| This essay shows how the various types of inflection in Modern Standard Yiddish are correlated with the architectonics of the root. Architectonics is defined as the distribution of sounds within a root. The greatest amount of attention is devoted to noun roots, with one chapter reserved for verbs and adjectives.;Although some correlations of morphonological shape with inflectional type in Yiddish (noun plural and gender; verb past participle suffix; adjective declension) have been noted in the literature, a more comprehensive account is given here than in any previous work. Not only can the inflection of a Yiddish noun be correlated with the quality of its final consonant, but also with the quality of its initial consonant, the quality of its vowel(s), and with its lexical category. A concerted effort is made to eliminate (or at least minimize) the need to rely on etymology to predict inflection. Such reliance has been frequent in the literature. On the contrary, etymological clues should issue in many cases from a judicious use of information from architectonics. Moreover, the correlations which are spelled out here should provide an alternative to the usual pedagogical approach of rote learning, enabling the student to determine inflectional type from the form of the root rather than always needing to memorize the relevant inflectional suffixes.;Roots are represented by means of a morphophonemic code in upper-case letters. This code is based on the "agglutinating analog" mentioned by Floyd Lounsbury (1953) in reference to Oneida and later developed by Robert Austerlitz (1967) for Finnish and Daniel Abondolo (1988) for Hungarian. The advantage of a morphophonemic code is that it avoids the pitfalls of reliance on orthography, while providing a level of abstraction that takes into account both phonemic and morphemic operations. |
