Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 3.088
August 20, 1993

1) Yiddish orthography (Bob Goldberg)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Aug 19 22:32:27 1993
From: xidak!poseidon!bob@uunet.UU.NET (Robert N. Goldberg)
Subject: Yiddish Orthography

It's too bad that the revised Yiddish orthography does not suggest
the pronunciation of most words in the spoken Yiddish theater
dialect.

The older orthography used in the dailies DER TOG and FORVERTS had
some advantages over YIVO orthography in this regard.  For example,
as I recall, the dipthong ayin-hey was used in places where I would
say "ey" but that are now spelled with just an ayin, e.g., lehbn ->
lebn.  To one who says "lebn", the "h" seems like needless baggage,
but to one who says "leybn", the "h" is there for pronunciation, to
distinguish it from ayin without hey, e.g., "er".

I believe that "ih" was also used in words like "ihr".  This also
gives pronunciation hints -- it says that the "i" has a longer
sound, as opposed to the shorter "i" sound in "mit".  So those extra
hey's had a reason for being.

I don't know if old orthography contained any hints for dialects
that interchange "ey" with "ay", as in "fleysh mit beyne" vs.
"flaysh mit bayne", vs. the other two permutations, but I know that
"ay" could be spelled aleph-yud, which could thus be distinguished
from "ay" and "ey" and pronounced according to one's dialect.

My uneducated guess is that the people who removed the heys in the
revised orthography considered them as superfluous because the hey
didn't change the pronunciation in their dialect.  I cannot imagine
that a galitsianer would want to change the spelling so as to
eliminate the pronunciation hints that used to be there!

The implications of representational power and information content
on Yiddish orthography is something I'm more qualified to speak
about, as a computer scientist.  Clearly, in a language with
multiple dialects like Yiddish (and its step-cousin, German),
allowing orthography to contain pronunciation hints for more than
one dialect implies that there must be alternative spellings for the
same sound in some of the dialects (in Yiddish, this implies more
vowel instances).  What YIVO seems to have done is to pare down the
orthography to the minimum set of vowels to express pronunciation of
a single dialect close to litvish, thus eliminating pronunciation
hints for the major spoken dialect of the language.  Did they do
this intentionally, or did they convince themselves that the pared
down spelling was more "consistent" and "simpler", and therefore
"better"?

Ideally, what could be done to accommodate the different dialects is
to add additional vowel dipthongs or diacritical marks.  If this
were done for standard and theater Yiddish only, it would be
something like:

Current		(PROPOSED)	(YIVO)		(YIVO)
YIVO		Orthographic	Litvak		Southern/Galitsianer
Vowel		Vowel		Pronunciation	Pronunciation
----------	------------	-------------	--------------------
e  (er)		e    (er)	e   (er)	e    (er)
e  (lehbn)	eh   (lehbn)	e   (lebn)	ey   (leybn)

o  (hob)	oh   (hohb)	o   (hob)	o    (hob)
o  (zog)	o    (zog)	o   (zog)	u    (zug)

u  (gut)	u    (gut)	u   (gut)	i    (git)
u  (shul)	uh   (shuhl)    u   (shul)	u    (shul)

ay (bay)	ay   (bay)	ay  (bay)	a    (ba)
ay (dray)	aleph-yud   	ay  (dray)	a    (dray)

and so on ...

You can think of the proposed vowels as an encoding of the
differences in pronunciation between the two dialects.   Using the
new spelling, both dialects can infer sound from spelling.  The
galitsianer would pronounce "o" as "u" but "oh" as "o", "u" as "i",
but "uh" as "u", etc.  The litvaks would have to memorize when to
use one or the other to spell correctly, but since they are supposed
to be the literary ones, they can cope.

I wouldn't propose that every minor sub-dialect (e.g., Aunt Sadie's
over there on Flatbush Ave.) be encoded, only the most common ones,
which clearly includes stage Yiddish and the dialect you get when
reading YIVO orthography.

So from an information-content point of view, and assuming that you
WANT spelling to reflect pronunciation, the old orthography had some
of the right ideas after all (its other drawbacks and
inconsistencies aside). Too bad the spelling revisionists were
unaware of the value of those silent hey's and aleph-yud's, or that
they chose to ignore the value.

Bob "Nissen" Goldberg

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.088