MacMaster





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