I'm Fablungit

The Megillah is a book about the story of Esther, and is read during the holiday of Purim:

Link to Megillah

So "Der gantseh Megillah", meaning as Jes says, "the whole shebang", is idiomatic, as if the person is referring to the entire book.

Is this clear? Yiddish is a language that really loses something in translation!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I just can't help being pedantic sometimes.

Jespah, the word 'shebang' does not come from the Yiddish even though it sounds like it should. It was in use in the USA at least as long ago as the Civil War (1860-1865) and meant a rudely-constructed shelter. Union soldiers, many of them recent Irish immigrants, used the term to mean the quarters they constructed for themselves at an encampment when something more substantial than tents was called for. Etymologists and lexicographers aren't quite sure where the word originated, but it might be a variant of 'shebeen', a ramshackle Irish pub.

How it came to mean 'the whole enchilada' is something else again.

Another good word is FLIBBERTIGIBBET. It could means almost anything but it means >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
http://www.quinion.com/words/weirdwords/ww-fli1.htm

Great stuff

Re: Roberta. Yaw righr about Noo Yawk



Well, Phoenix, I don't think, you are right:
a) verklemmt is a German word older than Yiddish (e.g.used in Medieval songs)
b) The Yiddish language is a member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages.
Growing out of a blend of a number of medieval German dialects, Yiddish arose c.1100 in the ghettos of Central Europe
Although the vocabulary of Yiddish is basically Germanic, it has been enlarged by borrowings from Hebrew, Aramaic, some Slavic and Romance languages, and English.

Walter- Looks like we are both right........but you are MORE right. Einschultig meir! Apparently scholars have not really made a definitive decision on the derivation of Yiddish, but there are studies attempting to figure it out!

http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.yiddish.html

Phoenix


re. your source: mmh - might be, but at least Yiddsih scientist (two of the worldwide University chairs are in Germany!) have a slightly different opinion.
Now (since ~1998) they don't believe any more that Yiddish developped through the ghettolisation of Jews, but that .... they are still discussing.

However, the oldest documents found in Yiddish are very similar to the equivalent German texts of that period.

Haven't many languages, because of the injection and mingling of words from other tongues, become to some extent mongrels.
English moving into Continental Europe, Spanish into American English and vice versa.
The French desire, for example, to retain as much purity in their language as possible points up a lot of concern. English may be viewed in some countries as being something of a cuckoo, so to speak.

Walter, I have no doubt that German existed before Yiddish. However, in Yiddish verkempt means choked up with emotion. So the word might be the same, but the meaning is different.

As for trying to spell all these Yiddish terms--because Yiddish is written in Hebrew, all Yiddish terms are transliterations. Spelling is up for grabs, except, perhaps, for the terms that have become Americanized and appear in the dictionary.

My parents' families came from different parts of Europe. Although both families spoke Yiddish, my parents did not always understand each other. I'm sure that local vernacular and vocabulary influenced the language.

One of the reasons I like a2k is revealed in this thread. I started by saying I'm fablungit, and we're now into such an intereseting discussion. Denks, you guys. (Denks is a transliteration of how my father's mother said thanks.)

Zay-in mitte gitte shoo - means everything has its season, or all in good time. Dad often says it if I tell him I have a lot of things to do, and essentially what he means is, it'll all get done, don't worry, it will all happen.

Thanks, Jespah. I'll add that to my Yiddish lexicon.

Yeah, jespah, "Kluge kinder hobn kurtse jorn" :wink:

Hi Walter, The only word I understand is children. Please translate for us.

"Wise children have short years." (~ will not live long, as in a Polish proverb.) (Which isn't thought to be connected with jespah!!!)

A Yiddish version of "The good die young"?

Walter -- did you write that (spell that) in a German dialect or was that Yiddish?

... hobn (haben) kurtse (kurze) jorn (Jahren)

Andy, I would interpret that differently. Wise children won't be children for long. Walter, am I wrong? I probably am. So be it.

Piffka

Yiddish ('Jiddish', to be correct). (re correct: your translation is is best German :wink: )

Jüdish, to be even more correct.

Sorry, Andrew, but 'No'
- 'jüdisch' means all connected to/with Jews,
- 'jiddisch' is 'yiddidish' (e.g. "Lehrstuhl für Jiddische Kultur, Sprache und Literatur, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf"; "Lehrstuhl für Jiddistik, Universität Trier" - to name the two German out of five Yiddish university chairs worldwide)

I could be wrong, Walter, but my understanding is that our word 'Yiddish' or 'Jidish', if you like, is merely a corruption of the original expression which was Jüdishe Deutch, or Jewish German. The spellings became phonetic over time as people forgot where the original word had come from.