Contact and the History of Germanic Languages

Roberge, Paul T.

doi:10.1002/9781444318159.ch20

Cited by 25 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Likewise, the majority of Yiddish grammatical exponents are also transparently Germanic ( Jacobs et al 1994 ), regardless of whether they are applied to indigenous Germanic or borrowed Slavic words (specific lexical and grammatical examples are listed in the linguistic supplement, supplementary text S1 , Supplementary Material online). Consequently, there is a natural consensus in modern linguistics on the German affiliation of Yiddish ( Rothstein 2006 ; Harbert 2007 ; Roberge 2010 , inter alia ), and it would take much more evidence than has been presented by Wexler to support the contrary assertion that Yiddish is a “fifteenth Slavic language” (Wexler’s original proposal, Wexler 1991 ) or even a “relexified Slavic language.” Although the Slavic component in Yiddish lexicon is indeed significant (ca., 5–10% overall), it predominantly represents cultural vocabulary. Likewise, despite Wexler’s claim that “Yiddish grammar and phonology are Slavic (with some Irano–Turkic input)” ( Das et al 2016 , similarly in Wexler 1991 , 2010 ), he has managed to offer only a few grammatical/phonological matches between Yiddish and Slavic, generally confined to secondary grammatical features (such as semantic shifting of some German aspectual/spatial verbal prefixes and some nominal derivational suffixes towards the functions of their Slavic counterparts).…”

Section: Major Problems Of the Yiddish Relexification Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews

et al. 2016

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In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das et al. have attempted to trace the homeland of Ashkenazi Jews and of their historical language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016. Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol. 8:1132–1149). Das et al. applied the geographic population structure (GPS) method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geographic coordinates of populations supposedly ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews, placing them in Eastern Turkey. They argued that this unexpected genetic result goes against the widely accepted notion of Ashkenazi origin in the Levant, and speculated that Yiddish was originally a Slavic language strongly influenced by Iranian and Turkic languages, and later remodeled completely under Germanic influence. In our view, there are major conceptual problems with both the genetic and linguistic parts of the work. We argue that GPS is a provenancing tool suited to inferring the geographic region where a modern and recently unadmixed genome is most likely to arise, but is hardly suitable for admixed populations and for tracing ancestry up to 1,000 years before present, as its authors have previously claimed. Moreover, all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is a Germanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic substrata.

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Section: Major Problems Of the Yiddish Relexification Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews

et al. 2016

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“…19 Polomé 1989, 54. 20 Rifk in 2007 For the methodology, cf Polomé 1989;Markey and Greppin 1990;Schrijver 1997;Andersen 2003;Bammesberger and Vennemann 2003;Mees 2003;Roberge 2010..…”

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confidence: 99%

Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

Iversen

Kroonen

2017

American Journal of Archaeology

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In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia's earliest farmers. 1 introduction Language is an important part of human self-perception and a creator of identity among human groups through time, and, as such, language is an important factor in understanding cultural change in prehistory. Around 4000 B.C.E., large parts of northern Europe saw the introduction of Neolithic life represented by the appearance of domesticated animals and crops as well as polished flint and stone tools and new pottery forms such as funnel beakers (figs. 1, 2). In southern Scandinavia, the Neolithic roughly covers the fourth and third millennia B.C.E., corresponding to the period ca. 4000-2000 B.C.E. or 4000-1700 B.C.E. depending on whether the final Late Neolithic, Late Neolithic II (ca. 2000-1700 B.C.E.), is considered part of the Neolithic or the earliest Bronze Age. 2 The fourth millennium B.C.E. appears as a highly progressive and productive period in which we see the construction of a wide range of monuments (including the building of tens of thousands of megalithic tombs), a rich deposition practice, elaborate pottery styles, an expanding settlement pattern, and woodland clearance. Despite the evidence of a rich and ritually complex epoch, the fourth millennium B.C.E. was in cultural terms rather homogeneous and predominantly occupied by the Funnel Beaker culture. However, northern Europe is a region that saw profound cultural changes in the early third millennium B.C.E. In southern Scandinavia, the end of the Funnel Beaker culture overlapped with the emergence of Sub-Neolithic 1 Figures are our own unless otherwise noted. 2 For a detailed discussion on this matt er, see Iversen 2015, 29-31.

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“…While contact between speakers of different language varieties is hardly a new phenomenon (Thomason 2001;Eichinger 2016;Ptashnyk 2016b;Roberge 2010), intensified global connections and new infrastructures facilitating faster travel have changed the scope and nature of physical human mobility. Whether people travel temporarily or for longer periods, as tourists, as labor migrants or refugees, they will always take their sociocultural and linguistic knowledge along with them and share it with those they encounter.…”

Section: The Research Case In a Nutshell: Research Questions And Aimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language contact in a mining community

Pecht

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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages

Cited by 25 publications

References 51 publications

Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews

Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews

Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

Language contact in a mining community

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