Jiddish

Wed Jun 11 20:31:53 UTC 2014

 To anyone with a knowledge of language-change and the histories of the Germanic languages, the idea of Yiddish descending from either Wulfilian or Crimean Gothic is absurd, to say the least. Even a cursory comparison of High German, Yiddish, and Gothic reveals that the number of phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features shared by High German and Yiddish far far exceeds that shared by Yiddish and Gothic.

 It should also be borne in mind that the Graeco-Latin textual sources as well as archaeological findings agree that between circa 375 and 450 AD, the Goths of the latterday Ukraine abandoned this area en masse for land in the west. An enclave of "Goths" remained in the Crimea, but this group does not appear to have been particularly numerous and was confined to the south western tip of the peninsula, sharing the area with a number of other ethnic groups.

 Fallacious is the argument that because Gothic is a Germanic language, like Yiddish, and some Goths are known to have remained in the Crimea, the Yiddish used in this area must therefore stem from Gothic.

 The very idea that a peripheral minority could have seen their language adopted broadly and, further, altered so as to share a huge number of features typical of High German specifically - above all, when such features are completely absent from the small corpus of extant Crimean Gothic, contemporary with the earliest records of Yiddish - boggles the mind.

 And how can Viking-Age Gotlanders have any bearing on Crimean Gothic? The supposition that the 'Got-' of Gotland and 'Gut-' 'Gothic' descend from the same Proto-Germanic root proves nothing. The Canadian province of British Columbia and the South American country of Columbia share the same name but have absolutely no historical or cultural connection.

 Edmund
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