American linguist
Max Weinreich ( "Maks Vaynraych"; , "Meyer Lazarevich Vaynraykh"; 22 April 1894 – 29 January 1969) was a Russian-American-Jewish linguist, specializing in sociolinguistics and Yiddish, and the father of the linguist Uriel Weinreich, who, a sociolinguistic innovator, edited the "Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary".
He is known for increasing language awareness of Yiddish as a standardized language; he popularised the phrase "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".
Biography.
Weinreich began his studies in a German school in Goldingen (modern Kuldīga), transferring to the gymnasium in Libau (modern Liepāja) after four years. He then lived in Daugavpils and Łódź. Between 1909 and 1912, he resided in Saint Petersburg, where he attended I. G. Eizenbet's private Jewish gymnasium for boys. He was raised in a German-speaking family but became fascinated with Yiddish.
In the early 1920s, Weinreich lived in Germany and pursued studies in linguistics at the universities of Berlin and Marburg. In 1923, under the direction of German linguist Ferdinand Wrede in Marburg, he completed his dissertation, entitled "Studien zur Geschichte und dialektischen Gliederung der jiddischen Sprache" (Studies in the History and Dialect Distribution of the Yiddish language). The dissertation was published in 1993 under the title "Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung" ("History of Yiddish Linguistics").
In 1925, Weinreich was the cofounder, along with Nochum Shtif, Elias Tcherikower, and Zalman Reisen, of YIVO (originally called the "Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut" — Yiddish Scientific Institute). Although the institute was officially founded during a conference in Berlin in August 1925, the centre of its activities was in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), which eventually became its official headquarters as well. YIVO's first office in Wilno was in a room in Weinreich's apartment. Remembered as the guiding force of the institute, Weinreich directed its linguistic, or philological section in the period before the Second World War. His children were both born in Wilno at that time. His elder son Uriel (1926-1967) a linguist and lexicographer. The younger Gabriel Weinreich (1928-2023) was a physicist and musical acoustician.
Weinreich was in Denmark with his wife, Regina Shabad Weinreich, the daughter of a notable doctor and Jewish leader of Wilno Zemach Shabad, and his older son, Uriel, when World War II broke out in 1939. Regina returned to Vilnius, but Max and Uriel stayed abroad, moving to New York City in March 1940. YIVO was founded in Vilnius before being relocated to New York City. His wife and younger son, Gabriel, joined them there during the brief period (1920-1923) when Vilnius was in independent Lithuania. Weinreich became a professor of Yiddish at City College of New York and re-established YIVO in New York.
Publications.
Weinreich translated Sigmund Freud and Ernst Toller into Yiddish.
Weinreich is often cited as the author of a witty quip distinguishing between languages and dialects: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" ("אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט", "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot"), but he was then explicitly quoting an unknown auditor at one of his lectures at Columbia University shortly after the war in 1945. This auditor was a high-school teacher who encapsulated one of the paradoxes of modern linguistics, i.e. that linguists may be in disagreement on the precise characterization of a given variety as a dialect or a language as a result of "ignor[ing] politics", while, in Maxwell's assessment, "understanding political opinion is more relevant than linguistic expertise" in the hierarchical categorization of language and dialect.
Publications in English:
In Yiddish and German:
References.
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