The Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine argues, in “The Jewish Century” (2004), that Yiddish did not evolve typically: if you study its form and structure, you discover its deliberate and fundamental artificiality–it is the language of people who are interested, in Slezkine’s words, in “the maintenance of difference, the conscious preservation of the self and thus of strangeness.”
–The New Yorker, via Ratty