Current mood:	intrigued
Entry tags:	writing

random language thoughts
acari had a fab post on German words in English. I took a history of the English language course in college and never quite recovered ;-)

English is particularly weird, IIRC, being a melange of Middle Low German and early Norman French with a lot of weirdness, including Latin from scholars since about 1400. Hybrid vigor, when it works, just a mess sometimes. Many of the "rules" of our language are actually rules of Latin applied to English in the 18th and 19th centuries by teachers who loved -- or at least admired -- Latin.

As for gestalt and verklempt, they have been absorbed because, in their English versions, they fill a void in the vocabulary. I think it's good for us to be open to other languages, we as a culture are pretty xenophobic otherwise.

... [acari says she thinks verklempt is from Yiddish]...

Yes, verklempt is Yiddish, meaning "choked up with emotion". It's not very common outside of those with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

There are a few Yiddish words that have wider usage: I think lots of people understand "schtick" as meaning the special thing someone does, their basic comedy routine: Dom's schtick was doing impressions of other actors. Also "chutzpah" -- a cross between confidence and hubris. "Kibitz" meaning to offer advice from the side, like a back-seat driver. "Tchotchkies" or "chochkeys" are knick-knacks, little things one puts on shelves, often of the cheap and silly kind distributed by vendors at a big convention.

The most widely used Yiddish-derived word in fandom is "maven", meaning someone who's an expert in a field, with the connotation of also being trustworthy and helpful. William Safaire popularized it, calling himself a language maven in the 60s.


ETA: the above is about Yiddish-in-American-English, not at all about UK or Commonwealth English. Yiddish being pretty much a mix of German and Hebrew, with some Russian and Polish thrown in, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews who lived in The Pale, an area pretty much overlayed by and variously ruled by Germany, Russia, Poland and Lithuania. My great-grandparents were native Yiddish speakers but I don't know much at all, which makes me kinds sad.