Here are the results of a very interesting study, which I participated in (along with 30,000 other people).
FWIW, I usually pronounce the o in “orange” like “a” in farce, though the longer I’ve lived outside New York, the less consistent I’ve become; call the place that I attend services “synagogue“‘; am proficient in Hebrew; never even heard of the word “tachlis” despite spending nine years in Orthodox yeshivot in New York; have people stay “with” me, not “by” me; say “Shabbat Shalom” and “Sukkot”; and would never, ever, consider naming my children “Mendy” or “Basia.”
Categories: Uncategorized
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Southern speech excluded altogether?
I suppose Mississippi is in the New York area, because I grew up hearing “are” instead of “ore” in all of these. My name is pronounced, back home, as if the “u” is not there at all. “Larra”.
Er, where does “Daddy” come in there?
Well, it’s a fun article, not a scholarly one, and the authors say that they know their sample isn’t representative. It’s interesting to me to see how hick speech from Mississippi (like mine, for instance) differs from hick speech in Florida. I discovered the other day that “that beats all” is not in wide use around here.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 8:40 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Again, fwiw, when I was a kid, I thought that watching all sitcoms in which kids address their parents as “father” or “mother,” or, worse, yet, “sir” and “ma’am” (Brady Brunch) was very funny. I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew addressing their parents so formally.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 9:09 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Oh, wow, we grew up saying “sir” and “ma’am”. I still talk to my parents that way. My 22-yr-old daughter addresses my husband and me as “sir” and “ma’am” and so do her contemporaries from back home. I don’t know if the kids around here say it or not. People my age were brought up to.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 10:17 pmayzc says:
Interesting study. One nitpick is that Mazel Tov is Hebrew not Yiddish.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 10:39 pmbyomtov says:
Interesting article. One thing that was odd to me was the use of “shpiel” in English to mean “sales pitch.” I would say “spiel.”
“Shpiel” just means “game” or, in verb form (“Shpielen”), “to play.” The verb is sometimes reflexive — “Er shpielt sich” (He is playing himself) means “He is playing.”
Quote
November 8, 2009, 10:43 pmComp Sci Phd says:
“by me” is a yiddishism, as it’s proper german. see http://german.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/PrepPitfalls.htm
Quote
November 8, 2009, 10:47 pmSoronel Haetir says:
I knew plenty of people in Idaho who did in fact do this (address their parents as Sir and Ma’am). Some even after reaching adulthood.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 11:28 pmIlya Somin says:
Hey, my grandmother’s name is Basya (though this name is far more common in Russia than in the US).
Quote
November 8, 2009, 11:45 pmComp Sci Phd says:
I prefer Batya. Basya makes me think too much of Bessie, which strikes me as a name for a cow. (with apologizes i nadvance to all people who know people named Bessie)
Quote
November 9, 2009, 12:14 amDavid Bernstein says:
Ilya, my own grandparents’ names wouldn’t be in the mix, either.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 4:43 amMark N. says:
Basia is actually a fairly common name in modern Greece, among Christians. Not too sure how that came about.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 4:51 amJewish Word Usage Survey « Aliens in This World says:
[...] 9, 2009 Here’s a fun one, via The Volokh Conspiracy — a survey of New Yorkers and other American, Jewish and not, and how they use words related [...]
Maureen says:
In Polish and Greek, Basia is short for “Barbara”, female barbarian. (It’s a saint’s name, and of course the Greeks called anyone who didn’t speak Greek a barbarian.) Same spelling, different meaning and origin.
I was aware of the meaning of “spiel” as game. But I’ve always thought that “spiel” as sales pitch has a connotation that something is being spun out and elaborated, catching you in the words. I guess a Purim spiel is a play, so maybe that’s where the elaboration thing came into the word — the salesman is play-acting a bit, performing a script?
Quote
November 9, 2009, 6:58 amFedya says:
Maureen:
The German word Spiel can also be used to mean a (stage) play, in which case it’s short for Schauspiel. The spelling without the H is of course the correct one, but then Yiddish is just German with really bad spelling. :-p
Quote
November 9, 2009, 8:41 amYankev says:
My grandkids — who live in Israel, but whose father goes to a black hat yeshiva — call their father “Tate” (pronounced Totti”) which is Yiddish for Daddy.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 9:22 amYankev says:
Interesting study. From this you can make a living?
