What's red and Welsh and Yiddish all over?

[muckefuck]

No German lesson this week--the Rabbi got too busy. In addition to pouncing on his ngs last week, I also had a couple of opportunities to remind him, "Das hier ist kein Jiddisch!" But to take the sting away, I followed up by asking him if he'd ever heard of Rotwelsch, the German thieves' cant. As you might expect, there's quite a bit of Yiddish in it. In fact, the language itself can even go under the name of Ganovensprache (albeit rarely).

And just as in English, yesterday's cant has a knack for finding its way into today's slang and even general colloquial usage. I told him that of three common slang words I know for "money"--Kohle, Kies, and Moos--two of them are actually Yiddish in origin (and all of them have been folketymologised to look German). Hebrew, in fact: the first (if my sources are to be believed) derives from a word for "bag" and the second is from Hebrew מעות ma`oth "money" [like Spanish dinero, from the name of an ancient coin]. Both have been modified over time to appear identical to common German words (i.e. Kies "gravel", Moos "moss".) As a result, probably not one in a hundred speakers could tell you they're of foreign origin; certainly I didn't know that when I learned them.

Reading Fontane yesterday, I came across another beautiful example--this one not in the least disguised by folk etymology: ausbaldoweren. Paul glossed this as auskundschaften, also a word I didn't know, but it apparently means "keep a lookout". The root is Yiddish baldover from Hebrew ba`al dabhar "word master". The range of Yiddish meanings is somewhat quirky, from "person in question" through "accused" to "culprit". How exactly we get from this last to "lookout" I couldn't say, but it's interesting to note that Fontane, writing in the 1890s, puts this word not in the mouth of a criminal but of a young maid-of-all-work from a respectable Christian family.

Comments

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I've long wondered about the relationship between Yiddish and German. Care to offer a brief synopsis?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

1. Jews came to Germany. They started speaking German.
2. Jews left Germany. They kept speaking German.

Obviously it's more complex than that. Basically, any time you have a community which lives somewhat apart from the society whose language it speaks, you end up with a divergent sociolect. You see this throughout the Middle East where different sectarian communities traditionally spoke somewhat different forms of the same Arabic vernacular.

Normally, there's enough intercourse between the various communities that the varieties remain mutually intelligible. But that can change when one of the communities because isolated from the rest--such as when one group of speakers migrate to an area where the majority do not speak the community language.

That's what happened with Yiddish. There were always some differences between German dialects as spoken by Jews and as spoken by gentiles (mainly in the area of religious vocabulary, where Jewish German borrowed many terms from Mediaeval Hebrew). But it was German Jewish migration into Eastern Europe that both cut off these varieties from the mainstream of development in the Germanic linguistic sphere and exposed them to other influences (primarily from the surrounding Slavic languages, which many Eastern European Jews were bilingual in).

The Jews who continued living in Germany had their own divergent dialects, but these mostly disappeared with Emancipation, when German Jews became integrated into mainstream German society.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Cool - thanks! I kind of guessed it was something like that, but For some reason I thought it was more complicated.

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

I remember owning (and misplacing at some point) a little book on the subject, called "Jiddisch im Berliner Jargon", by A. Nachama. It's on amazon.
(Fontane characters would speak some Berlin or Brandenburg dialect.)

Ausbaldowern apparently is a Gaunersprache term but it was used in mainstream, too. It's a bit dated now, but still understandable. It means to check out the details of sth in order to then make some kind of cunning plan, or that's how I always understood it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've been struck by how little Berlinerisch there is in the Fontane I've been reading. At first I put that down to the poshness of the principle characters, but the example above is from an extended scene "downstairs" where the servants are having a game of Skat while the quality is out. Nary an "ik" or a "jut" in the whole chapter!

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

True. Not nearly enough to satisfy my curiosity. It's probably to do with the lack of appreciation for dialects / their role as a class marker in German. I'm sure "downstairs" people would have spoken proper Berlinisch (or some other home dialect) amongst themselves at the time.

Berlinisch is not very well represented in books or films at all, imo. It is very close to Hochdeutsch, though, so it's easily straightened out when written, if that makes sense. I love proper Berlinerisch though, and I hanker after every bit I get in old films. I watched "Wolf unter Wölfen"
https://www.amazon.de/Wolf-unter-W%C3%B6lfen-TV-Archiv-DVDs/dp/B00388YNFO/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1314993631&sr=1-1
recently, and there's this one scene in the kitchen of the girl's landlady where the landlady and another tennant have heated conversations. That's the most broad and authentic proletarian Berlinisch I've ever come across in film. Pure gold.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It could also be just Fontane recognising his limitations. Earlier he has a stab at giving a fusty old music teacher a Polish accent; this seems to consist chiefly of doubling his r's (presumably to indicate the lack of a tense/lax contrast in his vowels, i.e. I suspect "Serr warr" is meant to represent ['zɛr 'var]). I can't really judge the accuracy of this, but his attempts at representing German as spoken by an English coachman strike me as completely unconvincing. He makes no orthographic changes to reflect pronunciation and has the speaker get tricky grammatical constructions absolutely correct while inserting undigested English phrases, e.g. "Und hier this little fellow with his arrow....wird er den Pfeil fliegen lassen oder nicht[?]" So if he had attempted to compose some "echt Berlinisch", I fear it would've come out sounding utterly inauthentic.

Und danke für den Tipp! Armin Mueller-Stahl mag ich als Schauspieler besonders gern.

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

Agreed, plus he probably didn't think it important. That's what I originally meant, too. The characters would speak some variant of the local dialect (even though Fontane may not necessarily reflect this).
I don't think there are that many convincing examples of transcribed dialect about, at least I can't think of many. Bits and pieces in Döblin, maybe.

I wholeheartedly recommend Wolf unter Wölfen. So interesting, for me as a Westerner, to get a DDR take on things. Very unique; they didn't make that kind of film in the West. Excellent actors, too.
Armin Müller-Stahl bowled me over. He's *very* young and *very* good in this.

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

In modern Hebrew, כיס is pocket. I know this because gall bladder is כיס_המרה (lit. pocket of bitter stuff). Of course, that doesn't verify the etymology you give.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

On a related note ... I read this and thought of you: http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/noodling/