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Fun #etymology of the day: Yiddish באקאליינע bakaleyne "grocery store", ultimately from Arabic بقالة biqāla or بقال baqqāl. It was borrowed from Arabic into Persian as بقالی baqqālī, and from there into Tatar and other Turkic languages. But how'd it get to Yiddish? A thread 1/5
The word made its way from Tatar to Slavic langs like Russian бакалея bakaleja (& Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, etc). 1 of these—probably Russian or Ukrainian—is most likely the source of the Yiddish word. But this isn't the only point of contact between Yiddish & Arabic. 2/5
In 1918 a New York-based press published a short textbook teaching colloquial Palestinian Arabic in Yiddish, to serve the needs of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine. You can read all about it here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29785904 3/5
In 1987, the Ahmadi community of Kababir, an Arab neighborhood in Haifa, produced a partial Yiddish translation of the Qur'an. It was commissioned from abroad by Ahmadi leader Mirza Tahir Ahmad; he probably didn't know how marginal Yiddish had become in Israel. 4/5
The translation is titled דער הייליקער קוראן der heyliker kuran, or "The Holy Qur'an" in Yiddish. It's bilingual, with side-by-side text and translation, and is available online: https://www.alislam.org/quran/selected-verses/Yiddish.pdf I doubt it's found many readers, but it deserves a proper study. 5/5
