H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
Page 408
dress’n dem boy und gehn in butcher-store und in grocery. Dernoch vet sie machen dinner und gehn in street für a walk.”21
For some time past there has been an active movement among the New York Jews for the purification of Yiddish. This movement is an offshoot of Zionism, and has resulted in the establishment of a number of Yiddish schools. Its adherents do not propose, of course, that English be abandoned, but simply that the two languages be kept separate, and that Jewish children be taught Yiddish as well as English. The Yiddishists insist that it is more dignified to say a gooten tog than good-bye, and billet instead of ticket. But the movement makes very poor progress. “The Americanisms absorbed by the Yiddish of this country,” says Abraham Cahan, “have come to stay. To hear one say ‘Ich hob a billet für heitige vorschtellung’ would be as jarring to the average East Side woman, no matter how illiterate and ignorant she might be, as the intrusion of a bit of Chinese in her daily speech.”
Yiddish, as everyone knows, has produced a very extensive literature during the past two generations; it is, indeed, so large and so important that I can do no more than refer to it here.22 Much of it has come from Jewish authors living in New York. In their work, and particularly their work for the stage, there is extensive and brilliant evidence of the extent to which American English has influenced the language.
5. Italian
Rémy de Gourmont, the French critic, was the first to call attention to the picturesqueness of the Americanized Italian spoken by Italians in the United States;23 unluckily his appreciation of its qualities has not been shared by American Romance scholars.
Note 21. I am indebted throughout this section to Mr. Abraham Cahan, editor of the leading Yiddish daily in New York, and a distinguished writer in both Yiddish and English. [back]
Note 22.Cf. the article on Yiddish, by Nathaniel Buchwald, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 598, and the bibliography following, p. 822 ff. [back]
Note 23. In L’Esthétique de la Langue Française; Paris, 1899. [back]
