Interesting fact: In trying to represent Old High German phonemes with familiar Hebrew phonemes, Yiddish lost the Germanic feature of phonemic *vowel length*. Thus we have situations like: Yiddish פֿילן [filn] (meaning to feel) ~ German "fühlen" ~ English "feel" Yiddish אויספֿילן [oysfiln] (meaning to fill) ~ German "(aus)füllen" ~ English "(out)fill"/"fill (out)". In German and English, there is a difference in vowel length which distinguishes the words fühlen/feel and füllen/fill. Whereas in Yiddish, there is no phonemic vowel length, both of these have collapsed into the single phoneme "i". And hence prefixes have to take the role of marking which meaning is intended; פֿילן [filn] by itself is "feel", but when prefixed with אויס [oys] ( ~ German "aus" ~ English "out"), instead of just giving it a sense of completion, the purpose of אויס [oys] is to indicate that the second meaning of פֿילן [filn] is intended. In German, prefixes are used to give different senses to the root verb, but I have not yet seen a case of them disambiguating between two fundamentally different root verbs with the same spelling and pronunciation like this. Though feel free to correct me. Fascinating, no? :)
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 07:05:18 +0000
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