Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9-13th Centuries. the Indispensable Role of

by Paul Wexler

In this comprehensive study Paul Wexler demonstrates that Yiddish is a Slavic language largely relexified to genuine and artificial German and Hebrew, as a cryptic language of trade in the Khazar Empire in the 9-10th centuries for the use of multilingual Jewish merchants, who enjoyed special privileges on the Afro-Eurasian Silk Roads until the 13th century. Other Judaized trade languages (Turkic, Chinese, Arabic) were also coined at this time in the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3447115734
• ISBN13: 9783447115735
• Release Date: May 2021
• Publisher: Harrassowitz
• Length: 1430 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.