Talk:Yeshivish

message: This article needs serious work.  I'll call attention to two claims:
1) "could perhaps be considered a dialect of English. It might be classified as a Pidgin"
NO encyclopedia article should havce the phrase "could perhaps."  An encyclopedia article is meant to represent the current level of knowledge and debate over certain topics.  What linguists have analyzed Yshivish?  Do they argue over whether or not it is in fact a dialect of English?  Which linguists take one side, and which take another?  For what reasons?  What are the linguistic arguments for classifying it this way -- and what are the linguisstic arguments for not doing so?  If the article cannot describe such debats, then this sentence should simply be cut as it is empty of meaning and value.
: Regarding my revision on this point, see pages xv-xxi in Weiser. Shmuel 03:27, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Along the way, I realized that I'd chosen a poor example in the latter case, as "machmir" itself is an adjective, not a verb; I've modified the sentence accordingly. Thanks for the catch! Shmuel 07:40, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Article needs work

message: We need a section that gives the definitions of various Yeshivish words.
:No, we don't. Wikipedia is not a slang dictionary. JFW | T@lk 07:46, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Shmuel 23:59, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, there is another book about Yeshivish, however I can't remember the name.I remember that it had some pretty fine example of Yeshivish, including a translation of the Gettysberg Address into Yeshivish. If I can find it, perhaps I'll add it to the article to give people an idea of how Yeshivish sounds (if there is no objection). Shykee 04:04, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was Wieser's book that had the Gettysburg Address. It ended with "that a nation that shtams by the oilam, by the oilam, by the oilam, will blaib fest ahd oilam." -- A brilliant demonstration of the many meanings of "by" in Yiddish, which then get unfortunately lost on anyone unfamiliar with the original. On the other hand, using "the oilam" both for the three cases of "the people" and also using "ahd oilam" to capture the implied "never" of the original, is a great example of how (on rare occasion) it is possible that a translation might improve upon the original. --Keeves 21:08, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Dictionary Section 

message: Add it to your user page incase any one is confused with your Yeshivish grammar. :) I have talked to an admin, and they said it is fine. ems 12:35, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New babel 

message: This article is mainly about the language/pidgin Yeshivish, but inludes a vague paragraph about Yeshivish culture in general. Why not spin off this irrelevant article or integrate it into one about modern Orthodoxy? - Arithmomaniac 11:00 PST 4/20/06
That's not a bad suggestion, but it might fit more specifically into the article about Haredi Judaism. If it deserves an article of its own, then the lifestyle should get just as much attention as the language. That's how the word is used in Orthodox circles anyway: we say stuff like "That shul is very Yeshivish," and in that context it's basically a synonym to "black hat" Orthodoxy, or the group more accurately described as Haredi Misnagdim. "Yeshivish" as a speech form simply refers to Yinglish used to a particularly high degree and mixed with the jargon of Talmud study. Notice that the article's chief example of Yeshivish speech comes from a Talmudic discussion, yet the book that's mentioned as a supposed study of Yeshivish speech is called Frumspeak, not Yeshivaspeak. marbeh raglaim 19:54, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I added an intro pointing out that Yeshivish can also refer to the specific cultural/ethnic aspect of the users of the Yeshivish dialect. Shykee 12:40, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree that the word "Yeshivish" is more often used to refer to the culture rather than the language. And while it isn't synonymous with Chareidi, it is pretty much equivalent to "Chareidi non-Chasidic." Also it should be noted that the term "black hatter" is often used to describe a member of the Yeshivish movement/culture. Someone now needs to write this article. marbeh raglaim 06:45, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is the observation I came here to make, and of course it was made five years ago! This article should probably be renamed "Yeshivish (dialect)" and include a disambiguation section. To describe a group of people, "Yeshivish" is often used synonymously with "Litvish" and "Misnaged," albeit with shadings of meaning, to mean "non-Hasidic Haredi" and should be cross-linked with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misnagdim page. Thus, many speakers of Yeshivish would not be considered Yeshivish Jews, but Modern Orthodox Yeshiva students (not Hasidim, though, since they all just speak Yiddish). Illinvillain (talk) 19:24, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separation of Culture Article 

