פּױליש-שטאַמיקע װערטער אין ייִדיש
Long-Lasting Language Contact and its Lexical
and Semantic Outcome Based on the Example
of Polish Lexical Borrowings in Yiddish *
װעגן דעם פֿאָרש־פּראָיעקט
Our goal is to study the transfer of vocabulary from Polish to Yiddish, the language of Eastern-European Jews. The latter is a clear example of a mixed language significantly influenced by Polish.
By conducting a meticulous analysis of Polish-origin words in Yiddish, their meanings, grammatical properties and relations to other words, we hope to find answers to more general questions. We are comparing the semantic and grammatical connections of specific words within the new environment of Yiddish with those of their etymological ancestors in Polish. By doing so, we aim to show for instance how to distinguish words originating from the speakers’ ancestral mother tongue from later borrowings within a mixed language (see below).
Answers to these kinds of questions will enrich the existing body of knowledge of the consequences of language contact.
Direct language contact is primarily linked to human migration and occurs whenever individuals or groups sharing the same space are forced to communicate using more than one language.
Therefore, it ultimately comes down to finding strategies for overcoming communication barriers. Most of the time this leads to contact-induced changes within the vocabulary, phonetics and grammar of the languages involved, which, in cases of long-lasting contact, occur unconsciously to the speakers. The most common results are borrowings, both on the level of linguistic matter (such as words) and linguistic patterns. In extreme cases a group may abandon its mother tongue in favor of another language. Sometimes a form of “linguistic compromise” is reached, which appears to have happened in the case of Yiddish when Jews who spoke Judeo-Slavic languages (also called Knaanic) integrated with their mostly German-speaking co-religionists immigrating from Western Europe. In contact linguistics, this process is called language shift. One of its results was the carryover of certain Slavic words into the emergent mixed language of Yiddish. This inherited vocabulary (lexical relics) is one of our research topics.
Although these linguistic processes are universal phenomena, Slavic-Jewish-German contact provides a good illustration for them.
The figure below presents the outcome of Jewish-Slavic language contact in its consecutive stages.
Click on each point to view content.
Slavic glosses originating from the language (ethnolect) of Slavic Jews, known as the Knaanic language, appear in medieval Hebrew texts dating as far back as 11th-13th century. Roughly 150 such glosses have hitherto been identified (Kupfer/Lewicki 1956). Many of them may be found later on as relics in Eastern Yiddish (Geller 2013, 2015).
An example of such a gloss is the word פּלצא pleco/pleca/plece < opl. plecy (dual form of opl. plece) ‘back’ attested in the 11th-century Commentary of Rabbi Gershom (“The Mainz Commentary”):
‘[The body part extending] from the armpit [is called] pleca/plece in the Knaanic language.’
source: Kupfer, F.; Lewicki, T. (1956) Źródła hebrajskie do dziejów Słowian i niektórych innych ludówśrodkowej i wschodniej Europy, Wrocław, Warsaw: Ossolineum, p. 26-27.
Slavic inscriptions written in the Hebrew alphabet on medieval coins created by Jewish moneyers during the reign of Mieszko the Old and Leszek the White come from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
One of the extant inscriptions reads as followed:
משקא קרל פּילשקי /mškɔ krl pilski/
pol. ‘Mieszko król Polski‘
eng. ‘Mieszko the king of Poland’
source: Gumkowski, M. (1962) Monety hebrajskie za Piastów, in: Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, no. 41, p. 3-19, no. 42.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brakteat02.jpg)
The first attested uses of individual words of Slavic origin are found in Yiddish texts from the mid sixteenth century. Some of them may be considered relics (inherited remnants) of the Knaanic languages, others may be borrowings from the languages of the neighboring peoples, Polish among others.
You can find an example below:
1543
נעביך/נעבעך /nebex/ ‘unfortunate(ly); alas; oh dear!‘ < ocz. neboha
This is one of the first Slavicisms attested in the Mloxim bux (Augsburg, 1543) and Šmuel bux (Augsburg, 1544) among others. Its meaning and usage are still current in modern Yiddish.
source: Šmuel-bux (1544). Augsburg, p. 159
Originating from 1613 Sejfer derex ejc ha-xajim (A Path to the Tree of Life) is the first known text written entirely in what was then called Polish Yiddish, later redubbed Eastern Yiddish, the ancestor of modern Yiddish.
It is abundant in words of Polish origin (over 50 lexemes), as well as many grammatical and derivational features existing in Yiddish today (Geller 2015).
טאטרשקי זעלי /tatrske zele/ < pol. tatarskie ziele ‘sweet flag, literally: Tatar herb’
יאלװיץ /jalovec/ < jałowiec ‘juniper’
source: Geller, E. (2015) Sejfer-derech ejc ha chajim. Przewodnik po drzewie żywota. Warsaw: Wyd. Muzeum im. Jana III Sobieskiego w Wilanowie.
A few examples of linguistically mixed texts can be found amongst the collections of Polish Jews’ folk songs published by Menachem Kipnis in the interwar period. An example of a Jewish Ukrainian-Hebrew folksong “Po tim boci Dunaju” (“On this Side of the Danube”) reads as follows:
| po tim boci dunaju, ni daleko vid kraju, potupaju, potupaju. wejeroe rinunejnu ad orew. kričit kozak: ratujte, ratuj mene matuška pogibaj, pogibaj. wejeroe pidjonejnu ad orev.nima vesla i čelna, umirat prišla pora, potupaj, potupaj. |
 |
Source: Kipnis, M.; Zeligfeld, Z. (1925) 80 Jidiše folkslider. Tejl cvej, Warsaw: A. Gitlin.
