Journal of Jewish 5 (2017) 200–216

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Diachronic and Synchronic of Southeastern

Paul Glasser Independent scholar

Abstract

Present-day Southeastern Yiddish (SEY) is a relatively young dialect, probably formed after the Khmelnytskyy massacres of 1648. Was the primary force in its historical pho- nology the influence of coterritorial languages, of other dialects, or internal factors? How important was the role of homonymy and the functional load of specific pho- nemes? Internal factors that may have had the greatest influence on the development of SEY are best sought in the transitional dialects on the fringes of SEY.

Keywords

Southeastern Yiddish − Jakobson − Bukovina − tote-mome − functional load − homonymy

Introduction

The origins of Southeastern Yiddish (SEY), spoken in most of present-day Ukraine, Moldova, and eastern Romania, are somewhat mysterious. Central Yiddish (CY), spoken in most of present-day Poland, Hungary, and western- most Ukraine, and Northeastern Yiddish (NEY), spoken in present-day Belarus, the Baltic states, and northeastern Poland centered around Białystok (see Figure 1, below), developed in situ over many centuries. In contrast, modern SEY is probably a post-1648 phenomenon, as the Jewish population of Ukraine was decimated in the Khmel’nyts’kyy massacres and later resettled “by survi- vors returning to their places of origin” as well as by “migrations from both the NEY and CY areas” (Herzog 1969:70). Although it is possible that “the spatial relationship among the preexisting patterns was reestablished,” the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/22134638-050Downloaded21120 from Brill.com09/26/2021 02:41:46PM via free access Diachronic & Synchronic Phonology of Southeastern Yiddish 201 influence of the migrants cannot be discounted, nor can the influence of “ag- gressive features of SY1 phonology” on NEY (ibid.). I argue here that the origins of SEY phonology should not be sought externally, as in Jakobson 1953, but internally, with U. Weinreich’s and Herzog’s analyses as the point of departure. Moreover, avoidance of homonymy and maintenance of phonemic distinc- tions that bear a high functional load appear to play an unexpectedly, counter- intuitively small role. SEY is generally distinguished from NEY by the presence of zugn ‘to say’ and kimen ‘to come,’ as opposed to standard and NEY zogn and kumen; it is de- limited by the presence of flejš ‘meat’ (as in standard and NEY) as opposed to CY flajš. However, an examination of isoglosses within SEY may shed light on its origins: southern SEY, where two high front are preserved (/ɪ/ and /i/) and where in most environments2 historical /a/ has raised to /o/, e.g., tote- mome ‘parents’ (cf. general Yiddish tate-mame); parts of northern SEY, where the distinction between the two high front vowels has collapsed in toto or in part; and Bukovina, which evinces SEY flejš, but also shares features with CY (see Fig. 1 below).3 Table 1 contains the synchronic vocalic inventory of the various dialects without regard to their historical origins.4 However, this inventory is not strictly accurate. More recent research has demonstrated that not all phonemic contrasts are equally strong. Hall (2009:11) states the following: “Predictability of distribution is not an ‘all or nothing’ sta- tus. Depending on which part of the distribution we are given, it may in fact be possible to predict which of two sounds will occur; only the overlapping environments cause difficulties.” Renwick (2012:260) introduces the concept of “phonemic robustness,” buttressed by her discussion of “marginal contrasts …

1 Southern Yiddish, the umbrella term for CY together with SEY. 2 M. Weinreich (1973, vol. 2:343) lists only pre-/x/ and pre-/r/ as the environments where /a/ has not raised to /o/. Between them, U. Weinreich (1958:238) and Baviskar et al. (1992:34) give the full list: before velars /x/, /r/, /k/, /g/ and palato-alveolars /š/, /ž/, /č/, as well as before /j/ and in word-final position. (While /r/ is realized variously as [ɣ] and [r], the sound change /a/ > /o/ is blocked preceding /r/ regardless of its phonetic realization.). 3 See Wolf 1969:104. What is referred to below as “southern SEY” is delimited by isogloss C to the north and west; “northern SEY” is the eastern two thirds of the area delimited by isogloss A to the north, B to the west and C to the south; “northeastern Poland” is the area between Warsaw and Białystok, and more specifically the extension of SEY into this area; Bukovina is the area south and east of isogloss B, west of isogloss C. 4 Parentheses () in the following tables indicate phonemes that occur in only part of the given geographical area; regional variations in the pronunciation of a single phoneme are ignored.

