Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazim, central and eastern European Jews and their descendants. Written in the Hebrew alphabet, it became one of the world's most widespread languages, appearing in most countries with a Jewish population by the 19th century.
Etymology. Yiddish ????? kop 'head', diminutive forms ?????/??????? képl/képele; diminutive ending replaced with English diminutive -i.
Yiddish. Hebrew and Yiddish are languages spoken by Jews all over the world. While Hebrew is a Semitic language (subgroup of Afro-Asiatic languages) like Arabic and Amharic, Yiddish is a German dialect which uses many Hebrew words but with a very distinctive Ashkenazic pronunciation.
Furthermore, in English, one never hears a woman referred to as mensch, while in German a woman can be called mensch, as in ein Heber Mensch, meaning "a dear person." So somewhere on its way from German to (modern-day?) Yiddish, the meaning of mensch was narrowed down to the male.
In modern Hebrew and Yiddish goy (/g??/, Hebrew: ???, regular plural goyim /ˈg??. ?m/, ???? or ?????) is a term for a gentile, a non-Jew. Through Yiddish, the word has been adopted into English (often pluralised as goys) also to mean gentile, sometimes with a pejorative sense.
Shalom (Hebrew: ??????? shalom; also spelled as sholom, sholem, sholoim, shulem) is a Hebrew word meaning peace, harmony, wholeness, completeness, prosperity, welfare and tranquility and can be used idiomatically to mean both hello and goodbye.
To be a shanda for the goyim is to confirm the most hurtful stereotypes,thereby doing damage twice: a Jew who dishonors Jews by not only doing something bad, but doing something that confirms the worst fears of others about Jews in general.
So Yiddish is an old form of German, with borrowed Hebrew and other foreign words mixed in. That is why they are so similar. German and Yiddish (?????? ) are so similar because they are both Germanic languages, specifically falling in the West Germanic language group.
Meshuga, also Meshugge, Meshugah, Meshuggah /m?ˈ??g?/: Crazy (????, meshuge, from Hebrew: ?????, m'shuga'; OED, MW). Also used as the nouns meshuggener and meshuggeneh for a crazy man and woman, respectively.
It's a good bet that Yiddish klafte with its pejorative meaning is indeed from Aramaic, because in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (according to Sokoloff's dictionary) the masculine kalba meant 'dog, base person, male prostitute'.
While the words mazal (or mazel in Yiddish; "luck" or "fortune") and tov ("good") are Hebrew in origin, the phrase is of Yiddish origin, and was later incorporated into Modern Hebrew.
