Title of the article

1.3.Language interactions in the Haskala

Let us now return to our model of language interactions. As we have seen, the intensity of the interaction depends on the number of “exchange particles” - language changing individuals - , that is a kind of “distance” measured in the social network; furthermore on the “eligibility” of the languages to transmit and to adopt features. We shall now confront this model with the linguistic reality of the different stages of the Haskala.

Concerning the first stage, when only a handful of followers of Moses Mendelssohn rejected the Jüdischdeutsch and started speaking Hochdeutsch, our model will correctly predict that the number of exchange particles is insufficient to affect German in a perceptible way.

The number of exchange particles increases dramatically when we reach the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the people changing language more or less consciously adopted the idea of their original idiom being an unclean and corrupt version of the target language. Consequently, by nature their language change consisted of not bringing any influence on the target language with them. By applying our vague physical model to this situation, we might say that although the two languages were indeed close - from the viewpoints of geography, linguistic similarity and social contacts - , Hochdeutsch was not “eligible” enough to be seriously affected.

What happened in the third stage of the Haskala? The following three case studies represent three possibilities. The first one, the influence of Yiddish on Hungarian, was actually a case where some elements of stage 2 Haskala were still present. The emancipation of the Jews was closely related to their assimilation into the Hungarian society, culture and language. As Jews wished to become an equal part of that society, let us call this case type e. Each of the many people brings only a very “light” quantum of influence, similarly to the very little mass, if any, of the electron neutrinos. The type mu designates a case when Jews migrated to a newly created Jewish “land, language and culture”, namely to Modern Hebrew. Here less people carry possibly more “weight”, that is why they can be paralleled by the heavier muon neutrinos. In the third case, that is the birth of Esperanto, only one person of Jewish cultural background wished to transform the entire word, with a total rejection of reference to any form of Jewishness, at least on a conscious level (type tau, referring to the probably heaviest type of neutrinos).