The Mendele
Review: Yiddish Literature and Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 11.003 [Sequential No. 180]
Date:
1) This issue of TMR
(ed).
2) Review Essay
Marion Aptroot on Erika Timm, Historische jiddische semantik and Erika Timm & Gustav Adolf Beckmann, Etymologische
Studien zum Jiddischen.
[New insights on how Yiddish became Yiddish – ed.]
Click here to enter: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr11/tmr11003.htm
1)--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: This issue of TMR.
In this issue of TMR Professor
Marion Aptroot, Head of Yiddish Studies at Duesseldorf's
Notice:
2)------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Marion Aptroot
Subject: Review Essay
Marion Aptroot
on Erika Timm, Historische
jiddische semantik and
Erika Timm & Gustav Adolf Beckmann, Etymologische Studien zum Jiddischen.
Erika Timm, Historische
jiddische Semantik. Die Bibelübersetzungssprache als Faktor der
Auseinanderentwicklung des jiddischen und des deutschen Wortschatzes. Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag 2005.
Erika Timm and Gustav Adolf Beckmann, Etymologische Studien zum Jiddischen. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur
Problematik der jiddischen Südost- und Ostflanke. (jidische schtudies,
13)
Erika Timm takes us to the Middle Ages and back in Historische jiddische Semantik, her study of Old Yiddish vocabulary and
morphology that, to a surprising extent, survive in Modern Standard Yiddish.
Having scoured medieval and later sources on Hebrew Bible translation in the kheyder[1], Timm has uncovered its influence on
language formation. She has
thus made a major contribution to the history of both the Yiddish language and
of Ashkenazic Jewish culture. The historical
dictionary of an important part of (Modern) Yiddish vocabulary, the
centre-piece of this volume, illuminates Yiddish literature as well as
etymology.
Since Max Weinreich posited his view of Yiddish as a fusion language
(shmeltsshprakh),
the uniqueness of Yiddish was not sought in its Germanic Component and the Romance Component was deemed to consist of a
very restricted number of words not meriting much further exploration. The
interest of subsequent researchers was either directed towards the Slavic and
Semitic Components or towards alternative theories of where Yiddish began. Weinreich placed this birthplace in Southern and especially
in
In Historische jiddische Semantik. Die Bibelübersetzungssprache
als Faktor der Auseinanderentwicklung des jiddischen und des deutschen Wortschatzes[2] Timm demonstrates
how the practice of translating the Bible in kheyder during the earliest period
of the emergence of the Yiddish language influenced the formation of its
Germanic Component, that the influence of Judeo-French in this context is more
important than thought, and that an important part of the original translation
vocabulary is present in everyday Modern Eastern Yiddish.
Erika Timm, emeritus professor of Yiddish studies at the
Historische jiddische Semantik is the fruit of twenty years of research dealing with
central issues in the emergence of the Yiddish language. The difference between
the Germanic Component in Yiddish and German (including all German dialects of
the relevant periods) is one of the topics in Yiddish studies that have stirred
Erika Timm’s interest. Timm
uses Weinreich’s component terminology, but makes it
clear that the image of the Germanic Component of Yiddish as being part of
German as a stock language of Yiddish is too simple. Timm
shows that parts of the Germanic
Component of Yiddish have a meaning that cannot be explained by means of German
historical linguistics or dialectology and that some Germanic words in Yiddish have never been part of German but are
original coinages. In addition, some words mistakenly attributed to the
Germanic component are of Romance origins or have been influence by
Judeo-French traditions in biblical translation. The causes of the development
of Yiddish as a language different from all German dialects are not just found
in socio-historical developments and contact with Slavic languages. One of the keys to understanding the earliest
independent developments in Yiddish as a European language lies in the basic
education system, the kheyder.
The kheyder
education, which ideally every boy received, consisted for an important part in
translating text passages from the Torah. Since Yiddish wasn’t taught as a
subject, the translation language was the only Yiddish taught in a formal
setting. Translations were transmitted from generation to generation and
therefore the vocabulary was relatively constant. Shloyme
Noble already pointed this out in his study of translation of the Torah in kheyder [4]. The language of Bible translation was
central in transmitting Yiddish within Ashkenaz.
