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Alphabet Soup (Linguistics)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Yes, now you draw my attention to it, it is rather brilliant. Shouldn't someone check to see whether it is original.

my very limited knowledge of Aryan languages.

Pff! I speak one fluently and several others with varying degrees of mastery.

If Duncan is right, then we have five hundred years (?) of different alphabets but we still don't know if that is enough to create two distinct languages (even to the level of, say, Portuguese and Spanish).

But the really interesting aspect is that for Croat, Serb, Bosnian, Hindi, Urdu we have populations who are ninety per cent illiterate for ninety per cent of the time. Which means that all differences arise from our principle that the written form leads the spoken one.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote:
Yes, now you draw my attention to it, it is rather brilliant. Shouldn't someone check to see whether it is original.

Dan has written a great deal concerning the impact of alphabets on language development and might have touched upon the notion that different alphabets might produce two languages from one -- he should chirp in here -- but I am certain none of us have ever applied it to the specific problem of German and Yiddish (though we've discussed the subject for quite some time now).

As I am sure no one else is even considering the notion that alphabets might govern pronunciation more than they reflect it, I've great confidence in the originality of Rocky's idea.
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Rocky



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Here's what I could find on Yiddish. It's from a book called "The Politics of Interpretation" by Jerold C. Frakes - pg. 69/70. I don't think I can permanently link to it, but you can google the book and google will let you read random pages of it.

The context of this quote is a discussion of the Cambridge (Yiddish) Codex. The codex was discovered in 1382 in Cairo.

In 1963 and 1965, Josef Weissberg published two articles analyzing the phonetic system of the Cambridge codex. In the first he immediately notes that the primary question confronting scholars with respect to the codex is whether the language is Old Yiddish or Middle High German. Initially, it seems that his approach is different from those of his predecessors, since he attempts to define the constraints on strict linguistic analysis in relation to this group of texts:

1) It is always difficult to distinguish closely related languages, especially at an earlier period in their history, when their similarities were even more pronounced than at present;

2) this problem is further compounded when an apparently uniform language is used by two "national" groups

3) it is even more problematic with respect to medieval documents which had no rigid orthographic rules;

4) in its earliest stages, the use of the Hebrew alphabet alone distinguished Yiddish from Middle High German, and only later did the linguistic form of the two languages diverge;

5) with respect to Dukus Hurnt the problem also arises of the relation of the language of the text to the rather strict tradition of the conventional literary style associated with courtly poetry, which avoided regionalisms and vernacular; and,

6) the Middle High German literary language of the manuscripts is an artificial construct, which has been further obscured by the standard, "normalizing" practice of modern editors, thus rendering a comparison of the language of the Cambridge codes to "Middle High German" more problematic still.
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Ishmael


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Well Rocky. There you have it. You are the first person in the wrorld to realize that Yiddish is merely German written with Hebrew characters (or is German, Yiddish, written with Latin characters?). Why aren't you writing a book about it already?
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Mick Harper
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The context of this quote is a discussion of the Cambridge (Yiddish) Codex. The codex was discovered in 1382 in Cairo.

I find this statement absolutely reeks of bogosity. And note even the author of the book puts "Middle High German" in quotes by section six. He suspects, along with me, that all the various 'Germans' that bespatter the OED are mostly bogus.

But I join Ishmael in his remarks.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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The context of this quote is a discussion of the Cambridge (Yiddish) Codex. The codex was discovered in 1382 in Cairo.


When exactly were German Jews writing notes to one another -- in Egypt?

Puts me in mind of the Jews of Alexandria who assisted Caesar in Cleopatra's civil war, according to conventional history.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Dan has written a great deal concerning the impact of alphabet on language development and might have touched upon the notion that different alphabets might produce two languages from one

Yes, there has been a lot of stuff about divergences arising within English as a result of literacy and a little stuff on differences between English, French and German arising from their respective programmes of education. But we pretty well share a script: I don't think we've said anything explicit about the different differences different scripts might introduce.

3) it is even more problematic with respect to medieval documents which had no rigid orthographic rules

But they still set out to settle subtle matters, to determine things that by their own admission can not be settled.

Well Rocky. There you have it. You are the first person in the wrorld to realize that Yiddish is merely German written with Hebrew characters

I don't get this, since someone already said

4) in its earliest stages, the use of the Hebrew alphabet alone distinguished Yiddish from Middle High German
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Mick Harper
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When exactly were German Jews writing notes to one another -- in Egypt?

