The melody lingers: the Yiddish speech of Ashkenazic Jews.

It all began in an elevator of a Fifth Avenue department store. The woman standing next to me said to her friend: "If it'll be cold out (her pitch dropped considerably at the word "cold"), then I'll take it along; but if it won't (and her pitch rose considerably at he word "won't"), then I'll leave it behind." The linguist in me recognized that set of pitches: they are the pitches assigned to contrasting halves of a sentence in Yiddish. What's more, from everything I knew, this same pattern of pitches appears (under the same circumstances) in Talmudic chant. I had no way of knowi