Timm has chosen the
semantics of Yiddish Bible translation to study the differentiation between
Yiddish and German vocabulary in the period leading up to the point where
Yiddish is clearly an independent Germanic language. Timm
realized that a contrastive approach between Yiddish and German should not end
with the study of the obvious, the non-Germanic components or even with the
unique semantics of German Component words used to designate special Jewish
customs. The Romance Component has always been quantitatively weak; the Slavic
Component becomes more obvious in the written tradition only at a later date[5]. The
Hebrew-Aramaic component is the most obvious, but dependent on the text genre
and the degree of education of the author/speaker. Some of the earliest Yiddish
texts, for example the rhyming verse pair in the Worms Mahzor
(1172), contain Germanic and Hebrew-Aramaic elements, but others are devoid of
words of Hebrew-Aramaic origins (e.g., the Cambridge Codex with the exception
of the Hebrew Titles which were probably added at a later stage). They were in
all likelihood consciously omitted for aesthetic reasons: a ‘mixed’ language
was perceived as stylistically seriously flawed.
Erika Timm explores the differentiation between Yiddish and
German during the Old Yiddish Period, examining facts and underlying principles.
Max Weinreich, in chapter 3 of his history of the
Yiddish language (Derekh ha-shas) and
earlier articles on the relationship of cultural specificity and the
development of the Yiddish language, had already pointed out how a language is
determined by a culture and its religion. He also gave some examples of loan
translations from loshn-koydesh
(e.g., oyf eyn fus). In her 1987 study Timm
also provided a number of cultural specific expressions such as lernen (for
studying canonical Jewish texts) or vrouen-shul (vaybershe shul) for the women’s part of the synagogue. She
subsumes the latter type of expressions formed under the influence of Jewish
religion as “institutsbedingt” (determined by an
institution) because they developed from institutions and customs in Ashkenazic Jewry. Such elements were part of Timm’s earlier study;[6] the present book is
concerned with what she calls “übersetzungsbedingte”
phenomena (determined by translation), which have come into existence through
the translation practice in the medieval khadorim.
The book is
divided into four sections:
A. General overview, introduction and synthesis (p. 1-147);
B. Alphabetical section (p. 149-575, an etymological dictionary of an important
part of the Yiddish vocabulary);
C. Specific semantic fields in Bible translations (p. 577-681): designations
for musical instruments, gems in the breastplate of the High Priests, flora and fauna);
D. Indices and Bibliographies.
As point of
departure for her exploration, Erika Timm used Mirkeves hamishne
(MM), also known as Seyfer shel reb Anshl, a Hebrew-Yiddish
glossary of the Torah printed in
Because she
analyses the continuity in the language of Ashkenazic
Jewry from its origins until the present, Erika Timm opts for the use of the term Yiddish for the language of Ashkenazic Jews from the earliest texts in Hebrew
characters onwards without going into the question of when the disparate
developments of Yiddish and German lead to the existence of two different
languages. That question cannot be answered because no clear line can be drawn:
it is not a matter of all or nothing. Yiddish has developed under the influence
of the German language which at all times had many more speakers and, much of
the time, more prestige.
In order to
sketch the development of the Yiddish translation tradition Timm
analyses its relationship with the Bible translation tradition of the French
Jews (Part A, § 9, p. 33-40). In the tenth and eleventh century the main
communication of Ashkenazic Jewry with the rest of
the Jewish world took the route over northern
The beginnings
of the Yiddish translation tradition are to a large extent lost to us. The
manuscripts predating Mirkeves hamishne that
Timm could consult all date from ca. 1390 and
thereafter. Hardly any manuscripts including Yiddish words predating the
persecutions of 1349 seem to have survived. Based on the analysis of the Bible
translation corpus, Timm concludes that the Yiddish
Bible translation did continue to develop after 1349, but before that date it
may have been more open to changes in its vocabulary: with only very few
exceptions the words in use in Yiddish – excluding Yiddish translation coinages
– can still be found in German until 1400. The pogroms of 1349 and the politics
of expulsion of the Jews from the towns and certain regions lead to the
dissociation from German and a stronger conservation of the Yiddish translation
language.[8]
The drifting
apart of Yiddish and German is not only caused by the conservation of the
Yiddish tradition, but also by the
changes in the German language, which Timm
illustrates with striking examples. Under the influence of Luther’s translation
many variants which continue to be part of the Yiddish Bible translation
vocabulary disappeared from Standard German and numerous German words of Latin
and Greek origin which Yiddish had borrowed in their traditional, Germanic form
(e.g. Yiddish apteyk, lempert, mirmlshteyn) were “corrected” in German – also in
Luther’s Bible – according to the humanistic knowledge of Latin and Greek
(German Apotheke, Leopard, Marmor).
