From Judeo-Provençal to Judeo-Piedmontese and Western Yiddish

Abstract

When Jews were expelled from southern France and went to northern Italy and southern Germany, they lost their language and learned Judeo-Piedmontese and Western Yiddish. However, there are features of these languages that suggest a Shuadit substratum. Jews were expelled from France in the fourteenth century and from Provence in the fifteenth. In Shuadit, the Hebrew letter ד is pronounced [z] medially and finally, reflecting a parallel change in Provençal. It is possible that Jews from Provence brought the pronunciations [juz] and [lamez] with them to Germany, where the final sounds unvoiced, leading to the [yus] and [lames] we find in Western Yiddish. The fact that the names of these letters are different in Western and Eastern Yiddish suggests that these pronunciations arrived in Germany after Eastern Yiddish speakers had already moved to the region of Poland-Lithuania. Some of the Jews fleeing Provence went to the Piedmont region of Italy. Judeo-Piedmontese is the only variety of Judeo-Italian with the front rounded vowel [y]. In the Judeo-Italian of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, however, we find only [u]. Perhaps the presence of [y] in Judeo-Piedmontese reflects a Judeo-Provençal substratum.

Keywords:

• Jewish languages
• Shaudit
• Judeo-Provençal
• Judeo-Italian
• Western Yiddish
• Judeo-Piedmontese
• chain shift
• migration