Talk:Oy vey/Archive 1

"Similar in meaning and pronunciation to the Russian "Uvy"
No, it's not. Uvy is more "Alas" than "Woe" in terms of meaning, and is a single exclamation rather than two separate words in terms of pronunciation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.151.170.103 (talk) 22:28, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Vey: from Aramaic?
In Bamidbar (Numbers) 24:23, Balaam says (in the KJV) "Alas!" The Hebrew for this is "oy", spelled aleph-vov-yud (I dunno how to get this thing to display Hebrew text). The Targum Onkelos for this is "Vai", spelled vov-yud. I'd always assumed that "Vai", so pronounced, was the Aramaic translation for the Hebrew "Oy". (cf. Latin "Vae", as in Emperor Vespasian's last words, "Vae, puto deus fio") Of course my family spoke the Galician dialect of Yiddish, so "Vey" would have been pronounced "Vai" anyway.

Shalom S. (talk) 01:26, 19 December 2007 (UTC)


 * If you look through the page, this has already been covered. It's pretty much a coincidence -- "vey" in Yiddish comes from "Weh" in German, meaning "woe". The use of "oy" in the Hebrew text could be related, but that's assuming a pronunciation trait that happens to exactly parallel phonetic developments in Yiddish two millennia later is preserved unchanged. It's like saying Uri Geller does his unspectacular tricks with psychic powers -- it could be true, but it's more likely he's just a magician, and a rather uncreative one at that. Haikupoet (talk) 02:40, 19 December 2007 (UTC)