Yiddish morphology

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

Nouns

Yiddish nouns are divided into three classes, or genders - masculine ("zokher"), feminine ("nekeyve") and neuter ("neytral"). On the whole, gender is assigned to nouns arbitrarily, though there are some regularities. 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.

Nouns are not normally inflected for case. A few exceptions exist which are optionally or obligatorily inflected for case, including certain kinship terms ("tate" 'father', "mame" 'mother') and the word "harts" 'heart'; among these, masculine nouns take the ending "-n" in the accusative and dative singular, and feminine and neuter nouns take "-n" only in the dative singular.

Possession is not indicated by a separate genitive case (as it is in German). When reference is to a human, possession is indicated with a suffixed ס "-s", not unlike English possessive "-'s". Other forms of possession are normally indicated by the preposition פון "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 all other types of nouns. However, there are a very large number of nouns with irregular plural morphology; irregular manners of marking the plural include , "-es", "-er" with umlaut, umlaut alone, and (for many words of Hebrew origin) "-im" with stem mutation.

Adjectives

Adjectives are inflected for case as well as gender and number. While attributive adjectives—that is, those that directly modify a noun—are inflected to agree with the noun in number, gender, and case, predicate adjectives remain uninflected. For example, one says "der guter man" 'the good man' with the adjective "guter" inflected for masculine singular nominative, but "Der man iz gut" 'The man is good,' with no suffix on "gut". When an adjective is used absolutively—that is, to stand as the head of a noun phrase as if it were itself a noun—its 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.

The indefinite article is אַן "an" before a word beginning with a vowel and אַ "a" everywhere else.

Verbs

Like most Germanic languages, Yiddish employs V2 word order: the second constituent of any clause must be the finite verb, regardless of whether the first constituent is the subject, an adverb, or some other topicalized element. However, Yiddish is unusual among Germanic languages in that it employs V2 syntax in both main clauses and subordinate clauses: apart from Icelandic, other Germanic languages only employ V2 syntax in main clauses.

Conjugation

Yiddish verbs are conjugated for person and number. The present tense of verbs is conjugated thus:

Like other varieties of High German, Yiddish has ceased to use the inflected past tense (preterite) entirely, and the perfect tense, constructed periphrastically with forms of האָבן "hobn" 'have' (or זײַן "zayn" 'be') and the past participle of the verb, has taken over its function. Certain verbs will take האָבן 'hobn', while others will take זײַן 'zayn'. There is no way to tell which verbs take which auxiliary. Verbs taking "hobn" are more common, however; as a rule of thumb, those taking "zayn" are often verbs of motion."Hobn" and "zayn" are conjugated irregularly:

For example, the past tense of איך קויף "ikh koyf" 'I buy' is איך האָב געקויפֿט "ikh hob gekoyft", and the past tense of איך קום "ikh kum" 'I come' is איך בין געקומען "ikh bin gekumen" 'I came'.

Past participle

The past participle is used extensively in Yiddish. The majority of verbs (weak verbs) form the past participle with the addition of -גע "ge-" and ט- "-t" to the stem, e. g. געקויפֿט "gekoyft" 'bought.' However, there are also a group of verbs, called strong verbs, which form the past participle with -גע and נ- "-n", accompanied by a vowel change, e. g. געהאָלפֿן "geholfn" 'helped' from the stem -העלפֿ "helf-" 'help.' The vowel change is unpredictable and simply must be learned.

The prefix -גע 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 -פֿאַר "far-" or -באַ "ba-"; and verbs built on the stressed suffix יר- "-ir", usually used for loanwords. Thus the past participles of פֿאַרקויפֿן "farkoyfn" 'sell' and אַבאָנירן "abonirn" 'subscribe' are, respectively, merely פֿאַרקויפֿט "farkoyft" and אַבאָנירט "abonirt".

There is no way to tell from the infinitive whether a verb is strong or weak.

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).