I’m reading Valentin Kataev’s Алмазный мой венец [My diamond crown (a Pushkin quote)], one of his many novelized memoirs or autobiographical novels or what have you (it’s the fifth I’ve read so far), and I’ve gotten to a point where his Odessite friend Eduard Bagritsky says to his wife “Бенимунис” [benimunis], said to be a “Jewish oath” meaning ‘I swear.’ This didn’t ring any bells, so I googled it and found this discussion (in Russian) by Valery Smirnov, which quotes various sources with various alternative spellings like бенимунес [benimunes], бенамунес [benamunes], бенемунес [benemunes], and бенымуныс [benymunys] but doesn’t explain its origin. Anybody know?
Well, it starts with “be”, which is common enough as an oath beginning (I swear *in* X) but I can’t think of what the X is, although some plausible adaptation could also get those last two letters to be a first-person genetive “my Y”, reducing our swearum to nimun, which is as far as I’m able to go without some serious head scratching.
The Odessa Russian exclamation бенимунис! comes from the Yidish exclamation !בנאמנות (benemones!) ‘on [my] word of honor!’, as pronounced in Southeastern Yidish, where the third vowel is /u/, hence у in Russian.
The other Russian spellings you note (бенимунес, бенамунес, бенемунес, and бенымуныс) all reflect, as expected, that Southeastern Yidish realization of the third vowel.
The Russian government established Odessa in 1795 and during the nineteenth century a growing number of Yidish-speakers settled there, most of them speakers of Southeastern Yidish. The Yidish koine that developed in that city is therefore largely of Southeastern Yidish origin.
It is a toss-up whether Yidish has influenced Odessa Russian or Russian underworld and prisoner cryptolect more.
Maybe from be-emunah בֶּאֱמוּנָה which means with faith or faithfully. Doesn’t explain first n, though
Ok, there seems to be a Hebrew word בְּנֶאֱמָנוּת be-neemanut (tav is realised in Ashkenazi pronunciation as “s”) which GT translates as devotedly, but quick search doesn’t find any wide spread ritual uses.
I’d translate bene’emanut, in Hebrew usage anyhow, as “faithfully”, the way you’d speak of a faithful friend, employee, or dog. I can’t speak for the Yiddish idiomatic usage.
I don’t have any Yiddish to speak of (to my shame, as it probably was both my grandmothers’ native language) but do remember the word from the chorus of Papirosn as sung by the Barry sisters (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTNFm783a4):
Kupitye koyft zhe, koyft zhe papirosn,
trukene fun regn nisht fargozn.
Koyft she bilik benemones,
koyft un hot oyf mir rakhmones,
ratevet fun hunger mikh atsind
To my ear, they pronounce it [benamunes] or thereabouts.
That Barry sisters clip is great!
This is not my kuleana (as the Hawaiians say), but here goes my pure speculation:
Perhaps ‘benemunes’ (or however it is transliterated) is from Yiddish nemen, to take, from German nehmen, to take.
From a Spanish source, Yiddish “a khies benemunes” אַ חיות בנאמנות means “un placer, realmente.” “A khies benemunes” must literally mean “a true pleasure,” so maybe “”a pleasure “taken.”” “Khiyes” (חיות) in Yiddish is “life, livelihood, pleasure.”
http://publicaciones.filo.uba.ar/sites/publicaciones.filo.uba.ar/files/Teatro%20%C3%ADdish%20argentino%20%281930-1950%29_interactivo_0.pdf
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%97%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA
Also, “”af benemunes” [means] (strictly between us),” which can be found in this document by using the FIND feature: http://samlib.ru/h/hejfec_i_b/antisand.shtml Maybe the idea is that it is “taken” that the two people are speaking in confidence.
Benemunes seems to also mean “(knickknacks and) notions.” Maybe little retail notions are somehow “things taken,” but that is pure whimsy on my part. And maybe that’s what the word means in the wonderful song of the Barry sisters (Koyft she bilik benemones = she buys cheap notions?).
https://books.google.com/books?id=YPMeyxDwN4MC&pg=PT99&lpg=PT99&dq=benemunes+jewish+saying&source=bl&ots=Nt1SUTIUcN&sig=ACfU3U1MtcwvauzKsNiuB3w2Hso9wSl9Dg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5r-OqjffvAhXtFjQIHSeWAcUQ6AEwDnoECBcQAw#v=onepage&q=benemunes%20jewish%20saying&f=false
That went far afield, but to your original question: ““Бенимунис” [benimunis], said to be a “Jewish oath” meaning ‘I swear,’” might just literally mean “taken,” as in something like “you can take my word for it!”
