Re: Aleph-umlaut

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

On 11/12/2018 5:48 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote: You know, you're right (as is Beth), and I don't know why I'm arguing the point.  It's something I've been working on: I shouldn't defend a position JUST because it's _my_ position, and yet that's just what I did. Know the feeling; I've been guilty of the same on occasion. So, yes, it certainly does seem essentially German.  I couldn't say why they chose to write this part in German, or why they chose to transcribe it in Hebrew letters, really.  I assumed Yiddish probably because of the context and the alphabet used, but there's no reason for it not to be German.  Now, the pamphlet originated from Kloizenberg, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluj-Napoca which is in Romania, but German was probably enough of a lingua franca (after all, Yiddish developed from it for that reason).  You didn't say when the pamphlet was written, or I overlooked it, but there was a time, much later than the split of Yiddish/German when German was the language in which much academic research was published. Meaning, anyone educated might bother to learn it (and write in it) for that reason. Just like Latin earlier and English today. In addition, there were areas of German diaspora spread fairly widely in the East. Kloizenberg (its Yiddish name) seems to have been founded as Klausenburg by German settlers in the 13th century and as late as 1776 seems to have a (short-lived) German-language university. At any rate, it seems to have been part of the Austrian Empire. All this gives tantalizing hints why the writer might have chosen German even though the choice of alphabet strongly suggests that the target audience was Jewish. And the text being basically German would explain the aleph-umlaut which was the start of all this, though it doesn't so much need an "explanation": it's interesting enough that it's _there_. Sure. The next level, as you indicate, is to deduce the other orthographic conventions. Also interesting that no other umlauted letters were considered distinct enough to be transcribed so (or else they just happened not to show up).  There may be a number of reasons. We've seen that "ü" was transcribed as "i", reflecting a systematic vowel shift between German and Yiddish. There are probably not too many minimal pairs where you couldn't reconstruct the intended word from intra- or inter-word context. I wouldn't be surprised to see "e" for "ö", for example. Finally, none of the umlauts are really common in word-initial positions. "ü", for example shows up mainly in three roots "übel", "über" and "üben" (practice), some of which admittedly have many compounds. For "ö", it's largely "Öl" (oil) and Greek loan words (like economy). "ä" is the most diverse of the three. There are a number of words starting with A that take an umlaut in the plural. All of this may have contributed to the need to mark the a-umlaut explicitly while making do with a close substitute for the other ones. There are probably mildly interesting things (depending on your interests) to be gleaned from studying how the transliterations, how they seemed to use ע for word-final "e" in "die" in some places but א in others, etc. Precisely. Not in the context of character coding so much as just in terms of learning about writing systems. For example, is it something that was absolutely common with "standardiyed" conventions, or more of an ad-hoc thing? A./ Anyway, still interesting, I thought. ~mark On 11/11/18 8:28 PM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote: I agree with Beth that the text reads like a transcription of a standard German text, not like a transcription of Yiddish, small infidelities in vowel/consonant renderings notwithstanding. These are either because the transcription conventions deliberately make some substitutions (presumably there's no Hebrew letter that would directly match an "ü", so they picked "i") or because the writer, while trying to capture standard German in this instance, is aware of a different orthography. The result, before Beth tweaked it, would resemble a bit a phonetic transcription of someone speaking standard German with a Yiddish accent. The fact that there are no differences in grammar and the phrasing is absolutely natural for written German is what confirms the identification as German, rather than Yiddish text. Just because Yiddish is closely related to German doesn't mean that you can simply write the former with standard German phonetics and have it match a text in standard German to the point where there's no distinction. I think the sample is long enough and involved enough to give quite decent confidence in discriminating between these two Germanic languages. Grammar, phrasing and word choice are in that sense much better indicators than pure spelling; just as people trying to assume some foreign accent will give themselves away by faithfully maintaining the underlying structure of the language - that even works if the "accent" includes a few selected bits of "foreign" word order or grammar. In those artificial examples, there's rarely the kind of subtle mistake that a true non-native will make. A./