The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders

Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, Catherine Gibson, Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, Catherine Gibson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349577033, 9781137348388
• eBook ISBN: 9781137348395
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. It offers perspectives from a number of disciplines such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy.
Languages are artefacts of culture, meaning they are created by people. They are often used for identity building and maintenance, but in Central and Eastern Europe they became the basis of nation building and national statehood maintenance. The recent split of the Serbo-Croatian language in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia amply illustrates the highly politicized role of languages in this region, which is also home to most of the world's Slavic-speakers. This volume presents and analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. The overview concludes with a reflection on the recent rise of Slavophone speech communities in Western Europe and Israel. The book brings together renowned international scholars who offer a variety of perspectives from a number of disciplines and sub-fields such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy, making this book of great interest to historians, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists interested in Central and Eastern Europe and Slavic Studies.

1
Cross-border Turkic and Iranian Language Retention in the West and East Slavic Lands and Beyond: A Tentative Classification

Paul Wexler

Introduction

Speakers of Aramaic, Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Mongolic, and possibly Indic languages migrated into Europe between the third millennium BCE and 1300 CE; see, for instance, Syrians, Jews;¹ Sarmatians, Scythians, Jas, Jazygians, Chvalis, Alans, Avars, Huns, Roma (on their possible Iranian origins, see below), Cumans, Khazars, Kovars, Pechenegs, proto-Bulgarians, Hungarians, Mongolians, respectively. Apart from Hungarians and Turkic Karaites (at least until recently), most migratory groups eventually assimilated to the local majority ethnic groups and adopted their languages.

The case of Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazic Jews, is unique. Jewish Iranians – marginally of Palestinian Semitic stock and mainly the descendants of Iranian converts to Judaism from the first century CE onwards – probably mixed with Turkic and Slavic converts to Judaism in the Khazar Empire by the ninth century at the latest. The Khazar Jewish community as a whole presumably spoke Iranian and Eastern Aramaic (also brought from Iran – the language is still spoken in Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan) and acquired the Turkic (Khazar) and the Eastern Slavic lingua francas of the Khazar Empire. Their two liturgical languages were Eastern Aramaic and Hebrew; their written language, a type of ‘pseudo-Hebrew’ or ‘Hebroid’, consisted of an Aramaic or Iranian grammar and phonology (depending on the speaker) plus an Old Semitic Hebrew lexicon with countless new Hebroidisms (this language was Semitic only if the native language of the scribes was Aramaic, but its grammar and phonology were never from ‘Semitic Hebrew’). Possibly as early as the eighth century, but certainly by the ninth, the Jewish Turko-Slavo-Iranians from the Khazar Empire and Jewish Iranians from the Iranian Empire migrated into the mixed Germano-Sorbian lands² as peripatetic merchants who enjoyed a monopoly on the Silk Roads between the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, and Morocco in the West and China in the East (but apparently never reached the Korean and Japanese terminals of the Eastern Silk Roads). Anxious to invent a secret trade language, the Jews invented ‘Yiddish’ by ‘relexifying’³ their native Slavic (originally Kiev-Polissian, that is, pre-Ukrainian, or Sorbian) to a German, Hebrew, Germanoid, and Hebroid (freshly invented pseudo-German and Hebrew) lexicon. Presumably, relexified Slavic (Yiddish) was brought back soon afterwards to the Ukrainian lands, where the process of relexification was repeated, uniquely from Kiev-Polissian. Relexified ‘Sorbian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ Yiddish were close enough to merge; hence, Yiddish is a unique mixed West and East Slavic language.

As a partly mixed Slavo-Iranian population, the Jews resemble the Croats, who were an Iranian tribe that acquired Slavic speech before migrating into the Balkans and the West Slavic lands, or a Slavic-speaking group with an Iranian tribal name, or a mixed Slavo-Iranian group with Iranian chieftains (this may have been the case also with the ancestors of the Czechs, Serbs, and Sorbs). In addition to speaking Slavic (‘Yiddish’), some of the Jews were clearly also speakers of an Iranian language, and possibly also of Eastern Aramaic (see fn 1 above). Until the seventeenth century there were still some monolingual Slavic-speaking Jews in Belarus.

It is imprecise to speak about ‘Iranian’ and ‘Turkic’ tribes. Individual or small groups of migrants who came to Europe with mercantile objectives were probably a single ethnic group speaking a single language. However, larger groups of mercenary soldiers or marauders were more likely to be confederations of linguistically and ethnically diverse tribes. The case of Jews is germane; they were described in the late ninth century by ibn Khordādhbeh, the Persian minister of posts in the Baghdad Caliphate, as a confederation of international merchants, called ar-rāđāniyya ‘Radhanites’ (named after a locale in southern Iraq), speaking no less than six languages: Persian, Arabic, Slavic, Rūm (Greek), Frankish (probably German, rather than French or Italian), and Andalusian (Spanish?). It is unlikely that a single merchant would have been fluent in all six languages. The Khazar population itself was polyethnic, including Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Slavic, and Caucasian nomads, agriculturists, and hunter-gatherers. If we claim that the Khazar populations that came to the west spoke Turkic, we clearly mean only the language of the majority and the aristocracy.

