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From: wald@zarquon.uchicago.edu (Kevin Wald)
Subject: Re: Yiddish orthography
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References: <1995Aug8.223303.15510@hcc.com> <Pine.OSF.3.91.950810173906.7363A-100000@sable.ox.ac.uk> <DD41Jy.Jno@midway.uchicago.edu> <Pine.OSF.3.91.950810225157.5642A-100000@sable.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 21:30:20 GMT
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In article <Pine.OSF.3.91.950810225157.5642A-100000@sable.ox.ac.uk>,
Peter J. King <shil0124@sable.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>On Thu, 10 Aug 1995, Kevin Wald wrote:
>
>> In article <Pine.OSF.3.91.950810173906.7363A-100000@sable.ox.ac.uk>,
>> Peter J. King <shil0124@sable.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> >
>> >	Errr... Yiddish is basically a dialect of German,
>> 
>> Errr . . . this depends what you mean by "basically". Most sources I have
>> seen consider Yiddish and (Modern High) German to be sufficiently
>> different as to count as distinct languages, albeit very closely related
>> ones.
>
>	I was compressing things.  It's a dialect of mediaeval High
>German.  So I should say either that it started out as a dialect of German
>or (more accurately, perhaps) that it's a dialect of an old form of
>German. 

Or even more accurately, that mediaeval Yiddish and the mediaeval ancestors
of (Modern High) German were dialects of Middle High German. I don't think
we're actually disagreeing about anything here, however.

>
>> >usually including Hebrew words).  It's a Roman-alphabet language - 
>> >always has been.
>> 
>> Errr . . . no. Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Just because
>> two tongues are very closely related doesn't mean they use the same
>> alphabet. (Consider Hindi and Urdu, for example.)
>
>	Again, I'm compressing.  It was often (normally) written in Hebrew
>characters, but I have certainly seen it written in the Roman alphabet,
>both in modern and in mediaeval versions.  In that sense, it's always been
>a Roman-alphabet language, but a Hebrew-alphabet language too.  I'm told
>that the earliest form was Roman-alphabet, but I'm also told that deciding
>what the earliest form was (given the way it grew out of German) is not an
>easy matter. 
>
>	My main point, though, was that there *is* a right and a wrong 
>way to spell Yiddish words in the Roman alphabet - it's not a matter 
>simply of finding a usable transliteration from the Hebrew alphabet.

Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily follow from the point made in
the preceding paragraph. Even granted that throughout its history,
Yiddish has, from time to time, been written in the Roman alphabet,
that does not mean that there was any *standardized* way of doing so.

Indeed, I would be quite surprised if there had been. (Of course, I've
been surprised before.) I am cross-posting to sci.lang, in the hopes
that someone over there knows more about the history of standards
for expressing Yiddish in the Roman alphabet.

Note, however, that even with such a system in hand, there is no guarantee
that the way it tells us to spell a given Yiddish word will correspond to
the correct way to spell the word when borrowed into English. For example,
I have seen a system for transliterating Yiddish (which was claimed, at the
time, to be "standard") in which "chutzpah" was spelled "khutspe" -- a
fine representation of the Yiddish word, no doubt, but a spelling I have
never seen for the *English* word "chutzpah". Similarly, some in this
discussion have supported an orthography for Yiddish that closely resembles
that of (Modern High) German, even to the point of spelling many initial
/f/s as v's. However, I suspect (based on my own limited experience) that
the *English* words "nosh" and "Yiddish" are rarely spelled "nosch" and
"Jiddisch".

Follow-ups are directed to sci.lang .

Kevin Wald              |  Hwaet saegest thu, yrthlingc?
wald@math.uchicago.edu  |     -- AElfric, _Colloquium Martianum_ 
