Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz
2005). In such cases, the language's lexicon may represent various strata of words from different languages the migrating people have encountered, deeming most phylogenetic-based approaches inapplicable. For that reason, it has been proposed to look at linguistic and genetic data in parallel and attempt integrative analyses (Brandt et al. 2014).
One of the last European languages whose linguistic and geographical classifications remain unclear even after three centuries of research is Slavic Yiddish (Weinreich 2008), the native language of the Ashkenazic Jewish community, whose own origins is still under debate (e.g., Costa et al. 2013; Elhaik 2013). The Slavic Yiddish (now called universally simply Yiddish), spoken since the 9th century, consists of Hebrew, German, Slavic, and other elements written in Aramaic char- acters (Weinreich 2008). Because of its many radical deviations
Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz
Ranajit Das1,2, Paul Wexler3, Mehdi Pirooznia4, and Eran Elhaik1'*
1Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK 2Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences (MCNS), Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India 3Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel 4Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University