Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Neuter Noun Endings

It didn't occur to me till today (I haven't read any Yiddish textbooks, so I feel like it says this in all of them) that common neuter noun in Yiddish that are not diminutives have common plural endings:

hemd/hemder
kind/kinder
bukh/bukher
lid/lider
ort/erter
bild/bilder

and the list goes on... is that a commonly known thing? Has anyone seen this pattern before?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know that this is true for some German neutral words, like Bild and Kind (both end in -er as in Yiddish). But I don't know enough German to know how many netural words use the -er plural.

Anonymous said...

PS I have another question for you, Mr. language detective-- When we say "Never have I..." in English (as in, Never have I tasted anything so wonderful, etc), is the syntax lingering influence from German syntax, where if you put mostly any word in front of the subject, you have to invert the subject and the verb? (If you can't answer this, maybe we can pass my question on to Bored Strakhir Statistiker).

אַרעלע/Arele said...

Becca: dealt with your question in my most recent post. Hope it answers the question!

rokhl said...

Isn't it bukh/bikher? Is that just dialect?

אַרעלע/Arele said...

yikes! that was a typo - thanks for catching that, you're totally right.