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[Alice Faber]

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
Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                        fax (203) 865-8963

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