This chapter has three goals:

(1) I will examine the westward migration of two primarily ‘Turkic’ (a and b) and two ‘Iranian’ (c and d) ethnic groups between the eighth and fourteenth centuries: (a) the Volga Muslim Tatars; (b) the Crimean Karaites (both resident since approximately the late 14th century, primarily in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania); (c) the Jewish Ashkenazim, dispersed throughout Europe, but historically most numerous in the East Slavic lands; (d) the Roma, found throughout Europe, but especially in the Slavic lands, by approximately the eighth and fourteenth centuries, respectively.

(2) Since my dual claims of a partly Iranian origin of the Roma and the Ashkenazic Jews are innovative, I will need to provide reasons for such claims.

(3) I will suggest a tentative typology of Asian language retention in the West and East Slavic lands.

The Karaites and Belarusian Tatars

The Karaites in Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania are of Crimean origin. After some 650 years in a Slavic environment, they have recently given up their Turkic language, Karaite, in favour of the coterritorial Slavic or Lithuanian speech.⁴ Hence, Karaite is the longest-lasting language in the Slavic lands of the four case studies considered here. The northern European Karaites practise an Iranian form of Judaism that denies the authority of the Talmud, which developed in eighth-century Iran; they are very likely of mixed Turkic and Iranian origin.

The Belarusian Tatars believe that they are of Crimean and marginally Russian Turkic stock (for instance, from Kazan’); their ancestors in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania spoke Qipčak (Kipchak) Turkic. In the 1600s, the Muslims became mainly speakers of Polish and Ruthenian (that is, Belarusian and marginally Ukrainian, if analyzed in today’s terms). In my view, since giving up Turkic, the Tatars have been repeatedly redefining their relationship to Turkic languages and cultures, though their ethnic makeup is now predominantly Slavic. Curiously, the coterritorial and contiguous Jews make no claims whatsoever to a Turkic linguistic, ethnic, or genetic affiliation, yet the linguistic and ethnographic facts suggest that they are in no small measure descended from Turkic Khazar converts to Judaism in the ninth century (see below).

Most of the Turko-Irano-Arabic vocabulary in use among the Belarusian Tatars falls into the domain of Islamic religion and culture, and as such might be borrowed at any time, and cyclically; some concepts are replaced by cognates, which fuels my doubts about an uninterrupted Turkic language tradition. Evidence for the changing inventory of Islamic terminology is, for instance, BrTat zjarec’, zirec’ ‘cemetery’ (seventeenth century) <Ar ziyāra ‘visit’; the term is still attested now, alongside a new variant of the same root <Ar mazār ‘place of pilgrimage’ (note Kar mėzar).⁵ Karaite dialects in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Crimea, as well as Tatar dialects in the Volga region, also use Ar ziyāra as ‘cemetery; grave’ (the ability of neighbouring minorities to retain common Arabic words needs to be explored; see also the last section).

The early Belarusian Tatar communities, unlike the Jews, lost their Turkic dialects for several reasons: In the first generations the women were Slavs, the men were often away in army service, and there may not have been compact Turkic-speaking communities. Arabic rather than Turkic was the group’s prestige liturgical language, and the first immigrants probably comprised speakers of many Turkic dialects. Akiner adds that some of the early Tatar settlers in Belarus were probably Shamanists, Buddhists, or even Christians, a fact which further contributed to Tatar disunity (Akiner 1978: 228. See also fn 8). This raises the intriguing possibility that some of the many Christian features in Tatar folklore, religion, and naming practices may actually be of Tatar and not Belarusian origin (Borawski 1987).

Without a Turkic language, the Tatars tried to create a separate linguistic profile by distancing themselves from the coterritorial Belarusian speakers, but their unique profile was too weak to produce a well-defined ethnolect of Belarusian; see, for example, unique BrTat hramotka ‘talisman worn around the neck’ vs. stBr hramata ‘official document’, dialectal R gramota ‘alphabet [primer]; letter; memorial book of the dead; paper’, Uk hramota ‘reading and writing; document; decree, edict’, hramotnyi ‘literate’ (note a parallel innovative plural of this Slavic root in Y gramotes ‘reading and writing; document, decree’). After the population shift away from the first partly mixed Belaruso-Tatars to the later preponderantly ethnically monolithic Belarusian Muslim families in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the latter sought to develop a new Muslim and linguistic profile.

