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[personal profile] muckefuck
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!
Date: 2005-10-07 10:22 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] danbearnyc.livejournal.com
So is moyl the same root as mohel? In ultra-Orthodox practice mohels bite off the foreskin (or part of the foreskin, anyway). There is an interesting case working its way through NYS courts involving a mohel who used this method and gave more than one young boy some form of Hepatitis.
Date: 2005-10-07 10:37 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
Nope, completely different sources. Mohel is from Hebrew (it's an agent noun but I couldn't tell you offhand what the verb stem is) whereas moyl and Maul both go back to Middle High German mul(e).

I heard about that case, but I didn't think it was that they bit the foreskin but that they sucked away the blood orally. I trust you to be intimate with the details, however.
Date: 2005-10-07 10:42 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] danbearnyc.livejournal.com
No. One doesn't do bloodsports. No.
Date: 2005-10-08 05:07 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tyrannio.livejournal.com
My small Bantam-Megiddo gives "dilute, adulterate" for mem hay lamed.
Date: 2005-10-08 03:51 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] keyne.livejournal.com
Herpes, actually, not hepatitis. At least one baby died.
Date: 2005-10-08 04:49 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] danbearnyc.livejournal.com
Ah, eew, yes. I have hepatitis on the brain (not the liver) just now.

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