Quantity Loss in Yiddish: A Slavic Feature?

From the point of view of quantity, the dialects of Yiddish can be divided into two major groups, viz. (a) those that have the opposition of vowel length and (b) those that do not have it. The Western and Mid-Eastern dialects, on the one hand, and the North-Eastern dialects, on the other, represent groups (a) and (b), respectively. According to most dialectologists, the South-Eastern dialects have not retained the opposition of length, thus belonging to the (b)-group dialects. Yet, there are those who argue that in some of the SE dialects this opposition is still present, although it is less manifest than in (a) (e.g. covering some of the vowels only). If this group exists in reality, it belongs to an intermediary type that may or may not reflect the general tendency, but itself is not indicative of the mechanism of quantity loss. According to Ulrike Kiefer,1 the tendency to lose the "systematische Opposition zwischen Langund Kurzvokalen" becomes stronger towards the East (Kiefer 1995: 158), leading to North-Eastern Yiddish which is "der am meisten neuernde [Dialekt] (weil Langenunterschiede vollig abgeschafft sind)", as Dovid Katz has put it (Katz 1983: 1030). Since the loss of quantity distinctions is regarded as indicative of the advanced state of the language, it follows that the opposite (i.e. length distinctions, as in Western Yiddish) must be typical of its most archaic state. The latter must have coincided with the earliest period of the history of Yiddish, most probably from its origin (between the 1 1th and 13th c.) to the time of the migration of the Jews to the East (^-lo* e). In other words, the earliest state of Yiddish is the period when Yiddish was a German(ic) dialect. In this capacity, it must have been characterized by an admixture of Hebrew elements only. According to Neil G. Jacobs, the Hebrew component in Yiddish had a certain specificity with respect to quantity. Thus, Hebrew words show reflexes coinciding with those of long vowels in some forms, but not in others, cf. sojdes 'secrets' and