Romanization of Yiddish
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Yiddish orthography is the
writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...
used for the
Yiddish language Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...
. It includes Yiddish
spelling Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spelli ...
rules and the
Hebrew script The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably ...
, which is used as the basis of a full vocalic
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
. Letters that are silent or represent
glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
s in the
Hebrew language Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language unti ...
are used as
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s in Yiddish. Other letters that can serve as both vowels and consonants are either read as appropriate to the context in which they appear, or are differentiated by diacritical marks derived from Hebrew ''nikkud'', commonly referred to as ''"nekudot"'' or ''"pintalach"'' (literally "points" as those marks are mostly point-like signs). Additional
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
distinctions between letters that share the same base character are also indicated by either pointing or adjacent placement of otherwise silent base characters. Several Yiddish points are not commonly used in any latter-day Hebrew context; others are used in a manner that is specific to Yiddish orthography. There is significant variation in the way this is applied in literary practice. There are also several differing approaches to the disambiguation of characters that can be used as either vowels or consonants. Words of
Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...
and Hebrew origin are normally written in the traditional orthography of the source language—i.e., the orthography of these words, which is consonant-based, is generally preserved ( Niborski 2012). All other Yiddish words are represented with
phonemic orthography A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond consistently to the language's phonemes (the smallest units of speech that can differentiate words), or more generally ...
. Both forms can appear in a single word—for example, where a Yiddish
affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...
is applied to a Hebrew stem. Yiddish diacritics may also be applied to words that are otherwise written entirely with traditional orthography.


Reform and standardization

In the early 20th century, for cultural and political reasons, efforts were initiated toward the development of a uniform Yiddish orthography. A specimen initial practice was described in detail by the Yiddish lexicographer Alexander Harkavy in a ''Treatise on Yiddish Reading, Orthography, and Dialectal Variations'' first published in 1898 together with his Yiddish–English Dictionary ( Harkavy 1898). Additional illustrations of this variation are provided in source excerpts in Fishman 1981, which also contains a number of texts specifically about the need (pro and con) for a uniform orthography. A detailed chronology of the major events during this normative action, including rosters of conference participants, bibliographic references to the documents they produced, and summaries of their contents, is given in Yiddish in Schaechter 1999. There is a less detailed (but extensive nonetheless) English language review of this process in Estraikh 1999. The first action formally undertaken by a government was in the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
in 1920, abolishing the separate
etymological Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...
orthography for words of Semitic (i.e., Hebrew and Aramaic) origin. Under this reform, Hebrew words were respelled according to their Yiddish pronunciation rather than their etymological spelling. The reform also eliminated German-inspired orthographic conventions such as silent "hej" and "ajen" letters and redundant
gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
of
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
s. A more comprehensive reform was developed in 1928 and finalized in 1932. It abolished the five special word-final allographs for the consonants h and s which had been a distinctive feature of the Hebrew-based Yiddish writing system; this change was widely reintroduced in 1961. Additional changes included: elimination of the silent aleph in word-medial positions; differentiating between the prefixes "af" and "uf"; changing the spelling of "ba" for prefixes and prepositions; eliminating doubled consonants at morphological seams; and adopting a Russified spelling of international terms and proper names. The most radical proposals involved the Latinization of Yiddish, which had precedents in pre-revolutionary plans like
Ludwig Zamenhof L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 185914 April 1917) was the creator of Esperanto, the most widely used constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887, although his initial ideas date back as ...
's 1909 blueprint. During the Soviet period, Latinization gained momentum between 1930-1933, coinciding with a broader campaign to Latinize writing systems of multiple Soviet languages. Nojekh Shulman published an article supporting a universal Roman alphabet in 1919, while in 1930 advocated for Latinization in the pedagogical magazine '' Ratnbildung''. initially opposed to Latinization, became one of its strongest proponents by 1930, arguing that the Roman alphabet was more international, ideologically closer to
Communism Communism () is a political sociology, sociopolitical, political philosophy, philosophical, and economic ideology, economic ideology within the history of socialism, socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a ...
, and would make it easier to eliminate Hebrew words from Yiddish. Proposals included a 26-letter Roman alphabet ( V. Kolchinski) and a 28-letter version ( Bentsion Grande). Though some songbooks were published using a Latin-based "Czech transcription" for musical notation, the Latinization initiative was ultimately shelved by 1934, when it began to be mentioned negatively in official publications. The changes are both illustrated in the way the name of the author
Sholem Aleichem Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (; May 13, 1916), better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish language, Yiddish and , also spelled in Yiddish orthography#Reform and standardization, Soviet Yiddish, ; Russian language, Russian and ), ...
is written. His own work uses the form but in Soviet publication this is respelled phonetically to also dispensing with the separate final-form ''mem'' and using the initial/medial form instead. This can be seen, together with a respelling of the name of the protagonist of his , by comparing the title pages of that work in the U.S. and Soviet editions illustrated next to this paragraph. The Germanized () in the former exemplifies another widespread trend, '' daytshmerish'', discussed further below. The efforts preliminary to the 1920 reform, which took place in several countries — most notably in Poland with focus on a uniform school curriculum — resulted in other devices that were not implemented as a result of any governmental mandate. These were further considered during the 1930s by the ,
YIVO YIVO (, , short for ) is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. Estab ...
( YIVO 1930). This led to the development of their ( – "Rules of Yiddish Orthography"), also known as the "SYO" (''Standard Yiddish Orthography'') or the "YIVO Rules" (1st edition YIVO 1935, current edition SYO 1999). This has become the most frequently referenced such system in present-day use. Although it regularly figures in pedagogical contexts, it would be misleading to suggest that it is similarly dominant elsewhere. Other orthographies are frequently encountered in contemporary practice and are house standards for many publishers. A useful review of this variation is provided in the Oxford University ( – "Standard Rules of Yiddish Orthography") ( Oxford 1992 an
available online
, written in and codifying a more conventional orthography than the one put forward by YIVO. Differences in the systems can be seen simply by comparing the titles of the two documents but they differ more fundamentally in their approaches to the
prescription and description Linguistic prescription is the establishment of rules defining publicly preferred Usage (language), usage of language, including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard ...
of orthographic detail. The former treats orthographic variation as a positive attribute of the Yiddish literature and describes essential elements of that variation. The latter presents a uniform Yiddish orthography, based on observed practice but with proactive prescriptive intent. Strong difference of opinion about the relative merit of the two approaches has been a prominent aspect of the discussion from the outset and shows little sign of abating. Although the Yiddish alphabet as stated in the SYO is widely accepted as a baseline reference (with a few minor but frequently encountered variations), the spelling and phonetics of the YIVO system of romanized transliteration discussed below, remain subjects of particular contention. The intent of the SYO is not to describe the spectrum of traditional orthographic practice. The bulk of Yiddish literature predates the formulation of those rules and the discrepancies are significant.


