Maloche

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Maloche colloquially describes " hard work ". The word goes in Hebrew מְלָאכָה( m e lā (') ḵā (h) - meläkä ), "work", in Ashkenazi pronunciation malōchō, back. Like many other Yiddisms , it found its way into everyday German via West Yiddish and Rotwelsche , where it has been attested since the 18th century .

The "big" Duden took up the term Maloche in 1987 and defined its use as casual for "[heavy] work". According to Hans Peter Althaus , the Rotwelschen Meloche, Melouche, Maloche, Maloge were used between 1822 and 1922 for "work, employment, trade, craft", the corresponding verb has been documented since 1750 and meant "work, do, do, manufacture, write". In the South Hessian dictionary , the verb forms melochen, melachen, malochen were defined as "hard work, work hard"; a Melochem as someone who does low work. Hermann Fischer referred to the crook language in his Swabian dictionary and named "plundering" and "harassment" as additional meanings. Other sources that assume a Yiddish origin, for example, refer to the craft boy as a meloche pen . In Thuringia in 1786 Melooche stood for “confusion”, in the Rhineland Malochem was recorded for “hard work”, but also “bad luck, bad luck” as a takeover from the language of the Jews. The use for “artifice” in the Brandenburg-Berlin dictionary from 1980 is not clearly documented according to Althaus.

The significance of hard physical exertion was spread among others by Upper Silesian miners, who had adopted the term from Polish Jews, in the coal mining areas of the Ruhr area . Today the term is mainly perceived as a typical Ruhr German word .

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: Maloche  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hans Peter Althaus : Chuzpe, Schmus & Tacheles: Yiddish word stories. CH Beck , 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-51065-6 , pp. 68/69, books.google.de .
  2. ^ A b Hans Peter Althaus: Zocker, Zoff & Zores. Yiddish words in German, CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2002, p. 47 f., Books.google.de
  3. ↑ Peter Heisch: The bitter-sweet burden of work. Notes on the topic of work in common usage. In: Sprachspiegel. Edited by the Swiss Association for the German Language (SVDS), 62 (2006), pp. 108–113 ( digitized version ).
  4. ↑ Ruhrdeutsch disappears from everyday life . In: DerWesten.de , June 26, 2011, published in the NRZ .