This collective monograph by four Polish Yiddishists proposes a balanced position between two extreme stands regarding the nature of the contact between Eastern Yiddish and some Slavic languages: Max Weinreich's assumption as to the Slavic adstratic influence on a language that was allegedly already constituted when Ashkenazi Jews resettled in central and eastern Europe on the one hand, and Paul Wexler's thesis that considers Yiddish the outcome of a relexification of Judeo-Sorbian and Kyiv-Polissian on the other hand.
In Ch. 1, Michał Gajek reconsiders the section in the History of the Yiddish Language where Weinreich deals with the lexical impact of Slavic languages on Eastern Yiddish and confronts the insights of the founder of Yiddish linguistics with more recent developments in that discipline (Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2008, 525–619). Gajek remarks that Weinreich's description of Slavic influences on Eastern Yiddish also entails a morphological dimension, especially as far as the Tense-Aspect-Mode-system is concerned. However, according to Gajek, Weinreich “analyzed them in isolation” (13). He reminds us that more recent research, like Ewa Geller's, one of this book's contributors, have given a far more substantial picture of the Slavicization of Yiddish grammatical structures. Lastly, Gajek analyzes Weinreich's description of the Slavic syntactical and phonological influences on Yiddish. His conclusion on Weinreich's legacy in the appraisal of the Slavicization of Yiddish is that this linguist perceived the many Slavisms in Yiddish in an atomistic way instead of viewing them as the manifestation of a typological shift.
Ch. 2, by Ewa Geller and Michał Gajek, puts in perspective the scholarly controversies on the emergence of Yiddish as a mixed language. It describes the hesitation between a Schuchard-inspired approach based on the principle of convergence between languages in contact and a genealogical model whereby Yiddish appears as a divergent derivate of German. Taking distance from Wexler's theories about the language shift through massive relexification, the authors prefer the theory that Yiddish is a contact language resulting from an incomplete and gradual language shift, not necessarily from Old Czech or Old Polish toward Late Middle German (as Alexander Beider assumes) but the other way round, that is, from Early Modern German toward Polish, a prestige language in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The variety of German originally spoken by Ashkenazi newcomers was not necessarily Western Yiddish, which the authors, following Beider's theory on the polygenesis of Western and Eastern Yiddish, do not believe to have been the origin of Eastern Yiddish. Three models describe the emergence of mixed languages: the grammar-lexicon split like in Media Lengua, the verbal-nominal system-split as in Michif, and metatypy, the split of paradigmatic and syntagmatic systems like in Sri-Lankan Malay (58–60). The third seems preferred by the authors (65–70), although they recognize that Yiddish may also have partly involved the first and the second processes (64–65; 70–78). In this chapter the authors also used an interesting criterion to corroborate their assumption as to the mixed nature of Eastern Yiddish, a language “‘stuck’ halfway between German and Slavic patterns” (86) using the concept of intertranslatability in order to stress the covert parallelisms between Eastern Yiddish and colloquial Polish (79–80).
Ch. 3 by Ewa Geller is a very detailed analysis of the grammaticalization processes that led to the naturalization of Polish morphological devices in Yiddish. Geller provides convincing examples of Polish-inspired word-formation and derivation: the Yiddish verbal suffix -even as a replication of the Polish infinitive ending -ować (103–17); the integration of the Polish optative particle niechaj as Yiddish nekhay (nehaj in the spelling convention preferred by the authors, 118–30); the diversification of adverbial formations through the grammaticalization of adverbs borrowed from Polish, sometimes in the frame of a hybrid construction involving an element from the German lexical stock (130–41).
