Description

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This volume examines relationships between native languages and Yiddish. It highlights the historical and sociolinguistic development of Turkic, Iranian, South Asian, Slavic, Greek, Balkan, Judezmo, Armenian, Georgian, and Basque languages. One of the main focuses is on the adopted post-medieval and pre-modern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi homelands of Eastern Europe.

The book emphasizes the role of ludic or playful modifications of a language's structures at the colloquial level as sources of linguistic change. And, it goes further to say that expressive language, linguistic iconicity, and etymological analysis can all complement and enrich each other.

About the Author

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MARK R. V. SOUTHERN teaches at Middlebury College in the Department of German and the Program in Classical Studies. He specializes in historical and Indo-European linguistics, language contact and sociolinguistics, German and the Germanic languages, Greek and Latin linguistics, the pre-Islamic Middle East, and Sanskrit. He is a contributor to Archaeology, Language, and History: Essays on Culture and Ethnicity Greenwood Publishing Group (2001).