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Yiddish grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yiddish grammar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The morphology of the Yiddish language bears many similarities to that of German, with some influence from Slavic languages and Hebrew.

Contents
1 Nouns 2 Article 3 Adjectives 4 Pronouns 5 Verbs 5.1 Conjugation 5.2 Past participle 6 References

Nouns
Yiddish nouns are classified into one of three genders: masculine (zokher), feminine (nekeyve) and neuter (neytral). To a large extent, the gender of a noun is unpredictable, though there are some regular patterns. Nouns denoting specifically male humans and animals are usually masculine, and nouns denoting specifically female humans and animals are usually feminine; nouns ending in an unstressed schwa are usually feminine. Nouns built on most of the common abstract-noun suffixes, such as -ung and -hayt , are feminine; diminutive nouns with the suffix -l are neuter in the standard language. Loanwords are generally assigned masculine gender by default unless they end in a schwa, in which case they are usually feminine. There are three cases in Yiddish: nominative, accusative and dative. The nominative case generally refers to the subject, the accusative to the direct object and the dative to an indirect object. Nouns themselves are normally not inflected for case, and case is indicated by the inflection of a related definite article or adjective. In a few situations, case inflection of the noun is optional or obligatory, including certain kinship terms (tate 'father', mame 'mother') and the words yid 'Jew' and harts 'heart'. In those cases, masculine nouns take the ending - -n in the accusative and dative singular, and feminine and neuter nouns take - -n only in the dative singular. Yiddish does not have a genitive case, and when referencing a human, possession is indicated with a suffixed - -s (like English possessive -'s). Other forms of possession are normally indicated by the preposition fun 'of'. The regular plural endings for nouns are - -s for a noun that ends in an unstressed r, m, n, or vowel, and - -n for most other types of nouns. The ending -n becomes - -en after a stressed vowel, m, n, ng, or nk . There are a very large number of nouns with irregular plural forms, including -es (these are usually nouns of Slavic origin), and -er with umlaut (eg., man 'man', cf mener 'men'; kind 'child', cf kinder 'children'), or umlaut alone (eg., hant 'hand', cf hent 'hands'). Some words do not change in the plural (eg., fish 'fish'). Many words of Hebrew origin form plural with -im and plural words of Hebrew origin which end in - are pronounced -es. Many plural forms of words are accompanied with a stem vowel mutation.
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Yiddish grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Article
The definite article agrees in gender, number and case with the noun it is used with. Masculine Neuter Feminine Plural Nominative Accusative Dative

der dos dem dos

di di

di di

dem dem der di

The indefinite article is a, which becomes an before a word (eg., a noun or adjective) beginning with a vowel.

Adjectives
Attributive adjectivesthat is, those that directly modify a nounare inflected to agree with the gender, number and case of the noun it modifies, while predicate adjectives remain uninflected. For example, one says der guter man 'the good man', but Der man iz gut 'The man is good'. When an adjective is used absolutivelythat is, to stand as the head of a noun phrase as if it were itself a nounits ending changes as if it were followed by a noun: Der man iz a guter 'The man is a good [one].' Neuter singular attributive adjectives have no case ending unless their noun phrase is introduced by the definite article. Masculine Nominative Accusative Dative Neuter Definite Absolutive Feminine Plural

guter gute guts gute gute gutn gute guts gute gute gutn gutn guter gute

The ending -n becomes -en after a stressed vowel, m, ng, or nk ; and it becomes -em after n. Yiddish is slightly simpler than German in that German -m and -n are both -n in Yiddish (or, in the case of the definite article, dem), and Yiddish does not have a genitive case. The "definite" and "absolutive" versions of the neuter gender are a relic of the strong vs. weak adjective endings of German (das gute Bier vs. gutes Bier). A class of pronominal adjectives, including eyn 'one', keyn 'none', and possessive pronouns such as mayn 'my, mine' and zayn 'his', display behavior opposite to that of ordinary adjectives: they are inflected for gender, number and case when used predicatively but not when used attributively. (Absolutively, they behave as normal adjectives).

