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Title: The structure of Yiddish
Review: Vocabulary of the English language consists of several layers, which are not genre-neutral. Stories about Merrie Olde England, such as the Mother Goose nursery rhymes, are heavily Germanic; more formal English writing, such as the United States Declaration of Independence, is heavily Old French; as for modern French borrowings, I am reminded of the Internet forum tagline, "Pretentious? Moi?". It was similar with Yiddish: the Germanic, Hebrew-Aramaic and Slavic layers each had their own connotations and could be combined to give expressive richness to a text. Harshav illustrates this with both 19th century Yiddish literature and with the Yiddish poetry of American immigrants. I doubt Harshav's assertion that most Yiddish speakers have always been multilingual, though; Mendele the Book Peddler's Benjamin the Third certainly wasn't.
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