Talk:Yiddish morphology

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[edit] Auxiliaries

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)

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)

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)

[edit] Morphology in the Charedi sector

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)

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)