Title of the article

Weak Interactions

Yiddish influence in Hungarian, Esperanto and Modern Hebrew
Tamás Bíró

When I arrived in Groningen, I was introduced to Tjeerd de Graaf as somebody speaking Hungarian. Then it turned out that both of us were interested in Yiddish. Furthermore, we shared the fact that we started our scientific life within physics, although, unlike Tjeerd, I have not worked as a physicist since my graduation. Nevertheless, as a second year physics student I received a research question from the late leading Hungarian physicist George Marx that was also somehow related to Tjeerd’s earlier research topic, neutrino astrophysics.
Neutrinos are funny particles. They are extremely light, if they have any mass, at all._²¹ Therefore, they cannot interact through gravitation. Because they do not have any electrical charge either, electromagnetic interaction is also unknown to them. The only way they can interact with the universe is the so-called weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces._²² Nowadays physicists spend an inconceivable amount of budget building gigantic, underground basins containing millions of liters of heavy water just to try to detect a few neutrinos per year out of the very intense stream of neutrinos flowing constantly from the Sun and going through the Earth, that is, us. Even though they almost never interact with regular material, through weak interaction they play a fundamental role both in shaping what the universe looks like and in the Sun’s energy production. Therefore our life would not be possible without neutrinos and without weak interaction.

Something similar happens in ethnolinguistics. The interaction between two languages may not always be very salient, and it cannot necessarily be explained by the most famous types of interactions. A weak interaction in linguistics might be an interaction which is not acknowledged by the speakers’ community, for instance for ideologically reasons.

In the present paper I shall present three cases of weak interaction between languages, understood in this sense, namely Yiddish affecting Hungarian, Modern Hebrew (Israeli Hebrew) and Esperanto. All the stories take place in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when a new or modernized language had to be created. We shall observe what kind of interactions took place under which conditions. A model for interactions combined with the better understanding of the social-historical setting will enable us to do so.