Oys mainem moyl in dayn or

For those who were as afflicted with curiosity as me, I finally tracked down an etymology of kugl. It claims that the name of the dish derives from that of the pan in which it was baked; an explicit comparison was made with Gugelhupf (designating either a kind of ring-shaped cake pan or a cake baked in one). Who am I to disagree?

I've almost finished Mann's Das Gesetz. Despite some biblical language, the vocabulary's been pretty straightforward, necessitating only the occasional trip to the dictionary. Hit a doozy yesterday, though: heischten keifend! Apparently, it means they begged Moses for something in a nagging manner. The syntax isn't bad either (especially given that it's Mann), though there is the occasional Schachtelsazt. That's a new word I learned from Nuphy last night for those sentences that are so packed with clauses and phrases that you lose the thread before you ever get to the main verb and then have to go back and sort of reassemble the whole thing segment by segment.

One of these days, I'll write a bit about the wonderful words I'm finding in my forays into Weinrich's Yiddish dictionary. For instance, I recently found that the general word for "mouth" is moyl. This is interesting because the usual German word is Mund, but the cognate seems to have fallen out of use in Yiddish. Maul, the cognate to moyl, is normally used of animals and rude when applied to humans. Yiddish, however, has its own rude term for "mouth", which is pisk and is derived in turn from a vuglar Slavic word (cf. Ukrainian pysok "gob; [animal] mouth"). There, encapsulated in the language, you have a pre-modern Eastern European hierarchy of mouths!