Already covered in the post below.
No disagreement there.
Actually, Yiddish comes from the German of the middle Middle Ages, not the early Middle Ages-- from a German more comparable to Chaucer’s English, than to the English of Beowulf.
Also, Yiddish speaking communities usually gave children Yiddish names, not Hebrew names. Lots of Yiddish names are derived from Hebrew names, and some are so close, they are essentially just variants in pronunciation. But a few are fairly different.
There are quite a number of Yiddish names that nonetheless, do end in “el,” because the Hebrew name did, but a Hebrew name with “el” is stressed on that syllable, while a Yiddish name usually is not.
I can’t tell you how a first-language Yiddish speaker hears the “el” in Yiddish names, but you can further form a diminutive by adding an “e” to the end. I get called “Rivkele” sometimes. And a boy named “ye-CHEZ-kel,” the Yiddish version of “ye-chez-KEL,” (Ezekiel) might get called Yechezkele.
There are other things he might get called as a diminutive, but no one seems to think it’s a slight to the almighty to say Yechezkele. And it’s more common in Orthodox families than any other.
That’s what I learned when I was a kid.
My WAG is that the Yiddish -el was a reduced form of the suffix -lein. My Swiss friend was named Kleisli and he told me that that was the Swiss form for little Klaus. The -li suffix is fairly common in Swiss German similar to the -l suffix in Austrian.
The link I posted earlier agrees with you for both modern German and Yiddish
As in English, common names have accepted dimunitives. Little Samuel would be “Shmulik”, while little Rachel would be “Racheli”.
It does get me wondering … is there possibly any validity to the OP’s thought after all?
I can imagine the “el” ish suffix being used some in the common parent German and it becoming attractive as a children’s name modifier partly due to an appreciated double meaning play to those who also knew Hebrew, my little baby from God?
I see no reason why -el couldn’t hold multiple meanings. The added significance of it being a homonym to a Hebrew word, very well could’ve impacted it’s usage in Yiddish (a language that drew heavily from Hebrew).
If the OP can make such a connection, surely Yiddish speakers (who were very familiar with Hebrew) could’ve drew similar connections too.
And there is a long tradition of puns in Hebrew names…
Examples?
Start in the beginning …
There’s also the fact that for more than a millennium, women were not taught Hebrew, and once Yiddish & Ladino replaced Aramaic as the “Jewish” languages, women spoke either Yiddish/Ladino only, or Yiddish/Ladino, and maybe the surrouding vernacular (Polish, Russian, Magyar, French, Galician, whatever).
Yes, mentioning Ladino is a digression, since diminutives in Ladino isn’t really relevant-- but not all Jews in the diaspora spoke Yiddish, and yet were not speaking Hebrew, and I want to account for them.
Then, there is the fact that whatever ideal we might wish, women did nearly all the childcare. In Jewish culture, men actually stepped in and spent a lot of time with their sons once they (the sons) were about 8 or 9, compared to the surrounding gentiles, but it hardly amounted to parity.
Anyway, the result of which was that the parent most often bestowing a diminutive did not know Hebrew. (Nor Aramaic, in which “El” also means God.)
At least for the period beginning the European disapora, until the very beginnings of Zionism, about a generation after the founding of Reform Judaism.
So, from about 700CE to 1900CE, to use round figures. So it might actually be irrelevant to talk about the coincidence of “el” the diminutive vs. “El” the deity, since those bestowing diminutives may not have been aware of it.
OTOH, there was a certain amount of crypto-Hebrew naming going on in locales where Jews weren’t allowed to give Hebrew/biblical names. For example, Einstein and Eisenstein stood in as a secret rendering of Isaac.
Did I miss the mention of Jor-El and Kal-El?
And who can forget Mon-El? So Hebrew and Yiddish and Kryptonian.
Shirley, this is no coincidence.
It can’t be.
And I’ve asked you not to call me, surely.
It should be noted that Yiddish and German are somewhere between being different languages and being dialects of one language. This is actually fairly common among the languages of the world. After all, what happens when two varieties of a language drift apart because one is spoken by one group of people and the other is spoken by another group of people isn’t that they each change enough to become clearly different dialects and then suddenly they turn into different languages in one blinding flash. There is no clear distinction between being different dialects and different languages. Yiddish and German are examples of this lack of distinction. Speakers of one of them can sort of understand the other with some difficulty.
“El” as a syllable meaning “God” comes from a Semitic root, “-el” as a diminutive suffix has a Germanic, i.e. Indo-European, origin. Both have had influence on Yiddish, but there’s surely no etymological connection between the two.
This Northwestern German native speaker understands Yiddish better than some Southern German, Austrian or Swiss dialects.