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Lexical Elements of Slavic Origin in Judezmo on South Slavic Territory, 16–19Th Centuries: Uriel Weinreich and the History of Contact Linguistics

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Lexical Elements of Slavic Origin in Judezmo on South Slavic Territory, 16–19Th Centuries: Uriel Weinreich and the History of Contact Linguistics Journal of Jewish Languages 5 (2017) 217–252 brill.com/jjl Lexical Elements of Slavic Origin in Judezmo on South Slavic Territory, 16–19th Centuries: Uriel Weinreich and the History of Contact Linguistics David M. Bunis Center for Jewish Languages, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem [email protected] Abstract From the 19th–20th-century beginnings of modern linguistics, scholars reported on various results of interactions between diverse language speakers; but it was only with Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact (1953) that a solid theoretical basis for the systematic study of contact linguistics was elaborated. The present article stud- ies lexical influences from South Slavic on Judezmo (Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) resulting from contact during the 16th–19th centuries between speakers of these two languages in the regions that, between 1918 and 1992, were known jointly as Yugoslavia. During the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian periods, borrowings in local Judezmo from South Slavic were relatively few compared with Turkisms. But from the nineteenth century, when the South Slavs gained political independence, Serbo-Croatian exerted an ever-increasing influence on Judezmo in this region. The case of Judezmo there dif- fers considerably from Yiddish in Slavic Eastern Europe throughout the same period, as described by Uriel Weinreich and others. Keywords Uriel Weinreich – Judezmo – Judeo-Spanish – Ladino – South Slavic – lexical borrowing – Sephardim – contact linguistics * The research on which the present article is based was supported by the Israel Science Foun- dation (grant no. 1105/11). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/���34638-050����� © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/���34638-050�����Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 05:01:20PM via free access 218 Bunis Uriel Weinreich’s Theoretical Framework for the Study of Contact Linguistics Linguists had observed and commented on the results of interactions between users of diverse languages – both spoken and written – before Uriel Weinreich published Languages in Contact in 1953, as an adaptation of his 1951 Columbia University doctoral dissertation (Weinreich 1951). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, founders of modern linguistics such as August Schleicher, in his monograph on Die Sprachen Europas (1850, esp. 26–28), Franz Miklosich, in his analyses of the elements of Turkish and Slavic origin in Balkan languages (1861, 1885–1886, 1889, 1890), and Kristian Sandfeld, in his introduction to Linguistique balkanique (1930; first published in Danish in 1926), all touched on structural features characteristic of languages whose speakers were in direct contact with speakers of other languages over time, and whose languages underwent change as a result of that contact. But such early treatments of language contact and its repercussions lacked a broad the- oretical framework. Weinreich’s pioneering Languages in Contact provided such a framework. In the book, Weinreich elaborated the theoretical base necessary for the deep, systematic study of contact linguistics he advocated, and he illustrated the principles he formulated by means of a rich selection of data exemplifying the results of a wide range of language contact types, at every structural level. Some of the data had been collected by Weinreich personally, in situ, in 1949–50, and represented the contemporaneous speech of members of the diverse language communities of Switzerland, who had co-existed, interacted, and influenced one another, linguistically and otherwise, for centuries. Throughout the work, Weinreich emphasized the pivotal role of the bilingual speaker as the agent of language change resulting from “interference,” and the role of the monolingual speaker as heir to the “inherited” loanwords imported and disseminated by the bilinguals. Since the publication of Weinreich’s book, scholars have used his principles as the basis for further theorizing on language contact in general, and for analyzing the results of contact in diverse geographic areas and of vari- ous structural and sociological types. In addition to the seminal role it played in the establishment of the field of language contact studies, Weinreich’s com- position contributed toward the founding of allied areas of linguistic research such as multilingualism studies; codeswitching, borrowing, and language mix- ing; sociolinguistics in its manifold aspects, including the study of Jewish lan- guages; and others. It was undoubtedly not by coincidence that Uriel Weinreich took an inter- est in the contacts between speakers