Title of the article

3.Conclusion

In linguistics, we could define weak interaction as an interaction that is not overtly acknowledged. No one would deny the influence of the French-speaking ruling class on medieval English, or the impact of the Slavic neighbors on Hungarian. But sometimes, conscious factors hide the effect. Yet, weak interactions are as crucial for the development of a language, as the nuclear processes emitting neutrinos in the core of the Sun that produce the energy which is vital for us.

We have seen three cases of weak interaction between languages. In fact, all three stories were about the formative phase of a new or modernized language, in the midst of the late nineteenth century Eastern Europe Jewry. In the cases of Yiddish influencing Hungarian and Modern Hebrew, the number of “exchange particles”, that is, the amount of initially Yiddish-speaking people joining the new language community, were extremely high: roughly one tenth of the Hungarian speaking population in nineteenth century Hungary, and probably above 50% of the Jews living in early twentieth century Palestine. Nonetheless, in both cases we encounter an ideology promoting the new language and disfavoring Yiddish.

Because the level of consciousness of this ideology seems to be inversely proportional to the ratio of “exchange particles” - stronger in Palestine than in Hungary - , the two factors extinguish each other, and we find similar phenomena. For instance, Yiddish has affected first and foremost lower registers, which are less censored by society; therefrom it infiltrates into informal standard language. Additional trends are Yiddish words entering specific domains, such as gastronomy or Jewish religious practice. Although it is essential to note that not all concepts that are new in the target culture are expressed by their original Yiddish word: many new expressions in these domains have been coined in Hungarian and Modern Hebrew, and accepted by the language community.

The third case that we have examined is different. Zamenhof was a single person, but as the creator of Esperanto, he had an enormous influence on the new language. The influence of Yiddish was again weak in the sense that it was not overtly admitted; however, we could present examples where the native tongue of Zamenhof influenced the new language. We could have cited, as the articles mentioned had done, numerous further instances where the influence of Yiddish cannot be proven directly, the given phenomenon could have been taken from other languages, as well; however, one can hypothesize that Yiddish played - consciously or unconsciously - a reinforcing role in Zamenhof’s decisions.

I do hope that I have been able to prove to the reader that seemingly very remote fields, such as physics, social history and linguistics, can be interconnected, at least for the sake of a thought experiment. Furthermore, “exchange particles” in the field of science, and Tjeerd is certainly among them, have hopefully brought at least some weak interaction among the different disciplines.