Talk:Yinglish

Germanic influences?
Some of these have clear Germanic origins, rather than American English origins - consider bleib schver - bleibt schwer, german for - remains difficult.

one difference
One differenc between English and Yinglish, yid is considered offensive in English. I know the derivation from the Teutonic, but that doesn't change the offensiveness. Ortolan88

OK, but there could be an article on "yid" where this is explained. Also, the word is used in literature. KF

theory
Ezra, I'm not sure I agree with your "theory" that Yinglish is a distinct language. I doubt that it's even a dialect. I am therefore tempted to delete the article entirely. Better yet, perhaps, is to indicate that the way Yiddish-speaking Jews converse in English has some distinctive features. Saying I did a mitzvah isn't really speaking a foreign language. It's merely an English sentence which incorporates a single foreign word.

English has a long tradition of incorporating foreign words, which is why a good unabridged dictionary may have half a million terms.

By the way, if you'll stop fighting with the old-timers and engage in a bit of dialogue, we can make an end of this edit war. --Ed Poor 22:28 Oct 31, 2002 (UTC)

I didn't quite manage to convey what I meant with I did a mitzva. Mitzva does not mean good deed, it means commandment. The reason why Mitzva is translated as good deed, is because you don't do commandments.

I felt and feel the entire set of Jewish articles written by the old contributors reflect the feelings that Conservative and Reform Jews have against many Orthodox Jews at not being considered practicing Jews. I think this is ingrained and that there is no way to talk it out of them. I have tried "dialog". I admit I have been very sharp with them, but that is because I think that the entire set of Jewish articles have to be rewritten, because I think their tone, organization, and content are simply an argument to support their validity. Ezra Wax


 * Thank you for initiating dialog with me, sir. We are not trying to make "valid" articles but neutral and balanced ones. You make a good point about the feeling of Conservative and Reform Jews, but we cannot find the TRUE point of view here. The best we can do is say, "Conservatives believe A", "Orthodox believe B" and so on.


 * Do your beliefs permit you to tolerate articles which describe various points of view? --Ed Poor

I am "hung up" with research. It is what I do for a living. It gives me a better understanding of subject matter and issues that are important to me. It provides depth to my understanding of topics. Through research I can better arrive at some perception of the "truth." I can't believe I am justifying myself for that. To use your own terminology, I am maching a leining, I'm doing a sugya be'iyun, I'm learning. Maybe if you would learn the material a little more seriously before you right about it, your writing would be subject to fewer attacks. Don't knock people who try to know. Syag lechochma shtika. Danny

almost entirely inaccurate
This page is almost entirely inaccurate; ostensibly about Yinglish, it mostly seems to be trying to describe Yeshivish. The two are very different phenomena, and the former is not particularly an Orthodox one, nor even an exclusively Jewish one. ("To be miyayesh," for example, is Yeshivish, not Yinglish; Saturday Night Live's Linda Richman character used Yinglish, not Yeshivish, as did New York Sen. D'Amato when he famously called his opponent a "putzhead.") I'm planning on reviewing my Leo Rosten and taking this in for a complete rewrite, which will provide citations. Shmuel 15:07, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

What's the word for woman living two doors down and back one? Surely someone is playing silly buggers with all these chick vectoring words? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.125.94.72 (talk) 21:49, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Yinglish vs. Yeshivish
I'm having a hard time figuring out the difference between Yeshivish and what is described in this article as Yinglish, and so I'm tempted to merge this to Yeshivish, creating a redirect. If someone wants to write a new article about Yinglish as distinct from Yeshivish, then that's easy enough to do. I've heard "Yinglish" used to mean "English characterized by a lot of Yiddish loanwords", which unlike Yeshivish is widely used by non-Jews: on "Punk'd", Ashton Kutcher once said "Fathers always seem to know when some guy wants to shtup their daughter" and you can't get much more goyish than a farm boy from Iowa. The other use of "Yinglish" I've heard is "Yiddish characterized by a lot of English loanwords" like "opsterziker" and "dansterziker" for "upstairs neighbor" and "downstairs neighbor" respectively. On the other hand, the Ethnologue entry Yinglish seems to be about Yeshivish rather than Yinglish in the two meanings I've heard. I'll wait about a week before merging to give interested parties a chance to comment. --Angr 09:49, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * There is a difference between the two. Yeshivish is specifically spoken by Yeshiva students and has a religious flavour, whereas Yinglish is spoken by immigrants from countries where nearly all Jews spoke Yiddish and is more secular.


 * Yeshivish does seem to be what's actually described in this article. The term Yinglish is used for both Yeshivish and what you describe as "English characterized by a lot of Yiddish loanwords" - but not particularly restricted to the Haredi community. So I guess most of the content of this article should be merged with Yeshivish, provided someone can be found to write a good description of the other (more common?) meaning of Yinglish to replace it. AJD 18:04, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah. As I said back in my above comment this past September, I've been planning on rewriting this article completely. Sorry about the delay; I've been busy, but I agree that it's past time this was addressed. I'll have at least a basic draft done by Sunday night. Shmuel 00:50, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Shmulik! How's that rewrite coming??? :-p Tomer TALK  00:14, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)


 * Gevald, has it been almost nine months since I promised to rewrite this?! Oy. My sincere apologies. I need to rein in my perfectionistic tendencies and just get a draft out there already. (Hmm. It'll be exactly nine months on Monday. Tisha yarchei leidah?) Shmuel 23:05, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Heh. Leidah indeed. :-p Tomer TALK  00:36, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