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Figure 1 Eastern Yiddish dialects a sharp distinction between allophones and phonemes is insufficient to cap- ture the relationships among sounds” (2012:3). With phonemic robustness included in the equation, the CY contrast of /u : u:/ is nearly allophonic (cf. Herzog 1965:183), as the two co-occur in only one environment, before /f/, and the single near-minimal pair is šluf ‘sleep!’ : štru:f ‘scold!; punish!’ Likewise /aj/ in southern SEY and Bukovina, which oc- curs only in morpheme-final position and before hiatus, e.g., zaj ‘be!,’ fajer

Journal of Jewish LanguagesDownloaded from 5 Brill.com09/26/2021(2017) 200–216 02:41:46PM via free access Diachronic & Synchronic Phonology of Southeastern Yiddish 203 u o oj a aj (eu) NEY (8–9) i e ej u o oj a aj northern SEY (8-9) (ɪ) i e ej u o oj a aj southern SEY (9) ɪ i e ej u o ou oj Maximum vocalic inventory Maximum vocalic ă ā aj Bukovina (11) Bukovina ɪ i e ej ŭ ū ŏ ō oj ă ā aj CY (12 vowels) ĭ ī e ej Maximum vocalic inventory Maximum vocalic Table 1 Table High Vowels Mid Vowels Low Vowels Low

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‘fire’; other instances of historical /aj/ are realized as short /a/ in the former, long /ā/ in the latter: hant ~ hānt ‘today.’5 Thus, while /aj/ may be considered a phoneme in SEY, in the larger part of the dialect its status is more nearly allophonic than phonemic. Hence CY has only eleven robust phonemes, Bukovina has ten, and Southern SEY has eight (see Table 2). The significance of “robustness” will become apparent below.

Sprachbund and the “Sixth Vowel”

Among the most important contributions on this subject are Roman Jakobson’s (1953) and U. Weinreich’s (1953; 1958). Jakobson published only this one article about, and in, Yiddish. Some of his remarkable insights into the development of the language, such as shift in the Hebrew component (1953:76), have not received the attention they deserve. Jakobson (1953:82–83) attributes the following phonological innovations to the adherence of Yiddish to Slavic influence and of SEY to a Balkan Sprach- bund (Havránek 1933):

1. The rise of “soft,” i.e., palatalized, consonants. 2. The shift of the (German-origin) distinction of fortis and lenis consonant pairs to pairs distinguished by voicing. 3. The loss of phonemic /h/ in SEY and northeastern Poland. 4. The appearance of phonetic [ɣ] as the voiced counterpart of [x], i.e., when phonemic /x/ becomes voiced as a result of regressive assimi- lation, it is rendered [ɣ]. 5. The /r/ phoneme becoming the voiced counterpart of /x/, i.e., when pho- nemic /r/ becomes voiceless as a result of regressive voice , it is rendered [x]. 6. The rise of new palato-alveolars /č/ and /ž/, or 7. The loss of the distinction between the alveolar and palato-alveolar series. 8. The dialectal acquisition of a qualitative distinction in the high front vowels. 9. The loss of quantitative distinctions, i.e., phonemic .6

5 U. Weinreich 1958:238. Stressed short /a/ occurs in morpheme-final position, in all dialects, in interjections, e.g., sha! ‘quiet!,’ the demonstrative aza ‘such a, sort of,’ and a handful of other words, e.g., petša ‘calves’ foot jelly,’ buržua ‘bourgeois.’ 6 Per Jakobson, all Yiddish dialects have lost distinctive vowel length; even CY long vowels in Yiddish are analyzed as diphthongs. U. Weinreich (1963:341) calls this “dubious analytic oper- ations”; the analysis of phonetic long vowels as long phonemes seems more plausible.

