Re: Jewish (was: constructed romance) languages

At 16:07 on 21.1.1999, Steg Belsky wrote:
> >    KARAIM: Lithuania
>
> The Qara'im (Karaites) are a Jewish sect somewhat similar to the old
> Sadducees....do you know if this is the Karaite language that is supposed
> to be descended from the language of the Khazars?
>
Yep.  Anyways it's a western Turkic language with quite some weird
distinctive traits.  Among others Turkic vowel harmony has been replaced
with consonant-palatalization harmony.  I wonder what its Hebrew-alphabet
orthography looks like. According to Koestler's hypothesis the Karaite
section of the Khazars retained the language while the rest was
Yiddishized.  He estimated that most of the Ashkenazi (sp?) Jewissh gene
pool is (or was, one fears...) in fact Khazar-Turkic.  Not at all
inappropriate, seeing that the Turkic family of peoples is one gigantic
diaspora.  Noone even knows where proto-Turkic was spoken.  There is one
language, Chuvash, that is a cousin of the Turkic languages, rather than
one of them.  Spoken somewhere in Russia, if my memory surves me.

B-P>


    B.Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
    ----------------------------------------------------

        Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                            (Tacitus)