Talk:Yiddish grammar

message: Does anyone out there speak Yiddish and can verify something? This article says some verbs form the past tense by using "hobn," while others form it by using "zayn," and that there is no way to know which ones use which, it is arbitrary. This seems odd, if Yiddish is a dialect of German, it would be very predictable: In German (as in old English) the past tense of transitive verbs uses "habben" while that of intransitive verbs uses "sein." This is very predictable and regular. If the verb can take an object, it is transitive "eat," because you eat and apple, the apple is the direct object. But "sleep" has no direct object, you don't do sleep to anything. Other examples would be "hit," you hit a ball, but "wake up" has no object, same for "go," etc. I imagine that Yiddish must be the same.   —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nealmcgrath (talk • contribs) 01:37, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Forming the Past Tense

message: Certain verbs will take האָבן 'hobn', while others will take זײַן 'zayn'. There is no way to tell which verbs take which auxiliary.
I would tend to disagree, and instead say that the choice of auxiliary is based on unaccusativity, as it is in German.  If no conversation is started on the topic after several weeks, I'll just write up a small explanation on it; I'm interested to hear any thoughts on this though.
—Firespeaker 08:57, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I did not find anything about German in the  unaccusative verb article. In Standard German, stehen, liegen etc use haben whereas gehen, laufen etc. use sein. In Southern German dialects, however,  stehen, liegen etc also use sein. Predictably, Yiddish follows the Southern pattern, see http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.asp?D1=96&H1=103&T1=lign. It appears that the unaccusative explanation is OK with yiddish, whereas German is ambivalent. Andreas 20:34, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hm, I'm not so sure anymore...  Perhaps it's that non-Southern German uses sein for unaccusative verbs and haben for everything else, whereas Southern German and Yiddish use sein for intransitive verbs and haben for everything else.  I was always told in Yiddish class that zayn was for intransitive verbs, but was told in syntax classes that German sein was for unaccusative verbs—I always ignored the difference and attributed it to an inadequate grammatical tradition in Yiddish.  It might, therefor, be best to stick with the Yiddish grammatical tradition on this page, regardless of its accuracy (which I'm now more inclined to accept). —Firespeaker 06:05, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Intransitive verbs" doesn't cut it. You say ich bin gegangen/gelaufen/gefallen, sure, but you never say ich bin geschlafen in German (except perhaps in some dialects), it's always ich habe geschlafen. So it's a different distinction or rule. The only real difference between Southern German and the rest is that stehen, liegen, sitzen (except for metaphorical sitzen as in prison) and hängen (the strong, intransitive verb) – probably not accidentally the same four verbs as listed in German grammar#Dative – use sein instead of haben; I'm not aware of any other verbs that differ in this way. Yiddish behaves the same as Southern German here, except for hengn. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:37, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

text: Interestingly, French behaves extremely similarly to (non-Southern) German in this respect: when a French verb takes être, its German counterpart will usually take sein. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:46, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Auxiliaries 

message: I would suggest (and make myself if I had the time presently) changes to this article based on current spoken Yiddish in the Charedi sector, which is much less inflected (as detailed in Jacobs 2006, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction). Der/dos/di are not distinguished in many cases. That is, if this article is meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive, which I think is a fair goal for an encyclopedia article. Zackary Sholem Berger 17:04, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Make those additions and not changes, and go ahead. The fact of existence of nonstandard dialects doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss the morphology of the literary dialect—descriptive of a standard is not the same as prescriptive. AJD 18:09, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Morphology in the Charedi sector 

message: It says that "It differs from German in not having a genitive case, and in the dative plural, where German uses den.".
But according to the table, it also differs in the accusative masculine definite article, because the accusative masculine definite article in German is "den" while in Yiddish it is "dem".
Is it like that? Can you fix it? Is the table correct?
:This is the only one of the five tables that is accompanied by detailed narrative comparison to German morphology and it would increase the imbalance to enumerate further such distinctions. It is inappropriate, in any case, for this table to appear before notions of noun gender and casing have been described, I have therefore reordered the headings and edited comparisons to German for consistency in extent. --Futhark|Talk 08:59, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Articles 

message: The section on plural nouns says "Nouns built on the diminutive suffixes -l and -ele form the plural in -ekh". It classifies this as an irregular plural. Why is this fully determinable rule less regular than the -s ending for nouns ending in an unstressed vowel? Largoplazo (talk) 15:25, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I'd say it's because -ekh is a unique plural suffix that only attaches to one or two morphemes (i.e., the diminutive suffixes -l and -ele). It's like how in English man~men is an irregular plural even though footman, fireman, Frenchman, etc. all form their plurals the same way: it's a property of the specific morpheme man. AJD (talk) 17:20, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is -ekh not called a regular plural? 

message: — Assignment last updated by UICLing (talk) 10:56, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: The Study of Language

message: BS"D
While the use of YIVO orthography and pronunciation is standard, it is a bit flawed on two parts:
1) It spells Hebrew loans as pronounced, which can be confusing. Native speakers (and many non-ones) normally approach the language with some knowledge of Hebrew, and when hearing a word like Shabbs Kawydesh, understand it to mean Shabbos Kodesh, for example, and might also prefer writing it like that to avoid the next problem.
2) It conveys Northern Yiddish pronunciation, which is 1) far less popular today than Southern Yiddish - albeit still spoken and used; 2) has markedly different pronunciations of the vowels than Southern Yiddish. These two reasons make the article's use of YIVO orthography confusing for someone trying to understand Southern Yiddish.
While using the YIVO standard is necessary (on the converse, for someone trying to read older secular Yiddish works, the YIVO orthography is great), maybe the other pronunciations should be noted alongside it.
----That being the case, how would we transcribe Southern Yiddish? The vowels that appear are not easily conveyed in Latin script, especially if one wants to note the allophony found in the dialect.
----As an aside, maybe we should add a section explaining the vowels in both Northern and Southern Yiddish, because they can be confusing also.
Shibolet Nehrd (talk) 11:21, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orthography; Phonology