The Tatars theoretically could have chosen a number of techniques to distance themselves linguistically from the majority Belarusian speakers: (a) a different dialectal base for their Belarusian speech from that of the Christians; (b) different formal and semantic parameters of an Islamic (Arabo-Turko-Iranian) lexicon shared with Belarusian Christians; (c) Islamic vocabulary coming from Turkic or Slavic-speaking Turkicized (mainly) Muslim groups, for instance Ottoman Turks, Volga, Crimean, Balkan Tatars, Bosnians and Gagauz, or (d) other non-Muslim Slavs, or (e) Karaites. A heightened linguistic profile was partly achieved by using the Arabic writing system for Slavic. In actual practice, the Belarusian Tatars appear to have preferred modest use of (b), and, more marginally, (a). Selection of (a) and (b) is tantamount to saying that Belarusian Tatars had to be perpetually ‘looking over their shoulders’ to see what the Christian majority was doing. Examples follow:

(a) Receptivity to more than one Belarusian dialect can result in variant forms of Islamic terms, which offers some distance from standard Belarusian practice. Examples are the presence and absence of the typical Belarusian feature of cekanne, dzekanne (affrication of palatalized dental stops), as in BrTat mječèt ‘mosque’ (~ mečèc’, stBr mjačèc’).

(b) Whenever Belarusians use Islamic terms that are relatively close to the Arabic etyma, the Belarusian Tatars often distort the surface cognate, for example BrTat m(j)ezim ~ mjazim ‘muezzin’ vs. stBr muèdzin ‘caller to prayer’ (< Ar mu’ađđin). It is unclear why the Belarusian Tatars use Ar minbar ‘pulpit’ as mumibir since the term is apparently not attested among Belarusian Christians (Lakotka 1995: 241); perhaps the source was a blended Ar manābir plural + Pers mämbär singular. Curiously, the same Arabism surfaces as WY almemer [with Ar ’al- ‘the’], but in EY balemer, with distortion due to folk etymology to bal- ‘possessor of’ + ‘article’.⁶ The common Tatar and Yiddish distortions of the Arabism suggest mutual contacts. Also distant from standard Belarusian are BrTat manla, munla, małna, mułła, mołła, mołna ‘Muslim cleric’ vs. stBr mulla, OBr molla < Ar mulla (dissimilation is typical of colloquial speech and of Persian [see discussion of ‘Saturday’ in the section on the Jewish Ashkenazim below]).

There appears to be no use of techniques (c) and (d), and almost nothing of (e) (see Kar mėzar above). The Tatars have a maximum of 400–500 ‘Islamic’ terms, not all of which are attested in the speech of any one speaker. The Turkic lexicon of Christian Belarusian is considerably greater. In comparison, there are approximately 7,000 Islamic terms in the Serbo-Croatian speech of Muslims, and, in parts of Bosnia, Christian speakers even surpass Muslim speakers in Islamic vocabulary (Škaljić 1966: 25–6).

Typical features of Turkic languages are missing or rare in Belarusian Tatar. One example is the periphrastic conjugation for integrating Arabic verbal material, which becomes indeclinable, while all grammatical categories are expressed by an inflected native auxiliary verb. This feature is found in Karaite for the integration of Arabic and Hebrew verbal material and is productive in Yiddish for Hebrew/Hebroid verbs, where it probably continues the precedent of Judeo-Slavic, which, in turn, was inherited, I suspect, from the Turkic Khazar or Iranian spoken by the Jewish Kiev-Polissians. For example, see UkKar (Halych) xatna kylma ‘circumcise’ (with Iranianized Ar ‘circumcision’ and native ‘do’ ~ Pers xätn

kärdän with native ‘make’), Y bojdek zajn ‘to inspect’ (< He ‘inspecting’, itself a loan from Pers bū ‘smell’ via Aramaic + native ‘be’). Compare non-periphrastic BrTar sjunnecic’ (Woronowicz 1935) ~ (po)sunnecic’ ‘circumcise’ (Akiner 1978) < Ar sunna ‘tradition’.

Further research is needed to ascertain whether the techniques for ethnolect construction were contemporaneous or staggered in application, which Islamic terms survived from the period prior to the switch to Belarusian, which factors determined the choice of Turkic sources of enrichment and the role of religion in (re)creating an Islamic Tatar identity.

The Roma

The prevailing view among (mainly non-native) historians and linguists is that the Romani language is of Indo-European Indic stock and that the majority of Roma speakers are descended from Indians who migrated to Western Asia and (especially Slavic) Europe beginning 1,000 years ago; their language allegedly underwent attrition due to widespread bilingualism. Like the Belarusian Tatars, the Balkan Roma have a very limited unique lexicon, with about 400–500 roots (approximately 2,000 words) in each Romani dialect, mainly from Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Byzantine Greek, often combined with a modest Indo-Iranian and Greek morphology. It is conceivable that the Roma are to some extent of Iranian origin, since many of the Indic words in Romani could also be of Iranian origin. However, I believe that Romani is not a ‘vestigial language’ at all but rather a later acquired ‘lexicon’ by a speech community that could at best claim modest links with India and Iran, though most speakers were originally indigenous to Europe. Thus, instead of being a severely impoverished Asian ‘language’, Romani is a collection of non-Indic lexicons an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Maps
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Cross-border Turkic and Iranian Language Retention in the West and East Slavic Lands and Beyond: A Tentative Classification
• 2 Identity and Language of the Roma (Gypsies) in Central and Eastern Europe
• Part I North Slavs and Their Languages
• Part II South Slavs and Their Languages
• Part III A Glimpse into the Future
• Index