Transliteration

A few Yiddish letters and letter combinations are pronounced quite differently in the various Yiddish dialects. Whatever impact this may have on the discussion of standardized orthography, it becomes a significant factor when Yiddish is
transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...
into other scripts. It is entirely possible to assign a specific character or sequence of characters in, for example, the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from ...
to a specific character or character sequence in the Yiddish alphabet. The transliterated form will, however, be pronounced in a manner that appears natural to the reader. A choice therefore needs to be made about which of the several possible pronunciations of the Yiddish word is to be conveyed prior to its transliteration, with parallel attention to the phonemic attributes of the target language. The romanization of Yiddish has been a focus of scholarly attention in Europe since the early 16th century. A detailed review of the various systems presented through the 17th century, including extensive source excerpts, is provided in Frakes 2007. The Harkavy treatise cited above describes a late 19th-century system that is based on the pronunciation of the Northeastern Yiddish dialect, Litvish, for an
anglophone The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, making it the largest language ...
audience. This was also a mainstay of the standardization efforts of YIVO, resulting in the romanization system described in detail below. The Harkavy and YIVO initiatives provide a convenient framework within which intervening developments may be considered. There was significant debate about many aspects of that sequence, including the need for any form of standardized orthography at all ( Fishman 1981). The outright replacement of Hebrew script with Roman script in the native representation of written Yiddish was briefly considered, among others by
L. L. Zamenhof L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 185914 April 1917) was the creator of Esperanto, the most widely used constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887, although his initial ideas date back as ...
. This had no impact on mainstream orthography but a number of Yiddish books are currently available in romanized editions. These include Yiddish dictionaries, a context in which consistent and phonetically tenable transliteration is essential. There is no general agreement regarding
transliteration of Hebrew The Hebrew language uses the Hebrew alphabet with optional vowel diacritics. The romanization of Hebrew is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Hebrew words. For example, the Hebrew name () can be romanized as or . Romanization i ...
into the Roman alphabet. The Hebrew component of a Yiddish text will normally reflect the transliterator's preference without being seen as a component of the methodology applied to the romanization of words presented in the phonemic orthography.


