"Yiddish is the Hamlet of languages; the Prince of Denmark's play abounds with questionable enigmas and a plethora of instances of the word "questions." Harshav emphasizes the derivation of Yiddish questioning from Talmudic procedures and of Kafka's parallel imitation of Talmudic learning in the self-questionings of his characters. As illustrations I would suggest: "Why not?" "Why ask?" "Who asks?" "What is the alternative?" "What and how does it mean?" "If that is the case, then does not a question arise?" These all can be seen as deriving from the Talmud".

"(...) This was in a talk on February 18, 1912, introducing a Yiddish theater troupe's performance in the Jewish City Hall of Prague. Famously the speech began with a marvelous irony: "I would like to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that you understand far more Yiddish than you think." What an appropriate epigraph that would be for Weinreich's History !"

Extracto de gran artículo sobre el origen y vida de ese (o esos) lenguaje (s) que nació (nacieron) cuando los restos del latín, más los comienzos del francés y el italiano, se mezclaron con el alemán de la edad media y varias lenguas eslavas a la vez. En la New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22020

(Imagen, portada de la novela de Michel Chabon, El sindicato de policía yiddish; entretenida a mil)

El Hamlet de los lenguajes