> A recent essay of his in the NYRB, On the Glories of Yiddish, was barely
> coherent. It's at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22020.
Should I read this, Mark?
I've been putting off doing so, despite its being available, as I'm
convinced I'll yet once more trip up over being unable to distinguish patois
from creole.
Bad enough trying to disentangle 16thC inflected Romany from Anglo-Rom.
{The Winchester Confessions of 1615 are jaw-dropping. Have you seen them?
Kicks a hole in every single accepted theory of the relation of early
English Romany to cant.
Dunno what Debord's widow would make of it, but. I think _The Princes of
Jargon_ was written before the Winchester Confessions surfaced.
[There seems to be zilch overlap between terms derived from inflectional
Romany as reflected in the Winchester Confessions, and contemporary <16thC>
English cant. Which on the face of it is deeply counter-intuitive.]
Mind you, I like it, as it sits well with my theory that Anglo-Romany was a
trade-language which coexisted with inflectional Romany.
Meep!!! }
R.
> Here's something that comes across loud and clear: whether or not he's
> paraphrasing the book under review when he says that "Yiddish and Middle
> Rhenish German are utterly distinct languages," he apparently thinks it's
> so. This is palpably ridiculous--the grammar and most of the vocabulary
> are identical, and it's possible to navigate Germany using Yiddish
> carefully, avoiding Hebrew and Slavic words. I watched my mother do this
> years ago.
>
> Mark
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