message: I've come back to this article several months after first commenting on it, and I'm still stunned by how ludicrous its assertions are. Among the many problems I have found:
(1) While I have not read Chaim Weiser's book Frumspeak, I seriously doubt it either was intended or has been received as a "serious" scholarly work.
(2) The examples cited in this article of Yeshivish grammatical features are nothing of the sort. Attaching English plural endings to Hebrew loanwords is completely typical of the way English speakers treat words borrowed from other languages.
(3) The article correctly notes that "speakers of Yeshivish clearly understand English," but it goes on to suggest that "The reverse...is simply not the case." That statement is playing very loose with the word "understand." Using a few unfamiliar words and expressions does not render one's speech incomprehensible to outsiders. That would be like saying a New Yorker cannot understand a Texan.
Some changes I have made to the article:
(1) The article claimed that in Yeshivish writing, "words of Aramaic, Hebrew or Yiddish origin are usually written in Hebrew characters." I changed this to "words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin are often written in Hebrew characters." Trust me, I grew up with this form, and it was rare to write a Yiddish word of non-Semitic origin (e.g. shul, zayde, bentsh) in Hebrew characters, and even words of Semitic (Hebrew or Aramaic) origin were frequently written in the Roman alphabet.
(2) According to the article, "As Yiddish was to Middle High German, Yeshivish may be to Standard American English." I added the sentence, "However, modern-day Jews are more integrated into Gentile society than they were in the past, and their speech is not likely to diverge as far from the standard languages as it once did."
(3) To sound a little more respectful, I changed "ultra orthodox Israelis" to "Israeli Haredim," and "proper Modern Hebrew or proper Yiddish" to "standard Ivrit or standard Yiddish."
Still, the article needs a lot of work before it will sound remotely reasonable. marbeh raglaim 01:00, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting. Sol Steinmetz's somewhat scholarly 1986 book Yiddish and English examines excerpts from numerous Orthodox Jewish newspapers showing what is essentially Yeshivish, though he doesn't use the term, and he seems a bit confused about the difference between Modern Orthodox and Haredi. marbeh raglaim 15:42, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad article 

message: I beleive that this article is foucusing on the wrong aspect of yeshivish. Yeshivish is a culture and though the way they speak is called yeshivish the basic meaning of yeshivish is the culture; the language is secondary. The article needs rewriting. the new article should focus on yeshevish yeshivas (chaim berlin, ner yisrael, ect.) dress (black hat) culture daily life and ect.Defendhim 13:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Wrong Focus/Rewriting

message: Though I have no specific sources to back myself up, I have begun to notice that Yeshivish or frumspeak has lexical gaps. For example, there is the verb to daven, and the gerund form davening is used to denote either "the act of praying" or "the prayer service." But Yeshivish has no simple, noun equivalent of the English word "prayer" in a sentence like "I have written a prayer for you." marbeh raglaim 18:35, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lexical gaps? 

message: When discussing "foon", the article cites what the author clearly believes to be a unique-to-Yeshivish phrase..."For example: Litvaks are different from Chassidim.".  The weakness here, is that American English almost never uses anything other than "from" as a modifier for "different".  Other Englishes, notably British and Australian, generally use the [incredibly uneducated-sounding (to the American ear)] "to" (as in "different to").  The only example I can think of in which any reasonably literate English speaker would think "different than" was normal English, is as a synonym for "unique than", as in, e.g., "We're more different than we thought." ... which is really just shorthand for "We're more different from each other than we thought."  Anyways, long and short, "different from" in Yeshivish is proper English, "different than", in either, as a substitute for "different from", is substandard...so if someone has a better example for foon, please put it into the article.  שבת שלום. Tomertalk 20:58, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  poor example 

message: There is a book actually written in 'yeshivish' for students of yeshivos called the kuntrus. While it is not meant for outsiders to understand it, if one puts in the time to figure it out, it provides a really unique and accurate look of the culture and language of 'yeshivish'. The only place I could find online to order it is 
[] 
71.182.222.96 20:21, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: A book written in yeshivish

message: It makes absolutely no sense to have two article. This article should be merged into the Yeshivish Jews article. For full discussion and to vote on this see Talk:Yeshivish Jews#Merge/s. IZAK (talk) 04:48, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge to Yeshivish Jews articles 

