Erika Timm

Erika Timm (born 1934) is a German linguist, the author of works that have made fundamental contributions to Yiddish historical linguistics and philology.

In 1985 she wrote her habilitation work in Trier University (Department of Germanistics, section of Yiddish studies). Currently she is a Professor Emeritus of the same institution. Her husband, Gustav Adolf Beckmann, a German philologist who specialized in Romance languages, was her collaborator on a number of books.

Studies written by Erika Timm mainly deal with phonetic, semantic and morphological aspects of Old Yiddish, comparison between Western and Eastern Yiddish and relationship between Yiddish and German dialects. Her most important contribution to the domain, the book ‘Historische jiddische Semantik’ on which she worked about twenty years (published in 2005), focuses on the Yiddish translations of the Bible compiled between about 1400 and 1750. Timm demonstrates how the practice of translating the Bible in Jewish elementary schools (kheyder) during the earliest period of the emergence of the Yiddish language influenced the formation of its Germanic Component, that the influence of Judeo-French in this context is more important than thought, and that an important part of the original translation vocabulary is present in everyday Modern Eastern Yiddish.

Erika Timm is also the scholarly editor of a number of Old Yiddish books and the author of several studies in the domain of German philology.

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