Transcription

A transliteration system uses one script to represent another as closely as possible. It normally permits unambiguous conversion between the two scripts. Where the intent is to indicate phonetic variation, some form of transcription (frequently done through usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet ( IPA)) will be required. There are also many contexts in which phonetic distinctions are indicated by the diacritical marking of the base characters, or through the similar use of some alternate script that is familiar to the intended audience. These approaches are all also seen in native Yiddish texts, where distinctions that cannot be directly represented with the basic Yiddish script but do need to be highlighted, are indicated by using additional Hebrew diacritical marks, with Roman letters, or with the IPA. There is no intrinsic reason why a transcription scheme cannot also be used for transliteration. In general, however, there is no expectation that the representation of a word in the source script can be retrieved from a transcription. Its purpose is to indicate how a word is pronounced, not its native orthography. The table in the following section indicates two alternatives each for romanized transliteration and phonetic transcription, and is keyed to the Yiddish character repertoire as codified by YIVO. Other transliteration systems are also regularly employed in a variety of contexts, but none represent the full range of variant pronunciation in Yiddish dialects. Nor is the YIVO system equally appropriate phonetically to all languages using Roman script. This issue becomes particularly complex when dealing with older texts where little is known about contemporaneous pronunciation; transmitting the fullest possible detail of their notation is historically important. There are several approaches to the romanization of such material. The YIVO transliteration system is solely intended to serve as an English-oriented phonetic counterpart to the modern Standard Yiddish described (and to some extent prescribed) in the SYO. That work does, however, consider the transcription of variant pronunciation as will be discussed below. YIVO published a major study of the range of Yiddish phonetic variation in ''The Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry'', commonly referred to as the LCAAJ. This uses a detailed system of marked Roman characters and
suprasegmental In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. Often, prosody specifically refers to such ele ...
marks to indicate that variation, and does not apply standard YIVO transliteration at all. Although the full phonetic transcription scheme is not amenable to presentation in the table below, its core elements have been included. This scheme has been used by later authors to indicate "phonetic transcription", and is labeled in that manner below. One recent example of this is provided in Jacobs 2005. Another transcription system frequently cited in academic contexts was devised and presented (in German) by
Solomon Birnbaum Solomon Asher Birnbaum, also ''Salomo Birnbaum'' ( ''Shloyme Birnboym'', December 24, 1891 – December 28, 1989) was a Yiddish linguist and Hebrew palaeographer who was born in Vienna and died in Toronto.Birnbaum 1918 and was used in his later German works, as well as his English publication Birnbaum 1979. This was intended to provide extreme flexibility in the representation of differences between dialects but failed to gain further practical acceptance due to its intricacy and idiosyncratic appearance:


The Yiddish alphabet

This table lists the Yiddish alphabet as described in the Uriel Weinreich ''English–Yiddish–English Dictionary'' ( Weinreich 1968), with a few variants that may be seen in readily available literature. The YIVO romanizations are taken from the same source, where they are presented as "sound equivalents". The romanizations indicated in Harkavy 1898 are included for comparison. The IPA transcriptions correspond to the examples provided by YIVO (with a few additional variants). The transcriptions in the following column were extrapolated from the LCAAJ. The Dutch transliteration system was taken from the . The elements of the two transcription systems appear in this table as appropriate to the standard pronunciation discussed under the next heading. The same elements, particularly those indicating vowels and
diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...
s, are associated with other Yiddish letters when other pronunciations are being transcribed. The table also includes several digraphs and a trigraph that are standard elements of the Yiddish
writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...
. They appear here in normal alphabetic order but are commonly collated separately at the end of a listing of the basic single-character alphabet. The pronunciation in contemporary
Hasidic Hasidism () or Hasidic Judaism is a religious movement within Judaism that arose in the 18th century as a spiritual revival movement in contemporary Western Ukraine before spreading rapidly throughout Eastern Europe. Today, most of those aff ...
communities reflects the regional dialects from which these communities originate, and therefore may differ from the standard presented below.


