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One of the Israeli prime ministers was strongly criticized for saying Shmorocco in a debate: and he would have been speaking Hebrew rather than Yiddish, so either it has been taken up into Modern Hebrew from Yiddish, or it was Hebrew to begin with.
I don't know of any basis for it in Ancient Hebrew. That is, I can't think of a grammatical explanation for it: it looks like a sound-symbolic thing. There are so many variously derogatory terms in sh + consonant (shlemiel, shnook, shlepper, shlemozzle, shnozzola, shmuck, shmoe, etc. etc.) that it looks like a prefix. I don't know enough Hebrew to see whether there's any common pattern in forming these.
One thing. The Biblical relative pronoun is 'asher, but there was apparently a short form sh. I've never seen it in the Bible so perhaps it was a later formation, a contraction of 'asher. In Modern Hebrew it forms a possessive 'of' when combined with l- 'to': i.e. the prefix shl- 'of' comes from 'which-is-to-'. This suggests that the sound-symbolic sh- forms might have arisen in a similar way.
Afterthought. I gather Begin (or whoever it was) just said Shmorocco instead of Morocco, i.e. no reduplication. It was this departure from the familiar Yiddish idiom that attracted my attention.
Entire Thread Subject Posted By Posted Max Quordlepleen 06/13/01 08:25 AM Re: Help! Schmelp of troy 06/13/01 12:31 PM Re: Help! Schmelp WhitmanO'Neill 06/14/01 05:14 AM Re: Help! Schmelp doc_comfort 06/14/01 05:48 AM Re: Help! Schmelp Faldage 06/14/01 11:04 AM Re: Help! Schmelp tsuwm 06/14/01 03:24 PM Re: Help! Schmelp inselpeter 06/16/01 03:23 PM Re: Help! Schmelp tsuwm 06/16/01 04:45 PM Re: Help! Schmelp NicholasW 06/18/01 10:36 AM Re: Help! Schmelp maverick 06/18/01 11:35 AM Re: Help! Schmelp Flatlander 02/13/02 04:11 PM Re: Help! Schmelp Keiva 02/13/02 04:25 PM Re: Help! Schmelp Capital Kiwi 02/17/02 09:32 AM Re: Help! Schmelp Keiva 02/17/02 11:30 AM
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