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It didn't exactly come out of nowhere, it was prefaced by "a fringe tends to develop; in Yiddish linguistics, that would be Paul Wexler".

As an L2 german (standard & dialect) speaker who's learning a slavic language I think "fringe" may be the charitable way to put it. (I've experimented with alemannic dialect speakers and upon first exposure they tend to think of yiddish as a different german dialect with some bizarre vocabulary)

> In a lokh in der erd hot gevoynt a hobit. Nit keyn bridke, koytike, nase lokh, ongefilt mit di ekn fun verem un a dripendikn reyekh, oykh nit keyn trukene, hoyle, zamdike lokh mit gornisht vu zikh avektsuzetsn tsi vos tsu esn: zi iz geven a hobit-lokh, un dos heyst bakvemlekhkeyt. —JRRT

Lagniappe: https://www.petitnicolas.com/livre/le-petit-nicolas/le-petit...

(honorable mention to https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט )



As a native Slavic speaker that can also speak an almost fluent Dutch, and knowing what the quoted Hobbit line says, I can't even see how this having anything to do with Slavic languages is even a discussion.


There is one word of Slavic origin in that paragraph: bridke (English ugly, Polish brzydki, German hässlich). (And I can't find a cognate for "dripendikn" in any other language.)


"Dripen" (oysdripen, ondripen) is the lemma (drip,ooze), so cognate to english "drip"?


I doubt it, because the cognate to English drop, German Tropfen is Yiddish tropn https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%90%D6%B8%D7%A... and the cognate to English dreep, German triefen is Yiddish trifn https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A4%D6%B... so I would expect a cognate to English drip to have an initial "t" as well.

Also, https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/dictionary.cgi says that "dripe" means "defecate (taboo)".




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