Journal of Jewish LanguagesDownloaded from 5 Brill.com09/26/2021(2017) 200–216 02:41:46PM via free access Diachronic & Synchronic Phonology of Southeastern Yiddish 205 u o oj a aj (eu) SEY (8–9) i e ej u o oj a aj Northern SEY (8–9) Northern (ɪ) i e ej u o oj a Southern SEY (8) ɪ i e ej u o ou oj Robust vocalic inventory vocalic Robust ă ā Bukovina (10) Bukovina ɪ i e ej u ŏ ō oj ă ā aj CY (11 vowels) ĭ ī e ej Robust vocalic inventory vocalic Robust Table 2 Table High Vowels Mid Vowels Low Vowels Low Diphthongs

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It is points 8 and 9 that interest us at present. In his item 8, Jakobson notes the presence of a “sixth vowel” in SEY, i.e., a second high /ɪ/.7 Jakobson considers this an areal phenomenon; to wit, the phonology of Ukrainian and Bulgarian each includes six vowels, and that of Romanian and Albanian is analogous (1953:78). Although the prevailing view in Slavic linguistics is that Russian and Ukrainian have six vowels each, it appears to me to be more productive to analyze Ukrainian8 phonology as a system of five vowels coexisting with two sets of consonants, palatalized and non-palatalized. It should also be noted that vowel quality in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian is affected by the presence of palatalization: e.g., palatalizing /e/ is considerably higher than non-palatalizing /e/; the former verges on i9 (palatalizing high front vowel), whereas the latter nearly impinges on y (non- palatalizing high front-). Be that as it may, in the Yiddish system, either high front vowel can be preceded by any consonant; sporadic instances of palatalization or affrica- tion preceding /i/, e.g., /čir/ for standard and NEY tir ‘door’ and /džir/ for dir ‘thee (dat.),’ do not alter the broader picture.10 Moreover, other than the high front vowels, there are no pairs of vowels that could possibly be construed as palatalizing versus non-palatalizing; unlike in the case of Slavic, the only way to analyze such sequences is plus vowel. It should also be noted that in contrast to Slavic, soft consonants never alternate with hard con- sonants in morphological paradigms (cf. Jakobson 1953:82).11 The qualitative distinction in the high front vowels in SEY territory is more complicated than Jakobson lets on. In his analysis of this phenomenon, Herzog (1969:61) cites Paul Garde (1961:40) to the effect that “changes along a border that separates an etymological distinction from a collapse of that distinction will result in the advance of the merger at the expense of the differentiation. The aggressiveness of the unitary /i/ that emerges in the transition area is at- tested both by its westward diffusion into a length-distinguishing area and by its slight incursion into NEY u territory,” i.e., where the word for ‘come’ is kumen, not kimen.

7 See also, e.g., M. Weinreich (1973, vol. 2:241). 8 As well as Russian, Belarusian, and Polish. 9 The spellings i and y as per Polish orthography. 10 U. Weinreich (1953:124) states that in the locations in northern Podolia that he investi- gated, “before /i/, consonants sound quite palatal.” This palatalization in SEY, however, appears to be restricted to northern Podolia and Volhynia. 11 See de Bray 1980:51 for a fuller explanation of the Slavic first and second palatalizations in inflection and derivation (de Bray 1980:51).

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Jakobson also stresses the mutual influence of neighboring languages that have no genetic relationship, which can result in greater similarity than that of two languages from the same family. He writes: “We will only mention the con- sonant systems of Czech, Slovak, and Serbo-Croatian, which display a far great- er, startling resemblance to neighboring, but genetically unrelated, Hungarian” (1953:72). Here, he again puts too much weight on the Sprachbund aspect. While it is true that Hungarian has the same four palatals as, e.g., Slovak – in Hungarian orthography ty, gy, ny, ly, in Slovak orthography ť, ď, ň, ľ, – Hungarian has no morphophonemic alternation between palatal and non-palatal, just as Yiddish does not, whereas the and Romanian do. In Slovak, dentals rarely occur before front vowels, palatals generally do; Hungarian has no such distribution. So while the phonemic system of Hungarian may resem- ble that of Slovak more than it does that of Finnish, this is a trivial statement.