Probably quite recently. Egypt in the nineteenth century became the arch-centre of the Fakes Industry. How can I say that Jews have a tendency to pitch up where a dollar is to be made without sounding anti-Semitic?
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Mick Harper
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Well Rocky. There you have it. You are the first person in the wrorld to realize that Yiddish is merely German written with Hebrew characters

I don't get this, since someone already said

4) in its earliest stages, the use of the Hebrew alphabet alone distinguished Yiddish from Middle High German

But Dan, Rocky has explained something that, yes, is obvious but only if you are not a scholar. Everybody (following the academic view) assumes that Yiddish diverged from German because the Yids are a separate group and it is a linguistic paradigm that language changes (rather rapidly) in discrete groups.

Rocky has stumbled into our paradigm which is that languages (barely) change unless there is a discrete literate class. And a discrete alphabet fuelling that difference is going to jet-propel the whole thing. Remember, 1382 aside, we don't know that Yiddish is any more than a very few hundred years old.
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
Rocky has stumbled into our paradigm which is that languages (barely) change unless there is a discrete literate class. And a discrete alphabet fuelling that difference is going to jet-propel the whole thing. Remember, 1382 aside, we don't know that Yiddish is any more than a very few hundred years old.

Exactly.

Scholars will tell you that early German-written-in-Hebrew attests that initially, Yiddish was just German. So far so good. But then they imagine that a distinct group of Germans (German Jews) evolved their own language over time and that this evolution was reflected in changes which occurred in that particular flavour of German that was written with Hebrew characters. Thus, German written in Hebrew characters slowly became Yiddish, by reflecting changes in speech.

We agree that the only initial difference between the two groups -- the Yiddish and the German -- was the alphabet they used. We further suggest that this difference was the sufficient engine behind the divergence that occurred in the spoken language. The alphabets themselves promoted competing pronunciations and alternate word-breakages -- possibly promoting slightly different grammars as a result of discrete words being broken in different ways. Presto-chango, you've got two very similar but different languages, formed around the hubs of two, influential literate classes.
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Ish wrote:
When exactly were German Jews writing notes to one another -- in Egypt?

More to the point how many Jews were living within the sphere of influence of Middle High German?

The only Jews in any number in that part of the world at the time were the Jewish Khazars whose Khagnate was defeated and absorbed by the Kievan Rus in the 10th Century. These Jews (who were predominantly converts to Judaism) became the East European Jews who lived in NON GERMAN speaking countries (Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia).

Germany at this time was staunchly Catholic (the Holy Roman Emperor was German) and anti-Jew. It didn't start its Drang nach Osten -- Eastern Expansion until well into the 12th century when it conquered the Slav and Prussians. This was accompanied by the Hanseatic League which controlled the local trade from major occupied cities.

So there is bugger all chance for the Jewish tendency to pitch up where a dollar was to be made.

So my question is how many Jews were living in German speaking territory in the 13-14 century?
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Mick Harper
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I was going to point out that Yiddish-speakers and German-speakers scarcely overlapped anywhere but Komorikid beat me to it. But a point he doesn't take up is that Jews and Germans were functionally exactly the same. Both groups were the urban traders living in a sea-of-Slavs.

This raises the intriguing possibility that the Yiddish-speakers were not Jews at all originally but Germans who had gone further east than the area of Latin alphabet and religion. And so adopted the local alphabet which was (there's just time before St Cyril) Hebrew. As I have constantly pointed out there are enormous advantages to signing up to the Jewish religion as well if you are an urban trader -- you get access to a really efficient payment network.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Komorikid wrote:
So my question is how many Jews were living in German speaking territory in the 13-14 century?

Well possibly a great many, because none of the things you wrote as facts are facts. These points are but received history and all of it might be wrong.

What we have then, you seem to be suggesting, is a contradiction between one document and the historical record. Now I don't have the expertise to know if you've correctly described the historical situation or not but, assuming you've got it right, one of these things must go.

Probably, it's the early Yiddish piece.

However, I've definitely got a problem with the notion that the Jews of Germany all moved in after the 14th century. I won't buy that for your dollar.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Well possibly a great many, because none of the things you wrote as facts are facts. These points are but received history and all of it might be wrong.

I don't have the expertise to know if you've correctly described the historical situation or not

I don't even know what the second means in the context of the first.

Reminds me of Creationism/Revealed Knowledge, though, with which we can do nothing more.
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DPCrisp


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Well Rocky. There you have it. You are the first person in the world to realize that Yiddish is merely German written with Hebrew characters

Ah, Ich verstehe was Du meinst.
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