Talk:gemish
Latest comment: 12 years ago by Chuck Entz in topic gemish etymology
The original contributor of this entry says it's from Yiddish. Googling for cites of this English word, though, I found that there seems to be a German noun Gemish (though we don't have it, and I don't know what it means). Anyone know whether the English word comes from that or from Yiddish?—msh210℠ 19:46, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
- To judge from google books:"ein Gemish" and google books:"ein Gemisch", the latter spelling is far more common in German (23/89 vs. 579/600,000). I'm not sure <sh> even exists in German; if so, w:German orthography doesn't mention it. This might suggest that it comes from Yiddish, which is regularly transliterated to English with <sh> for /ʃ/. As for the German noun's meaning, some of the hits seem to mean "mixture", or maybe specifically "solution" — see e.g. http://books.google.com/books?id=2qQOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA422&lpg=PA422&dq=Gemisch — but I don't speak German, and the few hits I can decipher may not be representative. Regardless, it's clearly related to (deprecated template usage) mischen and (deprecated template usage) gemischt, and presumably cognate with English mix. —RuakhTALK 20:10, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
- Finding overlap between Yiddish and German should never be a concern, since the core of Yiddish is a High German dialect related to standard German (with a huge amount of vocabulary added from Hebrew and various other languages). German Gemisch and Yiddish (cf. German jüdisch) געמיש are basically the same word, with -sch (German)/ש (Yiddish)/-sh(English) representing the same sound. I'm not sure it's accurate to say that gemish came from Gemisch, since most of Yiddish's German vocabulary was inherited from the two dialects' common ancestor. As for meaning, Gemisch means mixture or jumble (the verb is mischen). There's another word, Mischung, with a similar meaning.Chuck Entz (talk) 02:38, 17 March 2012 (UTC)