Abstract
While Yiddish already appears in texts beginning as early as Rashi’s commentaries on the Bible and Talmud,1 there is very little specifically linguistic information about actual idiomatic Yiddish language usage to be gleaned from those or similar glosses and glossaries in the ensuing centuries, for such texts always function to elucidate the glossed Hebrew or Aramaic text rather than as Yiddish texts that stand on their own. As Jean Baumgarten points out, the first treatments of Yiddish appeared at the same time that interest was developing in other European vernaculars and those other vernaculars were beginning to be recognized as having the potential to become languages of culture alongside the classical languages.2 This development ran parallel to the development of the printing industry, which distributed books to a far broader audience than had ever before had access to texts.3
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Notes
See Arsène Darmesteter, “Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible,” Revue des Etudes juives 53 (1907), 161–93
Arsène Darmesteter and D.S. Blondheim, Les Gloses françaises dans les commentaires talmudiques de Raschi, vol. 1: Texte des Gloses (Paris: Champion, 1929)
Erika Timm, “Zur Frage der Echtheit von Raschis jiddischen Glossen,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache undLiteratur 107 (1985), 45–81
Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 1–10.
See, especially, Anders Ahlquist, “Les Premières Grammaires des vernaculaires européens,” in Sylvain Auroux, ed. Histoire des idées linguistiques, II: Le développement de la grammaire occidentale (Liège: P. Mardaga, 1992), pp. 107–14
Mirko Tavoni, “La linguistica rinascimentale,” in Giulio C. Lepschy, ed. Storia delia linguistica, vol. 2 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), pp. 169–312
Louis Kukenheim, Contributions à l’histoire de la grammaire italienne, espagnole et française à la Renaissance (Amsterdam: N.v. Noordhollandsche uitgevers maatschappij, 1932)
G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–8)
On the Humanist description of other vernaculars, see G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory, vol. III, pp. 244-318; Heinrich Weber, “Die Ausbildung der deutschen Grammatik (einschließlich der niederländischen),” Histoire, épistémologie, language 9/1 (1987), 11–31
Erika Ising, Die Anfänge der volkssprachlichen Grammatik in Deutschland und Böhmen. Dargestellt am Einfluß der Schrift des Aelius Donatus De octo partibus orationis ars minor Teil I: Quellen (Berlin: Akademie, 1966).
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© 2007 Jerold C. Frakes
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Frakes, J.C. (2007). Humanism and Yiddish. In: The Cultural Study of Yiddish in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04655-0_2
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