The Standard Yiddish Orthography

The SYO is presented in Yiddish, and a few romanized transcriptions are included only where needed to indicate variant pronunciation. Given that the YIVO standardization initiative has been severely criticized for failing to accommodate such variation, it may be worth noting that the SYO explicitly references the three major branches of Eastern Yiddish — ''Litvish'' (Northern), ''Poylish'' (Central), and ''Ukrainish'' (Southern), as developed in the regions centered on present-day Lithuania/Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine/Moldova. The SYO gives dialect-specific romanized equivalents for the following characters: A few further romanized equivalents are provided but do not indicate dialectal differences. These are identical to what is contained in the table in the preceding section, with the following exceptions: YIVO took Litvish as the
standard dialect A standard language (or standard variety, standard dialect, standardized dialect or simply standard) is any language variety that has undergone substantial codification in its grammar, lexicon, writing system, or other features and that stands ...
with only slight modification, to a large extent because of the consistency with which its phonemic attributes could be represented by a standardized orthography similarly requiring only minimal elaboration of traditional practice. The important distinctions between Litvish, Poylish, and Ukrainish are therefore not indicated in either the SYO or Weinreich dictionary. These are, however, discussed in detail in the LCAAJ to which Uriel Weinreich was a major contributor. The Roman characters appearing in the SYO correspond to those used in the LCAAJ, and their marking according to Central European orthographic convention provides greater flexibility in notating dialectal distinction than does an English-oriented approach. Phonetic transcription is therefore common in linguistic discourse about Yiddish, often using a wide range of diacritical marks in clear contrast to the totally undecorated YIVO romanization. The SYO listing of the Yiddish alphabet (which predates the Weinreich dictionary) explicitly states that the vowels with combining points, and the ''vov'' and ''yud'' digraphs, are not counted as separate letters, nor are the additional consonant digraphs and trigraphs listed at all:
''The order of the letters in the alphabet is as follows, from right to left:''
''These are not counted as separate letters of the alphabet:''


Common variation

There are several areas in which Yiddish orthographic practice varies. One of them is the extent to which pointing is used to avoid ambiguity in the way a word may be read. This ranges from unpointed text, through a small number of pointed characters, to the redundant use of the full system of Hebraic vowel pointing. Text being prepared for print generally uses a certain amount of pointing. In other contexts, however, there is an increasing tendency to forgo it entirely. The most frugal application of pointing is the distinction of and by enclosing a dot in the former (further details below). Immediately beyond that is the differentiation of the from the unpointed form and then the further use of the . Where additional points are applied, there can be significant variation in their number and disposition and there are often internal inconsistencies in a single system. (The belief that this variation was an impediment to the recognition of Yiddish as a literary peer to the other major European languages was a primary driving force toward the development of orthographic norms.) A detailed generalized description of the pointing of Yiddish text is given in Harkavy 1898 and the topic is also treated briefly in the SYO (which otherwise simply declares the prescribed characters). A more extensive character repertoire is presented and discussed in Birnbaum 1918. Although consonants are basically represented in the same manner, the indication of vowels differs more widely. One noteworthy situation that does pertain to the representation of consonants is the indication of phonetic distinctions between each of the four character pairs , , , and . The 'hard' (
plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...
) pronunciation of the first letter in each pair is unequivocally denoted by a dot () in the middle of the letter. The 'soft' (
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
) pronunciation is similarly notated with a horizontal bar over the letter (). Most orthographic systems usually only point one of the two characters in a pair but may be inconsistent from pair to pair in indicating the hard or soft alternative. Text that otherwise conforms to the SYO therefore frequently omits the from , in harmonization with its unpointed final form, and makes the contrastive distinction from a solely with a in the latter (). The similar avoidance of the and preferential use of the is a common alternative for the contrastive distinction between and (), although in Yiddish, because is used much more than , with limited to words of Semitic origin, the is avoided and used instead. The is an attribute of earlier Yiddish orthographic tradition and the is an adaptation of what is more generally a Hebrew practice. This also applies to the alternatives for indicating the distinction between when used as a consonant or as a vowel. There is a related need for marking the boundary between a and where they appear adjacent to each other and, again, in the corresponding situation with and . A dot under a () and to the left of a () unambiguously indicates the vocalic form of those letters. Harkavy does not use these pointed forms in the main table above, being among the details codified in the early 20th century. In the traditional Yiddish orthographies where these letters are not pointed, the vowel is indicated by preceding it with a (reducing the use of which was a major focus of the normative efforts). The single and digraph forms of, for example, can be separated either with a dot or an embedded as or (, 'where'). Although only the former spelling is consistent with the SYO and appears in Uriel Weinreich's dictionary, he uses the unpointed alternative exclusively in his own ''Say it in Yiddish'' (), a phrase book that contains the word in a large number of "Where is...?" queries and was published when the rules had already been well established. A further graphic example of this distinction is seen in the official announcement, on 14 November 1997, of a change in editorial policy for the prominent Yiddish periodical

