2108: Mixed Origins for Yiddish Gender Terminology Sep 22, 2020

Yiddish vocabulary is at least 80% Germanic but the more technical or academic terms tend to come from Hebrew. The words for gender come from Hebrew, but Hebrew only has 2 grammatical genders whereas Yiddish has 3. In Yiddish, the word for 'masculine' is זכר (zokher); 'feminine' is נקבה (nekeyve), both of which are Semitic, whereas the term for the neuter gender is נײטראַל (neytral). Someone familiar with this alphabet could tell this without even needing to know Yiddish or Hebrew because Yiddish adopts the spelling for Hebrew loanwords, whereas for any other word, such as with נײטראַל, the vowels are included.

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