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This is a list of words that have entered the English language from the Yiddish language, many of them by way of American English.There are differing approaches to the romanization of Yiddish orthography (which uses the Hebrew alphabet); thus, the spelling of some of the words in this list may be variable (for example, shlep is a variant of schlep, and shnozz, schnoz).
Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had the limitations of its origins. There were few Yiddish words for animals and birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such voids were filled by borrowing from German, Polish and Russian.
An English sentence that uses either may be described by some as Yinglish, [1] though a secondary sense of the term describes the distinctive way certain Jews in English-speaking countries add many Yiddish words into their conversation, beyond general Yiddish words and phrases used by English speakers. [citation needed]
A page from Elia Levita's Yiddish-Hebrew-Latin-German dictionary (16th century) including the word goy (גוי), translated to Latin as ethnicus, meaning heathen or pagan. [1] In modern Hebrew and Yiddish, goy (/ ɡ ɔɪ /; גוי , pl: goyim / ˈ ɡ ɔɪ. ɪ m /, גוים or גויים ) is a term for a gentile, a non-Jew. [2]
Schmuck, or shmuck, is a pejorative term meaning one who is stupid or foolish, or an obnoxious, contemptible or detestable person. The word came into the English language from Yiddish (Yiddish: שמאָק, shmok), where it has similar pejorative meanings, but where its literal meaning is a vulgar term for a penis. [1]
Being Yiddish, the meaning can change by the use of gestures and a change in tone, so that tsatskele can become the favorite child. Leo Rosten, author of The Joys of Yiddish, combines the two main meanings and gives an alternative sense of tchotchke as meaning a young girl, a "pretty young thing".
This is a list of English words of Hebrew origin.Transliterated pronunciations not found in Merriam-Webster or the American Heritage Dictionary follow Sephardic/Modern Israeli pronunciations as opposed to Ashkenazi pronunciations, with the major difference being that the letter taw (ת ) is transliterated as a 't' as opposed to an 's'.
The Jewish English Lexicon was created by Sarah Bunin Benor, an associate professor of Jewish studies at the Los Angeles division of Hebrew Union College.Benor, a scholar of the varieties of Jewish English spoken in the United States, created the lexicon in 2012 with the support of volunteers who contribute to the growth of the lexicon's database.