Max Weinreich, the founder of Yiddish linguistic studies, clearly declared Yiddish as a fusion language, i.e. a de facto mixed one. Despite this statement, studies of Yiddish have so far been carried out primarily within the framework of traditional linguistics, based on the assumptions of the Language Tree Model. However, this research has failed to provide satisfactory answers to a number of questions concerning several typological characteristics of the idiom of Eastern European Jews. These distinguish Eastern Yiddish from the members of the Germanic family, and especially from German, its putative genealogical ancestor.
It bears noting here that in this volume, we focus exclusively on Eastern Yiddish. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, we use the linguonym Yiddish to refer to the historical and contemporary speech forms developed by Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews, as per generally accepted parlance. When discussing the Ashkenazic varieties used in Germany and Western Europe, we use the term Western Yiddish.
The peculiarities of Yiddish in comparison to German varieties include grammatical features such as a more elaborate consonant system as opposed to the vowel system, aspectual forms, free word order, or word formation and syntactic patterns. Similarly in semantics, features like the lexically expressed continuum from hypocoristic to augmentative forms or the elaborated conditional mood are of particular interest. It is a linguistic fact that Yiddish shares these and many other elements with the Slavic languages. Conversely, the said characteristics are either absent or only marginally represented in German, including its historical and regional varieties. The matter of the straightforward interlinear translatability of Yiddish sentences into Polish or Ukrainian, both in terms of syntactic and pragmatic equivalence, also merits attention. Therefore, in this volume, we would like to shed new light on the study of the linguistic effects of long-term Jewish-Slavic social and cultural relations using the latest methods of contact linguistics.
Moreover, research on the potential influence of the Slavic languages on Yiddish grammar and vocabulary, conducted by many scholars to date, has tended to address separate, selected phenomena. Those studies have been conducted in an “atomistic” manner, that is, without placing their results in the complex network of the language system. The latter consists of lexical, structural, semantic and pragmatic strands, which must be looked at holistically.
It is true that in our book too, we limit ourselves to analyzing selected contact-induced effects and processes, illustrating them with empirical examples drawn from contemporary Yiddish. However, contact phenomena such as lexical and structural borrowing, hybridization of vocabulary, introduction and modification of grammatical and semantic categories, as well as changes in sentence and word formation patterns, are shown as interdependent. It is hoped that the mechanisms of language change described in detail here will provide a broader context and allow for a fuller understanding of the role of Slavic languages on the emergence and development of Yiddish as inherently a contact or even mixed language.
The research approach developed by contact linguistics over the past decades has produced a new methodological and theoretical apparatus. In our view, its application is more effective than the traditional, diachronic-comparative methods in explaining the systemic and typological convergences and divergences that can be observed between Yiddish and its component languages. The methods of contact linguistics appeal to such universal phenomena as replication, relexification, reanalysis, metatypy, and diffusion. These mechanisms have been described and explained by a number of researchers on the basis of analyses of many contact situations, regardless of the types of languages involved. What is more, the causes of these phenomena are sought in the cognitive basis of natural language processing.
The effects of such processes on the language system can lead to far-reaching systemic changes. Sometimes they make it difficult to establish unambiguously the genealogical continuity of certain languages. Such idioms are generally called contact languages. When the origin of individual system elements or categories can be established and when their arrangement into interrelated areas of the language structure is recognized, they are referred to as mixed languages.
This term, which once had a negative connotation, is now a neutral typological category, involving both historical and, above all, systemic processes. It is epistemically fascinating to study the mechanisms of the “blending” of linguistic elements and categories from different sources, resulting in the formation of a new language. Moreover, this research deepens our understanding of the processing and social functioning of a natural language under the influence of a different one. Needless to say that the use of the term mixed language in no way questions the autonomous status of a given idiom, neither in the systemic nor in the sociolinguistic sense.
Thus, Yiddish is treated here as an autonomous language of the Jewish community that inhabited various parts of East-Central Europe for approximately eight centuries. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, there were nearly 12 million Yiddish speakers worldwide, and about one fourth of them lived on the territories of Poland
The research into the history of the Jewish social relations with the Slavic world shows that contact with Polish lasted the longest and was the most intensive. Unmistakable, idiosyncratic lexical and structural traces of this interaction were documented in Yiddish texts as early as the first decades of the seventeenth century. For this reason, we felt justified in choosing Polish as the model language for the Slavic influence on Yiddish. That is why, almost all language transfers into Yiddish discussed in this book, whether lexical or structural, are illustrated with Polish examples. This is not to say that the phenomena in question necessarily originated in Polish. Establishing their real source would require very detailed diachronic studies. These, in turn, would not guarantee reliable findings, due to the great similarity of the Slavic languages among themselves and the integration processes that took place in Yiddish.
Therefore, the examples presented in this book are meant to show cases of linguistic material and pattern transfer from a language that is typologically different from German. In this sense, Polish only represents the group of the Slavic languages that interacted with Yiddish in the long history of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. This is reflected in the title of the volume. These vernaculars include, in chronological order, (Old) Czech, Sorbian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian.
The monograph at hand is, in a sense, also a part of the debate about the origin and nature of Yiddish that heated up after Paul Wexler (1991) presented his hypothesis about the Slavic origin of the idiom thirty years ago. Although his theory attracted much controversy and criticism, it also raised some important questions. These addressed the diachronic, as well as systemic and typological issues mentioned above. In this light, explaining the causes and mechanisms of the emergence of the far-reaching structural changes observed in the Yiddish system should be considered of primary importance.
Structure of the Volume
This volume consists of seven separate chapters by different authors. The first chapter is a catalog and description of the various Slavic influences on Yiddish as presented by Max Weinreich in his monumental History of the Yiddish language. It also includes a critical review of some of his conclusions.
