Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Contractions
Yiddish is big on contractions, especially in spoken speak. Dos and es become s', ikh becomes kh', and so on. So why is it that Yiddish does contract tsu and dem to form tsum, but not tsu and der to form tsur? German does it, right? (zu+dem=zum, zu+der=zur) Was there some cultural reason, or did the form just become obsolete? Or is it a recent addition in German?
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3 comments:
Hmm, in French, de+le=du, de+les=des BUT de+la= de la.
gey veys...
That's actually interesting, because in Yiddish, as I pointed out, "di," the feminine article, when preceded by a preposition like "tsu," becomes "tsu der" and not "tsur." As you point out, the same is true in French, whereas German does go through with the "zur" form. Is this perhaps the Romance influence on Yiddish that drew it further away from Germanic? Does the same phenomenon occur in Slavic?
Yiddish is closer related to southern German dialects than to standard high german.
While in standard German it is usual to do zu+dem=zum and zu+der=zur,
for instance in Bavarian this is unusual just like in Yiddish. The correct form would be zu+dem=zum and zu+der would stay the same.
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