How do they distinguish between Modern Orthodox, Orthodox and Black Hat? I thought the first and last of those were subsets of the middle.
Neither the study nor anyone posting mentioned the book Frumspeak, which deals with the phenomenon of Yeshivisha Shprach — integrating words from Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish into one’s English to create an argot that functions as a group identifier. The study hints at this practice when it mentions Jews who use the world shul with one another but switch to synagogue when talking to outsiders.
Also, did anyone else find it suprising that when they study distinguishes between those in (or from) the New York City area and everyone else, the authors do not use the accepted Jewish term for “not in NYC” — i.e. out of town?
Quote
November 9, 2009, 9:30 amDavid Bernstein says:
Self-identified.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 9:43 ambyomtov says:
Yiddish is just German with really bad spelling
Yes. It can’t even get the alphabet right :-)
Actually, English is a lot of other languages — including German — with bad spelling.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 10:47 amYankev says:
He’vanti. But l’chora, those who consider themselves MO or Black Hat (or yeshivish, as Black Hatters are more likely to call themselves) would also consider themselves to be stam Orthodox. So it seems to me that there is some overlap.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 11:14 amYankev says:
Per byomtov, don’t you mean really bad transliteration from Yiddish into English?
When I was growing up, we had neighbors who spoke Jewish. My grandparents and great-uncles also could speak Jewish, but spoke English except when they did not want the kids (their kids included) to understand them. It was not until years later that I learned that Jewish was Yiddish, and not until years after that that I learned that Yiddish was simply the Yiddish word for Jewish.
Why is Yiddish one of the few languages whose name we don’t translate into English? We don’t insist on saying that people speak Deutsch or Francais or Ivrit or Espagnole. But if you say that people are speaking Jewish, people hasten to correct you and insist that you say Yiddish instead? Why? Saying that not all Jews speak Yiddish is no answer. Not all Germans speak German. The fact remains that Yiddish is Yiddish for Jewish. Can anyone think of other languages whose names we are
makpidscrupulously particular never to translate into English?Quote
November 9, 2009, 11:23 amdrunkdriver says:
“Mendy” is a really pretty name, but I’m not sure I’d give it to my daughter.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 11:36 amDavid Bernstein says:
It’s a boy’s name, short for “Mendel.”
Quote
November 9, 2009, 11:41 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Well, how about that.
There is an entire school of thought about the word “mama” being so similar across the globe; that it comes from the sound an infant makes as it smacks its lips looking for the breast, and that it’s probably the first actual spoken word. Funny how that word is kind of hard-wired into us — my daughter is grown, but if I’m at the grocery store and I hear a little voice cry “Mama!” my head whips around.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 12:33 pmPhilistine says:
Offhand, seems like Tagalog, Swahili, Urdu, and Afrikaans to name a few.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 1:03 pmFedya says:
Well, since Yiddish has Germanic origins, the words were originally in the Latin alphabet. There was no need to transliterate them into the Hebrew alphabet.
And you deleted the emoticon when you quoted me. I thought it was fairly clear I was cracking a joke....
Quote
November 9, 2009, 1:12 pmYankev says:
Mendel being Yiddish for the Hebrewe name Menachem, “comforter”, which for some unexplained reason takes on the diminutive form in Yiddish. And for reasons I’ve never understood, the Yiddish form is often used as a paired name following the Hebrew, as in Menachem Mendel, Yiztchak Isaac, Tzvi Hirsh or Dov Ber. I’m not sure why this is done with some Yiddish names and not others; e.g. one never hears Yaakov Yankev, Asher Anshel, or Mordechai Mottel (another example of the translation taking on the diminuitive form).
Can any linquists help us out on this?
Quote
November 9, 2009, 1:23 pmYankev says:
I guess Hindi is another. Afrikaans and Hindi I can guess from the cognate; what are the literal translations of the others?
Quote
November 9, 2009, 1:27 pmbyomtov says:
Well, since Yiddish has Germanic origins, the words were originally in the Latin alphabet. There was no need to transliterate them into the Hebrew alphabet.
Isn’t it plausible that this happened because Jews generally knew the Hebrew alphabet better than the Latin? I don’t know that this is so, but Yiddish spelling, using Hebrew characters, is purely phonetic. That seems to me to support the theory.
