User talk:-sche/notlanguages

I've had a problem in finding any documentation on Judeo-Georgian (jge), and I'm beginning to suspect it's a phantom language. Maybe you or someone with a research library at hand could figure out whether it exists? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:16, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, let's review what is known about it. Ethnologue, when they gave it a code, wrote that it "[m]ay not be a separate language from Georgian, but a dialect using various Hebrew loanwords". Other general-reference works seem to say the same thing, in more words or less. Ball's Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World states that whereas "Judeo-Tat is distinct from Muslim Tat, Judeo-Georgian is an ethnolect of Georgian like the English of American Jews for English." Haarman's Language in Ethnicity: A View of Basic Ecological Relations, after describing the unusual situation of the Jews of Georgia relative to the Jews of other former SSRs (namely that more speak Georgian than Russian), comments: "Perhaps because of these isolational characteristics, some scholars tend to stress the independence of Judeo-Georgian as a Jewish language, which, actually, in terms of linguistic affinity, is a variant of Georgian."

OTOH, Waldman, in his Recent Study of Hebrew (1989), outlines a handful of phonetic peculiarities of Judeo-Georgian, and writes that "Moskovich and Ben-Oren (1982) reject the claim that a separate Judeo-Georgian does not exist [... and] have gathered a file of more than a thousand elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Georgian origin that are specific to Judeo-Georgian speech." (But on the third hand, thinking back to Ball's analogy, the English of American Jews could be expected to contain many Hebrew loanwords that general American English would not.)

I have yet to find a note of which script the language uses.

- -sche (discuss) 19:23, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

In other words, it seems that the speech that evolved among the Jews in Georgia is definitely a discrete thing — "capable of being perceived individually and not as part of something else", as our entry on discrete puts it — so it's not a phantom the way e.g. some supposed Australian languages have been. (They've turned out to be town names used as names for already-known languages, without the towns even showing noticeable dialect differences.) It's just a question of whether social isolation, retention of certain old Georgian features which have disappeared from standard Georgian, a few pronunciation differences, and an influx of Hebrew loanwords qualifies it as a separate language. That could go either way. After all, "isolation, retention of certain old features which have disappeared from the standard language, a few pronunciation differences, and an influx of Native American loanwords" would describe w:Appalachian English relative to, say, standard British English. I'd still like to find which script it uses. - -sche (discuss) 03:32, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Discussion moved to Wiktionary talk:About Georgian.