Suffixes

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), page number unknown (chapter 1): There is one other thing that I recall about Yiddish. Many languages have some sort of suffix, added at the end of a word, for a variety of purposes—smallness, affection, intimacy, etc. In English we use only two: -let and -kin (e.g., booklet, lambkin) and both sparingly. German makes much more extensive use of -lein and -chen (e.g., fraülein, mädchen). Italian has a wide range, notably -ino, -etto, -ello and, to magnify rather than reduce, -one. A similar effect is achieved in Arabic not by adding a suffix, but by a change of vowels—from Hassan to Husayn, from ‘Abd to ‘Ubayd, as in the names ‘Abdallah and ‘Ubaydallah. Yiddish has a wide range of such suffixes, but one in particular, -inyu, caught my attention. It is attached to three words and to no others. The three words are father (tatinyu), mother (maminyu) and God (Gottinyu).…