Homonymy and Functional Load

In contrast to Jakobson, U. Weinreich (1958:237 ff.) and Herzog (1969) attempt to derive proto-SY by internal reconstruction. Weinreich appears to favor a par- allel development of CY and SEY, whereas Herzog implies that SEY is an out- growth of CY. This seems to beg the question of the retention of a sixth vowel. If SEY had arisen from a pure CY base, one would have expected the two series of historical vowels, five long and five short, to be reduced to five indifferent to length, as in NEY. Why the extra vowel, a result of two high front vowels surviv- ing, but being distinguished by quality rather than quantity? Both Weinreich and Herzog raise the possibility that the historical develop- ment of the vocalic inventory of SEY in general and of the high front vowels in particular has been motivated by the avoidance of homonymy: “The fact remains that the latter shift [historical /a/ > /o/ and historical /aj/ > /a/ in SEY] moved many words out of the a position and prevented an overload of homonyms. Thus such CY distinctions as mān man ‘my husband,’ hānt ‘today’ : hant ‘hand,’ correspond, in SEY, to man mon, hant : hont;12 that is, they have remained in force” (U. Weinreich 1958:241);

12 The question of the presence or absence of phonemic /h/ in SEY is ignored here; /h/ is written in phonemic transcription wherever it is historically justified, i.e., is present in the dialects that have not lost this phoneme, as well as in ahistorical instances such as those found in Bukovina (see below).

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The regionalization of [/ɪ/] in a north Ukrainian subarea gave rise to such new contrasts as [flɪgn] ‘used to’ : [flign] ‘flies’ … and must have militated against the collapse of the [/ɪ/ : /i/] distinction; … a further merger with [/ɪ/] would have led to further homonymy” (Herzog 1969:62).

However, homonymy does not appear to be a factor, viz.:

1. If morpheme boundaries are taken into account, homonymy is mitigated: both mān ~ man ‘my’ (standard and NEY majn) and hānt ~ hant ‘today’ (standard and NEY hajnt) were likely still transparently bi- morphemic at the time of the relevant vocalic shifts.13 Long vowels are rare before consonant clusters; the existence of such sequences can only be explained diachronically. 2. A cursory check of one word list (Glasser 1990:330–370) yielded only one other pair of homonyms avoided by the shifts /a/ > /o/ and /aj/ > /a/, zat ‘side’ (standard and NEY zajt) : zot ‘sated’ (standard and NEY zat), so the number is undoubtedly quite small. 3. This same sound change created at least as many mergers as it avoided: laxt ‘laughs’ ~ ‘shines,’ az ‘that’ ~ ‘ice’; gos ‘street’ ~ ‘heavy rain,’ top ‘pot’ ~ ‘grope,’ cop ‘tap; billy goat’ ~ ‘braid,’ kop ‘drop’ ~ ‘head,’ got ‘had’ ~ ‘God; god,’ flom ‘flame’ ~ ‘plum.’ 4. “Each [other] merger also created a few sets of new homonyms, such as Bessarabian14 [tejg ‘dough’ ~ ‘days’], Podolian [fɪln ‘to fill’ ~ ‘to be lacking’]” (U. Weinreich 1958:240); “Among the few resulting homonyms are [bud ‘bathhouse’ ~ ‘carriage canopy’, mul ‘time’ ~ ‘mouth’, kul ‘com- munity ~ (cannon)ball’, šub ‘scrape!’ ~ ‘window pane’, [h]uz ‘hare’ ~ ‘house’]” (158:247).15 That is to say, in each case of sound change, whether

