From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!uwvax!solomon
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: It"s OK by me.
Article-I.D.: crystal.163
Posted: Sat Feb 19 09:04:59 1983
Received: Sun Feb 20 07:32:49 1983

A recent item in this group contained the following:

	I think that "comprise" has aquired[sic] its new meaning through confusion
	with "compose", since the sentence:

		"The computer comprises a processor, memory, and peripherals."

	is okay by me.

Have you ever wondered about the colloquial usage "by me" to mean
"in my opinion"?  I strongly suspect the phrase comes from Yiddish.
Yiddish contains a word pronounced the same as the English words "by"
and "buy" (Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, but the usual
transliteration would render the word as "bey" or "bei") which translates
directly to the French "chez", but seems to have no simple English equivalent.
About the closest we can get is "at the home of".  For example, the
Yiddish "bey mir" corresponds to the French "chez moi", the
Danish "hos mej", or the English "at my place".  I maintain (without
good direct evidence) that native speakers of Yiddish simply "translated"
"bey" to "by", since "by" is a good English word, expresses roughly the
same idea, and doesn't require the speaker to restructure his sentence.
(Yiddish word order is much closer to English than German is.)