Download or read book Yiddish as a Mixed Language written by Ewa Geller and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish has so far been mostly described as a linear, genetic descendant of German. This volume makes a case for the mixed character of the idiom and the formative role of the Slavic component in its creation and development.
Download or read book Origins of Yiddish Dialects written by Alexander Beider and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of modern varieties of Yiddish and presents evidence for the claim that, contrary to most accounts, Yiddish only developed into a separate language in the 15th century. Through a careful analysis of Yiddish phonology, morphology, orthography, and the Yiddish lexicon in all its varieties, Alexander Beider shows how what are commonly referred to as Eastern Yiddish and Western Yiddish have different ancestors. Specifically, he argues that the western branch is based on German dialects spoken in western Germany with some Old French influence, while the eastern branch has its origins in German dialects spoken in the modern-day Czech Republic with some Old Czech influence. The similarities between the two branches today are mainly a result of the close links between the underlying German dialects, and of the close contact between speakers. Following an introduction to the definition and classification of Yiddish and its dialects, chapters in the book investigate the German, Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic components of Yiddish, as well as the sound changes that have occurred in the various dialects. The book will be of interest to all those working in the areas of Yiddish and Jewish Studies in particular, and historical linguistics and history more generally.
Download or read book Indo European and the Nostratic Hypothesis written by Allan R. Bomhard and published by Signum Desktop Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Languages in Jewish Communities Past and Present written by Benjamin Hary and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers sociological and structural descriptions of language varieties used in over 2 dozen Jewish communities around the world, along with synthesizing and theoretical chapters. Language descriptions focus on historical development, contemporary use, regional and social variation, structural features, and Hebrew/Aramaic loanwords. The book covers commonly researched language varieties, like Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as less commonly researched ones, like Judeo-Tat, Jewish Swedish, and Hebraized Amharic in Israel today.
Download or read book Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures written by Anita Norich and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating discussion of Jewish multiculturalism through the range of Jewish lingualisms, cultures, and history
Download or read book Born to Kvetch LP written by Michael Wex and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-11-20 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delightful excursion through the Yiddish language, the culture it defines and serves, and the fine art of complaint Throughout history, Jews around the world have had plenty of reasons to lament. And for a thousand years, they've had the perfect language for it. Rich in color, expressiveness, and complexity, Yiddish has proven incredibly useful and durable. Its wonderful phrases and idioms impeccably reflect the mind-set that has enabled the Jews of Europe to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution . . . and enables them to kvetch about it! Michael Wex—professor, scholar, translator, novelist, and performer—takes a serious yet unceasingly fun and funny look at this remarkable kvetch-full tongue that has both shaped and has been shaped by those who speak it. Featuring chapters on curse words, food, sex, and even death, he allows his lively wit and scholarship to roam freely from Sholem Aleichem to Chaucer to Elvis. Perhaps only a khokhem be-layle (a fool, literally a "sage at night," when there's no one around to see) would care to pass up this endearing and enriching treasure trove of linguistics, sociology, history, and folklore—an intriguing appreciation of a unique and enduring language and an equally fascinating culture.
Download or read book Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective written by Lily Kahn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective is devoted to the diverse array of spoken and written language varieties that have been employed by Jews in the Diaspora from antiquity until the twenty-first century. It focuses on the following five key themes: Jewish languages in dialogue with sacred Jewish texts, Jewish languages in contact with the co-territorial non-Jewish languages, Jewish vernacular traditions, the status of Jewish languages in the twenty-first century, and theoretical issues relating to Jewish language research. This volume includes case studies on a wide range of Jewish languages both historical and modern and devotes attention to lesser known varieties such as Jewish Berber, Judeo-Italian, and Karaim in addition to the more familiar Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, and Ladino. "On top of Brill’s Journal of Jewish Languages and a number of recent publications providing systematic overviews of Jewish languages as well as related theoretical discussions, this volume is a valuable addition to the increasing interest in Jewish languages and linguistics." -Wout van Bekkum, Groningen, Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVI 3-4 (2019)
Download or read book Jewish Languages from A to Z written by Aaron D. Rubin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Languages from A to Z provides an engaging and enjoyable overview of the rich variety of languages spoken and written by Jews over the past three thousand years. The book covers more than 50 different languages and language varieties. These include not only well-known Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, but also more exotic languages like Chinese, Esperanto, Malayalam, and Zulu, all of which have a fascinating Jewish story to be told. Each chapter presents the special features of the language variety in question, a discussion of the history of the associated Jewish community, and some examples of literature and other texts produced in it. The book thus takes readers on a stimulating voyage around the Jewish world, from ancient Babylonia to 21st-century New York, via such diverse locations as Tajikistan, South Africa, and the Caribbean. The chapters are accompanied by numerous full-colour photographs of the literary treasures produced by Jewish language-speaking communities, from ancient stone inscriptions to medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary novels and newspapers. This comprehensive survey of Jewish languages is designed to be accessible to all readers with an interest in languages or history, regardless of their background—no prior knowledge of linguistics or Jewish history is assumed.