(, ''Yiddish Forward''). It was first during that year that they adopted the YIVO orthography. The previous editorial position overtly opposed any such change and the following is included in the explanation of the shift (quoted in full in Schaechter 1999, p. 109):
And then we removed the in the words [] and [] (previously and ) and [] (previously ), and now will spell the words with a under the second as: ‎, and .
The appearance of three alternate spellings for the name of the Yiddish language in a statement intended to describe its orthographic standardization might not require any comment if it were not for the clear indication that the cardinal representation — — was neither the older nor the newer editorial preference. Regardless of the intent of that statement, a word-initial is consonantal and an adjacent is vocalic in all Yiddish orthographic systems, as is the constraint on a word initial diphthong. Pointing the second in is therefore, indeed, redundant. The spelling also illustrates some of the dialectic breadth of the Yiddish language, the name of which is both written and pronounced with and without an initial consonant. In earlier texts, a single in word-initial position was often used to indicate (a reflex of the German use of to denote ). Finally, letters other than may be used as silent indications of syllable boundaries and in compound consonants, as well as for extending the length of an adjacent vowel. This became particularly common in deliberately Germanized orthographies dating from the late 19th century, collectively termed . Its most obvious further attributes are the heavy use of double consonants where traditional orthography uses single ones, and the gratuitous substitution of German vocabulary for established Yiddish words. The desire to reverse that trend was another of the reasons for the effort toward orthographic standardization. Publishers of Yiddish newspapers have, however, been particularly conservative in their attitude toward that development and the preceding editorial statement in provides a useful capsule summary of the details about which opinions differed. Other current Yiddish newspapers and magazines retain the spelling and many elements of '' daytshmerish''. This is typified in (), which is one of several weekly tabloids — others being () and (, ''News Report'') — that all adhere to the earlier orthography and are in wider circulation and of substantially greater length than the
broadsheet A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long Vertical and horizontal, vertical pages, typically of in height. Other common newspaper formats include the smaller Berliner (format), Berliner and Tabloid (newspaper ...
. It may also be seen in the online version of th

( – ), as well as in its printed edition. Extensive additional source material relevant to the stance of the daily press on orthographic reform is provided in Fishman 1981. Editorial acceptance of varying orthographies is a general characteristic of
Hasidic Hasidism () or Hasidic Judaism is a religious movement within Judaism that arose in the 18th century as a spiritual revival movement in contemporary Western Ukraine before spreading rapidly throughout Eastern Europe. Today, most of those aff ...
publication, and a single work written by multiple authors may differ in that regard from section to section depending on the preferences of the individual contributors or the typographic context. One example of the latter situation is the use of the pointed forms of only in specific instances where they are deemed necessary to avoid misreading. (As may be noted with the preceding discussion of the spelling of , and the pointing of both and , the SYO contains some redundant elements.) The online manifestation of such orthographic heterogeneity can readily be seen in the Yiddish Wikipedia. This is an expansive aspect of contemporary Yiddish publication and will require detailed accommodation in future codifications of orthographic practice.


Graphic innovation

Orthographic reform, as considered here, embraces two distinct actions. The first is concerned with the way Yiddish words are spelled, as illustrated in the preceding section with the name of the language itself. The second relates to the graphic devices used to distinguish, for example, between א when representing what in English is an /a/ and when representing an /o/. The pointed אַ and אָ came into use for that purpose in the mid-18th century and were thus well established by the time the 20th century reforms were initiated, as were several other traditional Yiddish pointings. The most deeply entrenched of these was the distinction between פ ''fey'' and פּ ''pey''. YIVO proposed the additional use of pointed letters that were not in the Yiddish (or Hebrew) fonts of the day. This is a frequently cited reason for the SYO being slow to gain acceptance, but regardless of any opinion about their utility, most of the graphic elements introduced in that manner are now readily available. (The SYO explicitly states that pointing to disambiguate vowels does not change the identity of the base character; a pointed alef, for example, is not a letter of its own.) The first edition of the SYO was preceded by a collection of essays published by YIVO in 1930 entitled, "A Standard of Yiddish Spelling; Discussion No. 1" ( — , YIVO 1930). Neither the title of this work, nor its contents, were written using the conventions that YIVO was subsequently to put forward on its basis. The pivotal essay in the 1930 collection was written by Max Weinreich. His, "A Projected Uniform Yiddish Orthography" ( Weinreich 1930), was not written with the pointing that was to be prescribed in the SYO and introduces a character that was entirely absent from the previous repertoire. This is the V-shaped
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...
on the second line of that text, replacing the in Weinreich's name, and in the name of the city where the work was published, Vilna. It appears at numerous additional places in the text and in two other essays in the same collection but did not appear in any subsequent printed work. It was, however, included in the SYO as a recommendation for use in handwritten text, where it is also encountered. Yudl Mark, who authored one of the other 1930 essays in which the typeset form was used, was later to dub this character the ("acute Maxy"), and it remains enshrined in the YIVO
logo A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name that it represents, as in ...
. Further orthographic variation is seen in other YIVO publications from the same period, also using markings that were not included in the SYO, but which did have typographic precedent (for example, אֵ to represent /e/). The way in which the are set in the heading of the Weinreich article (in his name) is discussed below.


