Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Looking at the MLA Interactive Language Map is fascinating. What a neat toy.

Just for yucks, I decided to look up Yiddish, and found some surprising concentrations. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the country that reports > 99 Yiddish speakers (or maybe 199, the colors being very similar) until you drill down for a closer look. There you can see a few pockets of the up to 19,999. For instance Philadelphia has 2,922 Yiddish speakers.

One surprise was the entire top of Maine was colored in. Changing the view to By Zip instead of By County and the top of Maine shrunk to a tiny dot. I’m picturing this one old Jew living on the rocky shore, contributing his Yiddish to the county score. Conclusion: Aroostook is one big-ass county, particularly for a New England state. Ayuh.

Thanks to Language Hat for the link

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2004 at 4:59 pm and is filed under General, Languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.