spiel

[Charles C Doyle]

The OED gives merely as a variant of the word “spiel” the pronunciation with initial [long-S]  (as if spelled “sh-”).  But doesn’t that pronunciation actually represent a separate lexeme, one specifically evocative of the Yiddish-English counterpart (or derivative) of German or English “spiel”?

I fell to pondering this matter when an excellent student of mine, who is Jewish, wittily referred to a speech in _The Merchant of Venice_ as a “schpeel” (so spelled).

Below is a list of spellings, with the tally of raw Google hits for each.  None of those spellings appear in the OED entry for “spiel” (noun or verb).

Charlie
____________________
shpeel--24,300,000
shpiel--188,000
schpil--169,000
schpeel--145,000
schpiel--116,000
shpil--49,000

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org