t any plant names in Yiddish - YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

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˘È„”È Ôȇ ËÏÚÂÂ≠ÔÒ˜ÈÂÂÚ‚ È„ Ÿ ¯ÚËÎÚ˘ È΄¯Ó
Italian (for more details, see section 'East vs. West', below).
b. The medieval German dialects these immigrants encountered
there and later in various areas of what were to become Upper,
Central, and – to a lesser degree – Lower German speech areas.
c. The Hebrew-Aramaic elements that had entered the incipient
Yiddish language through various channels: as a substratum
preceding (Birnbaum 1979: 58) or contemporaneous with Zarphatic
and Italkic, as an adstratum from the Hebrew and Aramaic
texts of prayer and study.
d. The older Central and East European stratum, consisting of
loans from coterritorial West Slavic languages: Old Czech –
through the mediation of Western Canaanic (M. Weinreich
1973; I: 83-89; III: 12-80), for example kreyn – and Old Polish
(for example, szczaw>shtshov>shtshuf>khtshuf), was the result
of eastward migration and settling of West Slavic lands.
e. As Jewish migrants moved further east, an East Slavic stratum
– Ukrainian and Byelorussian – was added. This stage had its
highpoint with the Jewish agricultural colonization in Ukraine,
Bessarabia, Byelorussia, and Crimea, where the Yiddish speech
community came to know first-hand, for example, the varieties
of wheat – banátke, arnaútke, khersóner gírke, etc. advertised
for and by grain dealers in the periodical Kol-mevaser in the
1860s. The settlers came to know useful steppe plants, as well
as weeds. Kuráy (genus Salsola, called Russian thistle in English),
for example, is mentioned countless times in Yiddish literature
referring to Jewish colonization in Ukraine, as well as the
more recent colonization in Argentina, in the works of such writers
as B. Epshteyn, Elye Gordon, Note Lurye, Noyekh Lurye,
Leyb Kvitko, and Elye Spivak (for more details, see the section
on agricultural terminology below).
f. Geographically and linguistically peripheral in the development
of Yiddish botanical terminology in Eastern Europe were the
Jewish communities to the north and south of the Slavic heartland
and to the south of the Carpathian mountains. Plant names
of Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Rumanian, and Slovak
provenience had local currency but failed to gain literary acceptance,
with the partial exception of the Moldavian dialect of
the Rumanian language in Bessarabia.
g. Difficult to place chronologically but clearly Eastern European
are the various internal Yiddish developments – new, anonymous
coinages, semantic shifts – mentioned above.
h. The next stratum – like the preceding one – was not the result of
contact with coterritorial languages, but the consciously sought
influence of a non-contiguous language: the Germanizing attempts