Yiddish

[Shemtov]

So I noticed something about Yiddish:
In most places where German has Ich-laut, Yiddish has [x]. In fact, it seems that the conservative opinion is that this is because OHG didn't have Ich-laut.
However there is at least one word that has [ʃ]: Nisht (Germ. <Nicht>).
This would seem to indicate that there WAS ich-laut in OHG.
Is there anyway that we could have had [x]>[ʃ] in this word only?
Could have Ich-laut been beginning but incompleted when Yiddish split from OHG?

[Creyeditor]

In a lot of modern german sociolects and dialects there is a change from the ich-laut to [ʃ]. The hypothesis aout the incompleted change seems plausible to me.

[Avo]

In a lot of modern german sociolects and dialects there is a change from the ich-laut to [ʃ]. The hypothesis aout the incompleted change seems plausible to me.

It's especially common in Central German, and from what I've seen from Yiddish it looks quite Central German to me. So yeah, maybe it's influence from those dialects, especially because it's a rather common word.

Btw, whether Old High German /x/ had a palatal allophone already or not is not really relevant here - Yiddish is younger than OHG. When did German split /x/ into [ç χ] anyway?

[Xonen]

Could have Ich-laut been beginning but incompleted when Yiddish split from OHG?

Well, maybe... but I wouldn't assume anything on the basis of just one word. It could easily be a later irregular sound change or dialect borrowing or something.

[Aevas]

Remember that not all High German varieties have ich-Laut; Swiss German still lacks it, for example.

Seeing as Yiddish nisht also seems to mean 'nothing', I'm inclined to believe that it's related to the German dialectal word nischt 'nothing', that was common in most German varieties in the East (including Pomerania, Silesia and Prussia).

[Creyeditor]

So maybe metathesis nɪxts -> nisxt -> niʃt or nɪxts -> nixst -> niʃt?

[Shemtov]

A theory about Yiddish grammar:
Yiddish lacks the -te past tense suffix. Instead, the past tense is formed by a form /zajn/ (cognate to <Zein>) or /habn/ followed by the past participle /gemaxt/ "made" /getantsn/ "dance". Could this be explained by Slavic influence- as Ashkenazim moved into Slavic lands, perhaps they had the /zajn/ +/ge/+root+t as the plain past, and the /habn/ +ge+infinitive as the past perfect, and later (perhaps under influence of more German Jews (Yekkes) moving east or contact with Yekkes, plus the move to Romania and Hungary, and between with the Slavic-surrounded and the Romanian and Hungarian Jews, plus the fact that some cultural centers were in Baltic-speaking areas (i'm not sure if Baltic has the aspectual split Slavic has) made verbs regularize in their pattern? AFAIK, we don't have much Yiddish evidence from this period. Is this a possible theory?

[WeepingElf]

It has nothing to do with Slavic - exactly the same formation, once a perfect, is now the commonly used past tense in most varieties of colloquial German (I know what I am talking about as I am a native speaker of German). So the Yiddish periphrastic past is 100% German.

[Aevas]

It has nothing to do with Slavic - exactly the same formation, once a perfect, is now the commonly used past tense in most varieties of colloquial German (I know what I am talking about as I am a native speaker of German). So the Yiddish periphrastic past is 100% German.

Was about to say this. Most traditional High German varieties (including Alemannic, Bavarian and Luxembourgish) have done away with the simple past, and only use the periphrastic construction.

[Creyeditor]

And even though people often claim that Northern German varieties of German do still have the preterite forms in spoken language, I and the people I talk to usually have it only for a closed class of verbs, like modal verbs and so on.

[k1234567890y]

I think the [x]>[ʃ] in nisht could be an example of irregular sound changes, maybe due to influences from dialects with ich-laut i,e, dialect levelling.

While sound changes are largely regular, there can be small irregularities, it happens in English too, the pronounciation of blood and flood seems to be results of irregular sound changes, at least I interpret them in this way after reading the wikipedia article on the Great Vowel Shift of English, and it is said that the Great Vowel Shift happened after the spead of the Black Death:

After the Black Death, people from many different regions emigrated to the southeast of England, and it’s thought that their accents were combined to create new pronunciations. Other historians point out that at this time the nobility were beginning to speak English instead of French. They think that people began to pronounce words differently in order to distance their language from the French.