13 Per German etymological dictionaries, the members of the paradigms mix/dix ‘me/thee (acc.),’ mir/dir ‘me/thee (dat.)’ and majn/dajn ‘my/thy’ were all originally bimorphemic, containing a stem beginning with m- or d- plus a suffix; the etymology of hajnt is haj- ‘this’ (cf. hajjor ‘this year’) and naxt ‘night.’ 14 U. Weinreich (1953, 1958:236 and passim) divides SEY into two types, “Bessarabian” and “Podolian.” The isogloss delimiting the two is the realization of the cognate of ë in words like (“Bessarabian”) štejtl, lejbn: (“Podolian”) štɪtl, lɪbn, respec- tively ‘small town,’ ‘life ~ to live’ (standard and NEY štetl, lebn). By the twentieth century, the “Podolian” realization of this vowel, /ɪ/, had retreated to northern SEY; in most of SEY, other than in a few remnants, it had been replaced by the “Bessarabian” /ej/ (U. Weinreich 1953:130, 1958:236–237; M. Weinreich 1973 vol. 2:359). 15 Although at its height, the /u/ realization in words like mul ‘mouth’ (standard and NEY mojl) was prevalent throughout nearly all of SEY, by the twentieth century it had

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homonyms are created or avoided, the number of homonymic pairs is quite small, so the argument that this influenced sound change appears weak. 5. U. Weinreich (1953:122) notes such minimal pairs distinguished by the presence of /ɪ/ or /i/: štɪl ‘quiet’ : štil ‘easy chair’ (standard and NEY štil ‘quiet,’ štul ‘(easy) chair’), nɪs ‘nut ~ nuts’ : nis ‘(I) sneeze‘, etc. (standard and NEY nus ‘nut,’ nis ‘(I) sneeze’ ~ ‘nuts’). However, the existence of two areas where the /ɪ : i/ distinction has collapsed, in northeastern Poland (Herzog 1969:61), as well as in northern SEY centered on Rivne, indicates that even this phonemic distinction is not essential. Moreover, the iden- tity of the singular and plural of nɪs ‘nut(s)’ reflects a merger of historical u and i vowels, which took place in all of SY (see below, discussion of King 1967).16 The latter merger created homonyms such as the aforementioned nɪs ‘nut’ ~ ‘nuts’ in SY and nis ‘sneeze!’ ~ ‘nuts’ in NEY; without actually counting, it is very likely that these mergers created far more homonyms than any of the ones mentioned by U. Weinreich (1958). 6. In northeastern Poland, where the /ɪ : i/ distinction has collapsed, new homonyms have been created: e.g., filn ‘to fill’ ~ ‘to feel’, but the real- ization of standard and NEY feln ‘to be lacking’ is “Bessarabian”: fejln. In the greater part of northern SEY, where the /ɪ : i/ distinction is main- tained, different pairs of homonyms have arisen due to the “Podolian” realization of, e.g., standard and NEY feln : fɪln ‘to fill’ ~ ‘to be lacking,’ but filn ‘to feel’ (see Table 3). However, in the Rivne region, both distinctions have collapsed, thus filn ‘to be lacking’ ~ ‘to fill’ ~ ‘to feel.’ An example of greater homonymy in this latter region is, in principle, zin ‘sun’ ~ ‘son’ ~ ‘sons’ ~ ‘to see.’ In fact, suffixation has reduced homonymy to some extent: zin ‘sun’ ~ ‘son’ ~ ‘to see,’ zinen ‘suns’ ~ ‘sons.’17 Thus, what might have been four- or five-fold homonymy is only three-fold.18

retreated southwest, to Bessarabia; in the rest of SEY, it had mostly been replaced by /oj/ (U. Weinreich 1953:131, 1958:230, citing Vilenkin 1931). 16 As noted by, e.g., Herzog (1965:197), in NEY, vowel length was lost, thus historical long ū and short u merged, as did long ī and short i respectively; in SY, historical long ū merged with long ī and short u with short i respectively. Thus NEY zun ‘sun’ ~ ‘son,’ zin ‘sons’; CY zin ‘sun,’ zi:n ‘son’ ~ ‘sons,’ general SEY zɪn ‘sun,’ zin ‘son’ ~ ‘sons.’ 17 Herzog 1969:62 notwithstanding. Informants: the late Rivne-born and -raised informants Fayvl and Genye Zac. Herzog also includes zɪn (general SEY) and zin (where the /ɪ : i/ dis- tinction has collapsed) ‘mind’ “(more commonly z[ɪ]nen” (1969:61). In Rivne, this is also realized zinen. 18 As a result of the merger of historical u and i, some homonyms are apparently universal in SY: the aforementioned nɪs, as well as, e.g., hɪnt ‘dog’ ~ ‘dogs.’ Others are, again, avoided

