The Yiddish roots of "glitch"

It’s interesting to me that “glitsh” doesn’t have the same meaning in English & Yiddish.
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The somewhat tedious argument about whether Yiddish is or is not German has shlepped on since long before the Czernowitz Yiddish Conference of 1908.
Lots of people think they speak Yiddish:


How many can understand this?
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And apparently this still holds since my comment about the meaning of that “not nice” word is “awaiting approval” – a BoingBoing first for me :laughing:

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I think the problem is defining a single form of Yiddish and ignoring that Yiddish itself has (had? is it considered living or dead?) dialects. Your audio example for example sounded a lot like Bavarian/Franconian, with ned instead of nicht and so on, I had only a little trouble understanding the singer. Which makes me think a lot of cross pollination happened in Bohemia (now a large part of the Czech Republic) where Czech, German and Yiddish all coexisted in its cities.

I like to think of Yiddish as a transfer language: since many of its speakers travelled between communities, it enriched other languages just as much as it picked up its own terms. Perhaps “glitch” originally came from the Romance languages and their words for ice, based on the Latin word glacia?

(Editing to add that we are now entering really esoteric territory, with millennia of changes in languages being considered.)

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Yeah, my father also told me not to say Schmuck (although he had no issue with me saying words like fuck or shit or dick…)!

He didn’t speak Yiddish but understood it from his parents, and I think the problem was that by the time I was using the term (in the 70’s and 80’s) it had come to mean something much milder in English. My impression was that in Yiddish it had the power of a word like “cunt” in English – something I would still hesitate to call someone lightly.

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Andrews sisters explaining some Yiddish:

Though this song’s story is of interest, too, as this Yiddish song apparently was adapted to include English lyrics and then released with a German title:

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But only three of them end in “gry” :rofl::rofl:

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I could have been more clear with this: as Fnordius points out, when I say “Middle High German,” I’m referring to a language spoken in a particular place, in a particular time. The phrase ‘High German’ now comes to mean something like "proper English’ in common usage, which is not what I was talking about. Sorry for the confusion.

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Has now and has had in the past. For several Charredi/Chasiddic groups, Yiddish is still a living language.

There are also secular Jewish groups who keep trying to “revive” Yiddish as well.

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I love throwing Yiddish words into conversations with kids just because of the looks I get. A truly fun language, even for those of us who are firmly goyim.

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True, now that hangry was added to the OED and others… :roll_eyes:

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It is definitely a Germanic language, although different from Hochdeutsch and way different from standard German. It’s still close enough to German where I can understand it well. My understanding of Dutch is hit or miss, so it’s not as far from German as Dutch is.

Nobody’s saying it’s not close to German, or not Germanic, or that it doesn’t share a lot with German.

But it’s not just German in a Hebrew script. Over-simplifying it in that way would be erasing or minimising everything that makes it a different language. It would be like calling it “Little German” or something.

The parts of Yiddish that aren’t German aren’t tacked-on bits to a pure German body. The roots of Yiddish are pre-German, and the German part evolved alongside population migrations to Bavaria and elsewhere.

(And I know that’s how all languages work, but, specifically, treating the Hebrew in Yiddish as somehow only contributing “loan-words” to a pure German lexicon would be an offensive characterisation. I’m sure that’s not the intent, but it’s something to avoid.)

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I never said it was “just” German, but it’s mutually intelligible with German. Whether this makes it its own language or a dialect of German I’m not entirely sure.

I wasn’t only talking about what you said, but the whole thread.

You were responding to @Mindysan33’s comment, and that’s where she’s rightfully saying it’s not “just” and a lot of the responses kind of treated Hebrew as not that essential.

The point is not about what kind of German it is, but that it’s not only German.

It’s a complete language, not a dialect.

The basic grammar and vocabulary of Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, is Germanic. Yiddish, however, is not a dialect of German but a complete language‚ one of a family of Western Germanic languages, that includes English, Dutch, and Afrikaans. Yiddish words often have meanings that are different from similar words in German.

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I’ve thrown “schlep” around ever since college, when I first heard it used in a sentence (“thanks for helping me schlep this stuff”). Prior to that, the only context in which I’d encountered “schlep” was this one:

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It’s because of Jaffee’s influence that as kids, we used ‘glitch’ as a substitute word for ‘shit’.

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Really??!? I would love to know what you understand her to be saying. I have a lot of trouble translating this song, starting with the title. I’ll repost the link for convenience:

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