[Membroj] Esperanto & 'relexification of Yiddish'

[Ralph Dumain]

Many years ago, a childhood friend, Esperantist, linguist, and 
Yiddishist mentioned he came across references to Zamenhof in the 
history of Yiddish linguistics, due to Zamenhof's early interest in 
reforming Yiddish. I believe Zamenhof's project has been published in 
Esperanto, and I probably have it in my collection.

Anyway, here's a stray reference I stumbled upon:

-quote-

One can view the claim that Eastern European Ashkenazi settlers 
revived Hebrew in a Modern Israeli version as evidence of the 
thoroughness and planning in Zionist primordialism. Paul Wexler 
elucidates the politics behind the assertion in Two-tiered 
Relexification in Yiddish on p.3.


In the late nineteenth century, some East European Jewish 
nationalists, led by a Belarusian Jew, Eliezer ben Jehuda, proposed 
replacing almost the entire lexical component of their native Yiddish 
by Classical Hebrew phonetic strings, while a far smaller group of 
Yiddish speakers, likewise headed by a Belarusian Jew, Ludwik 
Zamenhof, simultaneously advocated the replacement of the Yiddish 
lexicon by a Latinoid lexicon of their own creation. The result of 
the former act of relexification (now spoken as a first or second 
language by over seven million Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs) is 
known universally as "Modern Hebrew"; the Jewish revivalists' choice 
of name for this type of "relexified Yiddish" was intended to foster 
the link with Classical Hebrew (which died out as a native language 
in approximately 200 A.D.) and thereby to strengthen a claim (which, 
otherwise, had almost no historical basis) to control Ottoman-British 
Palestine. The result of the second relexification act was Esperanto 
(on the Slavic or Yiddish grammar of the latter, see Goninaz 1974; 
Gold 1980; Piron 1982); Esperanto is the only "variant of Yiddish" to 
be spoken by a predominantly non-Jewish population.

-endquote-

Reference: Martillo, Joachim. "Issues and Questions In the 
Historiography of Pre-State Zionism," lecture, October 3, 2002.
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/7300
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