Knaanic

Knaanic was the language of the Jews of the medieval Slavic lands — above all Bohemia and Moravia — before Yiddish reached them. In structure it was essentially Old Czech, close to the Prague Czech of its day, but it was a distinctly Jewish vernacular: written in Hebrew letters, used among the Jewish communities, and known to them as Leshon Knaan, the “language of Canaan,” after the name medieval Jews gave the Slavic east. Its written remains are small but real — Slavic glosses scattered through the works of Bohemian rabbis (the thirteenth-century legal compendium Or Zarua marks dozens of them explicitly “in the language of Canaan”), personal names, and, most remarkably, Hebrew-inscribed silver coins minted for Polish dukes by Jewish moneyers.

It died not by assimilation into the surrounding Czech, but by replacement from within the Jewish world. From the thirteenth century onward, waves of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews moved eastward out of the German lands, fleeing the persecutions of the Crusade era, and settled among the Knaanic-speaking communities. The newcomers were culturally dominant within Jewish society, and the local Jews shifted to Yiddish rather than the other way around — a shift largely complete by the fifteenth century, with the last Hebrew-script evidence of the old language dating to the sixteenth. The linguist Max Weinreich argued that the Slavic words embedded in Yiddish, ones no longer current in Czech or Polish, came directly out of Knaanic before it died. The language left no literature and no living speakers — only glosses in the margins of holy books and a handful of coins.