I was looking at wordlists for tomorrow's class (our theme of the day will be "Expand your modern vocabulary using old words.") and I finally realised that the reason so many Yiddish words and phrases are a comfortable fit in English is because many of them're cognate*. Not all of them, but enough for comfort's sake. And this is why the Yiddish in the book I hated the other day (which I didn't tell you about - I read a book a day or thereabouts, you don't need to know that this one entirely...
Published on June 29, 2010 01:32