Jewish Slavic dialects

Jewish Slavic dialects (Knaanit, Qna`anith; self-named Lešoneynu “our language”) is the conventional name for several dialects and registers of Slavic languages spoken by Jews living in the Middle Ages in Slavic countries. All known Jewish Slavic dialects were supplanted by Yiddish or the surrounding Slavic languages ​​by the end of the Middle Ages.

The most famous is the Hebrew-Czech version of the ancient Czech language , which was spoken by Bohemian and Moravian Jews before the massive influx of Yiddish - speaking Ashkenazi from Germany and then the resettlement of both of them east and north-east to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth . However, nothing is known about its differences from the language of the surrounding population. Most likely, as in the case with other medieval Jewish languages ​​of Europe, the differences were minimal and were limited to interspersing Hebrew and Aramaic words and using the Hebrew alphabet .

There is also information about the existence of Jews in Kievan Rus , who possibly also spoke the Hebrew version of the Old Russian language in the 11th – 13th centuries , and possibly up to the 15th century . At the same time, since the "Old Russian" Jews came mainly from the Khazars , their spoken language could be the Khazar language , which is indirectly confirmed by the Kiev letter .

The name Knaanite ( English Knaanic ) is associated with the designation of the Slavic countries by the term Qna`an ( al-Heb. כנען , since ancient times denoting Palestine - Canaan ), found in Jewish texts (for example, Binyamin from Tudela in the 12th century calls the Old Russian State “The Land of Canaan "). The reason for this identification is unknown.

The Israeli linguist Paul Veksler, in contrast to the views of Max Weinreich about the late Slavic borrowings in Yiddish, put forward a hypothesis about the Slavic ( Puddle ) origin of the Yiddish language through the Germanization of Knaanite.