message: Did some heavy editing and mainly attempted to stress the fact that "Yeshivish" is not unique to English, and that this phenomenon exists in other languages as well, although I do not know if it is referred to "Yeshivish" in other languages either. I'm actually under the impression that "Yeshivish" is a term given to the dialect by the Modern Orthodox community, and not the speakers themselves, although speakers calling their vernacular "Yeshivish" is not that uncommon anymore.
The piece on YIVO needs some more expansion, and there should be an article on "Yiddishisten" somewhere (also this is mainly related to the debate on Hebrew vs.  Yiddish in respect to the official language of the state of Israel).
I took care not to delete anything that had a reference to it, or anything that displayed examples, although I will admit that those parts were badly authored as well (although I am not the one that put them there) Mordynu (talk) 01:35, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some heavy editing 

message: This article is pretty inaccurate, as shown above. I'll just focus on one word here, as the writer spent two paragraphs pointing out a mistake, but it was the writer that was mistaken.
"Shogeg in its original context means an incident which was caused unwillingly, but was a result of partial negligence."
Absolutely not. Shogeg is something done willingly based on one of two incorrect assumptions. Either that it is mutar, or it is assur, but not right now. And that is why it is used used instead of ones. There is no reason not to use ones because of the Ivrit meaning. In the Yeshivish world they would use "M'anes".  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.2.1.101 (talk) 11:22, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definitions incorrect 

message: The first use I saw of the term was in a short paragraph in the The Zeirai Forum (Zeirai being the Agudah's teen-age movement, an organization with a long and illustrious history) around 1977. It was a titled Yeshivish, and humorously described a fictional journey to a job interview, which failed because of language. The paragraph is intentionally written in Yeshivish, and I believe I recognized it quoted in Frumspeak. I have seen the magazine again more recently, but do not have a copy. BTW, I could have used that book when I started High School. And I can assure you that Y.U. shiurim were also in mild Yeshivish. Mzk1 (talk) 19:43, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin 

message: I can't understand this edit and this edit. Yeshivish is not for instance "a method of identifying with and obtaining inclusion into the exclusive society of torah scholars." No source is provided for anything like that. The book, "Frumspeak: The first dictionary of Yeshivish", by Chaim Weiser, is primarily concerned with language. It is not inconceivable that the term "Yeshivish" can be used in other ways as well. But the above two edits I think are going way out on a limb to make specific points that I don't think we know to be accurate. That I think would be original research if no sources can be brought to support it. Bus stop (talk) 03:17, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extended meanings? 

message: This unsourced contention is very strange to me. From broad personal exposure to and usage of Yeshivish, I can attest that this meaning has not made its way from M. Hebrew to Yeshivish. In Yeshivish a woman can be described as "ne'ensa" = "raped" (verb) or "anusa" = "raped woman" (noun). The word "oines" however does not mean "rape" typically and no one would hesitate to use it in a colloquial context to refer to being forced against one's will to do some action, innocuous or otherwise. This whole "pshat" in a sentence that was made up in the first place seems strange. I'll leave it alone for a few days but if no one comes up with a good source or eisene svara ;-) I will delete it. MosheEmes (talk) 00:44, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I just noticed a comment above from 8 Aug 2014, almost a year ago, making the same comment. In fact (to allay any accusations of sock-puppetry) I freely admit that may have been my non-logged-in self. But it hasn't been addressed or challenged since then so I'm going to change the article now.MosheEmes (talk) 00:49, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  oines-rape 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Yeshivish. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20110629142106/http://www.ling.upenn.edu/NWAVE32/abs-pdf/benor.pdf to http://www.ling.upenn.edu/NWAVE32/abs-pdf/benor.pdf
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Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 22:55, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This merger proposal was created to discuss merging Yinglish with this article. There has been discussion about this in the past, but I feel it is necessary to create an official discussion. The Yinglish article is about certain phrases that are commonly used by certain groups. There is no reason why that can't simply be a sub-section of this page. Besides, the Yinglish article lacks proper references (being mostly copied from a single book), and is unencyclopedic overall. If this merge is not carried out, I feel the next best move would be to nominate it for deletion. Either way, Yinglish should not exist as an independent article. — Puzzledvegetable (talk) 18:11, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: The term yeshivish certainly isn't a portmanteau word. The modifying suffix "-ish" is indispensable for relating the element "yeshiva" to the object of the term. People who study in yeshiva are yeshivish and they lend that name to the dialect that they speak. 107.127.46.12 (talk) 02:49, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Etymology of the term yeshivish