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Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by nsajko on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @02:29AM (#40437923)
Fun fact: that's actually a Yiddish word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frajer

English translation: dope, sucker. As in there's a sucker born every minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by eigenket on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @02:50AM (#40438036)
Fun fact: according to the etymology I could find online it's actually originally a German word (meaning client of a prostitute) that was borrowed by Yiddish, then borrowed in turn by Polish from Yiddish and also ended up in a couple of other European languages.
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by tokai on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @03:44AM (#40438353)
Yiddish is a German language.
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by eigenket on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @04:25AM (#40438647)
Not exclusively. It has elements from Hebrew and Aramaic (of course) as well as from various Slavic languages. A big chunk of it derives from High German but not all.
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by gumby on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @10:00AM (#40441107)
What tokai said was OK: English is also classified as a Germanic language even though it includes a lot of French words, not to mention Hindi etc.

For that matter, a German word like „Dolmetsch“ doesn’t make German a Turkic language.

Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by eigenket on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @10:49AM (#40441700)
I think calling something a Germanic language is a bit different to calling it a German language.

I completely agree with your point about a "Germanic language" but I disagree about "a German language".

Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by tokai on Friday May 24, 2024 @01:13PM (#40468263)
It developed from High German with elements of Aramaic and Hebrew, in the area we would now call west Germany. The only way it's not a German language is if you deny the historic and linguistic roots of the language.
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by eigenket on Saturday May 25, 2024 @02:02AM (#40472942)
It did not develop exclusively from high German, as I wrote before and it was geographically widespread enough for clear Eastern vs Western dialects to emerge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_dialects#Eastern_Yiddi...

Rather than existing "in the area we would now call west Germany" as you would like to believe for some reason. Eastern Yiddish in particular is much more than "a German language" (unless you want to call Polish a German language as well).

Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by phreeza on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @02:50AM (#40438038)
Similar word also exists in standard German, where it originally meant "f*cker" but now just means a man who buys services from a prostitute.
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by rurban on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @03:36AM (#40438300)
Freier is not F*cker, just someone who needs to pay for sex, and is more independent then
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by phreeza on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @03:43AM (#40438347)
No it more likely comes from archaic "freien", which still is used for "to marry" but used to mean something slightly different ;)
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by fransje26 on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @04:09AM (#40438521)
They still use a variant of that word in Dutch: vrijen. With the old meaning.. ;)
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by actionfromafar on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @09:07AM (#40440470)
The even older meaning is "courter".
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by verisimi on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @02:53AM (#40438054)
Also, 'chutzpah' which has a sense of being proud of trying to get away with it, unashamed.
Re:Scandal at America's top science fair by alex-korr on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @09:51PM (#40449471)
The word is widely used in Russian as well.