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Table 3 Dialectal realizations of high front vowels

Dialectal Realizations of High Front Vowels

Standard Northeastern Southern SEY Northern SEY Rivne and NEY Poland (“Bessarabian”) (“Podolian”) region

‘to fill’ filn filn fɪln fɪln filn ‘to feel’ filn filn filn filn filn ‘to be feln fejln fejln fɪln filn lacking’ vowel i, e i, ej ɪ, i, ej ɪ, i i inventory

7. The criterion for phonemic status should not be homonymy, but co-occurrence or not in overlapping phonetic environments. A pair like general SEY šɪf ‘ship’ : tif ‘deep’ (standard and NEY šif, tif) is not a minimal pair, but is often cited as evidence for the phonemic status of two high front vowels. This might be said to render moot the entire discussion of homonyms. 8. King (1967) analyzes the environments in which the historical u and i vowels merged as part of an evaluation of the concept of “functional load,” the hypothesis that phonemes should merge only when they appear in few common environments or serve to distinguish relatively few minimal pairs. In favor of this hypothesis, he cites Gilliéron (1918), Jakobson (1931), Trnka (1931), and Martinet (1933, 1938, 1952, 1955).19 However, his analysis of the historical phonology of Icelandic, Low German, High German, and Yiddish reveals that “functional load, if it is a factor in sound change at all, is one of the least important” (King 1967:848). With respect to SY specifically, he states that “we can obtain a rough idea of the size of the functional load involved in the merger of Southern

by means of suffixes: brɪst ‘breast,’ brɪstn ‘breasts’ (standard and NEY brust : brist); brider ‘brother,’ but brider, briders, bridern ‘brothers’ (standard and NEY bruder : brider). See Herzog 1965:167–168. 19 See King (1967:832–834).

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Yiddish /u > i/” (1967:846); “It is clear that this merger affected a highly useful opposition in the functional sense” (1967: 847). 9. Finally, in addition to the languages King discusses, it is useful to mention Modern Greek and French as well. The /i/ phoneme in present- day Greek has no less than eight sources in Ancient Greek: η, ι, ῑ, υ, ῡ, ει, οι, ηι. Likewise, French has, e.g., at least a three-fold merger in foi ‘faith’ (< Latin fĭdes), fois ‘time, occurrence’ (< Latin vĭces), foie ‘liver’ (< Latin fēcătum), which might even be a four-fold merger depending on the ety- mology of the toponym Foix ‘town in southwestern France.’ Thus, to con- clude, homonymy plays a smaller role in sound change than might be expected.

If the “sixth” vowel is neither a result of influence of co-territorial languages nor of avoidance of homonymy, what is its origin? Perhaps SEY did arise from a clash between CY and NEY; this clash, however, yielded different results in different areas of SEY.

Bukovina

As per Table 2 above, this westernmost corner has ten robust vowel phonemes with a certain degree of symmetry. Unlike the rest of SEY, Bukovina shares pho- nemic vowel length with CY, but only in the low vowels: /a : a:/. In the mid- and high vowels, Bukovina has qualitative differences that pattern similarly to CY quantitative differences: e.g., the mid-back /ou/, which pat- terns like CY long /o:/ and thus has not merged with any other vowels, whereas in southern and northern SEY, it has merged with /u/ or /oj/. However, like southern SEY, Bukovina does not have a robust phoneme /aj/; there is only a residue of [aj] in morpheme-final and hiatus position. Likewise, apparent rem- nants of tote-mome-lushn (/a > o/) in, e.g., Siret (Romania)20 before /n/ and /l/: hont ‘hand,’ kolt ‘cold,’ as well as instances of ahistorical /h/ in both Siret and Chernivtsi,21 point to SEY: e.g., harbiz ‘watermelon’ (standard and NEY arbuz), ha:ln zex ‘to hurry’ (standard and NEY ajln zix), heršt ‘first’ (standard and NEY eršt).

