Verse:Irta/Judeo-Mandarin/Proto-Ăn Yidiș

A Breton Middle Irish dialect right after Jews acquired it; phonologically close to the Cîzon (before vowel length was lost) and grammatically (morphologically) volatile; the nominative, genitive and vocative are still in use but the dative and the accusative have disappeared. The auxiliary system has been stabilized but with some slightly different forms or prepositions depending on the Ăn Yidiș dialect. Should be intelligible to a modern Irish or Gàidhlig speaker.

Todo: Reconstruct Proto-Ăn Yidiș Hebrew before and after filtering through Proto-Ăn Yidiș phonology. Before they used TibH but with an o /o(:)/ vs ů /u(:)/ distinction in cholam; TibH /u/ was /ü(:)/. TibH style allophonic vowel length should go through the filter, hence leading to QG o vs QQ ă

Proto-Ăn Yidiș still had unstressed /ɔː/ (from Middle Irish á and Proto-Ăn Yidiș Hebrew [ɔː], e.g. */'amətɔːn/ 'fool' and */'χanʊ̈kʰɔː/ 'Hanukkah'. Later dialects including Ăn Căyzon reduce unstressed à to /ə/.

[haddO:g ha:Ha:j su:HE: bammO:jim] -> Hadàg hachaidh sůchè bamàidhim

Phonology

Fully devoiced stop system (that's why tet and qoph are d and g)

Depalatalization of slender consonants in similar contexts as in Polish/Czech

Labials partly depalatalize, partle become bj pj mj fj vj

mh > nasal vowel + v

Slender c g = still palatal stops; slender t d = Mandarin q j (This explains why zayin/tsade were mapped to slender d/t); iotated t/d = čh č (merges with slender t d in Ăn Căyzon, but merges with slender c/g in some dialects)

Final slender ch > -h

Broad r/rr = /r/, slender r/rr = Czech ř (which sometimes dissimilates to r)

broad l/ll = dark L, slender l/ll = l like in Polish;

ň for slender nn but everything else becomes n

• a = /a/, [æ] before slender
• ann all arr = /auR/
• à = /ɔː/
• e = /ɛ/
• è, eu = /ɛː/ > /eə/ (before broad C), /ɛː/ (before slender C)
• é = /e:/ > /ej/ in some conditions/dialects
• e before broad mh > /ja/
• eaRR = /jɔː/, /eə/
• eo = /jʌ/ when short, /jo:/ when long
• i = /i/
• ì = /i:/
• ia, iRR = /iə/
• iù = /y:/
• o = /ʌ/
• ò, oRR = /O:/ > /oə/
• ó = /o:/ > /u:/
• u = /u/
• ù = /ü:/
• ua = /uə/
• ao = /əj/

Grammar

Nouns

Proto-Ăn Yidiș lost the neuter gender and the dual number, and had at least the nominative and the genitive. It's unknown whether the vocative survived. The accusative and dative were replaced by the nominative; genitive-marked objects of verbal nouns were in the process of being replaced with nominative forms. Possessives began to be marked with the an X a(i)g Y construction.

Verbs

*Tà me neidh ith (< *Tá mé i ndiaidh ith 'I am after eating') became the default construction for the past perfective (cf. German).