Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Since the 6th century B.C., Jews have created unique variants of many coterritorial non-Jewish languages with which they came in contact; Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Persian, and German are just a few examples. Widespread shifts to non-Jewish languages throughout the world and to revived spoken Hebrew in Israel are now resulting in the obsolescence of contemporary Jewish languages and putting an end to 2600 years of Jewish language creation. The present paper proposes a typology of Jewish language phenomena, explores the common linguistic components and processes attending their genesis and development, formulates urgent research tasks in comparative Jewish interlinguistics, and assesses the contribution of Jewish language study to general linguistics. A shift in the language of a community can have three effects on the identity of the speakers: (a) Language shift might be accompanied by a shift in ethnic identification; e.g., the Turkic-speaking Bulgars who emigrated to the Balkans in the late 4th century A.D. eventually assimilated fully to the local languages and cultures. (b) Language shift can take place without the loss of ethnic identity; e.g., the Egyptian Copts switched from Egyptian to Arabic, but retained some elements of a distinctive national culture, in particular a Christian identity. (c) Finally, cultural and ethnic assimilation can take place in the absence of language loss; e.g., various Balkan populations, in the wake of widespread intermingling and language contact over a millennium, have developed a large body of common ethnic, cultural, and even linguistic features, though there is little tendency to give up individual Balkan languages.' In any typology of linguistic and cultural shift, the Jews occupy a unique position. On the surface, the original Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine who adopted Aramaic and Greek as their spoken and written media would seem straightforward representatives of the second type-language shift without full ethno-cultural submersion. However, two factors render these and most other instances of Jewish language shift distinctive from the Egyptian Coptic experience: the Jews have had a tendency (a) to create a unique variant from the adopted coterritorial non-Jewish language, while (b) retaining written forms of Hebrew (the original language of the Jewish people in Palestine) and of Aramaic (the first successor language to Hebrew) as liturgical and literary languages and as potential sources of enrichment for the new vernaculars. Hebrew-Aramaic elements take the form of adstratal borrowings and occasionally even substratal retentions, transferred through successive Jewish languages and thus partly erasing the effects of the loss of spoken Hebrew and Aramaic. Hence language shift among the Jews-unlike that of the Egyptian Copts and Balkan