Pronouns
First Person Singular Nominative ikh
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Second Person du ir er

Third Person es zi zey

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Plural mir

Singular Familiar Polite / Plural Masculine Neuter Feminine Plural

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Yiddish grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Accusative mikh undz Dative mir undz

dikh dir

aykh aykh

im im

es im

zi ir

zey zey

Third person pronouns agree in gender with the noun they refer to. Thus even inanimate objects are sometimes referred to as er or zi if they are masculine or feminine respectively. Neuter nouns receive es.

Verbs
Like most Germanic languages, Yiddish follows the V2 word order: the second constituent of any clause is a finite verb, regardless of whether the first constituent is the subject, adverb or some other topicalized element.

Conjugation
Yiddish verbs are conjugated for person and number (singular and plural). The infinitive of a verb ends in - -n. The present tense of regular verbs is conjugated for person and number, as follows: Person Number koyfn 'buy' farlirn 'lose' koyf koyfst koyft koyfn koyft koyfn farlir farlirst farlirt farlirn farlirt farlirn

First Person Singular ikh Second Person Singular du er Third Person Singular zi es First Person Second Person Third Person Plural mir Plural Polite Plural ir zey

Like other varieties of High German, Yiddish does not inflect the past tense (preterite). Instead, the perfect is used, constructed periphrastically with forms of hobn 'have' (or zayn 'be') and the past participle of the verb. Most verbs take ' hobn', while some take ' zayn'. There is no way to tell which verbs take which auxiliary. As a rule of thumb, those taking zayn are mostly verbs of motion or status. Hobn and zayn are conjugated irregularly as follows: Person Number hobn zayn bin

First Person Singular ikh hob er Third Person Singular zi es

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Second Person Singular du host bist hot iz

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Yiddish grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

First Person Second Person Third Person

Plural mir hobn zenen Plural Polite Plural ir hot zent

zey hobn zenen

For example, the past tense of ikh koyf 'I buy' is ikh hob gekoyft , and the past tense of ikh kum 'I come' is ikh bin gekumen 'I came'. The perfective aspect indicating a completed action in the past or one whose completion is contemplated in the future can be formed by adding a prefix to many verbs. For example: ikh hob geleyent 'I read', 'I was reading' vs. or ikh hob ibergeleyent / ikh hob durkhgeleyent 'I read entirely', 'I read through'; er vet shraybn 'he will write', 'he will do some writing' vs. er vet onshraybn 'he will write completely', 'he will write up', 'he will get (something) written'; mir lernen zikh frantseyzish 'we are studying French', 'we are taking French' vs. mir viln zikh oyslernen frantseyzish 'we want to learn French thoroughly'. The most common perfectivizing prefixes are , , , , and , but there are no definitive rules for determining which prefix(es) attach to which imperfective verbs. This notion of verbal aspect is a Slavic grammatical phenomenon. Though not as fully developed in Yiddish as in the coterritorial Slavic languages, it is nevertheless a vital feature of the Yiddish verb system.

Past participle
The past participle is used extensively in Yiddish. The majority of verbs (so-called weak verbs) form the past participle by adding - ge- and - -t to the stem, e. g. gekoyft 'bought.' However, strong verbs form the past participle with - and - -n, accompanied by a vowel change, e. g. geholfn 'helped' from the stem helf- 'help.' The vowel change is unpredictable, and there is no way to tell from the infinitive whether a verb is weak or strong. The prefix - is omitted in past participles of verbs whose first syllable does not bear primary stress. There are two classes of verbs for which this happens: verbs with one of several unstressed stem prefixes, such as - far- or ba-; and verbs built on the stressed suffix - -ir, usually used for loanwords. Thus the past participles of farkoyfn 'sell' and abonirn 'subscribe' are, respectively, merely farkoyft and abonirt .

References
Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: a Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, ISBN 0-521-77215-X. Katz, Dovid, Grammar of the Yiddish Language, Duckworth, London, 1987, ISBN 0-7156-2161-0. Mark, Yudl, A Grammar of Standard Yiddish, CYCO, New York, 1978 (in Yiddish). Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yiddish_grammar&oldid=568135318" Categories: Yiddish language Grammars of specific languages This page was last modified on 11 August 2013 at 23:16.
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