Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Forced Assimilation

Yes, this is a crusade of sorts.
English speakers have this annoying tendency to take words from foreign languages and put them into a format that they're familiar with. For example, the word juggernaut: you might have thought that the "naut" suffix has something to do with the words "astronaut," "cosmonaut," or "nautical," (naus in Greek means ship, and is related to the English "naval"). But no. Those English speakers got you again. There is absolutely no connection. It actually is the following:

1638, "huge wagon bearing an image of the god Krishna," especially that at the town of Puri, drawn annually in procession in which (apocryphally) devotees allowed themselves to be crushed under its wheels in sacrifice. Altered from Jaggernaut, a title of Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu), from Hindi Jagannath, lit. "lord of the world," from Skt. jagat "world" + natha-s "lord, master." The first European description of the festival is by Friar Odoric (c.1321). Fig. sense of "anything that demands blind devotion or merciless sacrifice" is from 1854.
(By the way, my last name, Viswanath, is related to this word; viswa means "universe" and, as you now know, nath means lord. So my name means "lord of the universe." Not pretentious at all. But certainly befitting if you know my father's Yiddish/Hebrew name: Meylekh מלך.)

Now consider this: the Yiddish for "to bless" is bentshn בענטשן from the Latin benedecire. When this entered the vocabulary of the second-generation, the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and probably influenced by German spelling, it became bentshen. This further evolved into "benchin'," and, under the impression that this was formed in the same way that "whistling" becomes "whistlin'," converted it into the more English-friendly benching (barbells, anyone?).
I recently saw a similar ignorance of a word's Yiddish origin in a caption of a picture in a wedding album on Facebook: "the bedeckin'." I was tempted to break out into a spontaneous round of "Deck the halls with boughs of holly," but I was already marching onto the next picture. (I treat this with considerable sarcasm, but the Yiddish badekn באַדעקן is, in fact, related to "deck" and "bedeck.")
One more example before you start scoffing: it's not "good shabbos," as you might think, but rather gut גוט. This is a pet peeve of mine. But hey, not everyone knows Yiddish. ‫.הלװאַי

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