Customer Reviews

Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction

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I have heard Professor Jacobs lecture on a special topic (Courland Yiddish) at a research conference, and his talk was characterized by broad coverage and clarity of presentation. I also had the opportunity to speak to him at length several times, in Swedish, and was amazed at his mastering of our language: no silly accent there, he had been able to learn even the suprasegmental features of Swedish (such as the musical word accent) which usually only "true" natives can do. He sounded like a native speaker. Clearly then, he is a top-level Germanist and a polyglot with a true talent for learning foreign languages. He has previously published a more narrowly focused book on the phonology of Yiddish, but this one, as indicated by the title, is likely to have a more broad appeal.
The parts of the book are: pp. xv-xvi, Table of transcription of Hebrew letters used in Yiddish; xvii-xix, List of abbreviations (and he uses plenty of them throughout the book, so you will need it!); pp.1-8, Introduction defining the scope of Yiddish linguistics etc. ; pp.9-56, surprisingly entitled simply History, perhaps because it treats both the historiography of the subjects (how Yiddish has been studied through the centuries) and gives an outline of the actual (external) history of this language. This once hotly debated topic is now reaching, it would seem, a consensus which he presents skilfully, for instance avoiding to explicitly state that this involves abandoning the mid-20th century standard view developed by the portal figure of Yiddish linguistic history, Max Weinreich (see e.g. the latter's 1980 English-language monograph and in earlier decades writings in his native Yiddish.) ; pp. 57-89, Dialectology, showing the criteria for and geographical extension of the various dialects; pp.90-153 is a major section entitled Phonology, which happens to be Jacobs' own favourite area of study and is thus very detailed; pp.154-222, Morphology; pp. 223-263 Syntax (which he points out has rarely been treated at length, and certainly not in English, before); pp. 264-306, Sociolinguistics, which among other things tracks the attempts to standardize the language; pp.307-323, References, an excellent bibliography giving full references to the most important original sources as well as analyses written mainly in Yiddish itself or in German although many, more recent (post 1960's) papers are quoted which were written in English, attesting the upsurge in Yiddish studies in the US in the past few decades. He thus departs from the sad Anglo tradition of giving references only to English publications often motivated by an euphemistic phrase "since our readership would not have any use for non-English references" or the like. Jacobs gives Yiddish data in romanized form instead of in Hebrew letters actually used by the native speakers, and wisely avoids the YIVO transliteration and goes for IPA symbols instead.
Sometimes the terminology used appears overdone, I could not remember ever having heard terms like acrolectal (e.g. on p. 49), post-lexical resyllabification (p. 134) or post-cyclic phonology (p. 132), and as I mentioned above, there are MANY abbreviations used almost in every sentence. In the sociolinguistics section, I would have liked to know more about the role of Yiddish in the state of Israel and its relations with Modern Hebrew, but this controversial topic is not treated here, only the situation for Yiddish in the various parts of Europe and the USA are mentioned. The uvular fricative pronunciation of /r/ which is often heard today is mentioned only briefly in the half-page devoted to this consonant (p. 109): he mentions that it could be a feature which originated in larger cities/towns rather that the countryside. But could it not be partly due to influence from Standard German ?
This type of linguistic overviews of all aspects of a language are seldom written nowadays, probably because there are few authors around who would be able to perform such a daunting task these days. The book is an outstanding example of this classical genre. It is expensive but well worth the price. Hats off to Professor Jacobs.
(NB that the general reader who is looking for a non-technical description of the origins and developments of Yiddish is well adviced to look elsewhere, for instance to Dovid Katz, Words on fire, and Michael Wex, Born to kvetch, which complement each other due to their very different outlooks on and attitude towards the language.)

This book is extremely well written and the first several and last large sections can be read with profit by the non-specialist. For me it took a bit of getting used to Yiddish transliterated according the the rules used by professional linguists, rather than YIVO standard, but well worth the effort.

The author is a fine writer, and is consistently interesting and nuanced in his ability to combine perspectives and information from many disciplines to give a dynamic picture of Yiddish as a still-evolving (if numerically much reduced) language. One learns a good deal about English because the author, in telling the story of Yiddish, attunes the reader to niceties of language and to the dynamic way in which many historical and social factors, as well as dynamics internal to a language, affect its development.

The book is too expensive for me to encourage the average reader to quick go and buy it, and the middle section of the book really is for specialists, but I highly recommend you ask your library to acquire a copy, and to spend a few days with the book, if you are interested in the fascinating and complicated -- but, I now see, not incomprehensible -- development of Yiddish.

A very satisfying, if sometimes challenging, read.