Brandon
@ D. P. The song you mention gives another example of how the Yidish exclamation benemones is used – to emphasize the truthfulness of the speaker’s or the writer’s just expressed statement:
קױפֿט זשע ביליק בנאמנות ( koyft zhe bilik benemones)
In a free translation: ‘please buy them, [they’re] cheap – believe me [they’re really cheap]’.
An English equivalent would be “Scout’s honor.”
@ Brandon Stone. You too give an example of how the Yidish exclamation benemones! is used:
אַ חיות בנאמנות (a khies benemones) = a true pleasure, a real pleasure.
The relevant meaning of khies here is the last of the three you mention, ‘pleasure’.
Af benemones means something else: “just between us” or “just between you, me, and the lampshade” or “entre nous.” There is no allusion to secrecy in the Russian word or in Yidish benemones!
@ D. O.
“Maybe from be-emunah בֶּאֱמוּנָה which means with faith or faithfully. Doesn’t explain first n, though.”
True. Nor does it account for the second one or for the /s/.
I cannot find the passage with the word supposedly meaning ‘knickknacks, notions’. It’s probably a word other than benemones, but let’s see it.
Correction. @ D. O. It WOULD account for the second /n/ but it would not account for the first one or for the /s/.
David Gold: Greetings, and thanks for your comments. If you search for “benemunes” in the document at the link below, you should find the lyrics that contain the word, plus the English translation. It appears twice on that page, 98 in the book.
https://books.google.com/books?id=YPMeyxDwN4MC&pg=PT99&lpg=PT99&dq=benemunes+jewish+saying&source=bl&ots=Nt1SUTIUcN&sig=ACfU3U1MtcwvauzKsNiuB3w2Hso9wSl9Dg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5r-OqjffvAhXtFjQIHSeWAcUQ6AEwDnoECBcQAw#v=onepage&q=benemunes%20jewish%20saying&f=false
I think he misread the line from the linked text of Goldfaden, which is translated very loosely: Tselnik! Tselnik! koyft volvl benemunes, ikh zug aykh un leytsunes, translated as “Knicknacks and notions, priced to sell”. I don’t quite understand it: “Peddler! Peddler! Volvl buys honestly, I tell you a joke(???)”
D. Gold. Yes, but Hebrew is a bit like Radio Yerevan. patah-tav is a feminine construct suffix (emunah being a feminine noun) and vav-shuruk-tav is a suffix of some sort as well (Wiki says feminine abstractive, though I cannot see why being firm or faithful is not abstract enough). I don’t know how a noun can acquire prefix nun, but this one apparently did judging by the modern Hebrew word (unless, of course, it’s an Yiddish borrowing). Made a detour through niphal participle?
i was gonna hazard a guess that it’s בײַ מײַן אמנות / [YIVO transliteration] bay mayn emune / “by my faith”, which would have [aː] for the first two vowels for everybody but litvaks.
but then i looked in a dictionary and saw “נאמנות” / “nemones” on its own as “truth, faith”, which makes it “in good faith”, as Y said…
Thank you D.P. for recalling the song “Papirosn” to me… What an earworm! And full of choice expressions like עלנט ווי אַ שטיין elnt vi a shteyn “alone like a stone”…
Did the Yiddish expression originate as Hebrew בְּנֶאֱמָנוּת bəneʾĕmānût (with -בְ b- “in, with”) being used in the meaning “in faith, in all faithfulness”, as in Old French en foi, earlier English i’ faith, yfaith? I also wonder whether there was an equivalent use of a word for “faith, loyalty”, such as triuwe (modern Treue), in Old and Middle High German in a similar expression. (I am recovering from surgery and writing with voice recognition, and using a computer is difficult so I haven’t been able to look.)
