On the Boundaries of Phonology and Phonetics

2.2.Type : Yiddish and Modern Hebrew

This background illuminates why early Haskala honored so much Hebrew - the language of the contribution par excellence of the Jewish nation to universal culture, which is the Hebrew Bible, and a language that had been long studied by Christian Hebraists. And also why Yiddish, the supposedly jargon of the uneducated Jews and a corrupt version of German, was so much scorned in the same time.

Although the goal of the earlier phases of Haskala was to promote the literary language of the recipient country among Jews, that is practically Hochdeutsch, and Hebrew was principally only the object of scholarly study, still some attempts were made to use the language in modern domains, at least for some restricted purposes. After a few pioneering experiments to establish Hebrew newspapers in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Hebrew literary quarterly Ha-Meassef appeared as early as 1784 (Sáenz-Badillos, 1993:267).

However, it was not before the middle of the next century, when Haskala reached Russia, that the need of reviving the Hebrew language was really articulated. As already discussed, the major reasons for this switch were that the Jewish population did not see the underdeveloped surrounding society as a model to which they wanted to assimilate; the Russian society and policy did not show any real sign of wanting to emancipate and integrate Jews, either; furthermore, the huge Jewish population reached the critical mass required to develop something in itself. The summation of these factors led to the idea of seeing Jewry as separate a nation in its modern sense. A further factor reinforcing Jewish national feelings both in Eastern and Western Europe was the emergence of modern political anti-Semitism in the 1870s in the West, accompanied by events such as the huge Russian pogroms in 1881, the blood libel of Tiszaeszlár, Hungary (1882-3) or the Dreyfus-affair in France (starting in 1894).

The claims following from this idea were that the Jewish nation has the right to have a country - in Palestine or elsewhere, but at least it should receive some local autonomy - , and also that the Jewish nation must have its own national language. The two major candidates for the Jewish national language were Yiddish and Hebrew, although German was not out of the competition, either (cf. e.g. Shur, 1979:VII-VIII).

The first wave of attempts to revive Hebrew consisted mainly of purists, seeing Biblical Hebrew as the most precious layer of the language: some of them went so far that they preferred to create very complicated expressions to designate modern concepts, rather than using non-Biblical vocabulary. The fruits of this early period are among others the first regular Hebrew weekly, Ha-Maggid (1856), the first modern play by D. Zamoscz (1851), novels by A. Mapu, as well as works of S. J. Abramowitsch (Mendele Moykher Seforim), who can be considered one of the founders of both modern Hebrew and modern Yiddish literature.

The real upswing was observable in the last quarter of the century, especially after the 1881 pogroms, and when Haskala had reached the broadest masses, as well. Traditionally, the publication of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s article in 1879 entitled ‘A burning question’ is considered to be the opening of the new era (Sáenz-Badillos, 1993:269). Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) has been portrayed as the hero of the revival: he moved to Jerusalem in 1881, where he forced himself and his family to speak Hebrew. To speak a language, that is to produce everyday, spontaneous sentences “in real-time”, on a language that had been mostly used for writing and reading and only in restricted domains. His son, Ithamar (1882-1943), was the first person after millennia who grew up in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment. Ben-Yehuda constantly introduced new words designating weekday concepts, while he was editing a newspaper and working on his monumental Thesaurus, which incorporated material from ancient and medieval literature. In 1890, he founded the Va’ad ha-Lashon (‘Language Committee’), the forerunner of the Hebrew Language Academy, hereby creating a quasi-official institution for language planning.

However, Shur (1979) has argued against an overestimation of Ben-Yehuda’s role. Out of Fishman’s five stages of language planning (in Shur, 1979) (1. code selection; 2. ideologization of the choice; 3. codification; 4. elaboration and modernization; 5. standardization, i.e. the acceptance by the community), Ben-Yehuda was salient especially in codification and elaboration, as well as in vitalization, which was also necessary under the given circumstances. But for socio-political reasons, he had not much influence on the initial language choice and its ideologization, as well as on the final acceptance of the codified and elaborated standard.

It is clear that Yiddish was the mother tongue, or one of the main languages for a major fraction of the members of the Va’ad ha-Lashon, including Ben-Yehuda himself. Moreover, people with Yiddish as first language represented an important part of the speaker community of the old-new tongue in the first half of the twentieth century. Yiddish was not scorned anymore, as it had been a century before, but it was not considered as a major source for language reform, either. Especially for the later generations, Yiddish would symbolize the Diaspora left behind by the Zionist movement.

