If you wanted a good horse in 18th-century southern Germany, you had to come prepared. Horse-trading was a pretty Jewish line of business, it turns out, to the extent that a book published in 1764 calling itself Der Vollkommene Pferdkenner, "The Complete Horse Connoisseur", included a Hebrew-German dictionary and five sample dialogues to practice your Juedisch-Deutsch. This book is a treasure trove for all kinds of studies, but the beginning of the fourth sample dialogue is, to me, the highlight of the entire work. It's between two traders, one Jewish and one not.
I've put brackets around the Hebrew words and roots (you can see an image from the book below, in which the Hebrew parts are in larger print):
-[Jehudi atto]? -[Kenn dibbarto], [meaim] bist du [mackir], dass ich ein [Jehudi] bin? -Dein [Sokon] und dein [Loschon] ver[masser]n dich, dass ich es [maemin] bin. -Auf was [Aufon] bist du es [mackir] an [Sekoni], es [nosen]et ja auch [harbe benechem], die [Sekonim auruchim] haben. -Es ist [emes], [afal] sie sind sich [megalleach].
-You're a Jew? -You have spoken truly. How did you realize that I'm a Jew? -Your beard and language give you away, that's why I think so. -In what way can you tell by my beard? Why, there are many among you that have long beards! -True, but they trim.
So the Jewish horse trader has shown up incognito in his doublet and tricorn (just kidding, I have no idea what they actually wore), only to be given away by his long, untrimmed beard and funny Jew-talk (think yeshiva guys in polo shirts and baseball caps talking to the locals in Vermont). Great scene.
Especially interesting to me, however, is 1) the variety and density of the Hebrew terms, which make up every noun and all but the most essential functional verbs (like "to be" and "to have"), and 2) specifically the verb nosenet in the fourth line. It's very difficult to see any rhyme or reason behind the selection of Hebrew words and roots, which do not deal with Jewish-specific things (with the exception of "Jew"). Why is this fellow saying "beard," "way", "realize/discern", "give away", and so on, in Hebrew? Of course, this dialogue might have been made especially difficult to give the German reader a taste of what Jewish speech could be like at its most incomprehensible, but the sample would have to be a reasonable bit of Jewish speech--this is a horse trader's guide, after all, not a linguistic study! +Dovid Katz, the ירושה-טעאריע is definitely appealing here!
As for nosenet, the reason this interests me so much is that we have a rather unique semantic loan/calque here. A standard calque, like German/Yiddish "bei" to English "by", takes two words with overlapping semantic ranges and expands the boundaries of one to cover areas reached by the other. But here we have a word in Hebrew, "nosen", the boundaries of whose semantic range are very, very far from the German "es gibt", meaning "there are". And yet, "nosen" is given the blaringly German sense and then used _in place of_ the German "es gibt"! This would be the equivalent of a Russian immigrant saying "okay, make sure ostavat'sa in prikosnovenie!" He wants to say "okay, make sure to stay in touch", but his English is not good enough. Instead of saying "okay, make sure staying touch" (an attempt at idiomatic English) or "okay, ne propadai" (idiomatic Russian in place of English), he translates the English phrase word by word into Russian, then proceeds to use the non-idiomatic, literal translation in Russian instead of the appropriate phrase in English! Or, to hew more closely to the example, saying something like "I'm idu be there", where "idu" is "going", which has nothing to do with the future tense in Russian.
Another interesting point concerns the question of Juedisch-Deutsch vs. Yiddish. Not being a scholar of Yiddish, I do not have a strong position on when people came to speak and think of themselves as speaking a distinct language called "Yiddish", as opposed to "very, very Jewish German". It does seem, however, that this was a rather late development. What it looks like is that for many centuries there was a spectrum of Jewish inflection to your German\Russian\Old Romance\what have you, and if I had to hazard a guess I would say that nobody seriously thought about "Yiddish" earlier than the 18th century, and even when the idea really took off it was limited to a clearly delineated portion of the population. (And the "folksy" dialect of Sholem Aleichem is a carefully crafted literary artifact inspired by folk idioms--think Robert Burns.) Nationalist and social movements, which often rallied around language, helped move this sentiment along, and the culmination of this kind of thinking was the formation of YIVO. The modern-day equivalent of the speech in the sample dialogue is not Yiddish, of course, but yeshivish.
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