Ch. 4, by Agata Reibach, classifies the nominal compounds of Yiddish from the perspective of language hybridization. Besides the German-inherited right-headed synthetic compounds (sometimes entailing a Hebrew or Slavic component), Reibach describes non-Germanic analytic left-headed composition patterns whereby the elements combined can come from whatever constituents of Yiddish: Hebrew, Slavic, or even Germanic elements set up according to a non-Germanic (Hebrew or Slavic) microsyntactical pattern: breg yam (breg jam) “sea shore” instead of the noun phrase breg fun yam (170–71). This chapter constitutes an eloquent illustration of the way the mixed nature of Yiddish involves not only lexical matter but also the language patterns on which Eastern Yiddish emerged as a hybrid language. The examples involving the Hebrew components or structure make clear that the languages intertwined in Yiddish are three rather than two and that the role of Hebrew probably goes far beyond similar phenomena in other Jewish languages, beyond what is acknowledged by Reibach (62). The German base and the Slavic and Hebrew components coexist in the frame of a real ménage à trois. It could even be suggested that the massive influx of Hebraisms in Eastern Yiddish was the result of a destabilization of the inner structures of Yiddish as a side effect of the intense Slavicization (Cyril Aslanov, “Les hébraïsmes et les slavismes du yiddish et la cristallisation d'une identité juive est-européenne,” Conexão Letras: Linguística/ Literatura e Identidade, 2, no. 2, 2006, 36–47). Such a correlation between the permeability of languages to foreign borrowings and the instability of the grammatical system has been theorized by Frans van Coetsem in his path-breaking study about the transmission process in language contact (A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact, 2000, 105–34).
Ch. 5, also by Agata Reibach, is a study of the semantic field of body and bodily functions in Yiddish as partly open to borrowed words from Slavic languages and Hebrew. Following the typology of lexical borrowing and borrowability established by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook, 2009, 65–68), Reibach proposes pie charts that show that at least 20% of the Yiddish basic lexicon is of non-Germanic origin (14% is Slavic and 6% Semitic). This proportion rises to almost 33% (21.70% Slavic and 10.30% Semitic) when synonyms are taken in consideration (184). The detailed list of the body lexicon together with the synonyms is presented at the end of the chapter (194–201).
Ch. 6 by Anna Pilarski is a generative analysis of the word order in Yiddish interrogation sentences compared with their German and Polish equivalents, especially as far as left or right dislocations are concerned. The conclusion of the rather complex analyses of some token sentences declined in the three languages is that the processes of topicalization and focalization within the Yiddish complementizer phrases are closer to Polish than to German.
The last chapter, by Michał Gajek, deals with the lexical influence of Yiddish on Polish. It covers a wide variety of lexemes at several sociolinguistic levels from Jewish Kulturwörter to low registers connected with slang. Gajek provides interesting insights about how to distinguish Yiddish from German loanwords once they are integrated into the morphophonemic system of Polish (241–43).
The book displays a clear Polonocentrist way of describing the impact of the contact with Slavic languages on the genesis and development of Eastern Yiddish. This methodological choice is largely justified by historical considerations: the coincidence of Ashkenaz II with the territories of the Rzeczpospolita and the fact that before WWII Poland was home to more than 3 million Yiddish-speaking Jews out of a total population of 35 million (in 1939). This intense intertwining between Polish and east European Jewish history explains why most Slavisms of Yiddish actually go back to Polish.
This stimulating book changes the focus in evaluating the Slavic and especially Polish component in Eastern Yiddish: it goes far beyond the lexicon and even the borrowing of grammatical structures, as it also involves the concept of intertranslatability (especially in Chs. 2 and 6).
My only criticism toward this crucial contribution to the linguistics of Eastern Yiddish is the choice of “the so-called linguistic transliteration” instead of the YIVO spelling. Although the authors justified their avoidance of the latter (xii-xiii), the alternative spelling they use is not thoroughly consistent: the use of <x> and <š> instead of <kh> and <sh>, respectively, is welcome because it established a one-to-one equivalence between the Yiddish graphemes <<כ/ך and <ש> and their transliterations whereas <kh> and <sh> are digraphs. However, the use of <j> and <c> instead of <y> and <ts>, respectively, in order to transliterate the consonantal use of <י> and the affricate <צ/ץ> is less successful as they seem to be mere Polonisms. Here and there, there are some typographical errors. I mention two of them in order to facilitate the task of an eventual reedition of this excellent book that really deserves to be reprinted: ethnolect, not *ethnoolect (4), and etcetera is pleonastic; et cetera is sufficient (178).
