Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish(654 words) Assoulline Dalit Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe began to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the late eighteenth century, mainly in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron, which already had small Yiddish-speaking populations. The ensuing contact of these communities with Arabic resulted in salient lexical interference, documented by Mordecai Kosover in Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish, a book based on his fieldwork in Jerusalem between the years 1927 and 1937 (the transcriptions in this article are his). According to Kosover, many Arabic loanwords reflect the Ashkenazi Jews’ economic dependence on the Arab population, since they bought their food from Arab peasants, lived in houses built by Arab masons, traveled with Arab coachmen, and so on. The loanwords were phonologically integrated into Yiddish. Thus pharyngeal and emphatic consonants were not maintained, as in the cases of kharáke ‘commotion’ (ḥárake), maarúf ‘favor’ (ma‘rūf), kádi ‘judge’ (qāḍi), and mapsút ‘satisfied, content’ (mabsūṭ), and vowels were modified, sometimes significantly, as in ya bayéy! ‘my [heavenly] father’ (yā baiyï), ákhale ve-sákhale (also áhlan usáhlan, from ahlān wa-sahlān). Some loanwords were also morphologically integrated; for example, balátes ‘paving stones’ (balāṭāt) with the Yiddish plural suffix –(e)s, zbálnik ‘street cleaner’ (from zbāle ‘garbage’) with the Yiddish derivational suffix –nik, or the verb kayéfen ‘to have a good time’ ((ta)kayyaf(a)) with the Yiddish suffix –en, and its perfect forms, kayéfet and gekayéfet. The level of communal command of Arabic is hard to define with precision, but some documented utterances testify to a certain familiarity with the language, as can be deduced from the code-switch and the use of the clitic pronoun –hu in the following example: ikh’l dos oysfirn inál abúhu afíle ven er heyngt zakh uf sitín séne usabín yom! ‘I will succeed, cursed be his father, even if he hangs sixty years and seventy days’. Semantic changes are also attested, as, for example, ma salame or marselame ‘good-bye’, uttered on the departure of an undesired visitor or in general dissatisfaction (ma‘ es-salāme). Kosover documented hundreds of Arabic loanwords, including interjections, greetings, curses, and the like, reflecting daily contact with Arab speakers, such as tamám ‘excellent’ (tamām), tfádal ‘please, help yourself’ (tfaḍḍal), and volá el-azím ‘by God the almighty’ (wallāh el-‘aẓim). Most of the loanwords were cultural loans, such as vákef ‘sacred property’ (waqf), gafír ‘guard, night-watchman’ (ghafīr), rafitíye ‘bill of entry’ (raftīye), saráf ‘money-changer’ (ṣarrāf), turíye ‘spade’ (ṭūrīye), džáre (and the diminutive džárke) ‘water jar’ (jarra), kadámes ‘roasted chickpeas’ (qḍāme), khalekón ‘Turkish delight’ (rāḥat luqūm). The descendants of these Ashkenazi communities maintain Yiddish as a spoken language to this day. They are the so-called Jerusalemites, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews residing mostly in Jerusalem and the neighboring city of Bet-Shemesh, who preserve many of their ancestors’ traditions, such as the men’s light-colored attire, which developed in nineteenth-century Palestine under Ottoman rule. Since Israeli Hebrew is now the primary source for lexical borrowing, the number of Arabic loanwords in Jerusalemite Yiddish is significantly reduced as compared to Kosover’s documentation. They include such words as fúste ‘skirt’ (fusṭān), tábe ‘playing ball’ (ṭābe), džúbe ‘men’s elegant overcoat’ (jubbe), khaláke ‘boy’s ritual first haircut at the age of three’ (from ḥallaqa), and švóye švóye ‘slow’ (shway shway), all of which appear in Kosover’s study (see also Vaynshtok, pp. 79–82, 120, 122). Assoulline Dalit Bibliography Assouline, Dalit. The Emergence of Two First-Person Plural Pronouns in Haredi Jerusalemite Yiddish, Journal of Germanic Linguistics 22, no. 1 (2010): 1–22. Kosover, Mordecai. Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish (Jerusalem: Achva Press, 1966). Vaynshtok, Miriam. Ot Azoy (Jerusalem: Hamodiya Press, 2008). Cite this page Assoulline Dalit. Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish. Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Executive Editor Norman A. Stillman. Brill Online, 2014. Reference. Yeshiva University. 24 November 2014 First appeared online: 2014
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:57:09 +0000
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