Although there
are variants within the Yiddish Bible translation tradition, the Yiddish
primary texts (with the exception of the Amsterdam Yiddish Bible translations
by Blitz and Witzenhausen which underwent the
influence of Christian Bible translations) can be distinguished from Christian
German translations by their specific vocabulary and syntax. Timm explains the unity of the Yiddish Bible translation on
the one hand through the constant transmission over generations guaranteeing a
degree of consistency, and on the other hand through underlying principles
which Yiddish translations have in common and can be recognized after thorough
analysis. The older translations are extremely close to the Hebrew original in
their attempt to reflect the number and order of the words in the original text
as closely as possible. This was not always possible – Semitic and Germanic
languages being so different in structure – but the attempt to do so led to
constructions of the type der man der doziker (as
translation of ha-ish
ha-ze). On the level of the vocabulary, the
creativity of the early Yiddish Bible translators was put to the test. The
translators were confronted by the problem of finding matching translations for
Hebrew roots whereby for each Hebrew three-letter-root (shoresh) ideally one
corresponding Germanic equivalent was to be found. This
despite the fact that a single root can often have different meanings which
cannot all be covered by one translation equivalent. Furthermore, the
morphology of Hebrew and German is very different.
Generally when
translating a text, one tries to transpose the meaning and style from a source
language into a target language and aims for the language of the translation to
be as “natural” as that of the original text. This is not possible without
“artistic license”. Dealing with a revealed text (the Torah), faithfulness to
the source text had priority over the language of the translation in the Jewish
tradition and if necessary as the ultimate consequence a language had to be
created in the image of the original text.
The search for
appropriate translations led to different forms of independence with regard to
the German language which the first generations of Ashkenazic
Jews had adopted in their new environment. The translation language could (1)
select among different alternative words or expressions which German offered or
it could (2) change the content or (3) seek expressive possibilities of such
materials. Timm shows that these decisions are
dependent on the underlying motives for the choices made. The translation
language can (a) avoid or prefer a certain Germanic element without
consideration for the Hebrew language structure because of its semantic
properties (e.g. the word gayst ‘spirit’; its connotation with the Christian concept
of the Holy Trinity made Jews avoid its usage). Alternatively, the motivation
of certain decisions can be based on (b) the attempt to translate a Hebrew root
with words which are etymologically related or (c) the attempt to reflect the
syntactic properties of a Hebrew lexeme. E.g., in the translation frukhpern [un mern] zikh ‘to be fruitful
[and multiply]’, the verb frukhpern (or frukhtigen) was coined to reflect the ‘fruitful’ property of
Hebr.
The
translators would not have had to grapple with some of the problems with which
they saw themselves confronted if they had been able to use Hebrew words which
were probably commonly known because they were part of the everyday language.
The underlying principle, which predates the Ashkenazic
period, forbids the translation of
Hebrew through Hebrew – or in this case through the Hebrew Component of
Yiddish. How large this Hebrew Component was is not least hard to tell because
of the influence of Bible translation language and the – unrelated – aesthetic
principle that “mixed language” is aesthetically undesirable. [9] As a result Biblical
translations and glosses as well as literary texts from the early centuries of
Yiddish generally avoid the Hebrew Component and cannot be considered a
faithful reflection of the component structure in the vernacular. The
Hebrew words which form the exception in the Bible translation language are the
four cardinal points, the expressions tsofn, mizrekh, dorem and mayrev, used in more than 90% of the translations of
cardinal points in the texts researched by Erika Timm
(§20). Here again, Erika Timm explains an ‘anomaly’
through its rootedness in Jewish culture with
quotations from sources ranging from the Bible and the Talmud to the hugely
popular Tsene-rene
and the custom of having a mizrekh on a wall in the living room indicating the
direction of prayer.
The creation
of a translation language that reflects the semantic relationship between
different elements in the Hebrew language has led to the formation of new words
which – within the Germanic language family – are unique to Yiddish. Timm not only analyses the underlying principles but also
presents different specific morphological categories: the formation of nouns by
means of the suffixes -ung
(A § 21), -nish
(§ 22), -keyt
(-kayt,[10] § 23), haftik (§ 24) and
the substantive use of adjectives in the neuter form (§ 25, e.g. dos guts). For the
differentiation between German and Yiddish the plural formation on -s is also an interesting question (§
26) as is the diminutive plural on -likh (Mod.
