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Talk:הייראַט

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Latest comment: 8 years ago by Kolmiel in topic Etymology

Etymology

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@Kolmiel, Metaknowledge: Possibly borrowed from German? Otherwise I would have thought it should have been *הײַראַט (*hayrat). Raphael says it's "not recommended", which could mean he saw it as a Germanism. --WikiTiki89 18:57, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Wikitiki89: Thanks for noticing. Actually not even just *hayrat, but *hayrot (OHG -ā- > Yid. -o-). So yes, looks very much like it, even though the word means only "wedding" in contemporary German. Kolmiel (talk) 19:18, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
Good point. I don't know the exact range of meanings in Yiddish. This is why I hate one-word definitions like "marriage". It could just mean "wedding", but I don't know. --WikiTiki89 19:24, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
To be precise, German Heirat means “marrying" or "conclusion of a marriage”, thus neither "wedding party" (Hochzeit), nor "married life" (Ehe). -- I still think borrowing from German is likely given that there are two phonetic irregularities in a single word. (Plus the "not recommonded" note you mentioned.) Kolmiel (talk) 21:38, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
"Conclusion of marriage" sounds like divorce... But I know that's not what you meant. I assume you mean the part of the wedding when the marriage "takes effect" or becomes "official", or perhaps the entirety of the actual "ceremony" part, but not including the festivities. Although, de:Heirat says "festliches Ereignis, bei dem ...", which I understand as the entire wedding ceremony. Anyway, what I was trying to say before, is that it's very possible that the Yiddish word has the same exact meaning as the German word, because the dictionaries are not precise enough for me to tell and I'm not good enough at reading Yiddish to determine the precise connotations of the word by going through the Google Books results. --WikiTiki89 21:57, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Wikitiki89: Sorry for my bad gloss. (You do say "to conclude a contract", right? The same verb, schließen, is used in German, hence my mistake.) What I meant is basically, the "act of marrying", "becoming married", "marrying". The German wiktionary definition seems wrong. Of course, marrying is almost always done in a "solemn event", but it doesn't take that for a Heirat to take place. People just have to be married. Kolmiel (talk) 22:20, 20 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
PS: Duden's definition is more correct. It says "das Eingehen, Schließen einer Ehe; eheliche Verbindung" ("the entering, contracting [if that works] of a marriage; marital commitment"). If you want to stress that there's a party, your word is Hochzeit. ("Heirat" and "Hochzeit" can be synonyms but their focus is different.) Kolmiel (talk) 22:29, 20 July 2016 (UTC)Reply