Hebrew affixes in Yiddish
Summary
Description
Information and examples are from Weinreich (1953:32). The borrowing is explicitly argued to be indirect, i.e. these Hebrew affixes entered Yiddish as part of complex loanwords from where they spread to native Yiddish stems.
1 nominal number suffix
- -im ‘plural’, e.g. doktójr-im (doctor-plural) ‘doctors’, pójer-im (peasant-plural) ‘peasants’. The source form is the Hebrew masculine plural suffix. The affix is no longer productive and attested in the plural formation of only about seven person nouns (Gold 1998:137).
1 adverbializer
- bi- ‘with, among, by means of’, e.g. bi-gvald (with-force) ‘by force’, bi-langzam (with-slow) ‘slowly’, bi-companye (with-company) ‘in company’, bi-yidishlex ‘Jewish’ (this example is from Dutch Yiddish). The prefix derives adverbs from nouns and adjectives; it is not productive and stems from a Hebrew preposition (Gold 1998:137).