Y. –lekh)
(§ 27), which is here for the first time convincingly reconstructed. A
special characteristic of Yiddish Bible translation language is preference of
appositional instead of genitive groups (e.g. ek velt, sof-vokh), a construction which
also occurs in German but is much more widespread in Yiddish. Max Weinreich assumed that the influence of the Hebrew smikhut is the
cause; Erika Timm supports this view (p. 115). The
influence of the Bible translation language on ‘ordinary’ Yiddish and its
morphology is clearly demonstrated by the examples of the demonstrative der/di/dos dozik- and der/di/dos zelbik- (§ 29). Erika Timm traces their
emergence from early translations of Hebrew constructions of the type ha-yom ha-ze to the modern type, which gains ground around 1500.
Part B, the
alphabetical section, is a historical dictionary of those parts of the Bible
translation vocabulary that are specifically Yiddish (roughly 500 words in
about 300 items). The unmarked headwords are part of Modern Eastern Yiddish.
Those words that are restricted to Western Yiddish or cannot be found in
dictionaries of Modern Eastern Yiddish are marked with a diamond. The entries
often contain word histories that are little gems of (cultural) history and
reflect a dazzling erudition.
Historische jiddische Semantik provides us with a wealth of new facts and insights
regarding the Yiddish language and Ashkenazic
culture. It is a towering achievement in Yiddish linguistics and cultural
studies. Happily, the indices and clear structure will guide the earnest users
of this weighty reference work.
***
Etymologische
Studien zum Jiddischen. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur
Problematik der jiddischen Südost- und Ostflanke was
written by Erika Timm with Gustav Adolf Beckmann, a scholar
of Romance languages known in Yiddish circles as Erika Timm's
collaborator on a number of her earlier books.
This book
deals with the history of the Yiddish language and, specifically, with the
history of certain words. Erika Timm and Gustav Adolf
Beckmann discuss recent theories of the history of Yiddish, notably Paul
Wexler’s theory of Yiddish as a relexified Slavic
language and his adventurous etymologies. Dovid Katz
earlier took issue with Wexler’s methodology in his polemical, witty and well
argued “A late twentieth-century case of katoves”.[11] Timm and Beckmann join the main
points of his argument, but also react to Wexler’s more recent work and
add much that is new and of value regardless of the academic debate.
In chapters
discussing the etymology of gete (ghetto), davenen and katoves, as well as a list of words proposed by Wexler as
direct loans from Greek (Judeo-Greek) and a chapter on oriental words that are
of non-Greek origins, Timm and Beckmann make a very
strong case for following the history of a word over the centuries when trying
to establish its etymology. The case of ghetto
(Chapter I) shows that the original and widely accepted etymology (Venice’s “il ghetto nuovo”, the terrain
where the old foundry was located and which later became the enforced Jewish
quarter) is valid, but that the semantics of the word may at times and in
certain contexts have been influenced by other associations (e.g. by get ‘divorce’). Proposed etymologies can
be interesting phenomena in and of themselves. The chapter on katoves (Chapter
III) demonstrates that the use of an expression in the early centuries of its
use can offer vital information about its origins and development. For davenen (Chapter
II, which also refers to the heated discussion on Mendele
in 1997), Timm and Beckmann provide evidence to
support the theory that davav
is the most likely candidate ranging from the Torah, through Talmudic
traditions, also referring to non-Masoretic Jewish as
well non-Jewish interpretations, through medieval Judeo-French and Ashkenazic glossaries, the poetic style of piyyutim from the
sixth to the twelfth century up to Mendele Moykher-Sforim's Hebrew version of the Vintshfingerl, Be-emek ha-bakha,
via sixteenth century Yiddish texts that present Western Yiddish oren and Eastern
Yiddish davenen
as equivalents. The amount of evidence is impressive, but Timm
and Beckmann do not hide the fact that matters are complicated, among others by
an extensive gap in Hebrew lexicology (spanning most of the Early Modern Era).
They write that they are not under the illusion that the evidence, although
substantial, will end the discussion: facts may be unearthed that support
existing alternative theories or new etymologies can still be proposed.
