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conulyAnd along the way I was linked to another oh-so-old song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJr8uZPNm4Y
Now, this is much easier to read (and modernize singably), despite dating to about the same time:
Miri it is wile sumer y-last
And fugheles song;
Oc nu neheth windes blast
And weder strong.
Ei, ei! What this nicht is long,
And ic with wel miccel wrong,
Soregh and murne and fast.
Happily, there's a translation given below the video anyway. But still, the only really tricky word there is "fugheles", which apparently means "birds". I read that and immediately flashed back to several years ago, at the SICM, seeing a Jewish mother exhorting her toddler to look at the "faygeles". You don't have to speak any Yiddish to work out that when you're pointing at a birdcage while saying "Rifky! Faygeles! Faygeles, Rifka!" that one of those two words has to mean "birdies" while the other is a name. (That'd be the Rifka, a diminutive of Rebecca. I've always thought it sounds nicer than the only common English shortening of the name, Becky, but if you named your kid that and weren't Jewish you'd be dooming her to explain to people all the time how come she has that name.)
And after a little thought I remembered that in German bird is Vogel, so it all makes sense. Or it mostly does. It seems pretty obvious that the three words are related*, but where the heck did "bird" come from then?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bird
Apparently, nobody is really quite sure. Well, that's annoying. "Fugol" is preserved more or less in the word "fowl", anyway.
* Don't get carried away with this. Chance resemblances between languages are more common than you probably think. We happen to already *know* Yiddish and German and English and Dutch (vogel) and likewise are related (you can see all the various "bird" words for Germanic languages on the list linked) so I didn't think I was going too far out on a limb here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJr8uZPNm4Y
Now, this is much easier to read (and modernize singably), despite dating to about the same time:
Miri it is wile sumer y-last
And fugheles song;
Oc nu neheth windes blast
And weder strong.
Ei, ei! What this nicht is long,
And ic with wel miccel wrong,
Soregh and murne and fast.
Happily, there's a translation given below the video anyway. But still, the only really tricky word there is "fugheles", which apparently means "birds". I read that and immediately flashed back to several years ago, at the SICM, seeing a Jewish mother exhorting her toddler to look at the "faygeles". You don't have to speak any Yiddish to work out that when you're pointing at a birdcage while saying "Rifky! Faygeles! Faygeles, Rifka!" that one of those two words has to mean "birdies" while the other is a name. (That'd be the Rifka, a diminutive of Rebecca. I've always thought it sounds nicer than the only common English shortening of the name, Becky, but if you named your kid that and weren't Jewish you'd be dooming her to explain to people all the time how come she has that name.)
And after a little thought I remembered that in German bird is Vogel, so it all makes sense. Or it mostly does. It seems pretty obvious that the three words are related*, but where the heck did "bird" come from then?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bird
Apparently, nobody is really quite sure. Well, that's annoying. "Fugol" is preserved more or less in the word "fowl", anyway.
* Don't get carried away with this. Chance resemblances between languages are more common than you probably think. We happen to already *know* Yiddish and German and English and Dutch (vogel) and likewise are related (you can see all the various "bird" words for Germanic languages on the list linked) so I didn't think I was going too far out on a limb here.
