Jewish languages

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As Jewish languages of history and modern languages are referred to by speakers, the ethnically and / or religiously as Jews are dominated understand with native language skills, while more or less different from non-Jewish languages or language variants. These are partly completely different languages, not one language family .

Characteristic

Analytically, three groups of Jewish languages ​​can be distinguished:

  • Languages ​​that are clearly associated with Judaism and used by Jews ( ancient and modern Hebrew , Yiddish ).
  • Languages ​​that are more or less different variants of languages ​​with specifically Jewish linguistic features, which are also used by non-Jews, whereby mutual intelligibility is largely given (e.g. Ladino ; historically: Knaan ).
  • Jewish variants of Aramaic , Arabic , French , Italian , Czech , etc.

The generic term Jewish languages does not designate a “language family” of genetically related individual languages, but is rather a sociolinguistic collective term. The groups mentioned above cannot be clearly delimited from one another. For example, the Ladino, as a variant of Castilian Spanish, would be perfectly understandable for Spaniards; However, for historical reasons it has survived mainly in the Balkans , North Africa , Israel and Turkey , where the non-Jewish population does not speak any Romance languages , and only becomes “typically Jewish” through this linguistic isolation.

This applies analogously to the largest Jewish language up until the second half of the 20th century , Yiddish ; originally a variant of Middle High German , it only became a typical feature of Jewish culture due to the linguistic isolation of its speakers in the Slavic-speaking environment of Eastern Europe and later in Anglophone .

A common feature of all Jewish languages ​​is the presence of a more or less extensive special vocabulary, mostly of Hebrew origin, predominantly (but not exclusively) from the religious field, the use of the Hebrew alphabet (with restrictions - e.g. the Ladino was usually made with Latin letters written) and the observance of orthographic rules from the Talmudic period.

See also

Other Jewish languages:

literature

  • Michael Brenner (ed.): Jewish languages ​​in the German environment, Hebrew and Yiddish from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002. ISBN 3-525-20822-7
  • Joshua A. Fishman (Ed.): The Sociology of Jewish Languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Vol. 30. Mouton, The Hague 1981.
  • Joshua A. Fishman (Ed.): The Sociology of Jewish Languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Vol. 67. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 1987.
  • Joshua A. Fishman (Ed.): Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. EJ Brill, Leiden 1985. ISBN 90-04-07237-3
  • Heinrich Loewe: The languages ​​of the Jews. Jewish publishing house, Cologne 1911.
  • Shelomoh Morag, Moshe Bar-Asher, Maria Mayer-Modena (eds.): Vena Hebraica in Judaeorum Linguis. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Jewish Languages. Centro Studi Camito-Semitici di Milano, Milan 1999.
  • Herbert H. Paper (Ed.): Jewish languages, theme and variations. Association for Jewish Studies, Cambridge Mass 1978. ISBN 0-915938-01-4
  • Ghil'ad Zuckermann : Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew . Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2003, ISBN 1-403-91723-X .

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