“The new field of Afro-Asian (Silk Road) linguistics and the benefits for thereconstruction of Eastern and Western Slavic languages”
Paul Wexler, Tel-Aviv University
The spread of Iranian art forms to Europe, Central Asia, India, China and Japan are wellknown from archaeology and art historians. The spread of religions either from Iran or by
Iranians—such as Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduismand Judaism—have also been discussed, but, strangely, almost only in one direction—fromIran to the East. The main carriers of these influences were Iranian merchants, including
especially Iranian Jewish merchants. Linguistic issues along the Silk Roads have generally
been ignored. My talk today will introduce a new topic of cultural diffusion: “Silk Road
linguistics”, which will deal with two types of multilingualism and language creation:(i) Contacts among languages spoken or written along the international “Silk Roads”—
encompassing the vast territory between the German lands and (a) the Chinese and Southeast
Asian lands, and from the former, also Korea and Japan, as well as (b) the Iberian and Africanlands and (c) Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. These contacts have led to the rise of
isoglosses linking Afro-Eurasian languages. As a consequence, numerous puzzles in thehistories of individual Silk Road languages can find better solutions within a broad AfroEurasian, rather than narrow monolingual, context.
The present paper suggests how the Jewish trade languages—between the 9-13th centuries—
can elucidate many topics in the histories of the Jewish languages themselves, as well as in
the histories of their non-Jewish contact languages—especially Slavic and German. For
example, Yiddish, of special interest here, is itself a Slavic language with a cryptic, largely“German-like” lexicon, which holds a major key to identifying overt and covert Asian
influences in other Western and Eastern Slavic languages and in German. Yiddish can evenshed light on specifically Japanese phenomena, such as bai bai suru, maimai suru ‘to buy andsell’, butsubutsu kōkan suru ‘to exchange (things)’, ume ‘plums’, sai shin-no ‘careful,prudent’, conjoined nouns (e.g. ‘father-mother’ = ‘parents’ without a conjunction)—all ofwhich belong in isoglosses that include Eastern and Western Slavic languages, German,Iranian, and sometimes also Mongolian, Turkic languages and Arabic, inter alia.
(ii) New languages and cryptic lexicons of trade were created by peripatetic Jewish
merchants around the 9th century in response to intensive trade opportunities, granted by
special trading privileges from the Holy Roman Empire in Western Europe and the Tangdynasty in China in the late 9th century—almost simultaneously.
At the center of our present attention is the genesis of Yiddish, along with Judaized Iranianand Turkic languages, in the Khazar empire (destroyed by Kievan Rus’ in the late 10thcentury). The Iranian (first the Soghdians, and later, in the 8th century, the Persians) were themost important long-distance traders on the Silk Roads—and among them, the Iranian Jews
played a very significant role, because (a) they were a neutral group at a time when religious
hostility obstructed trade between Christians and Muslims, and between the latter andBuddhists and Hindus; (b) they were highly literate and multilingual. Another similarly
neutral group was pagan merchants, such as the mixed Scandinavian-Eastern Slavo-Rus’confederation which operated out of the Eastern Slavic lands (Russia, Belarus’ and Ukraine oftoday) but only as far east as Baghdad. The international Jewish trade guild accepted Roma(Gypsies) and other Indians, and pre-Christian Slavs; the raison d’être of the guild was acommon profession, not a common religion or ethnicity—though a common Judaic identity
did develop in time which recommended or required conversion to “Judaism”, an IranoPalestinian religion shaped by the majority non-Judaists. Hence, Jews today are multiethnic.
The trade languages were intended to be solely for the use of peripatetic merchants of acommon linguistic affiliation. However, since Jewish merchants were always in close contact
with co-religionists speaking other, often mutually unintelligible, languages (Judeo-Arabic,

-Berber, -Iranian, -Turkic, -Slavic, -Georgian, -Romance and -Chinese), it became imperative
to create a common lexical corpus of Hebraisms and Hebroidisms to facilitate communication
among those merchants. All the “Old Jewish languages” contributed to the cryptic lexicon,
but it appears that Slavic Yiddish speakers predominated in its formation.
During the past 10-15 years I have discovered an enormous, hitherto overlooked, Asian,mainly Iranian, component in Slavic Yiddish and Jewish culture (over 4200 examples),suggesting that the dominant component in the ethnogesis of the Jews was also Iranian andSlavic. Slavists have explored links with Iranian languages almost exclusively in theframework of the Common Slavic period of the early first millennium A.D., if at all(Kortmann and van den Auwera 2011 make very little reference to Persian or Iranian ingeneral).
Western linguists also often dismiss Iranian linguistic impact on European languages during
the migration period of the first millenium A.D.; e.g. the articles in Kortmann and van derAuwera (eds.) (2011) make very little reference to Persian or Iranian in general. Slavists have
But Silk Road linguistics shows that Iranian deposited a largely hidden Iranian (and Turkic)
imprint in Slavic and German long after that date due to the spread of mixed “tribalconfederations’; in addition to the Jews, see the Iranian ethno-glottonyms, Serbs, Sorbs,Croats, Obodrites, Czechs, inter alia. Hence, Silk Road linguistics is quintessentially a topic
for Slavists and Iranianists, and Yiddish can be a “litmus test” for uncovering an Asian
imprint in Slavic and German.
I believe that Silk Road linguistics also offers us a golden opportunity to understand how
cryptic trade languages and lexicons are created. Aside from the Old Jewish languages, wehave precious little attestation of cryptic mercantile speech. Rus’ merchants left no records.
Moreover, the cryptic Jewish languages appear to be the oldest known surviving examples.
With Silk Road linguistics, we can appreciate how Arabs, Iranians, Chinese, Turks andSlavs, together and separately, maintained the Silk Roads and stimulated the rise of Old
Jewish languages, which they provided with significant linguistic enrichment.

Reference:
B.Kortmann and J. van den Auwera (eds.) (2011). The languages and linguistics of Europe.
A comprehensive guide, 159-178. Berlin-Boston.