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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. <br><br>
Anyway, here's a stray reference I stumbled upon:<br><br>
-quote-<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>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 <i>Two-tiered
Relexification in Yiddish</i> on p.3.<br><br>
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<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>-endquote-<br><br>
Reference: Martillo, Joachim. "Issues and Questions In the
Historiography of Pre-State Zionism," lecture, October 3, 2002.<br>
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<a href="http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/7300" eudora="autourl">
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/7300</a><br>
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