The figurative usage of Slavicisms in the following text, evoking a specifically Yiddish worldview, is proof of their deep rootedness in the language:
דעמב /demb/ < pol. dąb ‘oak’
סאָסנע /sosne/ < pol. sosna ‘pinetree’
אָלשינע /olšine/ < pol. olszyna ‘alder’
יאָדלע /jodle/ < pol. jodła ‘fir’
װערבע /verbe/ < pol. wierzba, ukr. верба ‘willow’
Source: Papiernikov, Y. Di Zun Hinter Mir, after: Schaechter, M. (2005) Di geviksn velt in yidish, New York: YIVO, p. 3.
Jewish-Polish language contact naturally worked in both directions. Yiddishisms can be found not only in the Polish language spoken by Jews, but also in Polish sociolects, dialects, colloquial and official language (Geller 2011).
pol. xavernik ‘buddy, mate (criminal slang)’ < yid. חבֿר /xaver/ ‘friend’ + slav. {-nik}
source: Kurka, A. (1899) Słownik mowy złodziejskiej, Lviv, p. 48.
pol. chusyt ‘in this context: hassidic dance’ < yid. חסיד /xosid/ ‘Hasid’
source: Bilder, N. (1924) Nasz głos., Year 1, 1924, no. 3, p. 2.
pol. dintojra ‘kangaroo court’ < yid.דין תּורה /dintojre/ ‘rabbinical court’
source: Minutes from the 69th sitting of the Inquiry Committee for examining the charges of corruption during work on amendments to the broadcasting act (SRTV) revraled in the media, on the 24th September 2003, p. 48.
These are words taken over from the speakers of another language and integrated into one’s own as a result of direct or indirect language contact.
Colloquially, the term “borrowings” includes all foreign lexical material, from occasional insertions, through well-known but recognizably alien words, to vocabulary used commonly within a community without knowledge of its origin. In the case of a mixed language, the latter are hard to distinguish from so-called lexical relics – old words stemming from the group’s original mother tongue. In situations of intense and long-lasting contact, new words (coinages) may also be created out of foreign material that do not exist in the latter’s source language. Therefore, one can say that words commonly called borrowings may have varying degrees of rootedness in their recipient language, based on the intensity and duration of contact, which is depicted in the graphic below.
The Jews have been a multilingual people since the biblical times as a result of their living in a diaspora for the greater part of their history. Besides Hebrew, used among scholars as a language of religion, law and science, they also spoke the languages of the peoples among whom they lived.
Therefore, as the German-speaking Jews from the West migrated East, they encountered and absorbed their Slavic-speaking co-religionists. With time, the latter changed their mother tongue to the German ethnolect of their kin due to the prestige and dominance of German in the cities in which they settled. This language shift was incomplete, however, as these Jews (often unwittingly) introduced many significant grammatical and lexical elements of their speech into the newly acquired idiom (the so-called Slavic component of Yiddish). The mixed character of this new language was subsequently reinforced by lasting and intense contact with the Slavic speech of the surrounding peoples, particularly Polish. This process of language fusion is visible in the mixed structure of Yiddish vocabulary. For example, the dominance of Slavicisms within complete sets of concepts, especially those closely related to the human being itself, may be a proof of their relic status.
Contact linguistics generally makes the distinction between core vocabulary and borrowings (Tadmor/Haspelmath/Taylor 2010). The former seems to form the stable part of the lexicon, highly resistant to replacement. Body-part names are for the most part included in this group, as they describe a universal reality, very close to the human experience. That is why borrowings should theoretically be very rare in the area of the human body. In Yiddish however, many body-part names are of Slavic origin which may testify to their relic status.
Click on the points below for information on each word, described as it will be in the upcoming dictionary (see below).
װעגן דעם װערטערבוך
The interactive dictionary of Polish loanwords in Yiddish is the investigative team’s primary research tool. Firstly, it makes it possible to describe each word with numerous types of data, such as pronunciation, grammatical gender, inflection or inclusion in semantic fields such as the human body. Secondly, it enables searching and filtering the gathered material based on all types of the mentioned information.
Moreover, the structure of the dictionary, based on a wordnet-like architecture, allows a visualization of the relations between specific words in Yiddish and a comparison with analogous relations in the source language. Thanks to these features, the dictionary takes lexical analysis to a new level by mapping the process of language contact.
Click below to view presentation.
ביבליאָגראַפֿיע
PROJECT PUBLICATIONS
PRIMARY SOURCES
ONLINE SOURCES
SECONDARY LITERATURE (selected)
פֿאָרשערס־גרופּע
Institute of German Studies
Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw
www: https://neofilologia.wn.uw.edu.pl/profile/10/
principal investigator
Graduate of the Institute of German Studies
Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw
investigator
Institute of German Studies
Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw
investigator
investigator
Tomasz Naskręt M. Eng.
Wrocław University of Science and Tchnology
CLARIN-PL
programming services
Prof. Mariola Jakubowicz
Institute of Slavic Studies,
Polish Academy of Sciences
specialist consultant in Slavic Studies
Miłosz Lindner, BA
Mordechai Anielewicz Centre for the Study
and Teaching of the History
and Culture of Jews in Poland
University of Warsaw
scholar (01.2017-06.2018), investigator
*Project funded by the National Science Centre (NCN) as part of the Opus 11 competition,
UMO-2016/21/B/HS2/02549, 2017‑2020.
Contractor:
Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw
ul. Dobra 55, 00-312, Warsaw
Poland
http://plwordnet.pwr.wroc.pl/wordnet/
polonjid@wn.uw.edu.pl