Paul Wexler, Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics by A. de Vincenz

Summary

Paul Wexler, Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics. Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1987. Pp. 286.

In 1953 Uriel Weinreich's epoch-making book Languages in Contact appeared. It was an encyclopaedic report on research done up to that year, based on extensive reading (more than 650 titles), on the author's personal experience in the field of language contacts, and on his own field-work in a bilingual region of Switzerland. But it was more than that: a major research project or rather research programme for the future. And still more important: by giving the subject a name Weinreich created a whole new field of research, language contacts.

Wexler's book follows Weinreich's lead. It deals with language contacts between ‘Jewish languages’ and a number of Slavic languages, some of them fairly distant from one another. The book is based on Wexler's own research in language contacts, including his books on ‘Research frontiers in Sino-Islamic linguistics’ (1976) and ‘Exploring the distinctive features of Wandersprächen’ (1984). The bibliography contains at least a thousand titles.

Wexler calls his book rather modestly a ‘state-of-the-art report’, but it is also a research project for many years to come and a giant hypothesis for research, which he formulates as follows: ‘This study is an attempt to discover the “distinctive Jewish features” of the dialectally diverse Slavic speech of the Greek, Iranian, Turkic and possible Aramaic Jews who created the Judeo-Slavic civilizations that took root in scattered locales between the Elbe and Dniepr Rivers before the arrival of the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. [It] will try to define the nature of the Slavic languages used by Jews before the advent of [those] Jews on the basis of the extant Slavic glosses and texts composed by Jews as well as evidence from a number of coterritorial Jewish and non-Jewish languages. I think that it is reasonably certain that the Slavic used by non-Ashkenazic Jews in the West Slavic lands was, in its genesis and component make-up a “Jewish“ language, i.e. a “Judaicized” West Slavic …. This language, or collection of languages, is the forgotten link in the chain of Jewish language creativity in Europe which joins a Judeo-Greek saturated with Judeo-Iranian (and possibly Judeo-Aramaic and Judeo-Turkic elements) with Yiddish and possibly Balkan Judezmo …. In spite of the incomplete state of our knowledge, there are good reasons to attempt to delineate the field of Judeo Slavic linguistics at the present time.