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College Yiddish, by Uriel Weinreich; Yiddish for Adults, by Nathaniel Buchwald
- Abstract
Jewish scholars have played a prominent role in the development of modern linguistic science and have written some of the best descriptive grammars as well as some of the best studies in the psychology and sociology of language. Very few of these scholars have, however, turned their attention to Yiddish or Hebrew, although both languages offer important problems for linguistic research. For example, both contain a high degree of foreign borrowings: Yiddish has a Germanic base with a large number of borrowings from Hebrew and the Slavic languages; modern Hebrew has a Semitic base with extensive borrowings from the Indo-European languages. In fact, Hebrew offers a rather rare example of a language of one family (Semitic) which has taken over in large measure the syntax of another family (Indo-European). Yiddish and Hebrew therefore afford an excellent opportunity to study the process by which foreign elements are borrowed by a language and are adapted to the native structure.
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