The book claims that Yiddish was created when Judaized Sorbs first relexified their language to High German between the 9th-12th centuries; by the 15th century, the descendants of the Judaized Khazars also relexified their Kiev-Polessian (northern Ukrainian and southern Belarusian) speech to Yiddish and German, Yiddish thus uses a mixed West-East Slavic grammar and suggests that converted Khazars were a major component in the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis.

Autorentext

Paul Wexler is Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Zusammenfassung

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective.

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