Timm and Beckmann do not
try to impress us with the breadth and depth of relevant information – and
sometimes deliberately irrelevant information in order to show us with humor
that surprising information that may fit at first glance cannot possibly be
relevant. Although an excursion on the building of bimas in medieval
This book defends high standards in philological research as well as the view Timm shares with her predecessors Max Weinreich
and Solomon Birnbaum: Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazic Jewry
and bears the traces of the underlying unity of the culture as well as
significant diversity. In their final remarks “Lexik
und jenseits der Lexik” (the lexicon and beyond, Chapter VI) Timm and Beckmann explicitly formulate the questions that
cannot be answered by the proponents of “relexification”,
the theory that Yiddish is in its core a Slavic language that has adopted a
Germanic vocabulary. Those who don’t accept that Yiddish is a member of the
Germanic language family cannot explain the fact that Yiddish also has a
Germanic case system, Germanic verbal endings, Germanic pronouns, the Germanic
auxiliary zayn,
the analytical past tense, the basic numbers 1-10 etc. Timm and Beckmann side with Birnbaum, Bin-Nun and
Max and Uriel Weinreich in
supporting the theory of Western origins – a theory to which Timm has contributed a wealth of additional evidence in a
number of her publications – and make a case for the study of the Sprachbund
between (Eastern) Yiddish and Slavic languages.[12]
Endnotes
[1] The transcriptions in this review follow the YIVO-rules of
transcription for English language texts. The transcriptions in the books that
are being reviewed follow a related system conceived for a German context (in
which letters such as /s/ and /z/ are pronounced differently). The system used
by Timm contains additional information in the
transcription of quotations from Premodern and Early
Modern Yiddish: their spelling is defective and the transcription system
clearly indicates which letters are transcribed and which are based on the
(informed) interpretation of the author.
[2] ‘Historical Yiddish Semantics. The Language of Bible
Translation as a factor in the growing apart of Yiddish and German vocabulary’
[3] Erika Timm, Graphische und phonische Struktur des Westjiddischen unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Zeit um 1600. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1987.
[4] Noble, however, was interested in those parts of the kheyder
vocabulary that had survived in that context from about 1600 (he did not have
access to earlier sources) until the early twentieth century, but were not part
of the living language. He directed his attention to what was ‘unique’ from the
point of view of a speaker of Modern Eastern Yiddish. Timm
opens our eyes to the ‘uniqueness’ of what is taken for granted. Shloyme Nobl, Khumesh-taytsh: an oysforshung vegn der traditsye
fun taytshn khumesh in di khadorim,
[5] The continuing study of the impact of Slavic languages on
the structure of Yiddish is of great importance. Cf. the work of Ewa Geller and Dov-Ber Kerler and the syntax project of Henrike
Kuehnert, Rosemarie Luehr,
Moshe Taub and Miriam Wagner.
[6] Historische jiddische Semantik provides a wonderful example of the West-East
continuum of such vocabulary in the form of a rhymed verse on Jewish customs
collected by Chava Turniansky
from an informant from
[7] Timm provided overwhelming
evidence for the origins of these glosses to the period in which Rashis commentary was written in an article that reads like
a detective story. Timm, “Zur Frage der Echtheid von Raschis jiddischen Glossen,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen
Sprache und Literatur 107 (1985), p. 45-81.
[8] Timm remarks that the more
flexible “integration” of German words in the earlier period is responsible for
the “less remarkable” character of the earlier phase of the tradition before
1349. This may be an explanation for the lack of recognizable influence on the
texts, even the religious poems, in the Cambridge Codex. The following of the
style and form of German literary examples may also have contributed to this.
Nevertheless, Timm has found evidence of specific
Yiddish Bible translation vocabulary in the Cambridge Codex, cf. p. 48.
[9] On the perceived inappropriateness of the Hebrew Component
in verse epics see Timm 1987: 365-375. The first to
consciously break this rule was Elye Bokher (see Erika Timm in Chone Shmeruk, ed., Pariz un’ Vyene. Mahadura biqortit be-tseruf mavo, he’arot
venispakhim bidei Chone Shmeruk beshituf
Erika Timm,
[10] Erika Timm bases her
transcription of modern Yiddish on the YIVO system and klal-yidish pronunciation,
adapted for a German readership. An exception is made in the case of the
suffixes -hayt and -kayt
which are transcribed -hejt and -kejt, thus being closer to the Yiddish orthography than
the klal-yidish
pronunciation. I could not find information in the text on the motivation for
the transcription of the diphthongs in these two suffixes.
[11] Dovid Katz, “A Late
twentieth-century case of katoves” in Dov-Ber Kerler, ed., History
of Yiddish Studies, Chur: Harwood 1991, p.
141-163.
[12] The relationship between Semitic and Slavic impact on
Yiddish also deserves further exploration, cf. Steffen Krogh, Das Ostjiddische im Sprachkontakt. Deutsch im Spannungsfeld zwischen Semitisch und Slavisch. Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 2001.
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