Laudator Temporis Acti

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). Clearly, these are not diminutives—the message is not diminution but intimacy. I thought this remarkable. The same theological attitude of intimacy is expressed in a familiar Jewish joke about the hard-up businessman who prays, “Oh God, you help complete strangers! Why can’t you help me?”