Wexler, Paul. Two-tiered relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian dialect. Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 136. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. 713 pp.

Extract

The thesis advocated by Wexler in this book challenges traditional views of the makeup and genesis of Yiddish and Modern Hebrew. Traditional views assumed that “Yiddish was either a ‘deformation’ or a ‘creative Jewish outgrowth’ of High German, with attrition of Germanisms and acquisition of Slavicisms resulting from prolonged contact with the Slavic languages, while all historical attestations of Hebrew were regarded blindly as instantiations of Classical Semitic Hebrew” (3). Wexler's counter-proposal is twofold: On the one hand, Yiddish is Upper Sorbian relexified (in the 12th century) on the basis of High German phonetic strings, and Kiev-Polessian relexified on the basis of Yiddish and German (15th century); in this view, Yiddish is typologically a Slavic language with a German lexicon. On the other hand, Modern Hebrew is Yiddish relexified on the basis of Classical Hebrew phonetic strings; in this view, Modern Hebrew is typologically Slavic, like Yiddish, with a Classical Hebrew lexicon; hence, it is not genetically related to Old Semitic Hebrew. The aim of the book is to document this twofold proposal.