Yiddish Grammar - Nouns

Nouns

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.

Nouns are not normally inflected for case. A few exceptions exist which are optionally or obligatorily inflected for case, including certain kinship terms (tate 'father', mame 'mother') and the word harts 'heart'; among these, masculine nouns take the ending -n in the accusative and dative singular, and feminine and neuter nouns take -n only in the dative singular.

Possession is not indicated by a separate genitive case (as it is in German). When reference is to a human, possession is indicated with a suffixed ס -s, not unlike English possessive -'s. Other forms of possession are normally indicated by the preposition פון fun 'of'.

The regular plural endings for nouns are -s for a noun that ends in an unstressed r, m, n, or vowel, and -n for all other types of nouns. However, there are a very large number of nouns with irregular plural morphology; irregular manners of marking the plural include -es, -er with umlaut, umlaut alone, and (for many words of Hebrew origin) -im with stem mutation.