Soviet Yiddish Language Planning and Linguistic Development

by Estraikh, Gennady

• ISBN13: 9780198184799
• ISBN10: 0198184794
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-04-22
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

This is the first comprehensive study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union. A chronicle of orthographic and other reformsfrom the state of the language in pre-Revolutionary Russia, through active language-planning in the 1920s and 1930s, repression, and subsequent developments up to the1980sis recreated from contemporary publications and archival materials. Later chapters draw on the author's own experience as a Yiddish writer and lexicographer in Moscow. At a time when the Bolshevik party's Jewish sections held an influential position, Yiddish attained a functional diversity without precedent in its history; but underlying contradictions between ideas expressed in the slogans 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' and 'The right of nations toself-determination' led to extremes in language-planning. A golden mean was achieved after the 1934 Yiddish language conference in Kiev. Using contemporary literary works as a source of linguistic and sociolinguistic information, Gennady Estraikh charts the development of the resultant variety ofthe language, 'Soviet Yiddish'; the effects of severe repression in the late 1930s and 1940s; and the subsequent decline in usage. Comparisons are drawn between Soviet Yiddish language-planning and concurrent reforms in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and German; and the features and types ofSoviet Yiddish word-formation are analysed, notably univerbation, or compressing a phrase into one word.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	ix	(1)
Note on the transliteration	x
Introduction	1	(4)
1. Yiddish in late Imperial Russia	5	(18)
1.1 Sociolinguistic pattern of Jewish society	5	(5)
1.2 Urbanization, modernization, and acculturation	10	(6)
1.3 Languages of Kiev Jewish students	16	(4)
1.4 Change processes in Yiddish	20	(3)
2. Yiddish proletarian language	23	(39)
2.1 Inside new boundaries	23	(7)
2.2 Yiddish language retention	30	(8)
2.3 Yiddish proletarian literature as a socio-linguistic source	38	(7)
2.4 Yiddish Soviet-speak	45	(8)
2.5 Ukrainianisms and Belorussianisms	53	(3)
2.6 Lejzer Vilenkin's corpus	56	(6)
3. Language planning of the 1930s	62	(36)
3.1 The Soviet Yiddish Empire of the early 1930s	62	(6)
3.2 Language discussions	68	(5)
3.3 The Odessa language	73	(6)
3.4 The Kiev conference	79	(6)
3.5 Soviet Yiddish and Soviet German: Some parallels	85	(5)
3.6 A conference which did not take place	90	(8)
4. Soviet Yiddish in the 1940s to 1980s	98	(17)
4.1 Ejnikajt (Unity): The 1940s	98	(3)
4.2 The era of Sovetish hejmland	101	(7)
4.3 The 1984 Russian-Yiddish dictionary	108	(7)
5. Soviet Yiddish orthography	115	(26)
5.1 Preliminaries	115	(2)
5.2 The first steps towards reform, 1918-1920	117	(5)
5.3 Implementation of reform, 1920s	122	(5)
5.4 Latinization	127	(4)
5.5 The 1930s and after	131	(5)
5.6 Perception of the Soviet spelling reform	136	(5)
6. Soviet Yiddish word-formation	141	(28)
6.1 Preliminaries	141	(1)
6.2 Stump-compounds	142	(10)
6.3 Semi-abbreviations	152	(3)
6.4 Acronyms	155	(2)
6.5 Univerbs with the suffix -ke	157	(1)
6.6 Adjectivalization	158	(3)
6.7 The suffix -nik in Soviet Yiddish	161	(3)
6.8 The verbal prefix der-	164	(5)
Conclusion	169	(7)
References	176	(25)
Index of Yiddish lexical items	201	(10)
Index of names and subjects	211