20 Informant: the late Yoyne Gottesman. 21 Informant: the late Beyle Gottesman.

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Vowel Length

It can be said that the sixth vowel is a corollary of the loss of vowel length in NEY and SEY. As noted, Jakobson (1953:77) attributes these to Slavic influence.22 His, as well as U. Weinreich’s (1963:339–342 and passim) and King’s (1988) ef- forts to explain loss of vowel length in NEY and SEY entirely, or nearly so, by external factors do not seem convincing. While, as King notes, loss of length in a Germanic language astounds the Germanist (1988:86), he also notes that “no or German dialect really has long-short vowel opposi- tions the way languages like Finnish and Hindi do” (1988:92); even where vow- els are long in Germanic, they also differ qualitatively from short vowels. In the case of CY, qualitative differences between short and long vowels are at least as prominent as quantitative ones; in particular, the phonemically long counter- part of short /e/ is the diphthong /ej/. As for NEY, “the mergers … affected oppositions whose functional loads were probably less high … Length, as a distinctive feature, did not carry a high functional load in Middle High German” (ibid.).23 Perhaps Jakobson, Max Weinreich, et al., should not have asked why NEY and SEY lost phonemic vowel length, but why CY retained it. To quote King: “My impression is that vowel length in NEY went out with a whimper rather than with a bang, so orphaned had its status become” (1988:97). We can propose that SEY lost vowel length not so much under the influence of Slavic, but that of NEY. Even in CY, as in German, length does not have a high functional load. Much of it is allophonic. If the discussion is restricted to that of the German compo- nent, short /ĭ e ă ŏ/ primarily occur, not surprisingly, before historically gemi- nate consonants or clusters; long /ī ā ō/ and diphthong /ej/ before historically single consonants. Because of the historical development of High German and Yiddish, with few exceptions short vowels occur before voiceless consonants: /p t k f s š k x/; long vowels — before voiced consonants /b d g v z ž/. Those consonants that historically occurred both single and geminate, the obstruents /t f s/ and the resonants /m n l r24/, can be preceded by short or long vow- els. Most exceptions can be explained either by the presence of a morpheme boundary, such as the aforementioned example hānt ‘today’ (standard and NEY

22 A detailed discussion of the (counterintuitive) retention of vowel length in CY in a length- less Polish-speaking environment is beyond the scope of this article. 23 King (1967:846) notes that for want of direct Yiddish evidence, he was forced to use MHG to approximate functional load in the former. 24 In this context, /r/ patterns like a liquid; it has been noted above that in other contexts, /r/ patterns like the voiced () counterpart of voiceless /x/

Journal of Jewish LanguagesDownloaded from 5 Brill.com09/26/2021(2017) 200–216 02:41:46PM via free access Diachronic & Synchronic Phonology of Southeastern Yiddish 213 hajnt); by other morphophonemic considerations, such as the series of past participles with short /ɪ/ before /b d g/: gešrɪbn ‘written,’ geblɪbn ‘remained’; or perhaps by virtue of preceding a labial or or being polysyl- labic: zɪbn ‘seven,’ lɪgn ‘to lie’ ~ ‘(a) lie,’25 nɪderik ‘low,’ etc. (cf. M. Weinreich 1973 vol. 2:345).

Likely Origin of SEY

In the absence of written evidence, it can be hypothesized that before 1648, SEY was a subdialect of CY. Evidence for this hypothesis is as follows: Yiddish isoglosses between NEY and SY closely follow the border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 16th and 17th centuries. To this day, all of NEY is known in Yiddish as Lite ‘Lithuania,’ although this area also includes present-day Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, and northeasternmost Poland. Moreover, as late as 1885, the satirical writer Yitskhok-Yoyel Linetski, who was born in Vinnytsya, Ukraine, called his fictionalized autobiography Dos poylishe yingl ‘the Polish boy,’ which indicates that the severing of Ukraine from Poland in general and SEY from CY specifically had not yet entered folk consciousness (M. Weinreich 1973 vol. 2:239). Furthermore, SEY must have split off from CY before the latter underwent the sound change /ej > aj/, viz. southern SEY flejš ‘meat,’ lejbn ‘lions’ ~ ‘life,’ CY flajš, lajbn ‘lions,’ lejbn ‘life.’ The pull-chain model (see, e.g., Herzog 1969:66), in which the gap in the vocalic inventory left by the monophthongization of his- torical /aj/ would have opened a slot for /ej/ to shift to /aj/, appears to explain this: the residue of /aj/ in words like SEY draj ‘three’ would have prevented the /ej > aj/ shift, whereas the total /aj > ā/ shift in CY would have opened the door for the /ej > aj/ shift to follow. The loss of length in NEY and SEY caused wholesale realignment. As length was disappearing, many mergers loomed. NEY “sorted out its vowel length complexity by an act of dramatic simplicity: it abandoned vowel length alto- gether” (King 1988:97). SEY, which was born of CY, could not go that far, par- ticularly in view of the merger of /u/ and /i/ that had already taken place; it had to maintain a semblance of historical length, of symmetry in its vocalic inventory. Hence the southern SEY shifts /ay > ā > a/, /a > o/. The fact that both