of varieties of Germanic and Romance Journal of Jewish LanguagesDownloaded from 5 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 217–252 05:01:20PM via free access Lexical Elements of Slavic Origin in yugoslavian Judezmo 219 in Switzerland. By the time Languages in Contact appeared, Weinreich’s fa- ther, Max, had long established himself as one of the foremost Yiddish lin- guists in the world. He was a moving spirit of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, founded in Vilna in 1925. In 1940 the institute was moved to New York, and there, both Max and Uriel, as well as Uriel’s wife Beatrice, became leading figures in the scientific study of Yiddish language, literature, and folk- lore. In 1949 YIVO published Uriel’s College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and Culture, a fundamental, comprehensive introduction to Yiddish for the everyday reader. In 1954 Uriel initiated The Field of Yiddish, a series of collective volumes dedicated to the linguistics, literature, and folk- lore of Yiddish and other Jewish languages. In 1959 Mouton released Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich’s selective research bibliography on Yiddish language and folklore. Since then, revised English editions of College Yiddish, as well as its Hebrew version, Yidish la-universita (Jerusalem 1974), together with The Field of Yiddish volumes and the Weinreichs’ research bibliography, have stood at the core of Yiddish courses worldwide.1 In later publications on Yiddish, both Max and Uriel Weinreich demonstrated a particular interest in the distinctive non-Germanic linguistic components of Yiddish – especially Hebrew-Aramaic and Slavic, which perhaps more than any of its other features set the language apart from its non-Jewish correlate, German – and in the general phenomenon of language contact and resultant “interference” or influence and borrowing which, in the case of Yiddish, had given rise to its Slavic component. Uriel must have seen the language contact situation in Switzerland as an obvious parallel to that of Yiddish and its numerous neighboring languages in Eastern Europe, as well as among immigrants in the United States. Yiddish in America is mentioned numerous times in Languages in Contact; so too are Judezmo – Weinreich’s “Dzhudezmo” – and other Jewish languages, all of which existed in contact with other languages (Weinreich 1953:106). For this reason, coupled with his deep interest in general linguistic theory, the study of language con- tact in Switzerland and elsewhere would have been a natural dissertation topic for him. 1 On a personal note, had I not read Weinreich’s College Yiddish, with its chapter on other Jewish languages, and Languages in Contact when I was a high-school student, I might never have studied with Marvin I. Herzog, one of Weinreich’s most outstanding students at Columbia University, and entered the fields of Judezmo and Jewish language research. Journal of Jewish Languages 5 (2017) 217–252 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 05:01:20PM via free access 220 Bunis The Differential Impact of Slavic on Its Diverse Neighboring Languages In 1955 Uriel Weinreich channeled his interest in Yiddish-Slavic contact into an article focusing on one of its most telling results: the ‘fusion elements’ or ‘blends’ in Yiddish incorporating a morpheme of East Slavic origin. The Slavic languages have left their mark on all of the languages with which their speak- ers came into intensive contact. The divergent results of the influence of Slavic on each of its contact languages, however, are often striking. In an article pub- lished in 1958, Weinreich offered a convincing explanation for the significant influence of Slavic on Yiddish as opposed to the less significant influence of Slavic on colonial German spoken by non-Jews in the same region. Weinreich’s study of Slavic influence on these two structurally similar Indo-European languages – both spoken on Slavic speech territory but by com- munities having different sorts of relations with their Slavic-speaking neigh- bors – illustrates the divergent linguistic outcomes which can result from contact with Slavic by two quite distinct culture groups, in this case, Jewish and non-Jewish speakers of a primarily Germanic-origin language. The Jewish lan- guage world offers a particularly notable instance of the divergent influence Slavic has had on two languages of primarily Indo-European stock spoken by members of two subgroups of the same culture group, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews sharing much in the way of broad religious and national identity and eth- nic orientation, but existing in two different national-political spheres: Yiddish in contact with East Slavic in Eastern Europe, in which the local political re- gimes were themselves Slavic, apparently lending a certain importance and prestige to Slavic among Yiddish speakers and thus encouraging an openness to extensive Slavic influence on Yiddish at every linguistic level, early on in the history of
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