Jewish Culture and Languages, two scientific papers

2. Origin of Yiddish and its relationship with Classic and Modern Hebrew

Opposition towards language use often arises when it is a relatively new variant, like youth talk, a sudden more mainstream usage of a sociolect, or a language or variant spoken by a minority which supposedly endangers the status quo and economical power of the dominant language. Though Yiddish is by no means a newly emerged language it still suffers from the prejudice of being this, a newcomer and debased version of another language. For how long it has been around is still under debate up to this day but the most widely spread theories concerning time and place of origin can shed some light on why Yiddish still carries this unfavorable reputation.

The most optimistic estimations place the time of origin of Yiddish preforms as long as a millennium ago3. Regarded as ancedents and influences for Hebrew and Yiddish are Canaanite, Akkadian, Amorite, and Egyptian. It is presumed that before the exile from Israel in the 8th century BCE and Judah in the 6th century BCE inhabitants of Israel and Judah were mostly monolingual, afterwards the norm was to speak both Hebrew and Aramaic. Depending on where Jewish refugees settled the system of using Hebrew for prayer, an own Jewish language for everyday conversation and the local language in a vernacular form was already common (Ammon et al. 1924).

Despite ongoing discussions concerning the exact place and time of origin of Yiddish as we know it today the two most common theories are the Rhine-Hypothesis and Danube-Hypothesis. Both are focused on Germanspeaking regions and no definite convincing argument could be procured in favor of one so far. The Rhine-Hypothesis, sometimes also referred to as West-Hypotheis and the older of both, received most of its popularity and backup by virtue of being developed by YIVO-founder Max Weinreich himself. He suspected the area Loter, probably named after King Lothar II, to be the cradle of modern Yiddish. The first Jewish settlements in this region were Aachen around 801 a.D., Metz around 888 a.D., and Mainz around 900 a.D.. Cologne is mentioned in 1012 a.D. as the building site for a synagogue and Worms in 1034 a.D. (Eggers 60-62)4.

Located further in the south is the assumed region of Yiddish origin represented by the Danube-Hypothesis, an early Jewish settlement here would have been Regensburg. The settlers in this region came from the Balkans and North Italy to Bavaria. Once settled they established trade with Jews from the Rhineland for which a common language was needed, thus an early form of Yiddish were born. Presumably it was still very close to Middle High German, granting it the name 'Ashkenazic German', and strongly influenced by the native Romanic languages the settlers spoke (Eggers 61-63).

Nowadays most scholars work on the assumption that the Danube-Hypothesis describes the more likely scenario though this has not always been the case. Accordingly in many older articles and books about Yiddish language and culture writers refer to the Rhine-Hypothesis5. Still, some argue that the evidence in support of a origin in Bavaria is neither enough nor proven without a doubt. Mainly the amount of Romanic lexemes found in Yiddish is not so substantial that it proves a southern source. Broadly speaking Yiddish mostly makes use of Germanic elements, more precisely medieval German dialects spoken in the cities where Jews had settled, Classic Hebrew and Aramaic as it was spoken by Jews. The most basic structure is composed of the grammatical frame of Germanic dialects in which Germanic as well as Semitic and other foreign word roots are embedded (Katz, "Yiddish", 1-2). However, it would be wrong to assume that Yiddish follows a German grammatical and orthographic structure. It is important to keep in mind that, though derived, Yiddish is not identical with Middle High German: "While standard Middle High German forms may often be cited as a convenient frame of reference, it must be stressed that such comparison violates historical reality." (Katz, "The Wavering Yiddish Segolate", 8). Many minor orthographic elements were taken from Classic Hebrew and are kept alive in traditionalist groups who preserved older forms of Yiddish through various processes of modernization6.