Yiddish morphology is the morphology of the Yiddish language. It bears many similarities to that of German and has received some influence from Slavic languages. Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... Yiddish (Yid. ... The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ...

Articles

The definite article agrees in gender, number, and case with the noun it is used with. Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ...

The indefinite article is אַן an before a word beginning with a vowel and אַ a everywhere else.

Gender

Yiddish nouns are divided into three classes, or genders - masculine (zokher), feminine (nekeyve) and neuter (neytral). On the whole, gender is assigned to nouns arbitrarily, though there are some regularities. Nouns denoting specifically male humans and animals are usually masculine, and nouns denoting specifically female humans and animals are usually feminine; nouns ending in an unstressed schwa are usually feminine. Nouns built on most of the common abstract-noun suffixes, such as -ung and -hayt, are feminine; diminutive nouns with the suffix -l are neuter in the standard language. Loanwords are generally assigned masculine gender by default unless they end in a schwa, in which case they are usually feminine.

Nominals

Adjectives, but not most nouns, are inflected for case as well as gender and number. While attributive adjectives—that is, those that directly modify a noun—are inflected to agree with the noun in number, gender, and case, predicate adjectives remain uninflected. For example, one says der guter man 'the good man' with the adjective guter inflected for masculine singular nominative, but Der man iz gut 'The man is good,' with no suffix on gut. When an adjective is used absolutively—that is, to stand as the head of a noun phrase as if it were itself a noun—its ending changes as if it were followed by a noun: Der man iz a guter 'The man is a good [one].' Neuter singular attributive adjectives have no case ending unless their noun phrase is introduced by the definite article. Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ...

The -n ending becomes -en after a vowel, m, ng, or nk; and it becomes -em after n.

A class of pronominal adjectives, including eyn 'one', keyn 'none', and possessives such as mayn 'my, mine' and zayn 'his', display behavior opposite to that of ordinary adjectives: they are inflected for number, gender, and case when used predicatively but not when used attributively. (Absolutively, they behave the same as normal adjectives.)

Pronouns

Third person pronouns must agree in gender with the noun they refer to. Thus even inanimate objects are sometimes refered to as er or zi if they are masculine or feminine respectively. Neuter nouns recieve es.

Verbs

Like most Germanic languages, Yiddish employs V2 word order: the second constituent of any clause must be the finite verb, regardless of whether the first constituent is the subject, an adverb, or some other topicalized element. However, Yiddish is unusual among Germanic languages in that it employs V2 syntax in both main clauses and subordinate clauses: apart from Icelandic, other Germanic languages only employ V2 syntax in main clauses. In verb-second (V2) word order, the finite verb of a sentence is always in the second position. ... A clause is a group of words consisting of a subject and a predicate, although, in non-finite clauses, the subject is often not explicitly given. ... A finite verb is a verb that is inflected for person and for tense according to the rules and categories of the languages it occurs in. ... The subject of a sentence is one of the two main parts of a sentence, the other being the predicate. ... An adverb is a part of speech that usually serves to modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, clauses, and sentences. ... In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is the part of the proposition that is being talked about (predicated). ...

Conjugation

Yiddish verbs are conjugated for person and number. The present tense of verbs is conjugated thus:

Like the High German dialects, Yiddish has ceased to use the inflected past tense entirely, and the perfect tense, constructed with forms of האָבן hobn 'have' (or זײַן zayn 'be') and the past participle of the verb, has taken over its function. Hobn and zayn are conjugated irregularly: Subdivisions Central German Upper German High German (in German, Hochdeutsch) is any of several German dialects spoken in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Luxembourg (as well as in neighbouring portions of Belgium, France (Alsace), Italy, Poland, and Romania (Transylvania) and in some areas of former colonial settlement, for example in... In linguistics, a participle is an adjective derived from a verb. ...

For example, the past tense of איך קױף ikh koyf 'I buy' is איך האָב געקױפֿט ikh hob gekoyft, and the past tense of איך קום ikh kum 'I come' is איך בין געקומען ikh bin gekumen 'I came'.

Past Participle

The past participle is used extensively in Yiddish. The majority of verbs (weak verbs) form the past participle with the addition of -גע and ט- to the stem, e. g. געקױפֿט gekoyft 'bought.' However, there are also a group of verbs, called strong verbs, which form the past participle with -גע and נ-, accompanied by a vowel change, e. g. געהאָלפֿן geholfn 'helped' from the stem -העלפֿ helf- 'help.' The vowel change is unpredictable and simply must be learned. In linguistics, a participle is an adjective derived from a verb. ... In Germanic languages, weak verbs are those verbs that form their preterites and past participles by means of a dental suffix, an inflection that contains a /t/ or /d/ sound. ... In the Germanic languages, strong verbs are those which mark their past tenses by means of ablaut. ...

There is no way to tell from the infinitive whether a verb is strong or weak.

Tenses

As in the High German dialects, the inflected past tense (preterite) has fallen out of use, having been replaced with the periphrasitic perfect tense, formed with the appropriate form of האָבן 'hobn' or זײַן 'zayn' and the past participle. Certain verbs will take האָבן 'hobn', while others will take זײַן 'zayn'. There is no way to tell which verbs take which auxiliary. Verbs taking hobn are more common, however; as a rule of thumb, those taking zayn are often verbs of motion. This article is about the grammatical term. ... Periphrasis is a figure of speech where the meaning of a word or phrase is expressed by many or several words. ...