Yiddish as spoken of course also includes words from Hebrew and the national language of the speaker — Polish, Russian, etc. — as well as German.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 2:18 pmMilhouse says:
Hebrew-Yiddish name pairs were originally separate names: one was the person’s Hebrew name used for ritual purposes, and the other was the secular name.
Yankev is not Yiddish for Yaakov, it’s just another transliteration of the Hebrew; the “n” is an approximation of the consonant “‘ayin”, which most Ashkenazim drop in most contexts, but remains sounded when it is both preceded and followed by an “a”, as in “Ya‘akeiv”, “ta‘anis”, “hosha‘ano”, etc. And the “e” is the Litvish (and Temani) pronunciation of a cheilom (aka cholam).
One does in fact hear of “Osher Anshel”; I’m surprised that you haven’t. A pair that used to be common but for some reason has dropped out of use is “Yehoshua Falk”.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:00 pmMilhouse says:
Yiddish words were not “originally” in the Latin alphabet; their German ancestors were, but they came into Yiddish through oral intercourse with Germans, and were thus written in Hebrew letters without the writers ever having seen the German spelling.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:02 pmAssistant Village Idiot says:
Yankev, relate your question to why we say Paris, not “Paree” or the variations between native and American pronunciations of Bucharest, Copenhagen, or Moscow. It has to do with when the word was introduced into printing, especially English printing. That we have a separateness between “Jewish” and “Yiddish” testifies to its earlier intoduction into English, compared to Tagalog or Urdu, which were words known mostly only to specialists until recently.
The re-spelling (from our POV) of the few well-known places from the rest of the world (Bombay, Peking) is a related phenomenon, pulling the pronunciation away from what something looks like it should sound like in English to a closer approximation of how it sounds to those living there.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:16 pmMilhouse says:
Further to the above: One never hears Yaakov Yankev, because Yankev is not a Yiddish diminutive of Yaakov, but merely an alternative spelling. One does, however, hear Yaakov (or Yankev) Koppel, since Koppel is a Yiddish diminutive of Yaakov.
I don’t know where “Gershon Zangvil” comes from. Can anyone enlighten me?
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:32 pmYankev says:
Mostly. But oddly enough, the anomalies are in words from “lashon kodesh” — Hebrew or Aramaic — that never had to be transliterated into Yiddish. Hence, with no change in spelling, the Hebrew Yakov becomes the Yiddish Yankev and the Hebrew Yom Tov becomes the Yiddish Yontiff. Younger black hatters have taken to pronouncing Yontiff the way it is spelled, leading to the anomalous “Gut Yom Tov” , which I find as jarring as Good Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom or Chag sameach I can deal with, but Gut Yom Tov is neither a chicken nor a rabbit.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:35 pmYankev says:
I did not know that. Similar then to the mod. Hebrew Kobi? Thank you.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:37 pmYankev says:
Yeah, I went from a Conservative shul to a very small rural Orthodox shul with mostly Litvishers as members, many of them born in Europe. I remember my first Yem Kippur there, trying to figure out whose wine they were talking about at Mincha when they said it was time for Yenoh.
On the other hand, it was not as big an adjustment as hearing boorichee and ooleyni at other shils.
As far as never hearing Osher Anschel, I must be going to the wrong minyanim.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 3:43 pmys says:
And pairs “Zvi — Hirsch”, “Dov — Ber”, as well as “Zeev — Wolf” are simply translations between Hebrew and German (or Yiddish if you like).
Quote
November 9, 2009, 5:32 pmegd says:
Try asking someone from the British Isles if they speak “Celtic” (as in the Boston Celtics).
Quote
November 9, 2009, 6:44 pmstash says:
I point out that both American culture in general and the report in particular, assume that Yiddish culture is somehow identical to Jewish culture and identity. This leaves out not only German Jews (who, before the early twentieth century were the majority of Jewish immigrants) but also the Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews. For methodological purposes, it may have been useful to separate these traditions out. For example, a much higher percentage of German Jews are reform and conservative rather than orthodox of any stripe. (The Reform movement began in Germany, not this country). This skews the demographics of the Reform movement away from Yiddish (as opposed to Jewish) language and culture and may be a better—or at least part of—the explanation for less use of Yiddish among reform Jews, rather than the level of devotion. Without controlling for the factor of those for whom Yiddish was never a matter of heritage, one cannot reasonably measure the degree to which it has fallen away.
