Happy New Year

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“Guten Rutsch!” Or “ Happy New Year!” Or “Rutsch guet über!” (In Switzerland) is a New Year's Eve or New Year's greeting that is widespread in German-speaking countries : the person addressed is wished that he or she can get into the new safe and sound Year may come. The greeting can be proven from around 1900.

There are alternative explanations for the origin of the phrase. On the one hand, the view that this saying was of Yiddish origin and that it got into German through the conveyance of Rotwelschen . Another explanatory approach arises from the transferred meaning of the verb "slide" as "travel", which can already be found in older dictionaries, and the nouns "the slide" and "the slide" for "traveling" or "a journey".

To the origin of "journey" or "journey"

In the German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm , in addition to the explanations for the verb “slide” as “to move gliding”, “of voluntary and involuntary sliding” or “crawling”, there are also the freer uses of the word “because I slide away” and "Sunday slipping onto the land" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and under the lemma anrutschen the phrase "I will next time with her is slips come", the "travel" to the most jocular use of the word within the meaning of or direct "drive". Johann Andreas Schmeller offers further evidence of this transferred meaning in his Bavarian Dictionary from 1836, which under the lemma slip among other things "Irgend woin slip, in jest: drive. On Feyer's days, lively Munich likes to slide onto Bering or into Hesselloh ”notes.

For the feminine “the slide”, the Grimms also use the phrase “happy slide” to mean “journey” or “ride”. According to Küpper, the word has been used in this form since 1800, and he also specifies “to go on slide” for “to travel” for the 19th century.

The masculine form “der Rutsch” can be found, for example, in the phrase “good (happy) slide” for “good trip” from 1820. Since 1850, dialect for Saxony , Thuringia and Berlin has also meant “to make a slide” "For" take a little trip ". Since the 19th century, “the slide” has stood for a short journey or a shorter journey, whereby the “slide” referred to with the verb “slide” probably initially referred to a ride in a sledge and was later transferred to the train journey ; Küpper therefore suspects that the wish “Happy New Year” for the good transition into the New Year should imply “effortlessly” gliding over “like on a sledge”. Röhrich expresses himself in a similar way: “It is based on the idea of ​​slow, almost imperceptible gliding over” and adds that the wish is also shortened with “Come over there!”.

To the origin from the Rotwelschen

Siegmund A. Wolf gave in his book German crooks language. Dictionary of the Rotwelschen , the New Year's Eve greeting “Guten Rutsch” is a corruption of the Hebrew ראש השנה טוב Rosh hashanah tov, literally “a good head (beginning) of the year”; from this it is “distorted the otherwise pointless 'happy new year!' Happy new year". As a source he gives “1956 berl. mdl. “. Since his source for "Rosch ha schono - Neujahr" was Adolf Friedrich Thiele's work The Jewish crooks in Germany, their tactics, their peculiarities and their language (Berlin 1840), which - according to Wolf himself - "has the strongest anti-Semitic tendency" and before all of them contain purely Yiddish vocabulary, it is not entirely clear which words Thiele had taken from "genuinely Yiddish and which he had taken from the Rotwelsch linguistic material". In favor of Wolf's derivation, however, the fact that the Yiddish “rosch” as “Rosch” for “head” and “Rusch” for “Commendant” were already widespread in Rotwelschen around the middle of the 18th century would speak .

In 2002 Walter Röll put forward reasons based on phonetic and linguistic pragmatism against Wolf's thesis . First of all - according to Röll - the West Yiddish name for the Jewish New Year is rausch haschono / -ne or rauschaschone / -scheschone and not rosch haschana, because the latter is Sephardic and is considered an upscale language. In addition, the "phonetic distance between 'rausch' and 'Rutsch' [...] is quite large", and for reasons of linguistic history an older form of the word is also excluded, because "the diphthongization of / o: / to / ou / is [... ] was already spoken before 1500 ”. Another objection to Wolf arises for Röll from the fact that not only do the dates of the Christian and Jewish New Year celebrations not coincide, but also that the Yiddish names for the Jewish and Christian holidays are different. Carl Wilhelm Friedrich's dictionary of teaching in the Jewish language (Prenzlau 1784) says that the New Year of Christians was called schone chadosche (literally new year ), while the New Year of Jews was called rosch haschone (“the beginning of the year”). Even Johann Heinrich Callenberg testify in his Jewish Germans words book ... (Hall 1736) that the New Year's wish against Christians beautiful chadosche ( "God grant you a happy new year") was, and so asks Röll how "in dealing with non-Jews out of a desire the Christian “schone chadosche” is said to have turned into a “happy new year”.

Motif

In 2002, together with Simon Neuberg, Walter Röll proposed a different approach than the linguistic one to clarify the origin of the New Year's wish: Based on the fact that neither the Grimms in their German dictionary nor Daniel Sanders in his dictionary of the German language (Leipzig 1876) use the expression “ Guten Rutsch ”, the New Year's greeting could not be expected to emerge until around 1900, and a multiplier in the form of a“ leading medium ”may have contributed to its spread. According to Neuberg and Röll, this could have been the picture postcard that began to spread around 1890/1895. After the turn of the 20th century, the market for "openly sent congratulations ... explosively" increased, and a frequent motif for New Year's greetings was, among other things, the "Happy New Year". Neuberg and Röll assume that "if you search patiently" you should also find picture postcards from the beginning of the 20th century on which the "picture motif 'Happy New Year' is also verbalized".

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Happy New Year  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: happy new year  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Heinz Küpper: Dictionary of German colloquial language , 1st edition, 6th reprint. Stuttgart / Munich / Düsseldorf / Leipzig 1997, p. 684, Lemmata Rutsch I and Rutsch II .
  2. ↑ As an example: What is slipping on or on S / y / i / lvester? Onion fish .
  3. ↑ slide. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 14 : R - skewness - (VIII). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1893, Sp. 1568 f . ( woerterbuchnetz.de ). ; For the "applications in free use" see under II, 1), c).
  4. ↑ slide on. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 1 : A - Beer whey - (I). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1854, Sp. 432 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  5. ^ Johann Andreas Schmeller: Bavarian Dictionary , Part 3, Stuttgart, Tübingen 1836, column 191, Lemma slip .
  6. ↑ slide, f. 3). In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 14 : R - skewness - (VIII). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1893, Sp. 1568 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  7. ^ A b Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of proverbial speeches , Volume 4, 4th edition Freiburg, Basel, Vienna 1999, p. 1266, Lemma Rutsch .
  8. ^ Siegmund A. Wolf: German crooks language. Dictionary des Rotwelschen , unchanged reprint of the 2nd edition from 1985, Hamburg 1993, p. 269, number 4633 Rosch .
  9. ^ Siegmund A. Wolf: German crooks language. Dictionary des Rotwelschen , unchanged reprint of the 2nd edition from 1985, Hamburg 1993, p. 19.
  10. ↑ a b Hansjörg Roth: “Guten Rutsch!” In: Jiddistik Mitteilungen , No. 28, November 2002, pp. 12–15.
  11. ↑ a b c Walter Röll: Happy New Year? In: Yiddistik Mitteilungen , No. 27, April 2002, pp. 14-16.
  12. ↑ a b Simon Neuberg, Walter Röll: Comments on the "Guten Rutsch"; in: Yiddistik Mitteilungen No. 28 / November 2002, pp. 16-19.
  13. ↑ Simon Neuberg, Walter Röll: Comments on the "Guten Rutsch" . In: Yiddistik Mitteilungen , No. 28, November 2002, pp. 16-19 with a quote from The history of the open postcard . ( Memento from January 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive )