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 theTransliteration
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 isTranscription
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 andThe 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 andThe 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''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' (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
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-shapedComputerized 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 areDigraphs
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-characterU+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 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 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 withPunctuation
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 isU+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 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 See also
* Yiddish dialects *Notes
References
Sources
*External links