The second and longest chapter attempts to set the background for the thesis postulated throughout the book about the mixed nature of Yiddish. This section contains both the contact-linguistic theoretical foundations and the historical and sociolinguistic overview of the Polish-Yiddish relationships. All this forms an epistemic framework for the argument developed throughout the volume.
The following four chapters (3–6) are separate units that deal with different effects of the Slavic influence on various subsystems of Yiddish. They contain descriptions of the mechanisms of contact-induced changes within grammatical and semantic categories (chapter 3), word formation patterns (chapter 4), semantics (chapter 5), and syntactic structures (chapter 6). The processes and their effects corroborated in these chapters provide, in our opinion, arguments supporting the main thesis of the entire volume on the mixed nature of Yiddish.
The monograph concludes with a chapter devoted to the impact of Yiddish on the Polish language, with which Yiddish remained in close and long-lasting contact that nevertheless found relatively little recognition in Polish studies. The description of this contact not only confirms the acknowledged principle that languages do not impact each other symmetrically, but also attempts to explain the reasons for this disproportion from sociolinguistic positions. The innovative contribution of this final chapter of the volume is the development of diagnostics for distinguishing between Yiddish and German borrowings, which has been one of the main obstacles in studying the influence of Yiddish on Polish.
In addition to extensive example material presented throughout the volume (cf. especially the appendix to chapter 5), some new theoretical (chapters 3 and 7) and methodological approaches (chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6) for the study of Yiddish have been proposed.
Transliteration and Glossing
In this volume, we have chosen to use the so-called linguistic transliteration system to record examples derived from Yiddish, rather than the YIVO transcription currently in use also in linguistic papers. The YIVO transliteration table was originally developed for pedagogical purposes, as an auxiliary tool for English-speaking Yiddish students (Weinreich U. 1949). Conversely, the linguistic transcription and transliteration system, also called philological, was widely acknowledged and used in linguistic papers on Yiddish worldwide until at least the 1960s.
The advantage and reason for the popularization of the YIVO transcription was the absence of diacritics, which in the early days of digital text processing might have posed a certain technical problem. Today, this problem is no longer relevant and the advantages of the philological transcription are evident. Above all, it better meets the requirement of the adequacy of one character to one sound, set for transliteration systems in general. Furthermore, this transcription is neutral in relation to the various meta-languages of descriptions and takes users of non- English orthographic systems into consideration. For the sake of consistency, we have also applied this system (with the inclusion of the grapheme ⟨ə⟩ for the Hebrew shwa) to other non-Latin scripts. The equivalence tables translating the philological transliteration into the YIVO system can be found among others in Geller & Polit (2008: 13–14).
The International Phonetic Alphabet was used for phonetic and phonological transcription. Historical forms were spelled according to standards accepted in the relevant philologies, with respect to the characteristic sounds of past language varieties.
This book is amply illustrated with glosses and phrases in all languages relevant to the discussed subjects. Examples that are more complex than an enumeration of lexemes have been numbered and tabularly formatted throughout the volume. Comparative examples that demonstrate structural congruence or the lack thereof have been translated interlineally.
As a rule, glossing abbreviations, based on the Leipzig Glossing Rules, were only used when English translation equivalents failed to adequately express all the relevant grammatical categories of the source word. Even then, only those categories not conveyed by the translation were made explicit. Additionally, an effort was made to visually pair together the lexemes which are equivalent in the compared languages. Hence, the gaps in some lines correspond to the elements of a given sentence that do not have surface-level and free exponents in the compared phrase. In some instances, the lack of corresponding units was further underscored by using the null morpheme sign (∅).
In some cases, sentences that were highly incongruent with the rest of the example were separated with a horizontal line. Vertical lines were sometimes used to separate columns of short phrases where necessary. Equivalent standard translations were given at the bottom in single quotation marks, unless the given example required them to be positioned differently.
Acknowledgments
This volume has been created as a result of work on the research project entitled “Long-Lasting Language Contact and its Lexical and Semantic Outcome Based on the Example of Polish Lexical Borrowings in Yiddish”, carried out at the University of Warsaw between 2017 and 2022, managed by Professor Ewa Geller.* However, the scope and subject matter of this publication far exceed the objectives originally formulated in that endeavor. Thus, the book is the outcome of long-term research conducted both collectively and individually by its authors, Ewa Geller, Michał Gajek and Agata Reibach, who collaborated on the project.
In addition to the project contributors, Professor Anna Pilarski from the University of Szczecin (Poland), author of chapter 6, was invited to collaborate on the monograph. Her unique, generativist perspective on Polish-Yiddish linguistic contact in terms of syntax is an important methodological contribution to the issues discussed in the volume.
The research project, which led to the creation of the monograph, would not have been possible without the IT support of our invaluable colleagues from the CLARIN-PL team, above all, Tomasz Naskręt, ME, and Professor Maciej Piasecki.
In the early stages of work on the monograph, we were assisted by Zuzanna Łapa, MA, another participant in the project, who contributed some inspiring ideas, for which we owe her our sincere thanks.
We are grateful to Professor Mariola Jakubowicz of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Professor Mirosław Bańko of the University of Warsaw for consultations on Slavistic matters. Discussions with Professor Yaron Matras from the University of Manchester were helpful in organizing the theoretical concept of the volume. However, the greatest thanks are owed to the earlier scholars of language contact. We have benefited from their analyses and conclusions and were able to broaden not only the horizons of research on Polish-Yiddish contacts, but also the reflection on the functioning of language in general.
Needless to say, that the authors alone are responsible for the integrity of their analyses and scientific statements presented in this volume.
Ewa Geller, Michał Gajek, Agata Reibach
The project has been funded by the Polish National Science Center (NCN UMO-2016/21/B/HS2/02549). For detailed information s.