Yiddish orthography
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.
The first action formally undertaken by a government was in the Soviet Union in 1920, abolishing the separate etymological orthography for words of Semitic (i.e., Hebrew and Aramaic) origin.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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).
Text that otherwise conforms to the SYO therefore frequently omits the rafe from fey, in harmonization with its unpointed final form, and makes the contrastive distinction from a pey solely with a dagesh in the latter (פ פּ).
In the traditional Yiddish orthographies where these letters are not pointed, the vowel is indicated by preceding it with a shtumer alef (reducing the use of which was a major focus of the normative efforts).
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 (ISBN 0-486-20815-X), a phrase book that contains the word in a large number of "Where is...?"
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 — יידיש — was neither the older nor the newer editorial preference.
Finally, letters other than shtumer alef may be used as silent indications of syllable boundaries and in compound consonants, as well as for extending the length of an adjacent vowel.
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.
Publishers of Yiddish newspapers have, however, been particularly conservative in their attitude toward that development and the preceding editorial statement in Forverts provides a useful capsule summary of the details about which opinions differed.
Yudl Mark, who authored one of the other 1930 essays in which the typeset form was used, was later to dub this character the shpitsik maksl ("acute Maxy"), and it remains enshrined in the YIVO logo.
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.
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 puzzles.
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).
Writing text for presentation in a reading environment that has unknown font resources — as will almost invariably be the case with HTML documents — thus needs special care.
The same alternative modes of entry that are illustrated above with the pasekh tsvey yudn are available for all of the other pointed characters used in Yiddish, with largely indistinguishable visual results but with differing internal representations.
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.
Although the Yiddish punctuation mark is termed an אַפּאָסטראָף (apostrof) the character used to represent it is the Hebrew geresh, which differs both in its graphic appearance and, more importantly, in its digital representation.
The latter character appears as the horizontal mark flush with the top of the text in מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn, 'mother tongue'; the common vernacular designation for the Yiddish language).
Paired characters such as parentheses, brackets, and quotation marks, which are typographically mirrored — ( ) [ ] { } “ ” — are prone to incorrect presentation in digital Yiddish text, with the opening and closing forms appearing to have exchanged places.
