Have you had chow? Well, spera till I sign this chit and I'll take a paseo with you. [Pg158] Here we have an example of Philippine American that shows all the tendencies of American Yiddish. It retains the general forms of American, but in the short conversation, embracing but 41 different words, there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (/hola/, /amigo/, /porque/, /ese/, /señorita/, /lavandera/, /cuanto/ and /paseo/), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (/spera/ for /espera/ and /no kerry/ for /no quiro/), two loan-words from the Taglog (/komusta/ and /kayo/), two from Pigeon English (/chow/ and /chit/), one Philippine-American localism (/conant/), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (/hablaing/). The immigrant in the midst of a large native population, of course, exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that exerted upon an immigrant language by the native, but nevertheless his linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in dealing with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a very ponderable influence upon the general speech. In the usual sense, as we have seen, there are no dialects in American; two natives, however widely their birthplaces may be separated, never have any practical difficulty understanding each other. But there are at least quasi-dialects among the immigrants--the Irish, the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, the Jewish, and so on--and these quasi-dialects undoubtedly leave occasional marks, not only upon the national vocabulary, but also upon the general speech habits of the country, as in the case, for example, of the pronunciation of /yes/, already mentioned, and in that of the substitution of the diphthong /oi/ for the /ur-/sound in such words as /world/, /journal/ and /burn/--a Yiddishism now almost universal among the lower classes of New York, and threatening to spread.[56] More important, however, is the support given to a native tendency by the foreigner's incapacity for employing (or even comprehending) syntax of any complexity, or words not of the simplest. This is the tendency toward succinctness [Pg159] and clarity, at whatever sacrifice of grace. One English observer, Sidney Low, puts the chief blame for the general explosiveness of American upon the immigrant, who must be communicated with in the plainest words available, and is not socially worthy of the suavity of circumlocution anyhow.[57] In his turn the immigrant seizes upon these plainest words as upon a sort of convenient Lingua Franca--his quick adoption of /damn/ as a universal adjective is traditional--and throws his influence upon the side of the underlying speech habit when he gets on in the vulgate. Many characteristic Americanisms of the sort to stagger lexicographers--for example, /near-silk/--have come from the Jews, whose progress in business is a good deal faster than their progress in English. Others, as we have