Diacritical marks

[Libertine Seguros]

Turns out I can't actually read Hebrew.

Neither can I - that was Yiddish. Only the double dot below ought to be a line, only the Tseres ought to be a Patah, they look the same in the reply box but when posted I can see the dots rather than a flat line.

 

[hrotha]

Neither can I - that was Yiddish. Only the double dot below ought to be a line, only the Tseres ought to be a Patah, they look the same in the reply box but when posted I can see the dots rather than a flat line.

Hmm, I thought it might be, due to the double vavs and yods, but then I read אוי as אני and that threw me off. I totally should have been able to recognize the "oy vey!"

 

[Libertine Seguros]

haha yes, the aleph at the beginning of any word commencing with a vowel does throw people at first though. I still get caught out by it sometimes. I did quite a bit of work on Yiddish though, very interesting language history.

 

[hrotha]

Aye, I'm naturally drawn towards Yiddish, although I haven't given it a try yet. But a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet? Sold.

It'd do wonders to my appreciation of klezmer.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

I've read a fair bit of the short stories of Sholem Aleichem and IL Peretz, but not in the original Yiddish. Very hard to pick up the nuances in literary Yiddish without being fluent, I think, due to the three layers of loanwords and their connotations (Hebrew, Loez, Slavic) and poetic uses (plus the semantic effects of choosing to use a Hebrew loan rather than a Germanic base word or vice versa).

 

[ferryman]

Ah dinnae ken whit's been happenin wae a loat oh the posts oan here but it seems tae be OK if yeh poast in broad Scots. Fur whit it's wurth it's been reported tae the powers that be

That's Dan to you and me

 

[Maaaaaaaarten]

אוי וויי! אוי גואֵלט! וואָס פאֵר אֵ טשאָרבן

Hmmm I'm reasonably familiar with both Hebrew and German, but I can't make much sense of this.

So I guess there's more to Yiddish than just that - at least as far as the spelling is concerned.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

That says "Oy Vey! Oy Gvalt! Vos far a chorbn".

It is a few years since I did my study on Yiddish so there may be a couple of minor errors in the below, but I think it's ok as a general thing.

Yiddish is derived from Middle High German, so there are a number of differences between it and modern standard German; in addition to this the loshn-koydesh element (the Hebrew/Aramaic loans) are in the Ashkenazi readings, so there are various differences in that from Hebrew, either ancient or reconstructed (which often used the Sephardic readings as a pronunciation guide if I recall correctly, I may be wrong). As an example, modern Hebrew "shalom" vs. Ashkenazic "sholem" (although the loshn-koydesh words would be rendered using the traditional Hebrew spellings the majority of the time, whereas Loez, Germanic and Slavic words would be spelt out phonetically).

Yiddish also uses a few digraphs for diphthongs. Double yod = "ey", Double yod with patah = "ay", Vav-yod = "oy". In addition to this there is double vav, for "v". Yod is used for both and [y], while Vav is used for both and [w]. These are always semi-vowels word-initially; words commencing in or will begin with a silent א (e.g. איך "ikh" vs. ייִד "***"). Aleph has four functions;
1) as stated there, to differentiate word-initial yod or vav
2) as אַ with patah, to signify [a]
3) as אָ with qamats, to signify [o]
4) in loshn-koydesh words as required

Where double-vav or double-yod are not intended as part of their digraphs for ey and v, hiriq is used beneath the second to show that it is not meant to be read together with the first (like in '***' above - without the hiriq, it would be read 'eyd').

Edit: bizarrely, "Yiddish" is not censored, but the word for "Jew" in Yiddish is censored. Presumably because of some very derogatory uses of it, but here I am actually using it in its proper sense, i.e. in Yiddish...

Does that mean we are able to say ****stan now?

Edit 2: no... still can't say that. Strange that the word filter can edit out Y I D when used in isolation but doesn't edit the same letter combination in non-offensive situations (such as Yiddish, as in the language), and yet cannot tell that when the letters P A K I appear together in the name of the country -S T A N, no offensive connotations exist!

 

[Arnout]

^^ Just like you can't say spa.ziociclismo which is an Italian cycling website because apparantly the spa.zio part is some sort of degoratory word.

 

[Maaaaaaaarten]

Ah thanks Libertine, awesome!

Transliteration is a ***** though. At first I thought you made a mistake when you gave 'chorbn' for 'טשאָרבן', but then I realized that in English tsh = ch. I also got confused by reading that a yod can be both and [y], until I read the word semivowel and I realized English uses <y> for a palatal semivowel.

 

[hrotha]

Does Yiddish actually use niqqudot in normal texts though?

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Maaaarten - I used the YIVO standard romanization in the use of y (I shouldn't have put it in square brackets though, as that then confuses it with IPA - that's my mistake). YIVO is based in New York, so it's no surprise to see the transliteration adopt semivowels and digraphs according to English norms. "ch" and "tsh" are used interchangeably although "tsh" is more common I think.

hrotha - The aleph-patah for [a] and aleph-qamats for [o], yes, you will see in normal texts quite often, as there is little other use for niqqudot in Yiddish. As the sound for ayin does not exist in Yiddish, it was adopted as a letter for [e], whereas and are represented by yod and vav respectively, so niqqud only get used in differentiating aleph as [a] and as [o] and specifying when double vav or double yod are not to be read as digraphs.

 

[christopherrowe]

Not to distract from what has become a fascinating conversation, but I'm just going to check and see if the "increased capacity" of the forums spoken of in another thread has fixed the problem with diacritics.

This is an e. This is an é.

This is an n. This is an ñ.

This is a c. This is a ç.

This is a u. This is a ü.

This is an i. This is an î.

 

[Daniel Benson]

Cool. That should be fixed too.

Dan