Publisher's Synopsis
This volume contains 105 transcripts dealing with language and supplements Phonai volume 42 (= Part I) which contains 165 excerpts from interviews with German-speaking Jewish emigrants to Palestine/Israel largely on biographical subjects. The CD enclosed contains 41 of these excerpts and conveys an acoustic impression of the high proficiency and fluency of the speakers, all between the age of 60 and 100. The subsequent linguistic analysis divides into 10 subsections examining the sociolinguistic backgrounds of the cultivated 'educated' German displayed by the speakers and its grammatical and stylistic characteristics. Together the two volumes document and describe a variety of German distinguished first of all by its striking orientation to written and literary standards and models, and secondly by occasional lexical enrichments from the Hebrew-speaking world surrounding the speakers. This historically unique variety of German is doomed to disappear with the last generation of emigrants.
