ROBERT M. COPELAND

ROBERT M. COPELAND (b. 1907)

            He wrote a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 1951 on the linguistic relations in Yoysef Herts’s Ester oder di belonte tugend, ayne posse in fir abshniten yidish-daytsh mundart als baylage tsum shalakhmones an purim (Esther or the rewarded virtue, a farce in four parts, Judeo-German dialect as supplement to Purim treats) (Fürth, 1828).  The dissertation is a significant contribution both to research on Jewish Enlightenment literature in the Yiddish language and to linguistic research of a dialect of Western Yiddish, very close to the time of the decline of Yiddish in Germany.  A portion of the thesis was published in an expanded form, with the co-author Nathan Süsskind: The Language of Herz’s Esther: A Study in Judeo-German Dialectology (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976), XIV + 439 pp.

Source: Max Weinreich, in Yude a. yofe-bukh (Judah A. Joffe book) (New York, 1958), pp. 163, 179.

Dovid Katz