There are two reasons why I am happy to contribute a brief comment on the occasion of the reissue of Haim Blanc’s classic study from 1964 on communal dialectology in Baghdad: (i) I was one of the three editors of Blanc’s Gedenkschrift (together with Alexander Borg and Sasson Somekh, eds., Studia linguistica et orientalia memoriae Haim Blanc dedicata. Harrassowitz Verlag. Wiesbaden 1989), and (ii) the 1964 volume has had a profound influence on my professional activity up to the present.
I first met Haim Blanc back in the early 1960s when he gave a lecture on the three communal dialects of Baghdad at Columbia University, where I was a graduate student in linguistics. I still recall how inspirational that talk was, even at a distance of almost sixty years. The book served to introduce me to the broad field of “comparative Jewish interlinguistics”. Until then, I had experience only with Yiddish, a language which interested both Blanc and me, because of its deep Slavic imprint (see his thought-provoking “The Yiddish language: A brief survey of its Slavic element”, unpublished B.A. honors paper in comparative philology, Harvard University 1948; besides Harvard, also available at the library of the University of Haifa). Since 1964, I have written numerous articles and books on about a dozen Jewish languages (i.e., communal dialects), as well as numerous non-Jewish Afro-Eurasian communal dialects. In many of these publications, I mentioned Blanc’s 1964 classic study.
I see in retrospect that a significant part of my academic output was directly inspired by his book from 1964. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his publication reprinted here has inspired no small number of studies in “communal dialectology”. The post-Blanc literature is rich in new findings and implications which Blanc did not discuss (since not all the features appeared in Baghdadi Arabic), but which owe their discovery to the inspiration of Blanc’s 1964 book. I will briefly list some of the innovations that I have personally noted over the years:
(i) Two or more communal dialects may share features which owe their existence to largely divergent factors. For example, like Blanc’s Baghdadi triad of languages, all Jewish languages share a penchant for intensive Old Semitic Hebrew (and newly created, usually non-Semitic, Medieval “Hebroid”) enrichment, in small part, for cultural and religious reasons, and in large part, in order to construct secretive trade lexicons (the Jews were heavily involved in international Afro-Eurasian Silk Road trade between the 9–12th centuries, and in some reduced areas even later). Identification with Islamic religion and culture is always the primary reason why speakers of languages used by a majority Islamic population, especially in Asia, seek abundant Arabic enrichment. Interestingly, the goal of “closure” to a closely related non-Jewish communal dialect has propelled many (if not all) Jewish communal dialects to invent a very substantial corpus of largely common “Hebroid” neologisms, created on non-Hebrew, usually Perso-Arabic and Chinese models (many of which have found their way back into unspoken written Medieval Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, created in the late 19th century). To a lesser degree, speakers of Islamic communal dialects have also invented “Araboidisms”. The differential impact of neologisms in coterritorial communal dialects is still often a negelected topic.
(ii) In cases where Jewish merchants speaking different communal dialects from diverse locales started working together on travelling caravans along the Silk Roads, we note the creation of an “interrupted or non-contiguous Sprachbund” of Jewish communal trade dialects. Jewish Silk Road languages were primarily spoken originally in different areas (in contact with genetically related non-Jewish communal dialects), but they cultivated common Hebrew/Hebroid sources of enrichment to facilitate cross-linguistic communication among themselves.
(iii) Coterritorial communal dialects may share common loans and neologisms which actually differ in their sources and relative chronologies. For example, German benedeien ‘to bless’ appears to be taken from Northern Italian benedire, while the synonymous “surface cognate” Yiddish benčn may be from Southern Italian benedicere, or from a Balkan language where the Latin components bene- ‘well’ + -dicere ‘to speak’ also express ‘to bless’. Most native speakers and Yiddishists believe Yiddish is derived from German (in my view, Yiddish is a Slavic language). However, once Yiddish relexified most of its original Slavic lexicon to German (and created a mass of artificial “Germanoidisms” in the process), German—regardless of its historical relationship to Yiddish—could assume the function of a “senior communal dialect” for Yiddish.
(iv) Once a Sprachbund of communal dialects has come about, new “daughter” communal dialects may develop in different locations. This may have happened if Judeo-Latin fragmented into Judeo-Ibero- and Judeo-Gallo-Romance. Another example is when Iberian Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Portugese speakers who had to conceal their Jewish identity in the Middle Ages and pretended to be genuine converts to Catholicism, continued to practice Judaism secretly, and in a short period of time created new “crypto-Jewish communal dialects” of Spanish, Portuguese and Ladino (their original unspoken translation language of Hebrew prayers and religious texts), alongside their native obsolescent Judeo-Ibero-Romance speech. The original three Judeo-Iberian languages continued in use outside of Spain and Portugal among exiled unconverted Jews, while the three new “crypto-communal dialects” still survive in the old homelands, and in some cases were eventually brought to new territories where the original three communal dialects/languages were not usually spoken. Thus, Judeo-Iberian communal dialects may develop separately in different locales, even in the absence of related non-Judeo-Iberian communal dialects.
(v) The Baghdadi communal dialects (and especially secretive trade languages) provide a model for understanding how highly divergent multiethnic and multilingual populations can invent new communal dialects. Consider the many creolized variants of European languages invented by African slaves transported to the New World, who initially often spoke mutually incomprehensible African languages.
(vi) Communal dialects are often created through the process of relexification.
(vii) Often, when a Jewish and coterritorial non-Jewish communal dialect share a loanword, the Jewish communal dialect tends to preserve the form and meaning of the shared loanword with greater precision than the coterritorial non-Jewish communal dialect. A confirming example is Yiddish šabaš ‘tip for musicians at a wedding’ (< Persian with the same form and meaning), while coterritorial (related) Slavic target languages usually delete ša- or -aš and display an array of quite different meanings for the full and truncated forms.
(viii) Once a communal dialect loses contact with its original communal neighbor(s) through migration, it usually begins to lose its “communal features” and may come to resemble its former majority communal neighbor, especially if the latter was also a prestige written language. For example, Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic exported to India and Southeast Asia drew closer to the superdialectal written variant of Arabic, shared by all Arabic-speaking countries. This happened also when Yemeni Muslim Arabic was brought to Indonesia where there was no other Arabic dialect spoken nearby.
(ix) Since the raison d’être of a minority communal dialect is to create barriers to mutual comprehension by speakers of the coterritorial majority communal dialect, we should not be surprised to find much common vocabulary calibrated differently in coterritorial communal dialects. For example, in Iberian Judeo-Spanish (natively known as Dzhudezmo or Ḥaketia), the Arabism adefina meant ‘food prepared on Friday to be consumed on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when all work is forbidden’ but in Iberian Christian Spanish the term continues the meanings of the Arabic source etymon, i.e. ‘the secret; the burial; the modest woman’. The use of Arabic ‘secret, burial’ was motivated by the long period of cooking in a pot for several hours.
(x) In much linguistic literature, communal dialects are often given very sparse or no coverage at all (in fact, the communal dialect spoken by the majority is hardly ever called a “communal dialect”, only a “language”). Yet, communal dialects spoken by minority subgroups of the population (e.g. the Christian and Jewish variants of Iraqi Arabic discussed by Blanc) invariably provide precious information about the origin(s) of the minority dialects and the speakers themselves (and often information about the majority “communal dialect/language”), which is often unavailable from any other source. Hence, it is imperative to prepare a typology and an atlas of minority communal dialects for the benefit of linguists, historians, ethnographers and others.
I have read all of Blanc’s writings, and have learned a lot from all of them. But his Communal Dialects in Baghdad stands out as the gift that keeps on giving.
Paul Wexler