“Mame Loshen”
The role of gender-biased language contact in the syntactic
development of Yiddish
This paper examines the socio-linguistic situation and mechanisms
that led to diachronic changes in the syntax of Eastern Yiddish, such as the
emergence of embedded Verb-Second. Following Weinreich (1958), Santorini (1989, 1992) and my earlier work (Pereltsvaig 2017), I analyze these changes as
resulting from contact with Slavic languages. Furthermore, I argue that
contact involved interference through shift and “Pattern replication” (in
Matras and Sakel’s 2007
terminology) rather than borrowing or “Matter replication”. In addition, I
propose that the “shifters” to Yiddish who introduced Slavic grammatical
features were at least in part Slavic-speaking women who converted to
Judaism.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: The problem
- 2.Two types of transfer in contact situations
- 3.Were the local Slavs, Knaanic Jews, and/or descendants of Khazars the
“shifters”?
- 4.Slavic converts to Judaism as the “shifters”
- 5.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgment
-
Notes
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References