Talk:גיך

Etymology

@Kolmiel: Can you verify the etymology that was added? I found entries in dictionaries about the German words gech, gähe, and gach, but it doesn't seem that any of them mention a MHG form gāch and my German isn't good enough to sort through the details. --WikiTiki89 15:19, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: The modern standard form is German jäh with dialectally frequent g > j. The MHG form is correct. Pfeiffer mentions Middle High German gæhe and gāch (from Old High German gāhi). For the Yiddish form I'd construe an intermediate form Middle High German *gæch, i.e. without the final -e but with umlaut. Still, the vowel seems irregular. If I'm not mistaken, then MHG -æ- > Yiddish -ey-. Maybe there's a tendency to shorten before -ch-? (It exists in German before -cht at least.) Kolmiel (talk) 15:42, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! Yiddish regularly drops the final -e from Germanic words, so that's not an issue. As for the vowel, I guess it is strange, but there is a dialectal variant געך (gekh). --WikiTiki89 15:48, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Okay. What I meant about the final -e is that it must have been lost early enough for the -h to be pronounced -ch. (Note that the -e was also dropped in German, but later, so that the -h is mute in jäh.) 16:06, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

I just went through all our Proto-Germanic lemmas with intervocalic h and found that this seems to be a regular distinction between German and Yiddish. Compare פֿיך (fikh) vs Vieh, הייך (heykh) vs Höhe, שוך (shukh) vs Schuh. --WikiTiki89 17:05, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Ah okay. The relevant forms are chiefly those where -h- was intervocalic in MHG; only very rarely do these have -ch in modern German. When -ch (< OHG -h) was already final in MHG, the German outcome may be -ch (as in hoch) or zero (as in Schuh). But since Yiddish has פֿיך (fikh) from Middle High German vihe, you seem to be right that this is a regular thing in Yiddish. (It is also in Bavarian, with which Yiddish shares certain similarities, though it's generally more akin to East Central German.) Thanks for looking that up. Kolmiel (talk) 18:21, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

PS: Based on this, I think we should derive the form from Middle High German gæhe rather than gāch. While the vowel may still be slightly irregular, the form with umlaut is much closer than that without. Kolmiel (talk) 19:12, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

I just realized, the i vowel would have been regular in Southeastern Yiddish (see the לעבן (lebn) vowel in the dialectal vowel chart). So it could be that this dialect influenced the other dialects, including Standard Yiddish. This is all speculation on my part. In case you're interested, here is a map of the pronunciation of this word in Northeastern Yiddish, and here is a map of the border of the border between Northeastern and Southeastern Yiddish. --WikiTiki89 20:48, 19 April 2017 (UTC)