Two recently posted articles in the Jewish Internet magazine Tablet provide an excellent introduction to anyone interested in the fascinating and problem-fraught field of Yiddish historical linguistics. One, by Cherie Woodworth, a scholar of Eastern European history who died last year, at the sadly young age of 46, first appeared in the journal Kritika in 2010. The other is by Tablet staff writer Batya Ungar-Sargon. The two are complementary and should be read together.
The questions of where and when Yiddish originated, who were its first speakers and how it spread were long thought by most Jewish historians and Yiddish linguists to be open-and-shut. The standard view was most forcefully presented by the great Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1894-1969), who developed it exhaustively in his four-volume “Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Shprakh” (“History of the Yiddish Language”).
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