Back to Attila

[Joseph Salmons]

Just checked Neil Jacobs' _Yiddish: A linguistic introduction_
(Cambridge, 2005) and he indicates that Bavarian, like Yiddish, has a
second degree diminutive. He notes that Slavic has this too, so I
guess that piece of the puzzle is more complicated.


On Jun 20, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Alice Faber wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: Back to Attila
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>
> Joseph Salmons wrote:
>> Those -l- diminutives have deep historical roots, at least across
>> Germanic, maybe beyond. In German they are characteristic of southern
>> dialects. Alice Faber and Bob King used that in their work on
>> Bavarian elements in Yiddish, so Alice is the person in the know on
>> that subject.
>
> It's been a *long* time, and Bob did most of the Germanic work in
> those
> papers. The short take-home message is that there's a ton of variation
> in German dialects, past and present, that isn't reflected in New High
> German. When you start comparing Yiddish features with features
> found in
> other German dialects, the Bavarian and East Central German features
> tend to provide the best comparisons. So, the -l diminutive fits in
> there. What I'm not so sure of at this point is the *double*
> diminutive-- X, X-l, X-le.
>
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> Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
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