25 This pair of lexical items is problematic: the noun lɪgn is monomorphemic, but the verb infinitive is bimorphemic; therefore, the verb stem is actually monosyllabic. Historical long high vowels are often, but far from always, shortened in CY before a labial or velar. Thus neither of these hypotheses is correct in all instances.

Journal of Jewish Languages 5 (2017) 200–216 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 02:41:46PM via free access 214 Glasser of these shifts left a residue behind indicates that not all possible shifts took place. The /ɪ : i/ contrast, which is distributed in SEY in a completely different way from its Slavic counterparts, is also such a residue. While, as King (1967) has demonstrated, specific sound changes or the ab- sence thereof cannot be explained by avoidance of homonymy, some phone- mic contrast must, of course, be maintained. Thus, in a dialect where /u/ and /i/ had already merged, /ɪ/ and /i/ would tend not to merge, all other things being equal, as Herzog implies: “The regionalization of [ɪ]25 … must have mili- tated against the collapse of the [ɪ/:/i/] distinction” (1969:62). To paraphrase Renwick’s argument, when a phonemic contrast is marginal, it will not neces- sarily disappear entirely; it may be partially retained, in those environments where its functional load is relatively high (2012:258–259, quoting Sohn 2008). The occurrence of such a merger in the Rivne region is the exception that proves the rule, an extreme result of the collision between the NEY merger of long and short vowels and the SEY merger of /u/ and /i/ respectively. Just as the Bukovina subdialect, in particular, appears to derive primarily from CY, further evidence for the primarily NEY origin of northern SEY (Glasser 2008:73–74) is the /i/ vowel in, e.g., kirc ‘short’ (standard and NEY kurc, CY korec, general SEY kerc) (M. Weinreich 1965:75 et passim, 1973 vol. 2:366 ff.).

Conclusion

Attributing a major structural change in Yiddish phonology to Ukrainian seems mistaken, particularly in view of the fact that the main influence of Ukrainian has been lexical. Moreover, if nothing else, U. Weinreich (1963) makes clear that (profound) structural changes in Yiddish dialects, as opposed to (superfi- cial) lexical borrowings, cannot automatically be attributed to the given coter- ritorial language. Although SEY has lost vowel length per se, it has dealt with it very differ- ently from NEY; none of the SEY mergers was total. Only long /ū/ has left no residue, as it had nearly lost its phonemic status in CY, the dialect from which SEY is derived. Long /ā/ survived in Bukovina intact, in southern SEY in a new guise. Long /ō/ survived as diphthongal /ou/ in Bukovina, but merged with /u/ in most of SEY; by the 20th century, /u/ had been replaced nearly everywhere by /oj/. Long /ē/ diphthongized to /ej/, as it did in all of SY. A few new pairs of homonyms were added, others were avoided. Thus, rather than disturbing the symmetry of the vocalic inventory of SEY, the “sixth vowel” is one of several remnants of quantitative distinctions in new garb. Most important, the solu- tion to the problem has been found by means of internal reconstruction.

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Paul Glasser is the former dean of the Max Weinreich Center at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the editor of the completed English translation of Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language (Yale University Press & YIVO, 2008) and the co-editor of the newly published Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (Indiana University Press, 2016).

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