Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1895 — Barbarous Tongue. [ARTICLE]

Barbarous Tongue.

Most people have heard the word “Yiddish”—a corruption of the German Judisch, meaning Hebrew. It is pretty generally known also that Yiddish Is a jargon made up of Polish and German words with strays from other languages, and that it is spoken by Polish and Russian Jews. But how ■many know that this uncouth dialect Is spoken in New York City by no less than a hundred thousand people, that It can be read in six dally newspapers, and is spoken at three theaters? It Is a striking fact that those who speak this barbarous tongue cling to It with tenacity. They are the weaklings among our immigrants; they have neither the physical nor the mental traits to fit them to become co-founders of a sturdy and self-reliant race. Yet It Is precisely these people who cling the most closely to foreign speech and foreign ways. There is a sense In which the old party cry of “America for the Americans” has a just meaning. Not that we are to exclude from America the worthy, or to hold prejudice against those born In other lands. The Indiscriminate selfishness of the cry as thus interpreted rightly led to its political failure. But in the sense that all Americans, whether native-born or not, should strive to be in harmony as to language, customs and patriotism, we should at least be all Americans for America.