Computerized text production

There are orthographic alternatives in the digital representation of Yiddish text that may not be visually apparent but are of crucial importance to computer applications that compare two sequences of characters to determine if they match exactly. Examples of this are
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
queries and
spell checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic ...
s. Situations where differing representations of typographically similar characters can give unexpected or incorrect results are described below. This may prove a particular concern for Internet users as Yiddish is increasingly used in
Internationalized Domain Names An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-Latin script or alphabet or in the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacriti ...
, and in Web and e-mail addresses. Some mobile clients only provide limited support for typing pointed text, restricting the range of available characters for such things as
instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...
and other forms of spontaneous digital text. Even people who are skilled in using laptop or desktop keyboards for that purpose (which also requires some erudition) are subject to this constraint. This fuels the move toward unpointed text and is illustrated in the blog,
Yiddish with an alef
'. This is of particular note given the late acceptance of the SYO by its parent publication, ''
The Jewish Daily Forward ''The Forward'' (), formerly known as ''The Jewish Daily Forward'', is an American news media organization for a Jewish American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper, ''The New York Times'' reported that Set ...
'', discussed below.


Digraphs

There are two different ways in which each of the digraphs , , and can be typed on Yiddish and Hebrew keyboards (which are both commonly used for the production of Yiddish text). If the digraph appears on a single key, as is normal in a Yiddish keyboard layout, pressing that key will produce a single-character
ligature Ligature may refer to: Language * Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy) * Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words Medicine * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...
. In the
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
code chart the HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH DOUBLE VAV appears in position U+05F0, the HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH VAV YOD at U+05F1, and the HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH DOUBLE YOD at U+05F2 (where the U+ indicates that the numerical position of the character in the Unicode chart is given by following four
hexadecimal Hexadecimal (also known as base-16 or simply hex) is a Numeral system#Positional systems in detail, positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbo ...
digits). These ligatures are, however, frequently missing from Hebrew keyboards — a characteristic inherited from the similarly differentiated Yiddish and Hebrew typewriter layouts. A separate was, however, not provided on either. Hebrew typewriters were modified specifically for Yiddish by the replacement of the first two keys in the second row, which were used for punctuation marks, with one shifting key for "/" and another for "/" (with ). This can be seen on a typewriter that belonged to the Yiddish author
Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer (; 1903 – July 24, 1991) was a Poland, Polish-born Jews, Jewish novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator in the United States. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and publish ...
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Typewriters built directly for Yiddish include the same four additional characters in different positions, as can be seen on another typewriter that belonged to Singe

The salient difference between the two designs is that each key on the Yiddish typewriter produces one character only, available in two different sizes through shifting. As a result of the widespread practice of writing Yiddish on Hebrew keyboards and other legacy effects of the variant digraph forms on both modified Hebrew and native Yiddish typewriters, when Yiddish text is entered from a computer keyboard with single-key digraphs, many people nonetheless type the digraphs as two-key combinations, giving the corresponding two-letter sequences ( U+05D5 U+05D5; U+05D5 U+05D9; U+05D9 U+05D9). Although ligatures can be appropriate in monospaced font, monospaced typewritten text, other than in the smallest type sizes they rarely appear in proportional typesetting, where the elements of a digraph are normally letterspaced as individual characters (illustrated in Max Weinreich's name in the facsimile text in the preceding section). It may be of further interest to note that a useful, albeit highly colloquial, test of whether digraphs are regarded as single or double characters is provided by the way they appear in
crossword puzzle A crossword (or crossword puzzle) is a word game consisting of a grid of black and white squares, into which solvers enter words or phrases ("entries") crossing each other horizontally ("across") and vertically ("down") according to a set of cl ...
s. In Yiddish, each element of a digraph is written in its own square (and the same practice applies to other word games where letters are allocated to positions of fixed width in a regular array). The pointed digraph can also be typed in different ways. The one is simply to enter a precomposed , which is both displayed and stored as a single character (U+FB1F). The second option is to enter the ligature as a base character and then to enter a combining for display together with it. Although appearing to be a single character , it is stored digitally as two separate characters (U+05F2 U+05B7). These two forms can only be directly entered from a keyboard on which the ligature appears. As a result, a practice is developing where are indicated by enclosing a between the elements of a two-character digraph. The aligns correctly only with the first (subject to conditions described in the next section) but the display is tolerably that of a fully marked digraph and in some display environments may be indistinguishable from one or both of the previous alternatives. However, this option requires the storage of three separate characters (U+05D9 U+05B7 U+05D9). As a fourth alternative, albeit the least stable typographically, the second of two consecutive may be pointed (U+05D9 U+05D9 U+05B7). A is otherwise not part of any established Yiddish character repertoire, and its use in this context manifests conditions that are specific to computerized typography. The four possible representations of the thus have even greater potential for causing confusion than do the other digraphs. A further potentially confusing option specific to computerized text production, but not a component of any Yiddish orthographic tradition, is the combination of a with a ligature to represent the consonant–vowel sequence — , as (U+05F2 U+05B4) rather than the correct (U+05D9 U+05D9 U+05B4).


