Jewish morphology: adjective "Pesachdik" -> noun "Pesachdicity?"
Bear with me, there's going to be some linguistics jargon in this question.
In my Morphology class today, my professor was talking about how morphophonological alternation (i.e. changes in pronunciation that occur in specific morphological conditions) rarely occurs in loanwords. His example was that if English borrowed a word that ended in -ic (pronounced [-ɪk]), which superficially resembled Latinate nouns with the -ic/-icity (pronounced [-ɪk]/[-ɪsɪti]) alternation, like electric/electricity or elastic/elasticity, that English speakers still would not use the -ic/-icity alternation to give that adjective a noun form.
So, my question for you is this: English speakers have adopted "Pesachdik" as a valid English adjective. Can you say "Pesachdicity" to mean "the quality of being pesachdik?" What is your intuition as how to strange that sounds?
(And if so, we should make it more common, because I think it has a nice ring to it.)
Posted Apr 4, 2012, 4:48 PM UTC
The ending -dik stems from the yiddish/germanic suffix being thrown on yiddish or hebrew loan words, so it might have a slightly different convention.
Pesachdik already conveys the "quality of being for pesach." Adding the extra -icity is simply superfluous in this case.
Yes, the ending comes from a different etymological source, but my question is whether English speakers would use analogical leveling (i.e. "some adjectives that end in [Ik] can become [IsIti] in noun form, so this other adjective that ends the same way can do the same thing") to allow the word "pesachdicity" as a valid construction even despite its different etymological origin.
It's not superfluous. Pesachdik is an adjective: the -ity ending would make it into a noun. If one were to assume that "pesachdicity" were a word, then "My brother invited me for lunch, but the pesachdicity of his kitchen is questionable at best" would make sense, no? I think this makes sense, and while "pesachdicity" isn't a word I'd use a lot, I still think it's a valid construction. My question to y'all is whether you agree.
Well the ending you're working with in class is -ic ending. The [IsIti] form is only granted by the magical properties of the C being able to switch between the two forms which doesn't exist in our word. You'd have to look into the fundamentals of yiddish grammar as the properties of this suffix and how we use the word are following that languages rule, even though we're speaking English.
In your example you would say "My brothers kitchen isn't pesachdik," and we would get the same meaning and not be as akward. I don't think you can make it a real noun where something like Michig and Fleishig are nouns and adjectives.
Okay, well, the fact that [ɪk] is written as "ic" is totally arbitrary. Writing doesn't really affect how language works. The [ɪk]/[ɪsɪti] alternation has nothing to do with the fact that it is written with a "c." If English went through a spelling reform tomorrow, and "electric" were written "elektrik" and "electricity" written "elektrisity." The spoken language is what is important; written "language" is just an arbitrary representation of what is spoken.
The fundamentals of Yiddish grammar are irrelevant, because my question is about how English speakers apply English grammar to a loanword. Typically, when English speakers borrow a loanword, we just take the word and use it as we would any other English word. In general, we don't apply the grammar of the original language. As an example: the English plural of "ninja" is "ninjas," but Japanese doesn't mark its nouns for plural, so the Japanese plural of "ninja" would also be "ninja." There are exceptions, like how English speakers do use "kibbutzim" as the plural of "kibbutz," but those are exceptions.
Okay, then you disagree. That's fine. I was just looking for opinions. I don't really think of Milchig and Fleishig as nouns, though. How would you use them as nouns?
Well it's not just the word that's being loaned but the suffix as well which is separate from the word. That's the issue that I see anyhow. It's one thing if it's an English loanword, but we're talking about loan grammar (if you can call it that) when dealing with the -dik ending. Similar to how we might say "I'm staying by my uncle," where by comes from bei. Your professor's conjecture was only regarding a word that ends in -ic from another language. -dik isn't the natural ending to the word pesachdik, the word is only pesach (unlike electric which isn't really electr).
As for Milchig/Fleishig:
Don't get any Fleishigs in my milchig pot.