The Applied Epistemology Library :: View topic - How Fast Do Languages Change?

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

How to be a Cunning Linguist: Add Some Yiddish, of Course!
A guide to using Yiddish phrases in everyday conversation by Deanna Bugalski

Mick Harper wrote:

"it combines German, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with a pinch of Slavic added"
Not really. It's German. I'm not saying this lightly or critically. I'm saying it because there is a giant mystery attached to Yiddish. How come a bunch of Khazars from the Caucasus mountains ended up speaking a language of another bunch of people living a thousand miles away?

Deanna Bugalski wrote:

They bastardized it of course!

Ira Rampil wrote:

In the Middle Ages through the 19th century there were many Jews who were itinerant traders. They help spread a common language.

Mick Harper wrote:

You're saying people gave up their ancestral tongue because some peddlars have returned from foreign parts with news of a language far, far away?

Ira Rampil wrote:

I did not say that at all. Itinerant traders and their customers would benefit from being multilingual -- a competitive advantage. Not a replacement, a supplement. Apparently, over time, there were further adaptive pressures to switch from Hebrew/Aramaic.

Mick Harper wrote:

Adaptive pressures when living in areas speaking Polish, Lithuanian and Russian? I wonder what they were.

Ira Rampil wrote:

I leave that to your imagination

Mick Harper wrote:

It was your theory, I was rather hoping for some substance. But a lot of linguistics is imaginary.

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

As is my wont most mornings I tuned into YouTube for my daily Arsenal and Ukraine briefings. But YouTube knows me better and always waylays me with offerings like

How the Black Death saved English

This I must see. Some apparently influential dude called Gideon Ben-Ami thinks we'd all be speaking French if it weren't for the Black Death. Most of the lecture was about how everyone 'influential' spoke French (or Anglo-Norman French, as he quickly corrected himself). Only some ill-defined peasantry spoke English. It was a right royal battle of the languages.

Though he was good enough to mention that Wycliffe's Bible that came out shortly after the Black Death was in English so somebody in jolly old England was speaking English. Quoting what I take to be the latest orthodoxy he claimed that English is

41% French
15% Latin
33% Anglo-Saxon

Quite a contrast from my own rough estimate

00.1% French
00.1% Latin
99.8% English

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