Combining marks

Fonts that support Hebrew script do not always correctly render the combining points that are specific to Yiddish (and in many cases have general difficulty with Hebrew marks). Some applications display extraneous blank space adjacent to a letter with such a mark, and the mark may be displayed in that space rather than properly positioned with the base character. Writing text for presentation in a reading environment that has unknown font resources — as will almost invariably be the case with
HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
documents — thus needs special care. Here again, this is not simply a matter of typographic preference. The disjunction of combining and base characters can easily lead to error when character sequences are copied from one application into another. The same alternative modes of entry that are illustrated above with the are available for all of the other pointed characters used in Yiddish, with largely indistinguishable visual results but with differing internal representations. Any such character that appears on either a physical or a
virtual keyboard A virtual keyboard is a software component that allows the Input device, input of characters without the need for physical keys. Interaction with a virtual Computer keyboard, keyboard happens mostly via a touchscreen interface, but can also take p ...
will normally be recorded as a two-character sequence consisting of the base character followed by the combining mark. If a graphic character selector is used that does not emulate a keyboard, the desired character will be chosen from a table on the basis of its appearance. Since such facilities display combining marks separately from base characters, it is likely that the precomposed character form of a character will be the more readily recognized of the alternatives. Most applications will accept either form of input, but frequently normalize it to the combining characters. There are, however, some applications that normalize all input to precomposed characters. Digital texts containing the combining, and the precomposed alternatives are therefore both encountered. An example of extensive text using precomposed characters is provided by the online edition of the periodical (, ''Life Questions''). The present article was written using combining characters with the exception of the second row in the following table, which is provided to illustrate the differences between the two forms. In a viewing environment prone to the misalignment of base characters with their combining marks, precomposed characters are more likely to be typographically stable (but may cause greater difficulty in other regards).


Punctuation

The punctuation marks used to indicate sentence structure — the comma, period, colon, and semicolon — are the same in Yiddish as they are in English. The punctuation used for the abbreviation, contraction, and concatenation of words — the apostrophe and hyphen — are conceptually similar but typographically distinct in a manner that, yet again, can cause confusion when represented digitally. This can be illustrated with the contraction for (, 'it is'), which is (, 'it's'). Although the Yiddish punctuation mark is termed an () the character used to represent it is the Hebrew , which differs both in its graphic appearance and, more importantly, in its digital representation. (The APOSTROPHE is U+0027, and the HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERESH is U+05F3.) What is termed a double apostrophe is used to indicate abbreviation through the removal of several consecutive letters. For example, (, 'doctor') is abbreviated (equivalent to ''Dr.''). The punctuation mark is, however, not the QUOTATION MARK (U+0022), but the HEBREW PUNCTUATION
GERSHAYIM Gershayim (Hebrew: , without niqqud ), also occasionally grashayim. (), can refer to either of two distinct typographical marks in the Hebrew language. The name literally means "double geresh". Punctuation mark Gershayim most commonly refers t ...
(U+05F4), which is the dual form of the word . Yiddish words are also hyphenated in a manner that is directly comparable to English punctuation. The character used to indicate it is, however, not the HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D), but the HEBREW PUNCTUATION MAQAF (U+05BE). The latter character appears as the horizontal mark flush with the top of the text in (, 'mother tongue'; the common vernacular designation for the Yiddish language). Typeset text may also indicate hyphenation with a character resembling an equal sign (⸗), sometimes in an oblique variant, but this is uncommon in digital text. The distinctions between and "apostrophe – quotation mark – hyphen" are always indicated correctly in typeset material (with exception for the occasional deliberate use of the hyphen instead of the ). All characters in the first group are, however, not directly available on many Hebrew or Yiddish keyboards, and any that is lacking is commonly replaced by the corresponding character in the second group. Here again, in situations that depend on the correct matching of character sequences, the fall-back representation of a punctuation mark may not match the stored target of a database query, without the reason for the failure being apparent to a non-specialist user. Paired characters such as parentheses, brackets, and quotation marks, which are typographically mirrored — ( ) nbsp; “ ” — are prone to incorrect presentation in digital Yiddish text, with the opening and closing forms appearing to have exchanged places. (There are several instances in the preceding text where this problem will be apparent on systems that do not properly render mirroring characters in
bidirectional text A bidirectional text contains two text directionalities, right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text direction in ...
.)