Meshuginer nudniks, all of youse. :)   &mdash; Rickyrab | Talk 07:29, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree that this page currently describes Yeshivish, and should either be updated to something different or merged into the Yeshivish page. But that being said, what exactly does "Yinglish" describe. If it is limited to Orthodox Jews (of Ashkenazic origin), then it is a language somehow separate from Yeshivish with the same grammar, vocab, and speakers. If it's expanded to all Jews, then is it really much different from Yiddish words and phrases used by English speakers. I guess the moral is that, in general, the entire Yiddish-in-English part of wikipedia needs to be cleaned up. There is currently Yinglish, Yeshivish, List of English words of Yiddish origin, Yiddish words and phrases used by English speakers, and a very small list in Yiddish language. All of these have a lot of overlap and none are particularly complete. Any takers to lead the clean-up process? --User:nudave04 August 16, 2005


 * I'm on it. - Arithmomaniac38

Language?
Yinglish is described throughout as a language, but that seems far too formal a term for what is essentially a variety of English. IMO something like sociolect comes closest to describing Yinglish. (I'm not sure if dialect has quite the right connotation.) Any ideas? RMoloney 18:13, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

should be deleted
Either this is the same as Yeshivish - which already has its own page, or it's no different from saying that someone is speaking a French-English language every time they say something such as "laissez faire" or "coup d'etat". --User:israelish April 21, 2006

Yeshivish is arguably different. Yeshivish involves a lot of talmudic aramaic and tanachic hebrew as well, whereas Yinglish does not. JoshuaZ 20:33, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Leo Rosten's meaning
This article referred repeatedly to Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish but used the term Yinglish in a completely different way from Rosten. Leo Rosten used the term Yinglish to describe words created by speakers of Yiddish in English-speaking countries — new words that have both English and Yiddish aspects. This is rightly the primary meaning of the word Yinglish and I have rewritten the article to reflect this. The Joys of Yiddish gives not the slightest hint of the secondary meaning of Yinglish. Please keep this in mind before starting a reversion war.

Additional editing should standardize the second list of Yinglish words to be uncapitalized except for the proper nouns Litvak and Yekke. Anomalocaris 01:10, 17 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Why should Leo Rosten's sense of "Yinglish" be regarded as the "primary" sense, rather than a highly specialized sense of the word restricted to a single individual? It seems to me that the primary sense of "Yinglish" is the sense intended by most speakers who use the term. The only definition of "Yinglish" in the OED is "a blend of English and Yiddish spoken in the United States; a form of English containing many Yiddishisms"; Merriam-Webster has something similar. According to this definition, a list of Yiddish words used by non-Yiddish-speaking Jews is certainly primary-sense Yinglish.


 * In short, I question your assertion that a meaning made up by one man that has not achieved recognition in major dictionaries is "rightly the primary meaning of the word". AJD 04:26, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

More than loan-words -- consider loaned grammatical structure.
Moved to Talk:Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews

Moved back from Talk:Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews to here. Peter Chastain (talk) 07:42, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

I feel that there is sufficient difference between Yiddish, Yinglish, and Yeshivish to keep three articles going, but i'd also like to add that whereas Yeshivish incorporates a larger number of religious words, and Yiddish is an entire language, Yinglish is far more than "English with a bunch of Yiddish loan-words."

Have you all not noticed the grammar of Yinglish tends towards German sentence structure, and toward literalisms of translation, both resulting in "awkward" English grammar?

Example 1 -- This is not about Iowa farm boys using the word "shtup," it's about a form of speech that incorporates idomatic phrasings like, "So now he wants to shtup your daughter, nu?" that no Iowa farm boy would conceive of forming. The retention of German/Yiddish grammar rules while speaking English is half of what makes Yinglish more than just a variety of English filled with loan-words.

Example 2 -- "By me he's okay" is Yinglish, even though all of the words are English. What makes it Yinglish is the (incorrect) translation of the Yiddish "Bei mir". It sounds like "by me," but that is the wrong translation choice, because the meaning of "by me" in English is "near to me", so to the non-Yinglish listener the speaker seems to be saying, "When he is near me he's okay," but the Yinglish listener understands that the Yinglish speaker is actually saying, "In my opinion he's okay."

These are just two examples, and i am sure that a moment's reflection will bring more to your minds. The truth is that Yinglish, like Ebonics, varies from standard English in grammatical structure as well as in word-use.

cat yronwode Catherineyronwode 04:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree that Rosten's definition of Yinglish (a set of loanwords) is much too narrow. Benjamin Blech, in his Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish ( ISBN 978-0-02-863387-9), writes, "And Don't Forget the Grammar... Yiddish sentences also have a beat of their own..." His examples include (among others) ending questions with "or what?" and beginning questions with what ("What, do you want to get killed going alone? Ira will go with." Note: this example also illustrates dropping the last word in a sentence), and several others. I would also add the use of already ("Will you stop, already?") and beginning a sentence with a direct object ("This I want. That you can have." )These issues and many more are explored inYeshivish, but I would argue that the two articles should not be merged. While Yinglish has gone mainstream and can be understood by most English speakers, Yeshivish can be much more unintelligible. Peter Chastain (talk) 07:42, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Schm prefix indicating dismissive annoyance
Moved to Talk:Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews

Glitch
Section moved to Talk:Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews

Primary and secondary meanings of Yinglish
Since Yinglish has two opposite meanings, I split the article in two.
 * Yinglish: words of English origin used in Yiddish
 * Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews: words of Yiddish origin used in English

I used as a primary meaning "words of English origin used in Yiddish" because the article said that Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews is a secondary meaning. However Ethnologue quotes a definition of Yinglish as "a variety of English influenced by Yiddish". HaŋaRoa (talk) 05:27, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Written Yinglish/Yeshivish
Does anyone known if any Yinglish/Yeshivish works have been published in the Yiddish alphabet? Prsaucer1958 (talk) 15:58, 18 February 2012 (UTC)