Journal of Jewish Languages最新文献

This forum brings together nine researchers to offer their perspectives on the process of language documentation. Questions include how they find speakers, how they conduct their research, and what linguistic data and metadata they collect. We asked about practical and scholarly issues that have arisen in their fieldwork, including speakers avoiding stigmatized linguistic features and exhibiting influences from Modern Hebrew. Some of the points apply specifically to Jewish languages, and others are generalizable to endangered language documentation or even linguistic research more broadly.

The writing formulas in official letters in Modern Hebrew are often identical or similar to the formulas revealed in the Geonic letters. This article presents these similar formulas with two purposes in mind: 1) to illustrate the significance of the Interim Period for the formation of Modern Hebrew; 2) to show that the continuity of the use of the Hebrew language throughout history was a major factor that allowed the revival of Modern Hebrew.

Descriptions of the Passover evening service in Gaonic writings of the late ninth and early tenth centuries include the word ḥaliq as an alternative term for ḥaroset, a sweet and sour dipping sauce made from fruit and nuts. Through a diachronic view of ḥaroset in both the Greco-Roman context of the rabbinic Passover meal and the ʿAbbasid context of Gaonic Judeo-Arabic writing, I argue that the etymology of ḥaliq should be derived ultimately from the Latin allec, referring to a fermented fish sauce that was an essential ingredient of the dipping sauces from which ḥaroset evolved. I conclude with a survey of how ḥaliq (and words derived from it) was maintained as a term for ḥaroset in Jewish languages around the world from the Middle Ages until the present day.

In this article, I present an introductory overview of the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects, followed by a study of various aspects of contact-induced change that are exhibited by these dialects. Neo-Aramaic dialects were also spoken by Christian communities in the same region. The Jewish and Christian dialects differ from one another, even where the two communities lived in the same geographical area. I show that contact-induced change was generally more advanced in Jewish NENA dialects than in neighboring Christian dialects. I also demonstrate that a study of contact-induced changes provides evidence of the migration history of the communities. I present two case studies of differing degrees of convergence with contact languages and evidence of different migration patterns. These are (i) the Jewish and Christian NENA dialects of Urmi (northwestern Iran) and (ii) the Jewish and Christian NENA dialects of Sanandaj (western Iran).

This article examines the use of Mock Jewish English (MJE) among members of the modern far right as a means of perpetuating ideologies centered around antisemitic canards originating from the 19th and 20th centuries. In order to investigate MJE as an act of language crossing, I examine the 900+ million token Unicorn Riot subcorpus of the Corpus of Digital Extremism and Conspiracies (CoDEC). Following this analysis, I describe the linguistic features of MJE when it is used as ventriloquation, specifically the lexical and phonological features employed by the white supremacist parody advice show, Dear Rabbi. In my analysis, I find that these two strategies of MJE are used by members of the far right to spread antisemitic ideologies, further the semantic pejoration of Jewish lexical borrowings, and covertly affiliate themselves with one another in public spaces (via language crossing) or distance themselves from Jewishness (via ventriloquation).

This article explores linguistic imitation as a strategy of socialization. It focuses on the ethnographic context of New Mexico’s Jewish community, which some Hispanic New Mexicans are beginning to join after discovering their Sephardic, or Iberian Jewish, ancestry. Although several are choosing to formally ‘return,’ or convert, to Judaism, they often feel unwelcome in the community and, therefore, do not always have interlocutors who might help to linguistically integrate them. In this context, they adopt various strategies for learning community language norms, including imitating the speech of veteran community members and reproducing Jewish English as learned from books and internet resources, even if doing so results in non-normative usages. They may also use elements of Yiddish to mirror language used within the local Jewish community, positioning themselves as Sephardic through the use of an Ashkenazi language.

The article introduces the historical context of multilingual comedy by Greek writers of the early 19th century in Asia Minor, then an Ottoman realm. The author analyzes two passages from Erotomaniac Chatziaslanis and Monsieur Kozis containing Modern Greek dialects, Karamanlidika, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Turkish, and Judeo-Greek. The analysis shows that Jewish characters prefer to communicate in Judeo-Turkish. Both plays actively utilize (Jewish and non-Jewish) linguistic varieties for stereotyping and comedic purposes.