Mode and Tense in Yiddish

Abstract

The historical dialect area of Eastern Yiddish in Central and Eastern Europe is widely detached from the Germanic languages and mainly surrounded by Balto-Slavic (but also Romanic and Uralic) languages. The geographical location of Eastern Yiddish lead to looking at language contact with mostly Slavic languages. But this perspective simplifies the real language situation in two ways: on the one hand, the contact to Germanic languages (especially to German) was not completely broken off even in predominantly Slavic-speaking areas, for example via administrative languages or German-speaking settlements (language islands), and on the other hand, much more decisively, Yiddish has not suddenly ceased to be a Germanic language in the Slavic language area, so it still follows the internal rules of a continental West Germanic language. The following article examines the European Yiddish dialects, as they were collected in the 1960 s within the survey of the “Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry” (LCAAJ), in the mirror of a West Germanic dialect continuum. Looking at just one random area of morphosyntax as an example, we can see how analytical tendencies of Yiddish dialects fit into this continuum. A distinctive Germanic tendency is the decline of the synthetic subjunctive form in favour of analytical formations as a result of a structural remodelling of the TAM-system. Besides the analyses of the subjunctive additional evaluations of the analytic formations of the pluperfect and future are considered.