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Originally Posted by Alex Linder
Thanks, Karl. You know, I have looked this up repeatedly, and I swear to you, I never see hondel/hondle anywhere, it's always handel. Lots of jews are named Handelman.
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I am not surprised: Handelmann is probably just the name the Germans gave them and they adopted it as a surname as that was their primary function (such as it was) in European society.
Yiddish doesn't tend to translate literally into surnames as a rule of thumb, but the closeness of a Yiddish word to a gentile name or occupation usually means the surname is held to have a dual origin in Yiddish and the original German.
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I don't know how regularized yiddish is anyway.
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Not massively, but it does have a system of recognized usage. That said it is a dying language anyway as it probably has its origins as a kind of argot (of which jews have several others e.g. Ladino [Spanish + Hebrew] and Leshon Hakmeh ['Language of the Wise']) to prevent gentiles understanding what the jews are discussing and saying. Now they have (modern) Hebrew (aka Sabra) there is no need to actually speak the language beyond using ideas and terms from it.
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But you're right, the dictionaries say hondel. I swear I've seen handl, but I may be wrong.
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Handl is another way of spelling it from the 17th century with a slightly different connotation (if you ask me) see:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1...iddish&f=false
(The above summarizes the difference between the German and Yiddish conceptions of the term btw.)