Absence of Morphological Case and Gender Marking in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish Worldwide

Autor(en)
Zoë Belk, Lily Kahn, Kriszta Eszter Szendråi
Abstrakt

This paper demonstrates that the language of the post-War generations of adult Haredi (that is, strictly Orthodox), primarily Hasidic, speakers of Yiddish in the major Hasidic centers worldwide lacks morphological case and gender. Elicited spoken and written data from native Haredi speakers of Yiddish from Israel and the United States, aged 18-87, and limited additional evidence from Canada and Belgium, reveal a complete absence of distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter genders as well as between the nominative, accusative, and dative cases. While some speakers make use of a variety of morphological definite determiner and attributive adjective forms, their use is not determined by case or gender distinctions. Most of the speakers in our study have an invariable determiner pronounced as /dɛ/ or /di/, whereas the earlier case and gender suffixes on attributive adjectives have been reanalyzed as a single attributive marker, /ɛ/. These findings are consistent with our previous work on the loss of case and gender in the Hasidic Yiddish of London's Stamford Hill and support our proposal that the Yiddish spoken in (primarily Hasidic) Haredi communities can be considered a distinct variety of the language known as Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish.∗

Organisation(en)
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
Externe Organisation(en)
University College London
Journal
Journal of Germanic Linguistics
Band
34
Seiten
139-185
Anzahl der Seiten
47
ISSN
1470-5427
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/S147054272100012X
Publikationsdatum
06-2022
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
602004 Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, 602021 Jiddistik
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language, Literature and Literary Theory
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/absence-of-morphological-case-and-gender-marking-in-contemporary-hasidic-yiddish-worldwide(75f081c7-ebc4-49c6-9fd9-82ca06d1385a).html