Hebrew & Yiddish Re: Just wondering

Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > John Cowan wrote:
> > >
> > > Peter T. Daniels scripsit:
> > >
> > > > > Returning to the Real World, is Yiddish orthography
> > still an abjad,
> > > > > or has it too become alphabetic?
> > > >
> > > > Why would you suggest that Yiddish isn't an alphabet?
> > >
> > > I was trying to probe whether these labels (alphabet,
> > abjad, etc.) refer
> > > to scripts or orthographies.
> >
> > Do explain how such a distinction would work (and how it applies to
> > Yiddish). Be sure to include definitions of those two terms as well as
> > of "writing system."
>
> While waiting for John's answer, I notice that distinguishing "scripts" from
> "orthographies" makes sense by an engineering point of view, such as when
> talking about designing typefaces or computer encodings.
>
> In *this* context, you can say that Hebrew and Yiddish use the same "script"
> (i.e., they share the same collection of signs, so you can design a typeface
> or encoding which works for both languages), although they have different
> "orthographic systems" (i.e., the Hebrew language uses all Hebrew letters to
> represent consonants, while Yiddish uses some of them for vowels).

[I have lots and lots of messages awaiting me, so maybe someone's
already commented on this.]

This isn't correct (see Aronson in WWS) -- Yiddish doesn't have any
vowel points, and it doesn't use any letters as both consonants and
vowels (sort of like matres). Sure, there's a letter that looks like
it's a kametz below an aleph, but it's no more a composite character
than (to be intertextual) a w is "really" two v's. Also, Yiddish would
look very strange printed with a contemporary-design Hebrew font (just
as Hebrew looks rather odd printed with a Yiddish font). (As odd, at
least, as English in romain du roi, or French in Baskerville.)

> Of course, this distinction can be meaningless in other contexts, such as
> the scientific study of writing systems.

Maybe a better example is the Mac "Arabic" fonts, which accommodate
Persian and Urdu as well (or, as poorly; there are of course esthetic
compromises) -- the three languages use different orthographies, but
would you need to distinguish "script" from "writing system" to describe
them adequately (or optimally)?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...