[late night rambling about Yiddish and Arabic languages I guess]
fun fact: I tend to call both my cats bubala or bubbe which mean different things or the same thing depending on which Google result you believe but it seems both come from Yiddish ... I think? OPEN TO CORRECTIONS HERE LAUGHS
fun fact: I tend to call both my cats bubala or bubbe which mean different things or the same thing depending on which Google result you believe but it seems both come from Yiddish ... I think? OPEN TO CORRECTIONS HERE LAUGHS
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latest #23
But if they did it would make sense
I’ve mentioned this a few times but I grew up in a very heavily Jewish area and to this day there is a LOT of random Yiddish interspersed throughout my vocabulary
which is also how you can tell I come from New Jersey 
On a whim I just tried looking up a term of endearment used for my great grandmother growing up and to my shock I found it!
I never ever knew how it was spelled (or transliterated into English), so I always heard it as Tata
Though pronounced it would be more like “Teh-ta”
“Sitte” was also used though a lot less from what little I can remember... apparently it’s a more formal term of address
Apparently Teta is specific to Lebanese Arabic?
I could only find two spellings of it in actual Arabic and I don’t know how correct they are: تيتي/تيتة
Teta itself is just an affectionate term for grandmother, like grandma or granny in English
Or wait, maybe teta is Syrian? ... which would also make sense, as my family is also Syrian
BOY THIS STUFF ISNT EASY TO FIGURE OUT
but I found another term, one for my great grandpa! Jido.
... OR MAYBE THEYRE NOT SYRIAN? wow this is shockingly hard to figure out, laughs, there’s like a billion different transliterations for every single word
Jido is NOT pronounced how it looks, at least to a native English speaker. It’s more of a ... soft j? or like a hard z? How on earth do I describe that sound lol
I’m getting this:
“In Syrian dialect
Taytay is grandma
Jiddo is grandpa”
And this:
“In the Lebanese dialect:
Grandma: Teta
Grandpa: Jeddo”
“In Syrian dialect
Taytay is grandma
Jiddo is grandpa”
And this:
“In the Lebanese dialect:
Grandma: Teta
Grandpa: Jeddo”
... and many, many more 
WHO KNOWS!!! 
Additional fun facts: so I’ve known for a long time that my like great... great great great etc. grandfather had a statue built in his honor in his home village. What I didn’t know was that the village itself was NAMED after this ancestor of mine?
wait hang on
holy. holy shit it’s true. the great great (great?) grandpa I’ve been hearing about all my life has a dedicated Wikipedia page
Youssef Bey Karam
what is happening rn???? How did I NEVER KNOW THIS??????