[Membroj] Esperanto & 'relexification of Yiddish'

[Erin Piateski]

Interesting ideas.

Although I studied Yiddish for two years in college, and I would
hardly say that Esperanto is relexified Yiddish.  I would also not say
that Modern Hebrew is relexified Yiddish.  Native speakers of Modern
Hebrew can read biblical texts with relative ease.  Although there are
some archaic verb forms that are no longer seen in Modern Hebrew, and
the vocabulary has changed somewhat, the fundamentals of the grammar
are the same (and vastly different, in my opinion, from the grammar of
Yiddish).

Erin Piateski

2008/10/30 Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org>:
> 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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