Title of the article

1.Language interactions within a given socio-historical setting

1.1.Modeling interactions

In physics, the interaction between two bodies depends on three factors: the two “eligibilities” of the parties to interact, as well as their distance. For gravity and electromagnetism, the formula probably familiar from high-school physics states that the force is proportional to the product of the “eligibilities” - mass or electric charge - of the two bodies, divided by the square of their distance. In other words, the higher the two masses (or electric charges) and the smaller the distance, the stronger the interaction.

For Newton, who formulated this formula first, gravity was a long-range interaction. Modern physics has completed this picture with introducing exchange particles intermediating between the interacting bodies._²³ That way, contemporary science has also incorporated the view of Newton’s opponents who argued for the only possibility of short-range interactions.

To transplant this image, vaguely, into the phenomenon of language interaction, we have to identify the eligibilities of the two interacting languages, their distance and the exchange particles. In fact, we can do that even on two levels. On a purely linguistic level, one can easily point to words and grammatical phenomena - “exchange particles” - wandering from language to language. But it would be harder to identify in general the properties of the phenomena and of the given languages that make the interaction more probable or less probable.

The sociolinguistic level is more promising for such an approach. In this case, the human beings are the exchange particles: people who leave one linguistic community in order to join a new one. By the very fact of their moves, they affect their new language by a linguistic quantum. The closer the two language communities, the more people will act as an exchange particle. Here distance should be understood not only based on geography, but on the intensity of the social network, as well. Thus, the more people wander to the target community, the more linguistic impulse is brought to the second language and therefore the stronger the interaction. Note that the physical analogy is not complete, since the symmetry of action and reaction is not guaranteed for interacting languages.

The three cases to be discussed share the feature that the role of the carriers of the interaction is played by late nineteenth century Eastern European Jews. In order to understand the historical background, we have to recall what is called Haskala or Jewish Enlightenment.