This is an old revision of this page, as edited by CopyToWiktionaryBot (talk | contribs) at 09:22, 10 February 2007 (Robot: Automated text replacement (-\{\{ocab-stub(.*?)}} +{{TWCleanup}})). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 09:22, 10 February 2007 by CopyToWiktionaryBot (talk | contribs) (Robot: Automated text replacement (-\{\{ocab-stub(.*?)}} +{{TWCleanup}}))(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Yenta (יענתּאַ) from the Yiddish Yente, a back-formation from the woman's name Yente, alteration of Yentl, from Old Italian Gentile, from gentile, amiable, highborn, from Latin gentīlis, of the same clan. Despite its higher origins, today yenta is used as a descriptive term for a gossipy woman; a blabbermouth who can't keep a secret, a woman who spreads rumors and scandal and gladly gives advice whether or not one even wants it, and is sometimes used to refer to a woman who is a matchmaker.
Yenta doesn't have anything necessarily to do with match-making; in fact, the Yiddish word for matchmaker is shadchan, not yenta, yet it does have that usage in both social and cybersocial contexts; it is used often in that manner. Yenta is the name of the matchmaker in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. This is something of an erroneous association, since matchmakers in traditional Eastern European Jewish shtetls were men, and the match was settled between the fathers. The original stories of Sholom Aleichem, from which Fiddler on the Roof is based, have all the matchmakers as men.
The name Yenta has also been applied, perhaps somewhat erroneously, to matchmaking websites and matchmaking software, and it is the name of the Linux CardBus controller driver, which brings together Cardbus cards with the rest of the computer. Yenta, apart from the popular dating context, is also a highly developed peer-to-peer coalition-formation computing system that autonomously determines users' interests and then automatically forms discussion groups, in which users who share one or more interests may send secure real-time messages to each other, either one-to-one or in groups. The system was originally developed as part of Leonard Foner's doctoral dissertation at the MIT Media Lab's Software Agents group and his patented method and system for constructing a knowledge profile of users comprising both a public and private data base of a computer users profile.
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