See also

* Yiddish dialects *
Yiddish phonology There is significant phonological variation among the various Yiddish dialects. The description that follows is of a modern Standard Yiddish that was devised during the early 20th century and is frequently encountered in pedagogical contexts. ...
* Hebrew punctuation


Notes


References


Sources

*
Birnbaum, Salomo A., ''Praktische Grammatik der Jiddischen Sprache für den Selbstunterricht'', Hartleben Verlag, Vienna, 1918, (in German), 5th ed., ''Grammatik der Jiddischen Sprache, mit einem Wörterbuch und Lesestücken'', Buske Verlag, Hamburg, 1988, .
*
Birnbaum, Solomon A., ''Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar'', University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1979, .
*
Estraikh, Gennady, ''Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development'', Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999, .
*
Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.), ''Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters'', Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 1981, (in English and Yiddish), .
*
Frakes, Jerold C., ''The Cultural Study of Yiddish in Early Modern Europe'', Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, .
*
Frakes, Jerold C., ''Early Yiddish Texts 1100–1750'', Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, .
*Frank, Herman, ''Jewish Typography and Bookmaking Art'', Hebrew-American Typographical Union, New York, 1938. *
Harkavy, Alexander, ''Harkavy's English-Jewish and Jewish-English Dictionary'', Hebrew Publishing Company, New York, 1898. Expanded 6th ed., 1910
scanned facsimile
/div> *
Harkavy, Alexander, ''Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary'', Hebrew Publishing Company, New York, 1925. Expanded 2nd ed., 1928, reprinted, Yale University Press, 2005, .
*
Herzog, Marvin, et al. (ed.), YIVO, ''The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry'', 3 vols., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1992–2000, .
*
Jacobs, Neil G., ''Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction'', Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, .
*
Katz, Dovid, ''Grammar of the Yiddish Language'', Duckworth, London, 1987,
scanned facsimile
/div> *
Katz, Dovid (compiler), ''Code of Yiddish Spelling'', Oxforder Yidish Press, Oxford, 1992, (in Yiddish),
scanned facsimile
/div> *
Niborski, Yitskhok, ''Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh-stamike verter in yidish'', 3rd ed., Bibliothèque Medem, Paris, 2012, .
*
Schaechter, Mordkhe, ''The Standardized Yiddish Orthography: Rules of Yiddish Spelling'', 6th ed., and ''The History of the Standardized Yiddish Spelling'', YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1999, (in Yiddish with introductory material in English), .
*
Weinreich, Max, ''Proyektn fun an aynheytlekher yidishen oysleyg'', in ''Der aynhaytlekher Yidisher oysleyg: materialn un proyektn tsu der ortografisher konferents fun YIVO, ershte zamlung'', Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, Vilna, 1930. pp. 20–6
scanned facsimile
/div> *
Weinreich, Uriel, ''Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary'', YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1968, .
*
Weinreich, Uriel, ''College Yiddish: an Introduction to the Yiddish language and to Jewish Life and Culture'', 6th revised ed., YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1999, .
*
Yardeni, Ada, ''The Book of Hebrew Script'', The British Library, London, 2002, .
*
YIVO, ''Der aynhaytlekher Yidisher oysleyg: materialn un proyektn tsu der ortografisher konferents fun YIVO, ershte zamlung'', Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, Vilna, 1930
scanned facsimile
/div> *
YIVO, ''Oysleyg-takones fun Yidish'', Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, Vilna, 1935
scanned facsimile
/div>


External links



– by Alexander Harkavy; also includes his ''Treatise on Yiddish Reading, Orthography, and Dialectal Variations''
Ezra SIL
– a freely available font designed for heavily marked Hebrew script

– online interconversion of Hebrew script and YIVO transliteration {{DEFAULTSORT:Yiddish Orthography
Orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...
Typography Orthographies by language Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes