Hebrew Slang.

Huh. I’m a native speaker and I had no idea about the double origin of manyak: I figured it was a straight-up borrowing of maniac which had undergone some pejoration. I remember my first-grade teacher berating a kid who’d used the word and telling him he’d “said the worst word in the Hebrew language”, which puzzled me at the time. (I think I went home and asked my mom about it and was told it meant “crazy”, which didn’t seem so bad.) Thirty years later the mystery is solved. There’s an interesting thread about the word here. I wouldn’t say it’s “used in both senses”: it usually means something close to “jerk” or “asshole”, without any implication of mental deficiency.

The article is a bit slipshod, especially about transliteration — why fack but focking when the vowel is the same? And why can’t he make up his mind whether to use kh or ch for [x]? But it’s an interesting read nevertheless.

why fack but focking when the vowel is the same?

And why ck in either one?

I think of manyak as something like ‘perv’ in English, i.e. something sexual and disapproved of.

The two volumes of the Ben Yehuda–Ben Amotz slang dictionary (1982) gives the following, loosely translated: 1. Obsessed with one thing [like a hobby]; “About nature preserves, he’s a total maniac.” 2. Oversexed (derogatorily); “Fucking is all he ever thinks about, that maniac!” 3. Homosexual. “Every Friday night he goes to Independence Park, to the maniacs.” 4. Clever, sly [≈ English ‘bastard’]; “That maniac got an A- on the test without ever studying.”

The same dictionary also gives Ya Manayek, with the Arabic vocative particle. I don’t know if the pronunciation has anything to do with Arabic or if it’s a playful spelling pronunciation. I’ve never heard it. The meanings given are 1. (military) Said after mentioning a long stretch of time which is about to end; “I get released in 129 days, ya manayek!” 2. Affectionately ascribing to a person sexual appetite or cleverness; “I am not bringing my sister to your party, ya manayek!”

And of course, there’s the ever-popular axul manyuk ( < Arabic 'maniac's brother'), 'someone clever or sly', but especially 'great, awesome'; the second volume of the dictionary was titled "An axul manyuki Dictionary of Spoken Hebrew”.

The dictionary was compiled by Netiva Ben-Yehuda (no relation to the other B-Y) and Dan Ben-Amotz, two salty bohemians with no love for academic stuffiness. As such it was groundbreaking in its time, and more complete than anything else. Nevertheless, it is 30 years old, a long time for slang dictionaries. TR’s meaning ‘asshole’ also appears in some net dictionaries, but not in BY-BA.

This skit by Shalom Asayag (in Hebrew) talks about manyak “someone who isn’t OK”; manayek ‘snitch’; minayek “a bit of a snitch and a bit of a piece of shit”; mitnayek, “someone who became a minayek“; and the “nice” manyuk, and his brother, axul manyuk. Some of these must be riffs on the original, as beautiful and as fleeting as wildflowers.

The last paragraph regarding Russian is false. As the example shared by SFReader may suggest, Blyat and Suka (and others) have become more or less commonplace in Hebrew slang, and only since the ’90s.

Oriental and Mizrahi both literally means ‘eastern’. Israeli usage of the English word oriental has not caught on to the connotations of the word elsewhere. ‘Oriental’ appears on restaurant signs and in reference to Mizrahi jews in tourist literature; this widespread usage often startles or confuses visiting anglophones.

I readily forgive the foolish generalisations about UK slang in exchange for the highly quotable generalisation

“The natural tendency of the journalist is to speak and write in platitudes”

(think in platitudes, come to that.)

I like “vus-vus” for “Ashkenazi Jew.” Please, please let it be derived from a supposed tendency of of newly arrived Ashkenazis to wander round saying “Vus? Vus?”

My sense of the meaning of manyak is different from Y’s and from that of the slang dictionary. To me it’s a general word for someone you dislike or disapprove of, who behaves in a mean or antisocial way, etc. Someone who cuts you off in traffic is a manyak. There’s nothing sexual about it. The only one of the dictionary definitions that makes sense to me is the last (“clever, sly”), but only by extension, just like you might say “That son of a bitch got an A on the test without even studying”.

Ya menayek (which is how I’d spell it) sounds completely familiar to me, but I’m actually not sure I know what it means. I have it pegged as a kind of all-purpose exclamation of annoyance, but I could be wrong. I don’t use it myself (as opposed to manyak).

The bit that interested me most was right at the end: the disappearance of initial /h/ in Israeli Hebrew. Does anyone know more about this?

Our friend internet to the rescue: I looked up ‘definition maniac’ (in Hebrew) and came upon a couple of forums where this very question is asked and answered.

At one site, aimed at teenagers, the answers (from 2013) are “sly, clever”; “a bad person”; “the kind who makes out with every girl and a bad person”; “a maniac is a bastard [‘clever, sly’, I think] or messed up [מופרע]”; “a. makes fun of others when he/she is winning. b. tries to trip you up. c. not willing to help without getting something out of it, and then too you risk a knife in your back.”

At the other site, under the topic of “a lawyer has to be a maniac” (2009), one answer is especially clear: “Takes advantage of the niceness or weakness of others, thinks only of himself, doesn’t play by the rules when it’s to his advantage, shamelessly lies when it benefits him, deceives and even cheats to gain advantage, without honesty or integrity, uses others for his purposes.”

To me, these qualities fall under ben zona, ‘son of a whore’. TR, are the two more or less synonyms to you?

Hebrew h>ʔ is not just word-initial. Some people pronounce the h’s, some don’t. I first noticed this in the late 1970s, but it’s become much more prevalent since, in all walks of life, and (if I remember right) even in news broadcasts.

On a related note, I’ve been listening to some Meir Ariel songs ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar7l7Ja-3j0) , and found that he rolls his R’s in Hebrew. At first I assumed that he spoke with a Mizrachi accent, since they seem to pronounce their R’s like Arabs. But it turns out that he is a native Sabra. I’ve never heard another Sabra pronounce R’s this way. Am I wrong?

I long ago noticed the disappearance of initial /h/ in spoken Hebrew, though I don’t know its cause.

Fred Skolnik mentions ‘kafeh hafuch (cappuccino, latte).’ Back in 2007, the recently retired Philologos at The Forward devoted a column to this term, which he calls “upside down coffee” (a literal translation) and traces it to the German expression “verkehrte Kaffee,” which gets a quite respectable 600K ghits, including to a Wiki.de entry whose English counterpart is titled Café au lait.

Y, those definitions pretty much capture my idea of a manyak, yes. And it’s pretty much synonymous with ben zona (at least, in one of the latter’s senses — ben zona can also be strongly positive, although then it’s usually accented as a single word benzona with initial stress). In fact manyak ben zona is a natural extension of manyak.

Lewis Glinert’s 1989 “The Grammar of Modern Hebrew” has zero as the informal reflex of ה

The disappearance of /h/ is extremely prevalent, and indeed not only word-initial. As a case in point, consider מהמם mehammem “astonishing” which is a very popular enhancement adjective. The colloquial /me-a-mem/ has so taken over that its “official” txtspelling is 100מם, using the pronunciation of 100 מאה as /me-a/ for part of the word, following English’s gr8 and a4mentioned (what, that’s not a thing?).

I looked at Rosental’s slang dictionary. It only has the ‘jerk’ sense, going back to the early 1970s, not the ‘perv’ sense. This surprised me, because I’d supposed his dictionary would include everything in the BY-BA and other earlier dictionaries.
manyuk, it says, is the Arabic passive, i.e. ‘fucked’, and also something like ‘fucked up’, referring to a person.

Several decades ago I lived on a kibbutz for a time, where I worked in the garage. Here are a few words I found amusing. I have no idea if these were localized or generally used throughout Israel.

(1) The kibbutz vehicles had headlights whose bulbs had the brandname “shieldbeam.” The masculine plural in Hebrew is formed with the suffix “eem.” Headlights on the kibbutz were generically referred to as “sheelbeem,” and a a single headlight was a “sheelb.”

(2) Farm tractors have a shaft connected to the motor that, when engaged, rotates and drives equipment attached to the tractor (e.g., a mower). This mechanism is called a power-take-off, or PTO. On the kibbutz, it was pronounced as if it were of Russian origin – a “partakoff.”

(3) Instant coffee, heavily sweetened, was very popular. The most common brand was Nescafe. In Hebrew, “nes” means miracle, and the kibbutz members generally referred to instant coffee as “cafe nes” – miracle coffee.

1. I, and most other Israelis I know, use the word Manyak as to describe someone that in American English would be described as a S.O.B. ( Son of a Bitch).
2. The word Mat in Russian means mother. It what comes before it that makes is crude. Yobtfuyumat means something like “I fucked your mom”. In Hebrew we would use the ARABIC curse “Kus emac” (literally “your mother’s cunt” the same way we use yobtfuyumat.
I think the reason we use Arabic and Russian and some other languages curse words in Israel as opposed to Hebrew curse words, is that curse words in Hebrew are scarce and very boring.
The worst curse words I can think of in Hebrew are Ben Zona (S.O.B) and Lech Tizdayen (go fuck yourself). Others, that do not have a sexual context, are Metumtam, idiot, Tipesh (dumb, idiot, stupid).
It is really not much to use when you are furious and want to say something REALLY offensive and volgar.