Congratulate me: I just discovered that nebbish is a word in English. I was previously under the impression that neb was a shortened version of the Yiddish נעבעך nebekh and that it had come via Yeshivish.
Definition: A weak-willed, ineffectual person; a person who, entering a room, leaves the impression that someone just left; a person whose life runs, ironically, on the law of an Irishman named Murphy: "If anything can go wrong, it will." The difference between a nebbish and a schlemiel is that a nebbish is always pitied while attitudes toward a schlemiel can be harsher. Leo Rosten claimed that a nebbish picks up what a schlemiel knocks over. The quintessential nebbish is, of course, the Woody Allen characters of Allen's early films.
And now (drumroll) for the origin:
It's actually directly from the Yiddish, which is derived from the Czech nebohý "poor, unfortunate." But there's more to tap into - I'm talking Proto-Indo-European, baby! (If you don't know what I'm talking about, stop here and beware of the dangers of tracing word roots waaaaaay back - this is serious business.) The Slavic root is boh (this word in modern Slavic languages carries the meaning of "God," but bohatý, which would literally mean "godful," actually means "rich" - of course, people with God on their side would be wealthy, I suppose) and derives from the PIE root bhag-. So let's see what other words we can recognize from this root:
It wouldn't take too much skill to recognize the Sanskrit words bhagah and bhagavati, and if not that, at least the name of the Hindu religious work Bhagavadgita (literally, song of the blessed). There is some speculation as to whether the English word pagoda, which came via Portuguese, came from the polar origins of "idol" or the root that came to mean "god" - compare the etymologies of [from a corruption of Persian butkada, from but "idol" + kada "dwelling"] and [perhaps from or infl. by Tamil pagavadi "house belonging to a deity," from Skt. "goddess," fem. of bhagavati "goddess," fem. of bhagavat "blessed, adorable," from *bhagah "good fortune," from PIE base *bhag- "to share out, apportion"]
Then, if you figured, "hey, let's take the b and replace it with a p," you might think of the word esophagus, or recall learning in biology class of a certain type of virus called a bacteriophage, which means a bacteria-eater. These words comes from Greek, which ultimately came from the root bhag-, which appears to mean "to share out, apportion," which eventually evolved into the aforementioned Sanskrit and Slavic meanings.
2 comments:
Good to mention that nebbish actually comes from Western Yiddish, as did many Yiddish loanwords after the first wave of Ashkenazi Jewish immigration to America in the 19th century, since this was mostly from Western Europe (Germany). Western Yiddish is pretty much extinct nowadays, and so many words like 'nebbish' are preserved only as borrowings into English and other languages, and not in the Yiddish of today.
Is this because the [kh] phenome was closer to the [ch] in German, and therefore came into English as [sh]? Or were you talking purely of it's route and not its morphological journey?
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