The name comes from the "land of Knaan", a geo-ethnological term denoting the Jewish populations living principally in Czechia, though sometimes applied to all Jewish populations east of the Elbe River (as opposed to the Ashkenazi Jews, living to its west, or the Sephardi Jews of the Iberian Peninsula).
The linguist Paul Wexler has hypothesised that Knaanic is actually the direct predecessor of Yiddish and that the language later became Germanised.
[6] That view has been dismissed by nearly all mainstream academics, however, and contrasts with the more widely accepted theories of Max Weinreich, who argued that Slavic loanwords were assimilated only after Yiddish had already been fully formed.
[3] One of the very few commonly-accepted examples of Knaanic is inscriptions on bracteate coins issued under Mieszko the Old and Leszek the White, two Polish rulers of 12th and 13th century.
One in the National Bank of Poland's numismatic collection bears the word bracha, Hebrew for blessing.