Marvin Herzog

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Marvin (Mikhl) I. Herzog (born September 13, 1927 in Toronto , Canada ; † June 28, 2013 ) was Professor of General Linguistics and Atran Professor of Yiddish Language and Culture at Columbia University , New York . For many years he was the director of the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) at Columbia University and is editor-in-chief of the Yiddish Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry .

The works of Herzog and his teacher Uriel Weinreich belong to the pioneering work in the field of sociolinguistics and established the focus of Yiddish dialectology on the relationship between linguistic and cultural phenomena. In addition, Herzog made decisive contributions to language contact research .

The Southwest-Northeast Discontinuity in Eastern European Judaism

In his 1965 dissertation The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland; its Geography and History (“The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland”), Herzog proves a discontinuity in the language and culture of Eastern European Judaism, which he calls the Major SW / NE Discontinuity (“Main SW / NO Discontinuity”): One Numerous linguistic phenomena ( sound shifts , mono- and diphthonging of vowels , lexical differences) show a congruent boundary line with non-linguistic phenomena, such as the preparation of gefilte fish (sweet / savory), von Farfel (chopped / cut) or belonging or not belonging to one Hasidic group, on. In the congruence of isoglosses and cultural differences between the north-east and the south-west of the eastern Jewish settlement area, a deep fault line, originating from different settlement movements, emerges within Eastern European Jewry , which is often wrongly perceived as homogeneous , which limits the spread of cultural, linguistic and religious innovations, like that of Hasidism , determine. Elements such as the preparation of Shabbat fish or Farfel, “since they are ideologically neutral, have hardly ever been the subject of a counter-offensive by the rabbis . And yet they seem to show that the innovations spreading from the southwest to the northeast have come to a standstill on the same line as the ideological innovation of Hasidism. There is therefore reason to conclude that the rejection of Hasidism northeast of the border line [in Lithuania, Yiddish " Lite "] was less due to the targeted intervention of the rabbis than to the strong, intuitive defensive reaction of the "Litvakim" [Lithuanian Jews] against the tzaddikim attributed charisma and against the emotionality of the Hasidic religious practice. "

Archive and Atlas of the Language and Literature of Ashkenazi Judaism

After Uriel Weinreich's untimely death in 1967, Herzog took over the management of the Archives of the Language and Culture of Ashkenazi Judaism, an important resource for research into Yiddish and the culture of Ashkenazi Judaism, which consists of 5,755 hours of tape recordings of interviews with Yiddish-speaking informants recorded in Alsace , Israel , Canada , Mexico and the USA between 1959 and 1972, as well as approximately 100,000 pages of transcripts.

From the outset, the aim of the research project was to show the distribution of language and cultural variants that characterized the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe before the Second World War in a multi-volume language and culture atlas using maps based on the material of the archive. With Herzog as the main editor of this eleven-volume linguistic atlas, the first three volumes were published in 1992.

Fonts

  • Marvin I. Herzog: Channels of systematic extinction in Yiddish dialects. in: Max Weinreich (Ed.): Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature and Society . Pp. 93-107, 1964.
  • Marvin Herzog: The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland. Its geography and history. Indiana Univ./Mouton, 1965.
  • Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, Marvin I. Herzog: Empirical foundations for a theory of language change . In: Wilfried P. Lehmann, Yakov Malkiel (Eds.): Directions for Historical Linguistics. Austin 1968, pp. 95-195.
  • Marvin I. Herzog: Yiddish in the Ukraine: Isoglosses and historical interferences. In: Marvin I. Herzog, Wita Ravid, Uriel Weinreich (eds.): The field of Yiddish: studies in language, folklore, and literature. 3rd edition, Bloomington / The Hague 1969.
  • Marvin I. Herzog a. a. (Ed.): The field of Yiddish: studies in language, folklore, and literature. 4th edition, Philadelphia 1980.
  • Marvin I. Herzog a. a. (Ed.): The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry . 3 volumes, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1992–2000, ISBN 3-484-73013-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herzog, Columbia Professor and Yiddishist, Dies at 85 at forward.com, accessed August 4, 2014
  2. ↑ Biogram at www.eydes.de
  3. ^ Neil G. Jacobs: Yiddish. A linguistic introduction . Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-77215-X
  4. ^ Walter Röll, Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer: Disputes about Yiddish language and literature. Jewish Components in German Literature - the Assimilation Controversy. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-484-10529-1 , p. 32
  5. ^ Marvin Herzog: The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland. Its geography and history . Bloomington, Indiana 1965. Publications of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics, 37; International journal of American linguistics, vol. 31, no. 2 (English)
  6. ^ Marvin Herzog: The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland. Tts Geography and History . Bloomington, Indiana 1965, § 2.1, p. 18ff and § 6.2, p. 246ff
  7. ^ Marvin Herzog: The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland. Its geography and history . Bloomington, Indiana 1965, p. 273
  8. ^ "These items, being ideological neutral, are unlikely ever to have been the objects of a counter-offensive by the rabbis. And yet they seem to show the spread of innovations from the southwest to the northeast coming to a halt along the same line as the ideologically loaded innovation of Hasidism. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the rejection of Hasidism to the northeast of the boundary [...] was determined less significantly by the deliberate intervention of the rabbis then by "the Litvaks" intangible yet powerful reaction against the charismatic qualities claimed for the Tsadikim and the emotionalism that characterized the Hasidic worship. ”Marvin Herzog: The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland; its Geography and History . Bloomington, Indiana 1965, § 7.2, p. 274
personal data
SURNAME Duke, Marvin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Herzog, Marvin I .; Duke Mikhl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian linguist, professor of Yiddish at Columbia University
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 2013