Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 1 no. 114
November 26, 1991
 
1) Feminine suffixes (Ellen Prince)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 91 23:24:43 EST
From: Ellen Prince <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.112

>From: nmiller@trincc

>I recently referred to a neighbor who is married to a
>judge, and the word I used was /judgekhe/.  

i shall leave it to the true mavens to answer your
questions in detail but i can tell you this--while a
language may have a whole bunch of ways for doing things,
the relevant thing here being forming feminine nouns from
masculine ones, it's often (usually) the case that, at any
point in time, only one of the ways is 'live' or, as it's
technically called, 'productive'. thus, while yiddish has
feminine nouns in -in, -te, and -ke, the -ke form seems to
be the productive one these days. whence judgeke. (you do
mean judgeke, not judgekhe, right? and you'd say it with
three syllables, right?)

as an example from english, consider all the ways of
forming nouns from adjectives: -ity (intensity, vanity,
solemnity), -ise (expertise), -th (width, length, breadth,
health (from hale), wealth (from weal)), -ce (succulence,
indolence), etc etc. but only -ness is productive. so
imagine a new adjective, let's say fo, meaning 'false'.
what would you predict the noun would be? not foity or
foise or foth, right? but fo-ness sounds fine, right?
likewise note that 'candor' is becoming 'candidness' even
as i type. that's productivity. (maybe your grandchildren
will say 'a thing of beautifulness is a joy forever'...)

some other little comments:

>Since /ke/ is also a diminutive  (kleyninke), is its
>use in referring to women belittling?  Or would it be
>better to say that it's a _familiar_ suffix and used as
>a social leveller?  Hence benkerke and presidentke.

i think the suffix in kleyninke is -inke, not -ke. they're
possibly related but they're not the same. so -ke shouldn't
be deemed belittling. but go know what some people feel
belittled by...

>2.  What of the /te/?  It too seems to be replacing
>some older words or at least sharing space with them 
>(shokhente as well as shkheyne) but in other cases it
>would appear to be old (gabete, khazente).  Is it used
>only with Hebrew nouns (areyliste)?

-te is allegedly aramaic, which probably explains its
occurrence with semitic nouns. (tho i imagine baleboste was
created in yiddish, tho entirely out of semitic elements.)

>Finally, once we've settled all these questions, why is
>nogoodnik Yinglish but judgekhe Yiddish?

here's a stab at an answer: nogoodnik filled a gap in
english. judgeke doesn't fill a gap--english has judge and
doesn't require agentive nouns to have feminine endings in
order to be applicable to females. so english needs judgeke
like a hole in the head. and yinglish is, after all, a
dialect of english. yiddish, on the other hand, does
require that agentive nouns applied to females be marked as
female. so judgeke fills a gap in yiddish (once judge is
borrowed into yiddish, that is).

of course, this is all on the assumption that your judgeke
is a female judge. if it's the judge's wife, then maybe it
does fill a gap in english? my shaky intuitions tell me
it's more possible as a yinglish word if it means judge's
wife than if it means female judge. but i'm not sure.

one final free association. the -nik suffix is simply
something that makes nouns in slavic. in yiddish, however,
it makes agentive nouns only--people who do something. (one
exception is tshaynik, but that was presumably borrowed in
toto from slavic, not formed in yiddish.) anyway, when you
see a word with -nik in english, if it's a nonhuman, e.g.
sputnik, you know it's borrowed directly from slavic. if it
is a human agent, e.g. beatnik, refusenik, allrightnik,
nogoodnik, it's probably from yiddish (or from some
yiddish-influenced english speaker).

______________________________________________________
End of Mendele Vol 1.114