Post-Biblical Hebrew נֶאֱמָנוּת neʾĕmānût “trustworthiness, confindence, reliablity” is the abstract noun, derived with the usual abstract noun suffix וּת- -ût, of the Biblical Hebrew adjective נֶאֱמָן neʾĕmān “loyal, faithful, steadfast, true, upright”. This Biblical Hebrew adjective is actually the regular participle (pattern niqṭāl נׅקטׇל niC₁C₂āC₃, with the usual phonological adjustments caused by the guttural aleph) for the I-guttural Hebrew root ʾmn “to be firm, confirmed, reliable, faithful, have faith, believe” in the nifal conjugation. The root ʾmn is also the root in Amen!, Hebrew אָמֵן ʾāmēn “truly, certainly”. This root is not found in Akkadian to my knowledge, but is widespread in West Semitic:
http://sed-online.ru/reconstructions/187
For the sound changes the phrase has undergone on the way to its modern Yiddish form, compare the word that rhymes with בנאמנות benemones in “Papirosn”, which is רחמנות rakhmones, from Hebrew רַחְמָנוּת raḥmānût “mercy, pity”, from רַחֲמָן raḥămān “merciful”. Or an antonym of נאמנות “loyalty, faithfulness” such as Yiddish רמאות ramoes “cheating, fraud, deceit”, from Hebrew רַמָּאוּת rammāʾût.
@xerib
elnt = lonely
I do not know the etymology but the semantics would just about fit with German elend. The German word has a semantic range including miserable, wretched (also as expletive), but its etymology is “from another land”.
Thanks to Xerîb for the handy summary. No n-form of ‘mn in Arabic, but the usage reminds me of ‘amānah أمانة “something entrusted to one to pass on securely; a trust”, which I often hear cited as a supposedly untranslatable Arabic word.
It also happens to be cognate with my name: al-‘amīn “the trustworthy one”
elnt = lonely
PlasticPaddy, you are right of course. I was seduced by the rhythm of “alone as a stone”.
Question:
Is אַליין ווי אַ שטיין aleyn vi a shteyn “alone as a stone” a later remodelling of עלנט ווי אַ שטיין elnt vi a shteyn to make it rhyme in Yiddish (as lonely as a stone sort of does in English)? (I remember encountering alone as a stone 20 years ago at university from students from New York when discussing Yiddish and New York City regional English with them.)
(As for the etymology of עלנט elnt from the family of Old High German elilenti, Middle High German ellende, it must be right, as here:
https://www.dwds.de/wb/elend#etymwb-1
For the final devoicing of the remnant of the element originally meaning “land” in עלנט elnt, I suppose here :
https://books.google.com/books?id=ijVn2KP0FocC&lpg=PA66&dq=%22final%20devoicing%20of%20obstruents%22%20%22feature%20reintroduced%20via%20contact%22&hl=fr&pg=PA66#v=onepage&q=%22final%20devoicing%20of%20obstruents%22%20%22feature%20reintroduced%20via%20contact%22&f=false
in Neil G. Jacobs 2005 Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction, p. 66.)
+eländig/elendig
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elendig
I think that’s a non-starter. In the mirror universe (German), there are indeed two words benehmen*, but there’s nothing remotely similar to -unVs.
Rather, it’s exactly the kind of word I’d expect to be from Hebrew (or perhaps Aramaic of course).
* One, sich benehmen, meaning “behave”, the other existing only as the past participle benommen, which means the same as its cognate “numb”.
“Left alone, left alone, like a stone on the street”, because verlassen and Straße rhyme…
Is אַליין ווי אַ שטיין aleyn vi a shteyn “alone as a stone” a later remodelling of עלנט ווי אַ שטיין elnt vi a shteyn to make it rhyme in Yiddish (as lonely as a stone sort of does in English)?
i wouldn’t be surprised!
“aleyn” can be “alone” in the sense of “lonely”, but i think that sense has gotten stronger under the influence of english. in my mind, the other sense – the one in איך אַלײן “ikh aleyn” / “i myself” – is the more usual one in older material (and frustratingly often gets translated as if it were the other sense, into “only me”, which would be נאָר איך “nor ikh”).
@rozele
Thank you for your thoughts on this question. Have you noticed any other interesting convergence toward English in Yiddish used in North America?
…or maybe it was always there because there’s no separate word for “lonely” in Bavarian?
there’s no separate word for “lonely” in Bavarian
Uh-oh, looks like there’s no easy way to translate the lyrics of “Only The Lonely” (Orbison) into Bavarian. Or does Alloa d Alloanigs [vel sim] grab you ?
