Editing History of Esperanto (section)

==Standardized Yiddish ==
Around 1880, while in Moscow and approximately simultaneously with working on Esperanto, Zamenhof made an aborted attempt to standardize [[Yiddish]], based on his native Bialystok (Northeastern) dialect, as a unifying language for the Jews of the Russian Empire. He even used a Latin alphabet, with the letters ''ć, h́, ś, ź'' (the same as in early drafts of Esperanto, later ''ĉ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ'') and ''ě'' for [[schwa]]. However, he concluded there was no future for such a project, and abandoned it, dedicating himself to Esperanto as a unifying language for all humankind.<ref>Christer Kiselman, [http://www2.math.uu.se/~kiselman/pau2008.pdf "Esperanto: Its origins and early history"], in Andrzej Pelczar, ed., 2008, ''Prace Komisji Spraw Europejskich PAU'', vol. II, pp. 39–56, Krakaw.</ref> [[Paul Wexler (linguist)|Paul Wexler]] proposed that Esperanto was not an arbitrary pastiche of major European languages but a Latinate [[relexification]] of Yiddish, a native language of its founder.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wexler |first=Paul |title=Two-Tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect |date=2002 |publisher=Mouton de Gruyter |isbn=3-11-017258-5 |location=Berlin |language=en}}</ref> This model is generally unsupported by mainstream linguists.<ref name="Spolsky">{{Cite book |last=Spolsky |first=Bernard |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5Xk9AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA157 |title=The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History |date=2014 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-139-91714-8 |location=Cambridge |pages=157, 180ff, 183 |language=en}}</ref>