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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and this week I'd like to share with you for our end-of-the-year show

some things about languages and what happens when they come together, what it means when a language is mixed, how mixed languages get, what that says about some

languages that are near and dear to us. And I'm doing that partly as an excuse to dip a bit

into Yiddish, because a lot of you ask me to talk about Yiddish. The whole idea being what

is Yiddish? What is this peculiar language that seems so mixed up? What happened to it? How to linguist classify it? And it is a good question, and it leads us to other things that we need to look at when we think about the fact that no language is unmixed. Language is mixed in different ways.

I couldn't tell you all of them within one or even two of these shows,

but we need to broach the subject.

Let's start with this little passage from the musical Ragtime.

This is Tata, father, and his little girl, and they're coming to America, and at one point they sing this little tune.

So that's a stettel is America. That's America is a stettel, a nice little town. Then

Amachaya, Chleben. Those of you who listen to this and don't happen to know Yiddish, I'm sure

they're very few such people, but it's not Amakaya Leben. It's Amahaya Chleben. And so it's a wonder, I swear. America is a stettel. America is a small,

familiar town. It's a wonder, I swear. That's what they're singing here. That is the Yiddish

language. And the question is, what is Yiddish? Because Yiddish's vocabulary is quite

mixed. There's a lot of German in there. Okay, fine. awful lot of Hebrew in there. And then

there are a bunch of Slavic words, Russian-y, Polishy words that are in there. And they're all

...