Volvl isn’t a name; it means “cheap”, or so says Google Translate (קויפט וואלוול). “koyft volvl, benemunes” = “Buy cheap, honestly!”
I think the joke is the following parts of the stanza: “ver s’vet veln tayer, der zol brenen in fayer!”
Maybe something like “If my prices are higher, may I burn in fire!”?
Possibly not too distant from “…and that’s cutting me own throat!” Hotsmakh is maybe a Dibbler?
I think this is the actual book that the bits transliterated were taken from, although I can’t quite find the full exact thing, Page 38 in the PDF (numbered 36 on the page image) is where the bit with the selling needles to the girl starts, which looks like the best match.
The only way to render this is with a whole extra clause*: nur die, die** allein sind instead of nur die Einsamen. In my dialect allein sind comes out as [aˈlãsan], farther west or more conservatively it’s [aˈlo͠ɐ̯san] as you say.
* That happens a lot, actually.
** or was or die was… but not wo, that’s Alemannic.
I think the joke is the following parts of the stanza: “ver s’vet veln tayer, der zol brenen in fayer!”
Maybe something like “If my prices are higher, may I burn in fire!”?
I don’t know what s’vet means, but based on German it’s more like “(the one) who s’vet to choose expensive, (he) will burn in fire”.
@hans
Veln = wollen
So I would suggest “wer es wird teuer sein wollen, der soll in Feuer verbrennen” , i.e., “wer es teuer verkaufen will, der soll…”
I had the idea that it was shvitz, sweat, meant metaphorically. So maybe, again loosely:
“If you’re hot for prices higher, go burn in fire”.
I took s’vet to be “es vert”. There is a convention seen also in ch’vel where the short/unaccented vowel is dropped from the pronoun and the whole thing is treated as a unit with the single quote showing a “word division”.
@PlasticPaddy:
I think you’re right, now that I look at the page of the book I sent more closely. The text reads:
“און װער עס װעט”, with word breaks, just before it trails off, which I would transliterate as “un ver es vet“.
I’m wondering if maybe the version first posted was transcribed from a recorded performance, with less enunciation between common phrases.
Perhaps I’m coming in a bit late with this (two and a half years late), but here goes: the “un” in “un leytsunes” means “without,” like Ger. “ohne”: thus, “I tell you without joking.”
“Leytsunes” is ultimately from BHeb “letz” (“scoffer”), cf. Psalm 1:1.
You read it here first.
There’s no such thing as “late” around here — thanks for that!
“un” in “un leytsunes” means “without,” like Ger. “ohne”: thus, “I tell you without joking.”
My first Hebrew words ! Knowing German, I should find the rest a breeze. Unless that’s Yiddish, in which case I’m back to square one.
People do say that the German language and the Hebrew language is very guttural tongues.
The sounds is all guttural do you understand.
I’ve never noticed. Possibly because my mind is always in the guttur.
By the way, Yiddish “un” (pronounced “oon,” as in “cartoon”; same word as “ohne”) figures in the following very old interlingual joke:
Aquí está una mesa.
Spanish: here is a table.
A ki est un a messer.
Galizianer Yiddish: a cow eats without a knife.
(No Hebrew-derived words here, all Germanic.)
***
One can be confused, in Yiddish texts, by “un” standing for “und” vs. “un” standing for “ohne/without”; the two are pronounced differently (short u / long u) but written the same. “Un” for “und” can turn into “in” in Yiddish dialects with the u-to-i vowel shift; cf. “ki” for German “Kuh,” above. The u in “un” for “ohne” is the result of a different vowel shift and does not undergo this one.
Though I am not a,Yiddish dialectologist, I think it is fair to draw a parallel between these Yiddish vowel shifts and those found in the geographically coterminous Slavic languages: see, for example, Russian “L’vov” (the city) vs. Ukrainian “L’viv” vs. Polish “Lwów” (with an “ooh” sound).
Very interesting!
Looks like a sequence: first u-to-i, then o-to-u.
But assuming the opposite sequence for Ukrainian still can’t make sense of its extra-strange o-to-i shift: it had an u all along, which didn’t shift…