Earlier today I listened to a moderately interesting podcast on the presence of Yiddish within the English language, where an English podcaster collaborated with a cultural American Jew whose secular Jewish grandparents came from Austria and Germany. Yiddish itself is an example of a Jewish language within the Germanic subfamily of languages which combines elements of German, Hebrew, Slavic languages, and also Aramaic, as far as I understand it, and remains the folk language of the Ashkenazi Jews, which are numerically the predominant Jewish population within the United States. There was an earlier small population of Sephardic Jews, from which I am descended as well, which spoke other Jewish languages like Ladino which were similar blends of the main language of a host nation with elements of Hebrew. What we find, therefore, in the relationship between Yiddish and English is that both the English people and their settler colonists (like Americans) as well as the people of the Jewish diaspora have had a long history of blending languages and bringing words from other languages into new ones.

There are many approaches that a language can take towards other languages. Some languages, like French, have a national academy that seeks to control a language and purify it from foreign influences. English has never had this. Moreover, English has always existed in a situation where the speakers of the language were involved in a situation of intense bilingualism and long-term conflict with other languages. At times, as after the Norman conquest, English was for a long time the substratum language where the ruling class spoke Norman French. At other times speakers of English shared their country with earlier inhabitants who spoke various Celtic languages, Viking speakers of various North Germanic languages, or immigrant or other populations who spoke diverse languages within the British Empire and its constituent countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as areas as disparate as Samoa, India, the Middle East, and Guyana. In all of these cases, English was being learned (and often simplified) by foreign adult learners of the language, and similarly English speakers were being exposed to new words and expressions to describe the life other people lived around them.

When we look at the way that English has adopted foreign words and incorporated them, it resembles nothing more than an ameba growing through eating, becoming larger and larger as it swallows this set of words from Spanish, that from Yiddish, this from French, that from Greek, this from Latin, that from Arabic, and that over there from Hindi. The podcast I listened to focused on Yiddish, and I was mildly surprised to think that glitch was itself originally a Yiddish word, but has become so ordinary in English that, like the bagel, we cease to think of it as somehow unusual at all. For a variety of reasons, I have used a fair bit of Yiddish, most notably to talk about schlepping myself and my luggage all over creation when I travel, which is a burdensome process full of annoyances, or the tchotchkes (not a word discussed in the podcast) I have picked up along the course of my work life. One can learn a lot about English from the way that it picks up very specific and narrowly focused and useful words from other languages, even though this omnivorous nature makes it more complicated for others to learn English because it adds vocabulary that people use and probably need to recognize.

Given that I have ben a lifelong and native speaker of English, my own view of this tendency of English to be a particularly voracious language in taking words from other languages without losing its core properties is something that appears to me to be a pretty remarkable and unusual quality among the most popular languages of the world. I would be curious to hear from those who speak other languages if their own languages share these same tendencies, and what sort of patterns might be recognized in the way that a language treats the words it encounters from the speakers of other languages it is in contact with. To what extent can we say that there are languages who show patterns of resisting the importation of foreign words–like French–or those who import them promiscuously, like English does. Does this attitude towards foreign words have any sort of analogue in other areas of culture? That would be well worth examining.