My grandmother’s parents were both Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States, and I believe that she grew up Yiddish-English bilingual. I noticed an unusual feature of her English: she uses ‘enjoy’ intransitively, ie, saying “Did you enjoy?” instead of “Did you enjoy it?” I never really thought about this as anything other than a quirk of her speech, since we all have our idiosyncrasies, but I recently ran into a speech sample from someone who was described as ‘a Jewish grandfather’ saying the same thing.
Yiddish speakers of the Dope: is this a feature of Yiddish? That is, is the corresponding verb for ‘to enjoy’ an intransitive verb, which my grandmother is (consciously or subconsciously) literally translating?
Or…is this a feature of ‘Jewish English’ - that is, is it common to the dialect spoken by Americans from Jewish immigrant communities, but not because of a Yiddish analogue?
Or…is this something that older (American-)English-speaking adults do, and it’s only because of language shift that I think of it as unusual?