Download or read book College Yiddish written by Uriel Weinreich and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Revivalistics written by Ghil'ad Zuckermann and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ghil'ad Zuckermann introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration. Applying lessons from the Hebrew revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary endangered languages, Zuckermann takes readers along a fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival and provides new insights into language genesis. Beginning with a critical analysis of Israeli-the language resulting from the Hebrew revival-Zuckermann's radical theory contradicts conventional accounts of the Hebrew revival and challenges the family tree model of historical linguistics. Revivalistics demonstrates how grammatical cross-fertilization with the revivalists' mother tongues is inevitable in the case of successful "revival languages." The second part of the book then applies these lessons from the Israeli language to revival movements in Australia and globally, describing the "why" and "how" of revivalistics. With examples from the Barngarla Aboriginal language of South Australia, Zuckermann proposes ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian reasons for language revival and offers practical methods for reviving languages. Based on years of the author's research, fieldwork, and personal experience with language revivals all over the globe, Revivalistics offers ground-breaking theoretical and pragmatic contributions to the field of language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration.
Download or read book No Star Too Beautiful written by Joachim Neugroschel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique and rich anthology of Yiddish stories ranges from the beginning of Yiddish literature through I.B. Singer.
Download or read book Languages of the World written by Asya Pereltsvaig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces readers to the rich diversity of human languages, familiarizing them with the variety of languages around the world.
Download or read book It Could Lead to Dancing written by Sonia Gollance and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
Download or read book The Mixed Language Debate written by Yaron Matras and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mixed Languages are speech varieties that arise in bilingual settings, often as markers of ethnic separateness. They combine structures inherited from different parent languages, often resulting in odd and unique splits that present a challenge to theories of contact-induced change as well as genetic classification. This collection of articles is devoted to the theoretical and empirical controversies that surround the study of Mixed Languages. Issues include definitions and prototypes, similarities and differences to other contact languages such as pidgins and creoles, the role of codeswitching in the emergence of Mixed Languages, the role of deliberate and conscious mixing, the question of the existence of a Mixed Language continuum, and the position of Mixed Languages in general models of language change and contact-induced change in particular. An introductory chapter surveys the current study of Mixed Languages. Contributors include leading historical linguists, contact linguists and typologists, among them Carol Myers-Scotton, Sarah Grey Thomason,William Croft, Thomas Stolz, Maarten Mous, Ad Backus, Evgeniy Golovko, Peter Bakker, Yaron Matras.
Download or read book Language Contact Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew written by Edit Doron and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language constitutes a unique event in modern history: a language which for generations only existed in the written mode underwent a process popularly called “revival”, acquiring native speakers and becoming a language spoken for everyday use. Despite the attention it has drawn, this particular case of language-shift, which differs from the better-documented cases of creoles and mixed languages, has not been discussed within the framework of the literature on contact-induced change. The linguistic properties of the process have not been systematically studied, and the status of the emergent language as a (dis)continuous stage of its historical sources has not been evaluated in the context of other known cases of language shift. The present collection presents detailed case studies of the syntactic evolution of Modern Hebrew, alongside general theoretical discussion, with the aim of bringing the case of Hebrew to the attention of language-contact scholars, while bringing the insights of the literature on language contact to help shed light on the case of Hebrew.
Download or read book Yiddish written by S.A. Birnbaum and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great Yiddish scholars of the twentieth century, S.A. Birnbaum (1891–1989) published Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar in 1979 towards the end of a long and prolific career. Unlike other grammars and study guides for English speakers, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar fully describes the Southern Yiddish dialect and pronunciation used today by most native speakers, while also taking into account Northern Yiddish and Standard Yiddish, associated with secularist and academic circles. The book also includes specimens of Yiddish prose and poetic texts spanning eight centuries, sampling Yiddish literature from the medieval to modern eras across its vast European geographic expanse. The second edition of Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar makes this classic text available again to students, teachers, and Yiddish-speakers alike. Featuring three new introductory essays by noted Yiddish scholars, a corrected version of the text, and an expanded and updated bibliography, this book is essential reading for any serious student of Yiddish and its culture.
Download or read book Jewish and Non Jewish Creators of Jewish Languages written by Paul Wexler and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2006 with total page 966 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume brings together 34 articles that were published between 1964 and 2003 on Judaized forms of Arabic, Chinese, German, Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Slavic (including Modern Hebrew and Yiddish, two Slavic languages "relexified" to Hebrew and German, respectively), Spanish and Semitic Hebrew (including Ladino - the Ibero-Romance relexification of Biblical Hebrew) and Karaite. The motivations for reissuing these articles are the convenience of having thematically similar topics appear together in the same venue and the need to update the interpretations, many of which have radically changed over the years. As explained in a lengthy new preface and in notes added to the articles themselves, the impetus to create strikingly unique Jewish ethnolects comes not so much from the creativity of the Jews but rather from non- Jewish converts to Judaism, in search (often via relexification) of a unique linguistic analogue to their new ethnoreligious identity. The volume should be of interest to students of relexification, of the Judaization of non-Jewish languages, and of these specific languages.