In other words: Oy. What’s a poor yekke from the midwest to do? When I was a kid, older Jews in my congregation literally questioned my Jewishness when I would sometimes not get basic Yiddish terms.
However, I have been happy to adopt useful Yiddish terms as I come across them in accordance with the chart that indicates their increasing use. I did not know I was part of a trend.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 7:27 pmbyomtov says:
Yankev,
But oddly enough, the anomalies are in words from “lashon kodesh” — Hebrew or Aramaic — that never had to be transliterated into Yiddish.
That makes sense.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 7:39 pmRaghav says:
Yankev:
But oddly enough, the anomalies are in words from “lashon kodesh” — Hebrew or Aramaic — that never had to be transliterated into Yiddish.
I think this should either be (Israeli) leshon hakodesh (the leshon is in smikhut) or (Yiddish) loshn-koydesh. You’re right that this is the main source of non-phonemic spellings in Yiddish, though books published in the Soviet Union regularized the spellings of these Hebrew-Aramaic words words. But there are other anomalies as well. אױף is almost universally pronounced [af] as a preposition, and generally pronounced [uf] as an adverb, though some people use the spelling-pronunciation [oyf]. קײן is pronounced [ken] and not [keyn], though the latter is found in קײן מאָל נישט [keyn mol nisht] (“never”). זיך is often pronounced with some variation of [zakh] instead of [zikh], even in Standard Yiddish. Un azoy vayter...
Milhouse:
Yankev is not Yiddish for Yaakov, it’s just another transliteration of the Hebrew; the “n” is an approximation of the consonant “‘ayin”, which most Ashkenazim drop in most contexts, but remains sounded when it is both preceded and followed by an “a”, as in “Ya‘akeiv”, “ta‘anis”, “hosha‘ano”, etc.
I think this is a more general phenomenon than simply ayin preceded and followed by an “a”. See, for instance, the pronunciation of מעשׂה (“story”) as [maynse].
Fedya:
The German word Spiel can also be used to mean a (stage) play, in which case it’s short for Schauspiel. Further proof that The spelling without the H is of course the correct one, but then Yiddish is just German with really bad spelling. :-p
In Yiddish as well, as in the ubiquitious Purim-shpil. Additional evidence that German is just a corrupt dialect of Yiddish.
Derekh agev, I have to quibble with some of their translations. Takhles seems closer to “purpose” or “result”. And davka (Yiddish dafke), to me, expresses contrariness, something not captured by the translations “particularly, specifically.”
Quote
November 9, 2009, 7:53 pmMilhouse says:
Actually that is another example of exactly the same phenomenon. The ‘ayin comes between two patachs; it’s properly “ma‘aseh”; in the Litvish accent, at least, the vestige of the ‘ayin can be heard as the “yn” sound to which you refer, just as in “Yaynkev”, “taynness”, “hoshaynne”, etc.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 8:12 pmstash says:
Just to quickly address Yankev’s complaint that “Yiddish” is not translated to “Jewish”: I have to say that whatever its origins, the distinction is useful. Calling speaking Yiddish speaking “Jewish” would be misdescriptive. Yiddish was a regional vernacular spoken by a portion of the Jewish diaspora. It would be like calling Black-American English (a/k/a Ebonics)“African.” If “Jewish” was the general term, I wouldn’t lobby for “Yiddish”, but as it stands, clarity benefits from the distinction.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 8:23 pmbyomtov says:
Raghav,
Interesting comment. My mother, a cynical sort, used to refer to the “lockshen koydesh.”
Quote
November 9, 2009, 9:35 pmRaghav says:
Thanks for pointing that out, Milhouse — I stand corrected. This is very interesting; I never noticed the “between two pasekhs” rule.
Is this phenomenon related to the nasal in [binst] or [za(y)nt] in some Litvish dialects?
Quote
November 9, 2009, 10:11 pmNew Pseudonym says:
Urdu is the “army language.” It’s from the Turkic word for army (which came into English as horde).
IIRC Urdu bears the same relation to Hindi that Croatian does to Serbian. Same language, different alphabets.
Quote
November 9, 2009, 10:43 pmlibertariansoldier says:
Other languages whose names are not translated into English are Dari and Khmer.
Quote
November 10, 2009, 1:38 amreadery says:
If you’ve heard of “Adon Olam”
then you have indeed heard the word ‘tachlis’.
Quote
November 10, 2009, 8:48 pm