Explorations In Judeo Slavic Linguistics

A separate bibliographic treatment of the Judeo-Romance languages should facilitate a deeper appreciation of the contributions that they may make to Romance linguistics in general. Up until now, Judeo-Romance topics have scarcely been canvassed in Romance linguistic bibliographies. It is hoped that this new book serves to popularize the field of Judeo-Romance languages both among students of general Romance and comparative Jewish linguistics.

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.

This Handbook of Jewish Languages is an introduction to the many languages used by Jews throughout history, including Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino) , and Jewish varieties of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Iranian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Malayalam, Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Syriac, Turkic (Karaim and Krymchak), Turkish, and more. Chapters include historical and linguistic descriptions of each language, an overview of primary and secondary literature, and comprehensive bibliographies to aid further research. Many chapters also contain sample texts and images. This book is an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Jewish languages, and will also be very useful for historical linguists, dialectologists, and scholars and students of minority or endangered languages. This book is also available as paperback version.

The book claims that Yiddish was created when Judaized Sorbs first relexified their language to High German between the 9th-12th centuries; by the 15th century, the descendants of the Judaized Khazars also relexified their Kiev-Polessian (northern Ukrainian and southern Belarusian) speech to Yiddish and German, Yiddish thus uses a mixed West-East Slavic grammar and suggests that converted Khazars were a major component in the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis.

In the ever increasing volume of Byzantine Studies in recent years there seems to be one very apparent void, namely, the history and culture of the Byzantine Jewry, its presence and impact on the surrounding convoluted Byzantine world between Late Antiquity until the conquest of Byzantium (1453). With the now classic but dated studies by Joshua Starr and Andrew Sharf, the collective volume at hand is an attempt to somewhat fill in this void. The articles assembled in this volume are penned by leading scholars in the field. They present bird's eye views of the cultural history of the Jewish Byzantine minority, alongside a wide array of surveys and in-depth studies of various topics. These topics pertain to the dialectics of the religious, literary, economic and visual representation world of this alien minority within its surrounding Byzantine hegemonic world.

This volume contains 22 of the 95 papers presented during ICHL 10. The articles included here clearly reflect the on-going interest in the general mechanisms of language change, the close relationship between present-day historical linguistics and linguistic theory, and the renewed interest in language contact. The papers deal with more general issues as well as with specific problems in diverse languages and language groups. The volume contains three indexes: of names, of languages, and of subjects.

The author uses linguistic, ethnographic, and historical evidence to support his theory that the origins of Sephardic Jews are predominantly Berber and Arab.