Yiddish speaking “ex­change particles” dominated the community, much more than in the Hungarian case. Yet, a very conscious ideology required changing the previous ethnic language to the old-new national language, especially after the 1913-14 “Language Quarrel”, wherein the defenders of Hebrew defeated those of German and Yiddish (Shur, 1979:VII-VIII, X). This ideology was actively present in almost each and every individual who had chosen to move to the Land of Israel in a given period - contrary to the European case, where ideology of changing the language was explicit only in the cultural elite. Further, the language change was not slow and gradual, but drastic in the life of the people emigrating to Palestine, combined with a simultaneous radical change in geographical location, social structure and lifestyle. What phenomena would this constellation involve?

Yiddish influence on Modern Hebrew vocabulary has been investigated by - among others - Haim Blanc. For instance, the Modern Hebrew interjection davka (approx. ’necessarily, for all that’) is clearly a Hebraisation of Yiddish dafke, of Hebrew origin itself, and mentioned also in relation with Hungarian. Similarly, kumzitz ‘get-together, picnic, campfire’ undoubtedly originates from the Yiddish expression ‘come [and] sit down!’, since only in Yiddish do we find [u] in the verb ‘to come’. However, the expression was probably coined in Hebrew, as standard Yiddish dictionaries do not mention it. One can easily imagine the early pioneers sitting around a campfire in the first kibbutzim, chatting in a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew, and inviting their comrades to join them.

Nissan Netzer (1988) analyses the use of the Modern Hebrew verb firgen and the corresponding de-verbal noun firgun. Officially, the word is still not considered to belong to the language, for it is not attested in any dictionary of Hebrew that I know. Definitions for this word I have found on the Internet are: “the ability to allow someone else to enjoy if his or her enjoyment does not hurt one,” and “to treat favorably, with equanimity, to bear no grudge or jealousy against somebody,” and also “to be delighted at the success of the other”. The word can be traced back to Yiddish farginen ‘not begrudge, not envy, indulge’. As Netzer has demonstrated, there is a linguistic gap in Hebrew, for the expressions darash et tovato shel… or lo hayta eno tsara be- that should bear that meaning are cumbersome, circuitous, overly sophisticated in style and seems to cloud the true linguistic message. Therefore, they were not accepted by the linguistic community. When a leading Hebrew linguistics professor used the Yiddish equivalent in the early sixties, the situation made the listeners of an academic lecture smile, because in that time the Yiddishism was considered to be a folk idiom that would finally withdraw in favor of a “real Hebrew expression”. However, firgen would have become more and more accepted in daily conversation and even in journalistic writings by the eighties._³¹

This example has led us to the issue of the sociolinguistic status of Yiddish words in Modern Hebrew. Ora Schwarzwald (1995) shows that the vocabulary of the most used classical texts, such as the Hebrew Bible and liturgy, has become the base of Modern Hebrew, in all its registers. Furthermore, loanwords of European languages are also used both in formal and non-formal language. However, from less esteemed languages, such as Jewish languages (e.g. Yiddish and Ladino), as well as Arabic, words would infiltrate primarily into lower registers and everyday informal speech.

For instance, chevre ‘friends’ is used mainly when addressing informally a group of people, and it is the borrowing of the similar word in Yiddish (khevre ‘gang, bunch of friends, society’). The latter obviously comes from Hebrew chevra ‘society, company, gathering’, whose root is chaver ‘friend’, a well-known word for speakers of Hungarian and Dutch (gabber), too. The originally Hebrew word thus arrived back to Modern Hebrew, but keeping the phonological traces of its trajectory. Also note the minor shifts in the semantics during the two borrowings.

Another example for Yiddish influence on informal speech is the use of the -le diminutive suffix: abale from aba ‘dad’, Sarale ‘little Sarah’, Chanale ‘little Hanah’, and so forth. Observe that the suffix follows the Hebrew word, whereas in Yiddish one would have Sorele and Chanele expect.

Thus, the influence of Yiddish on Modern Hebrew is indeed similar to its influence on Hungarian: lower registers and informal speech constitute one of the canals through which this interaction takes place. To make the similarity even more prominent, we can point to two further canals, shared by the Modern Hebrew case and the Hungarian case. Similarly to Hungarian, the designation of goods of general culture, such as food names (beygelach ‘bagels or pretzel’) represent a domain for word borrowings. Moreover, Yiddish loan words, or Hebrew words with a Yiddish or Ashkenazi pronunciation are likely to appear in religious vocabulary (e.g. rebe ‘Chasidic charismatic leader’); typically in the sociolect of religious groups (especially within the ultra-orthodox society), and in the language used by secular Israelis to mock the stereotypically Yiddish-speaking ultra-orthodox Jews (e.g. dos ‘an ultra-orthodox person’, from Hebrew dat ‘religion’; vus-vus-im ‘the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Jews’, who often say Vus? Vus? ‘What? What?’ followed by the Hebrew plural ending -im).