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The pronunciation for "spiel" allows for either "speel" or "shpeel". The "shpeel" pronunciation is significantly more common where I live (American Midwest) and I'm curious why "spiel" didn't get the same "sh" or "sch" spelling that many other words with a Yiddish influence did:
There are many other examples but I don't see any other examples of the "sh" sound turning into just an "s".
As others have mentioned, spiel may actually be derived from German Spiel rather than, or in addition to, Yiddish shpil.
In German, syllable-initial /ʃ/ (the "sh" sound) is written with the trigraph <sch> before <r>, <l>, <m> and <n> (i.e. letters that represent resonants), but with the single letter <s> before the letters <t> and <p> (i.e. letters that represent plosives). I think this explains why we don't see /ʃ/ represented by <s> in words such as schlep, schlock, schmooze. German words spelled with <st> and <sp> are generally anglicized in English pronunciation to have /st/ and /sp/ (e.g. see this question about Einstein).
Yiddish romanization is considerably less standardized than German orthography, but in general, /ʃ/ is represented by <sh> in all contexts, including syllable-initial <sht> <shp>. There are some variant spellings used in English that have <scht>, such as "schtick" (a variant spelling of shtick); I didn't find any commonly used word spelled with <schp>, but people certainly might use that for non-standardized transcriptions of Yiddish words.
Spiel derives from German spielen not from American Yiddish like the other terms you mention (boldface mine):
- "glib speech, pitch," 1896, probably from verb (1894) meaning "to speak in a glib manner," earlier "to play circus music" (1870, in a German-American context), from German spielen "to play," from Old High German spilon (cognate with Old English spilian "to play"). The noun also perhaps from German Spiel "play, game."
Source: Etymonline
Wiktionary hints at a possible relation with the Yiddish term shpil from which probably the alternative pronunciation originates:
- From the German Spiel (“game, performance”), perhaps via Yiddish שפּיל (shpil). Cognate with Old English spilian (“to revel, play”).
JOSH's answer resolves the central question posed by MrHen. With regard to similar words adopted from German into English without inclusion of an h in the anglicized spelling, perhaps the closest match to spiel is spritz. Here is the entry for that word in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003):
spritz \'sprits, 'shprits\ vb {G fr. spritzen} (1902) : spray ~ vi : to disperse or apply a spray
According to Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yinglish (1989) there is a Yiddish-English form of spritz, and he spells it with an h (shpritz):
shpritz (verb and noun) shpritzer (noun) Yinglish. From German/Yiddish: spritzen: "to sprinkle," "to spray," "to squirt."
Rosten doesn't list a Yiddish/English equivalent form of spiel. However, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fifth edition (2011) cites the Yiddish shpil (derived from Middle High German spil) as a possible direct source of spiel in English:
spiel (spēl, shpēl) Informal n. A lengthy or extravagant speech or argument usually intended to persuade. intr. & tr.v. spieled, spieling, spiels To talk or say something at length or extravagantly. {German, play, or Yiddish, shpil, both [from] Middle High German spil [from] Old High German.}
The Eleventh Collegiate dates spiel in English to 1870 and gives only one pronunciation for it: \'spēl\ . This surprises me because I have heard \'shpēl\ frequently enough to think of it as a common alternative pronunciation. Likewise the Eleventh Collegiate says that the second syllable of the curling term bonspiel is pronounced \'spēl\ (not \'shpēl\ )—although it certainly was pronounced with a sh sound in Calgary, Alberta, in the early 1970s, when I lived there. In any case, Merriam-Webster thinks that bonspiel, may be derived from Dutch bond (league) + spel (game); this word's first known occurrence in English is ca. 1770, so it has been in the language much longer than the standalone German-derived spiel.
Any discussion of English spiel should disregard Yiddish, which is irrelevant to its etymology. The word comes solely from German.
For details, see pages 563-570 of David L. Gold's Studies in Etymology and Etiology (With Emphasis on Germanic, Jewish, Romance, and Slavic Languages).
